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Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The Clemenceau museum is housed in the ground floor apartment at 8 rue Benjamin-Franklin in Paris, where Georges Clemenceau lived from 1896 until his death in 1929. This place witnessed his political and journalistic career, particularly during the Dreyfus case, for which he wrote 665 articles between 1899 and 1903. Despite his two terms as President of the Council (1906-1909 and 1917-1920), he refused to occupy official palaces, preferring to stay in this apartment which he called "I don't want to live in furnished".

The building, initially a boyess of the aristocrat Robert de Montesquiou, was saved from sale in 1926 thanks to the intervention of an American patron, James Stuart Douglas, admirer of Clemenceau. The latter, through his council Bacon, bought the building at auction to allow Clemenceau, then 85, to finish his days there. After his death in 1929, his children gave all the furniture and objects to a foundation created to preserve the apartment "in the state where he was on the day of his death".

Opened to the public in 1931, the museum was completed in 1937 by a documentary gallery on the life of Clemenceau. Ranked a Historic Monument in 1955 (apartment and garden), it benefits from the label "Maisons des Illustres". The apartment retains its horse iron desk designed by cabinetmaker Gabriel Viardot, its Chinese-style room, and a dining room where he received friends and family. The garden, which he cultivated with passion, still houses plants exchanged with Claude Monet.

The Clemenceau Foundation, recognized as a public utility in 1932, perpetuates its memory by keeping the apartment as it was at his death. In 2017, the gallery's museum was renovated to mark the centenary of its role during the First World War. The museum is organised today between the ground floor (historic apartment) and the first floor (temporary exhibitions).

Future

The museum opened to the public in 1931. It was completed in 1933 by the opening of a documentary gallery that traces the life and work of Georges Clemenceau.

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