The Little(r) Museums of Paris

Musée des Arts et Métiers

|

Various churches occupied this site from the eleventh century until the French Revolution, when the new government nationalized religious properties across the country. Revolutionary forces turned what had become a monastery over to a very secular new institution: the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.

Allegorical portraits of agriculture and industry went up under the vaulted arches of the church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs. Today, early planes soar here, including the first rickety machine to cross the English Channel.

The century leading up to the Revolution was known as the Siècle des Lumières, or the Enlightenment. Scientists and engineers made great strides in science and technology, and the Conservatoire closely followed their application to the industrialization of France. Professors acquired examples of the latest innovations in agriculture, transportation, and motors, and they used the collections in the free classes they provided. The rails embedded in the floor of the galleries were used to move large objects into the teaching amphitheaters (there was no PowerPoint in the 1890s).

The collections opened to the public in 1802, by which time a general French audience was closely following the latest scientific news. Colorful, ornate instruments now on the top floor of the building were used to demonstrate discoveries like electricity in Parisian salons. At the front of the church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs swings a pendulum invented by Léon Foucault, which provides visual proof of the rotation of the earth. Foucault’s first job had been covering the meetings and debates at the Académie of Sciences for a major newspaper. In 1851 he staged a demonstration of his pendulum in the Panthéon with a sixty-pound weight (also owned by the museum) swinging on steel piano wire; Parisians lined up to see it.

But the pace of change made many of the items housed in the collections increasingly obsolete. Around the end of the nineteenth century, the institution became more like a museum in today’s sense of the word, showing the history of technical progress.

This survey includes both daily objects and exceptional ones. The automaton staff refer to as their Mona Lisa was created for Marie Antoinette in 1874. An elegantly dressed doll at a dulcimer, she has an eight-hour musical repertoire. A bulky steam-powered chariot for cannons from 1770 is a contender for the world’s first self-powered vehicle.

“It didn’t work very well,” admitted energy and transportation curator Lionel Dufaux, “but we find the object interesting.”

Dufaux is also fond of a model of a satellite dish–shaped device that boiled water, using solar energy, to create steam power.

“We’re in the 1880s, so people have been interested in these issues for a long time,” he noted. Another strange object, what looks like a taxidermized lion grappling with a snake, was actually made entirely from spun glass in the 1850s.

The wooden display cases from 1904, with their rippled handblown glass, now hold many items newer than themselves. Any visitor who grew up with cassette players and VCRs will feel particularly old in the hall of communications.

Other relatively recent additions include a prototype Mars rover from the 1990s and a Vélib’ bicycle from the first generation of Paris’s bike-share program.

The trickiest part of contemporaneous collecting is to figure out which innovations—a tablet versus a smartphone, for example—represent a true step forward.

“We prefer to reflect before adding something to the collection,” said Dufaux. “We attempt to ask ourselves that question.”

Phono Museum

For many years, Jalal Aro packed his apartment with vintage phonographs and gramophones.

“There was stuff everywhere,” says Aro. Originally from Aleppo, Syria, he came to France at age 20, where he met his wife Charlotte. Together, in the late 1980s, they began digging up audio-playback machines in antique shops and flea markets, bringing them home and living among all the equipment in a typically small Paris apartment.

“What was fun,” he said, “was that our kids would play with the things when they were very young. We would explain to them how they worked.”

The couple started dealing in historic audio equipment, eventually opening a shop in the Pigalle neighborhood. The people who would walk in, it turned out, had many of the same questions as Jalal and Charlotte’s children. This gave them the idea of creating a public museum from their personal collection.

Run by volunteers since 2014, the Phono Museum has shared a collection of sound recording technology dating back to a cabinet-size mechanical music box from Switzerland, completed in 1880.

Among the collection’s treasures is a barrel-shaped object on an ornate stand—a reconstruction of a phonautograph, which French inventor Edouard Leon-Scott de Martinville used to record the human voice in the 1850s, two decades before Thomas Edison.

