Some museums tell the story of a period, others the story of an artist. The Musée Carnavalet tells the story of a city: Paris, from prehistory to today, with more than 3,800 works and interiors shown across two Marais mansions joined together. You will find a canoe hollowed out of an oak trunk, the armchair Voltaire died in and Marcel Proust’s bedroom.
And then there is the practical fact that changes the visit: the permanent collections are free and open access, with no booking, as at every city museum in Paris. You pay only for the temporary exhibition. The museum is closed on Mondays and takes no luggage, only handbags.
What is a hollowed-out Neolithic tree doing in a museum of city history?
Let’s begin!
Two mansions, a courtyard and no queue
The museum fills the hôtel Carnavalet, built between 1548 and 1560 for Jacques des Ligneris, president of the Paris parlement, and the hôtel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, annexed in 1989; you go in at 23 rue de Sévigné. The first is, along with the Cour carrée of the Louvre, one of the few pieces of Renaissance architecture left in Paris, and the city bought it in 1866, on prefect Haussmann’s proposal, to make it the museum of its own history.
Before you go up, stop in the courtyard: reliefs of the seasons run along the facade, female figures set between the tall windows, with a balustrade of stone vases on top.
The route starts below, with prehistory, and climbs to the 20th century. The eight stops I suggest follow that order, and if you only have an hour you can do half and come back, since you are not paying for a ticket.
1. The Parisii canoe and the head from the amphitheatre
It starts with a dugout canoe hollowed from a single oak trunk, preserved over more than five metres. It was found on the bank of a fossil arm of the Seine, next to a group of Neolithic dwellings: the Bercy excavations of 1991-1992 turned up about ten of them, and the museum calls them the best preserved prehistoric boats in Europe. Beside it is a Parisii stater, the gold coin of the Gaulish tribe that gave the city its name.
A little further on there is a head from a statue that comes from the ancient amphitheatre, the one Parisians still call the Arènes de Lutèce, and a bronze Mercury. This is the part of the museum almost everyone walks through in a hurry and that deserves the opposite: here the city appears before it had this name.
2. The La Rivière rooms, painted by Charles Le Brun
Here the museum does something few museums can: it shows you the inside of a house that no longer exists. The salons La Rivière are the painted interiors made by Charles Le Brun for the great chamber and the gilded cabinet of the hôtel La Rivière, which stood at number 14 place Royale, today’s place des Vosges.
Le Brun would go on to become Louis XIV’s first painter and the director of Versailles. Here you catch him working for a private client, in a square you can go and see ten minutes away, and the comparison between the building outside and the room inside is worth the stop on its own.
3. Madame de Sévigné, who lived in this house
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, lived in the hôtel Carnavalet from 1677 to 1694, and the museum keeps three things from her side by side: the portrait painted by Claude Lefèbvre, a letter to her daughter, madame de Grignan, dated 2 February 1671, and her writing desk.
The marquise’s letters are the liveliest document we have of 17th-century Paris, and seeing them next to the furniture they were written on does something no transcription can.
4. The 18th century: Ledoux, Boucher and Voltaire’s armchair
Three pieces, in the same stretch of the route. The panelling from the Café militaire, the establishment that stood on rue Saint-Honoré, was made to designs by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, the architect of the Paris toll gates. The decorative panels for the salon of Gilles Demarteau are by François Boucher and his workshop: a painted arbour that turned a town room into a garden.
And then there is Voltaire’s deathbed armchair, the piece of furniture the philosopher died in, in 1778. The museum shows it without any drama, among the other objects of the century.
5. The Revolution, day by day
The section on the storming of the Bastille tells the days from 12 to 14 July 1789 one at a time, and the part played by the eastern faubourgs. On the wall hangs the sketch for the Tennis Court Oath by Jacques-Louis David, the painting he never finished.
Which object tells you more about 10 August 1792 than any painting?
Further on, among the objects from the storming of the Tuileries on 10 August 1792, three weigh more than any painting: a shoe belonging to Marie Antoinette, taken by one of the attackers, a small milk jug found in Louis XVI’s bedroom, and the last order the king wrote to Colonel Dürler, who commanded the Swiss Guards.
6. Art Nouveau: the Fouquet jewellery shop and the Café de Paris
Two rooms reassemble two vanished Parisian interiors. The first holds the fittings of the Café de Paris, the restaurant at 41 avenue de l’Opéra, signed by the architect Henri Sauvage and the cabinetmaker Louis Majorelle. The second holds the Fouquet jewellery shop, created in 1901 by Alfons Mucha for the jeweller Georges Fouquet.
Stop at the peacock: it is bronze, its tail climbs the yellow and purple glass, and its head leans out into the room as if it were about to come down. Mucha designed everything, from the display cases to the white and gold stucco ceiling, and when the shop was dismantled the fittings came here and were put back together room by room.
7. Marcel Proust’s bedroom
This is the stop nearly everyone comes for. The furniture and objects come from the three Paris flats Marcel Proust lived in after his mother’s death, and the museum has brought them together in a single room.
In the half-light you see the brass bed with its blue satin cover, the small table beside it and, behind, a lacquered screen with pagodas and bridges in gold on black. It is the room of a writer who worked at night, in bed, with the windows shut.
8. The Wendel ballroom, off the route
The last stop is not on the chronological route and has to be sought out. The Wendel ballroom comes from the hôtel Sourdeval-Demachy and was ordered in the 1920s by the Lorraine steel magnate Maurice de Wendel from the painter José-Maria Sert. It has been in the museum since 1989.
How did Sert paint a room that changes colour?
Go in and look up: walls and ceiling are painted as one grey landscape, crossed by enormous red drapes, with a procession climbing a mountain of figures. The restoration revealed how Sert worked: up to three layers of glaze laid on and worked with a cloth, with metallic powder, over a thin sheet of silver leaf. That is why the room changes colour depending on where you stand.
Practical information
Data checked on 23 September 2026 on the official website carnavalet.paris.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. The permanent collections are free and open access, with no booking. You pay for the temporary exhibitions and for tours with a museum guide. Opening hours. From Tuesday to Sunday the museum opens at 10:00 and closes at 18:00. The desks close at 17:15, which is also the last admission to the collections. It is closed on Mondays. Bags. Under the Vigipirate plan bags are checked as a matter of course and luggage is not allowed: only small handbags get in. If you are arriving from the station with a wheelie case, do this museum after the hotel. Getting there. The entrance is at 23 rue de Sévigné. The handiest stops are Saint-Paul on line 1 and Chemin Vert on line 8. How long to allow. The eight stops need two hours. Since it is free, it is better to split the visit in two than to rush it.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
Five minutes away is the Musée Picasso, in the hôtel Salé, and on the way you pass the Musée Cognacq-Jay, which is the 18th century seen by a collector, and the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature. In the other direction, towards place des Vosges, are the Maison de Victor Hugo and, on rue du Temple, the mahJ. And if the Café de Paris fittings caught your eye, the fireplace from the same place is at the Musée des Arts décoratifs.
Photo credits: courtyard front by GFreihalter (CC BY-SA 4.0); peacock from the Fouquet shop by Poulpy (CC BY-SA 3.0); Marcel Proust’s bedroom by Adoc (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wendel ballroom by Chatsam (CC BY-SA 3.0), all from Wikimedia Commons.
