Musée Carnavalet — Histoire de Paris

The Musée Carnavalet occupies two adjoining 16th- and 17th-century mansions in the Marais — the Hôtel Carnavalet, where the writer Madame de Sévigné lived for the last two decades of her life, and the neighbouring Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau. Together they've housed the City of Paris's own historical museum since 1880, making it one of the oldest municipal museums in France.

The collection tells Paris's story chronologically, from Gallo-Roman and medieval archaeology through the ancien régime, the Revolution — including an exceptional collection of Revolutionary-era paintings, models and relics, among them furniture from the Bastille and objects connected to Louis XVI's final days — and on through the 19th and 20th centuries to recent history. Entire period rooms, salvaged from demolished Parisian buildings, are reconstructed room by room, letting visitors walk through real Art Nouveau interiors and Belle Époque shopfronts rather than looking at them behind glass.