A painting by Francis Barraud shows Nipper, the artist’s late brother’s terrier, at the horn of a gramophone. This cozy, domestic scene was created at the key moment when phonographs and gramophones like those in the museum started entering people’s living rooms. Companies competed for customers by offering a new range of colors and designs, seen in this gallery, and new approaches to branding. Barraud shopped his image around to record companies. Edison turned him down (“Dogs don’t listen to phonographs”) but Emile Berliner’s Gramophone Co. adopted the logo with the tagline, “His Master’s Voice.”

Unlike many more traditional museums, the Phono Museum still regularly turns the machines in its collection on for visitors. Some play records, while others play wax cylinders that do degrade with use, making this a no-no for most conservators.

But, said Aro, “an instrument that makes music, if you don’t use it, it’s like you’ve let it die.”

“They need to function,” he believes, and besides, a digital reproduction of the sound is no substitute for the experience of seeing and hearing the original object play.

“Visually, it’s already intriguing and compelling,” he said, “but what’s more, whether it be collectors or a child who knows nothing about the object, as soon as you turn it on, they’re frozen in place.”

Musée de la Cinémathèque

| |

By the mid-1930s, the eclipse of silent film by the talkies unleashed the wholesale melting down of film stock to produce consumer goods like combs and nail polish, or simply to reclaim its raw ingredients. The young film fanatic Henri Langlois set out to save as much as he could. He and friends evacuated reels from flea markets, recycling factories, and bankrupt distribution houses. “Never assume you know what’s of value,” Langlois insisted. Even imperfect films could become important historical documents.

With Georges Franju, he founded the Cinémathèque Française to preserve and screen films. During WWII, with the Germans seizing banned titles, friends of the Cinémathèque buried film canisters in their yards, wardrobes—even the dungeon of a southern château. Langlois continued to host secret screenings of Soviet and other contraband pictures.

After the war, regulars at Cinémathèque screenings included François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and others who went on to direct New Wave cinema in the 1950s and ’60s.

From the Cinémathèque’s growing archive of film history, Langlois created an exhibition in the Palais de Chaillot in 1972. It wasn’t necessarily educational, says the Cinémathèque’s resident historian, Laurent Mannoni, but rather atmospheric, “a kind of mysterious attic, which was moreover beautiful.”

Unfortunately, the low-budget museum’s lack of a guard or protective glass led to a lot of thefts, most famously of a dress that had purportedly belonged to Marilyn Monroe.

A 1997 fire forced the museum’s contents into storage. It took ten years for an exhibition space to open in the Cinémathèque’s new home in a Frank Gehry–designed building in southeast Paris. This gallery is, as of writing, being redesigned, moving away from attempting an exhaustive cinematic history to mostly focus on the work and impact of French film pioneer Georges Méliès. His best-known film is the silent science fiction classic Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902).

The museum’s other treasures will still come out of the reserves from time to time for temporary shows and internationally traveling exhibitions.

Musée de la Magie and Musée des Automates

On request

A magic act, it turns out, requires no translation, even for young visitors. A visit to the Musée de la Magie begins with a performance of basic illusions by one of the resident magicians, followed by a tour (also in French) of the collection of magical objects displayed in atmospheric, sixteenth-century vaulted cellars. (Request a guidebook at the ticket booth with English descriptions.)

Magic, as it happens, is about stagecraft but also technical assistance. One glass cabinet in the museum displays an assortment of vintage “physics boxes,” a little like the starter home magic kits for sale these days. Professional-grade equipment includes an Egyptian mummy case used to “disappear” its occupant and the first box successfully used to saw a woman in half, made for an American.

The museum reserves a special place for nineteenth-century French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (the namesake for the American Harry Houdini). The innovative illusionist’s career went a long way toward making magic respectable, taking it from street theater to the stage. Robert-Houdin was the first magician to abandon wizards’ robes and perform in a tux and tails.

The objects housed here mostly trace back to the collection of one man: Georges Proust saw his first magic show at age six and was seriously collecting magical items by his teens. He became a performing magician and started a school of magic in Paris in 1993. He subsequently opened up his collection of magical objects, one of the world’s finest, to visits from the public.

Musée Carnavalet