The mint of the French state is still a factory, and it works in the middle of Paris, behind a neoclassical facade a hundred and seventeen metres long that almost everybody takes for a ministry. Inside the Monnaie de Paris they cast, strike and chase metal the way they did when the building was inaugurated, on the quai de Conti between the Institut de France and the Pont Neuf. The museum is called the musée du 11 Conti, and it takes you to watch the workers at their benches.
What decides when to come is not the opening time but the day of the week, and nobody tells you at the entrance: the workshops work from Monday to Friday, and since the museum closes on Mondays, you see them running only from Tuesday to Friday. On Saturday and Sunday, in exchange, there is the engraving demonstration from 15:00 to 17:00. They are two different visits, and both are free under 26.
How is a coin made, exactly?
Let’s begin!
1. The palace the eighteenth century built for making money
Why does a mint have a courtyard of honour?
Because in the eighteenth century making money was an act of sovereignty, and it was shown to whoever came in. The design is by Jacques Denis Antoine, the first stone was laid on 30 April 1771, the facade on the quai was finished in 1773 and minting moved in officially on 20 December 1775. The building is one of the first great examples of French neoclassicism, and it is organised around a cour d’Honneur with the grand staircase, a cour de la Méridienne and a cour de l’Or.
What is left of the eighteenth-century state rooms is the frescoed vaults, the gilded stucco and, in a niche above a red marble fireplace, a seated female allegory with a cornucopia in her arms and a large wheel behind her.
The route has ten rooms, five on the ground floor and five on the first, and in this article I take you through six of them. The thing to keep in mind all the way round is that this is not a historic building converted into a museum. It is a working manufactory that has opened part of itself to the public, and the route is built on purpose so that you move from the display cases to the windows that look into the workshops.
2. The foundry, one of the last in central Paris
The route starts on the ground floor, and it starts with fire. The foundry of the Monnaie has been running since 1775, since the site was born as a manufactory, and it is one of the last left in the heart of Paris.
Here they cast the bronze of the medals and the sculptures the mint produces for artists and institutions. If you come on a weekday, from the room you see the real work: not a reconstruction, not a video, the workers at their bench. It is the reason it is worth moving your visit by a day rather than coming here at the weekend.
3. The materials and the laboratory
The second room asks a question that sounds obvious and is not: what is a coin made of? The route runs from the mine to the laboratory, and it explains the physical principles that govern an alloy: why gold does not oxidise, why silver blackens, why a coin in daily use has to survive millions of hands without losing its relief.
The part that usually comes as a surprise is that a mint is not only a workshop: it is also a place where things are measured. Establishing how much gold an alloy really contains is a problem as old as coinage, and the way to solve it, in principle, has not changed: you take a sample, you assay it, you weigh it.
4. Chasing and patina
A casting comes out of the mould rough, with the marks of the pour and the flash still on it. The chaser finishes it by hand, stroke by stroke, and the patineur gives it its colour, which is not a varnish but a chemical reaction controlled on the surface of the metal.
These are two trades that survive in very few hands in Paris, and this is one of the rare chances you have to watch them close up. The museum treats them as it would treat painting, with their tools in a case and their gestures on video. Stand in front of the case that sets a freshly cast medal beside the same medal finished, because that is where you grasp how much of the result is human work.
5. The Grand Monnayage, with Dame Fortune looking on
The room of frappe contemporaine tells the story of the factory at Pessac, in the Gironde, where French circulating coins have been struck since it opened in the mid-1970s, and it tells it looking out over what used to be the heart of the system here in Paris: the Grand Monnayage, the striking workshop.
In the vestibule of the Grand Monnayage stands a statue that has watched over the place since it opened. She is Dame Fortune, carved by Louis Philippe Mouchy to a model by the architect of the building himself, and she has the classical attributes of her condition: the wheel, the cornucopia and the blindfold. She is the guardian of coining, a job that has to come out exact every single time, and they gave her the blindfold of the goddess who hands things out at random: the contradiction is there, and the museum does not try to resolve it.
After nearly two hundred and fifty years without a restoration, the statue has been put right again with a public fundraising campaign. If you noticed a seated female figure with a wheel and a cornucopia in the state room, you now know what those attributes are.
6. The treasures, a strongroom open to the public
What does a mint keep in its strongroom?
On the first floor the route changes register and becomes a collection. The room called Les trésors does exactly that, it opens the strongroom, and it shows several groups the Monnaie had never put on display: the cargo of a ship, a spoil of war, a forgotten inheritance and valuables buried in a time of unrest.
These are hoards, groups of coins hidden together by somebody who meant to come back for them and never came. Look at the dates on the coins, because every hoard is a date and a fear, and the sequence of the coins inside tells you when that person started putting money aside and how long they had.
7. The art of collecting, around Jean Warin
The last part of the route asks why people collect coins, and it starts from Jean Warin, born at Liège in 1604 and dead in Paris in 1672. Warin engraved the coins of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, carved the busts of the first and of cardinal de Richelieu, and in 1647 became controller general of the coinage of France. But what ties him to the press you saw two rooms back is something else: it was he who imposed the screw press in place of the hammer on the Paris mint, and the first louis d’or came out that way.
Beside him the museum places historic and contemporary collectors, and the intention is declared: to make you want to start a collection of your own. In the next room, the one for the creations of the manufactory, you see what comes out of these workshops today, from official medals to collectors’ series. And before you leave you can strike a mini-medal of your own, which, let us admit it, is why children remember this museum.
Practical information
Details checked on 26 September 2026 on the official site monnaiedeparis.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. The museum ticket costs 12 euros full price and 8 reduced. With a personal Navigo pass it costs 10 euros. On the first Sunday of the month entry is free. Free admission. Entry is free for the under-26s, on production of a document. Attention: the guided visit is a different ticket, it costs 14 euros full price and 10 or 6 for the two reductions, and it includes entry to the museum. If you only want the rooms, the 12-euro one is enough. Opening hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday, from 11:00 to 18:00, and on Wednesday until 21:00. Last admissions are at 17:30, and at 20:30 on Wednesday. Closing days. It closes on Mondays, on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. On 24 and 31 December it closes at 16:00, with last admission at 15:30. When to see the workshops. The workshops work from Monday to Friday, so with the museum open you see them from Tuesday to Friday. The demonstration of the art of engraving runs instead on Saturday and Sunday, continuously from 15:00 to 17:00. Paris Museum Pass. The museum is not included in the pass. Getting there. The entrance is at number 11 on the quai de Conti, or from 2 rue Guénégaud. The stops are Pont Neuf on line 7, Odéon on lines 4 and 10 and Saint-Michel on line 4. There is scaffolding on the entrances at the moment for building work, but the opening hours do not change. How long it takes. You walk the ten rooms in an hour and a half. With the engraving demonstration allow half an hour more.
The exhibitions on at the Monnaie, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
The quarter around here is worth the walk: behind Saint-Germain-des-Prés, five minutes away, is the Musée Delacroix in place de Furstenberg. Going up the boulevard Saint-Germain you reach the Musée de Cluny and, on the riverside, the Institut du monde arabe. On the other side of the Pont des Arts are the Musée du Louvre and the Musée des Arts décoratifs. And if the idea of a museum inside a factory has won you over, the Musée des Arts et Métiers is the version that deals with machines.
Photo credits: facade by PHGCOM (CC BY-SA 3.0); frescoed dome and allegorical statue by DiscoA340 (CC BY-SA 4.0); screw press by Chabe01 (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
