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Key figures

Origin and history

The Branly Pier Museum, today named the Branly Pier Museum - Jacques-Chirac, is a project led by former President Jacques Chirac and designed by architect Jean Nouvel. Inaugurated on 20 June 2006 after a decade of controversy and debate, it brings together the collections of the Museum of Man and the National Museum of the Arts of Africa and Oceania. Its bold architecture, including a 200-metre bridge building and a 17,500-m2 garden designed by Gilles Clément, makes it a unique place in Paris, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

The museum was born from the desire of Jacques Chirac, passionate about early art, to create a space dedicated to non-Western cultures. The project, launched in 1996, sparked opposition, notably from agents of the Human Museum, who feared the dismantling of collections in favour of an aesthetic rather than a scientific approach. Despite these tensions, the museum opened in 2006, becoming one of the most frequented in the world in its category, with more than 20 million visitors since its inauguration.

The site, once occupied by the National Building Guard and then by temporary buildings after the Second World War, was transformed into an innovative museum complex. Jean Nouvel has designed a 3,200 tons metal bridge structure, supported by stilts, to preserve the green space imposed by the Plan d'Occupation des Sols de Paris. The museum now houses 300,000 objects transferred from the Museum of Man, exhibited in a vast platter without partitions, organized by continental zones: Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.

Since 2016, the museum has been named Jacques Chirac, in tribute to its initiator. It is also marked by controversies, especially about the colonial origin of certain works. In 2020, France authorized the restitution of 26 works of the royal treasure of Abomey in Benin, taken in 1892. Since 2019, the museum has conducted a survey of the 46,000 African objects in its collections, acquired during the colonial period, to assess the conditions for their acquisition and consider possible restitution.

The museum is distinguished by its aesthetic-centered museumography, sometimes criticized for its lack of historical and anthropological contextualization. He organizes about ten temporary exhibitions a year, some of which, like Tattoos, tattooed (2014-2015), have attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors. Its Claude Lévi-Strauss theatre, its media library with 321,900 documents, and its restaurant Les Ombres, offering a view of the Eiffel Tower, make it a multifunctional cultural place.

In 2021, the Quai Branly was partially renamed quai Jacques-Chirac in tribute to the former president. The museum continues to evolve, with projects such as the Gallery of Five Continents at the Louvre, inaugurated in 2025, and reflections on the decolonization of its collections, in an international context of increasing requests for restitution.

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