Timeline

Key figures

Origin and history

The Museum of Man finds its origins in the Musée d'Ethnography du Trocadéro, founded in 1882 by Ernest Hamy in the former Palace of Trocadéro, built for the Universal Exhibition of 1878. His first collections include a donation by explorer Alphonse Pinart, including about 3,000 objects from the Americas and 250 from Oceania. The museum also inherited cabinets of royal curiosities and 19th-century scientific missions, enriched by sometimes controversial expeditions, such as the Dakar-Djibouti mission (1931), accused of plundering African heritage. On the eve of its demolition in 1935, the museum suffered from an outdated image, competed with new media and other institutions such as the Guimet Museum.

The present man museum was created in 1937 by Paul Rivet for the Universal Exhibition in the Passy wing of the Palais de Chaillot (16th arrondissement). It merges the collections of the Ethnography Museum, those of physical anthropology and Prehistory of the National Museum of Natural History, as well as the Institute of Ethnology of the University of Paris. This innovative project combines museum, research laboratory, library (modernized by Yvonne Oddon) and teaching centre, under the supervision of the Ministries of Education and Ecology. As early as 1940, the museum became a focal point of the Resistance with the network of the Museum of Man, founded by Boris Vildé, Anatole Lewitsky and Yvonne Oddon, which organized escape routes and published a clandestine magazine. Several members, including Vildé and Lewitsky, were shot at Mount Valerian in 1942.

In 2009, President Jacques Chirac transferred ethnographic collections to the Musée du Quai Branly and MuCEM (Marseille), leaving only his departments of Prehistory and Anthropology to the Museum of Man. After a renovation of 96.6 million euros (2009–2015), the museum reopens in 2015 with an interactive three-track course: "Who are we?", "Where do we come from?" and "Where do we go?". It preserves major pieces such as the fossils of Cro-Magnon or Man of Neanderthal, and remains an active museum-laboratory, housing two mixed units of the CNRS and a specialized library. His militant role, inherited from Paul Rivet, is manifested in exhibitions committed to contemporary issues (racism, ecology, immigration).

The museum is also marked by polemics about the restitution of works, like the three sakalava skulls promised in Madagascar in 2025. Its architecture, signed Brochet-Lajus-Pueyo (2006), integrates the structures of the palaces of the Universal Exhibitions of 1878 and 1937, with an atrium illuminated by a zenithal roof. Today, he stands out from other French museums (Quai Branly, MuCEM) for his multidisciplinary approach, combining natural sciences and humanities to explore the natural and cultural history of humanity.

His iconic figures include explorers such as Alphonse Pinart, anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss (interim director in 1949–1950), and resistors such as Yvonne Oddon. The museum also inspired cinematographic works, such as the Rio Man (1964) or the Resistance series (2014). Its collections, among the richest in the world (700,000 prehistoric pieces, 30,000 anthropological pieces), make it a unique place to understand human evolution and its future challenges.

Collection

Le musée de l'Homme conserve une collection nationale d'anthropologie et de préhistoire unique au monde, témoignant de l'émergence et du développement des sciences de l'Homme au xixe siècle, riche de spécimens insignes relatifs aux origines de notre espèce ou à la mise en oeuvre des premiers comportements symboliques, et toujours support de recherches actuelles.

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