Musée de l’Homme



Musée de l’Homme - Museum of Man.
 


1879 - Musée Ethnographique du Trocadéro.
 


1928 - Became director of the Musée de l’Homme.
 


Published on December 15, 1940, Résistance served as the first newsprint for the Réseau du Musée de l’Homme.
 

Location of Musée de l'Homme

Description of the Musée de l'Homme

The Musée de l'Homme is an ethnographic museum situated within the Palais de Chaillot across from the Eiffel Tower. Opened in 1938, the Musée de l'Homme centered on commencing Director Paul Rivet's concept of "objets témoins,"[1] devoting equal attention and value to advance made in biological, societal and cultural human livelihood. While it was forged with four distinct sites including a navy section, a national monument section, a popular culture section, and a place focusing on the natural and cultural history of mankind, the Musée de l'Homme has slanted under constant renovation due to insufficient interest and investment. In the 1990s, the museum arrived under renovation and was closed to the public for decades before partaking "a third life,"[2] in 2015 with renovated auditoriums and lecture rooms. Nevertheless, the Musée de l'Homme emphasizes a long-standing international aura dubbing France as the art capital of the world with the designed lecture rooms as well as educational workshops and state-of-the-art artifacts. The museum was built in 1879 as the Musée Ethnographique du Trocadéro and conducted analysis on ethnographic and archaeological artifacts from the 1878 Universal Exhibition that had been held on the Place du Trocadéro. While its doors were open to the public in 1882, the Musée Ethnographique du Trocadéro fell into deficit and failed to reveal interest until anthropologist and medical doctor Rivet became director with an ambition to create a multi-disciplinary institution in 1928. With a decade-long renovation process, the Musée de l'Homme was born and Rivet issued that the interaction between man and nature along with the evolving man be articulated in vitrines and synthetic vitrines. The Musée de l'Homme resided throughout the twentieth century with an inadequate funding base but has recently been renovated to boast a Paul Rivet atrium, a Germaine Tillion documentation section, a Jean Rouch auditorium, a Yvonne Oddon research library and an André Leroi-Gourhan seminar room. [1] Rebecca J. DeRoo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France After 1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 37. [2] Benjamin Dodman, "Paris Museum of Mankind Reopens After Brush With Extinction," France 24, October 17, 2015, , accessed November 23, 2017, http://www.france24.com/en/20151014-paris-museum-mankind-musee-homme-anthropology-sapiens-climate-branly.

Selected bibliography

DeRoo, Rebecca J. The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France After 1968. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Schlanger, Nathan. "Back in Business: History and Evolution at the New Musee de l'Homme." Antiquity no. 352 (2016): 1090. Academic OneFile, EBSCOhost (accessed November 24, 2017).

Jones, Colin. Paris: The Biography of a City. New York: Penguin Group, 2006.

"History of the Musée de l'Homme." Musée de l'Homme. Accessed November 24, 2017. http://www.museedelhomme.fr/en/museum/history-musee-homme.

Schoenbrun, David. Soldiers of the Night: The Story of the French Resistance. Scarborough: New American Library, 1980.

Taylor, Lynne. Between Resistance and Collaboration: Popular Protest in Northern France, 1940-45. Hampshire: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000.

"Musee de l'Homme Museum of Mankind." EUtouring.com. Accessed November 24, 2017. http://www.eutouring.com/musee_de_l_homme_museum_paris.html.

Dodman, Benjamin. "Paris Museum of Mankind Reopens After Brush With Extinction." France 24. October 15, 2015. Accessed November 24, 2017. http://www.france24.com/en/20151014-paris-museum-mankind-musee-homme- anthropology-sapiens-climate-branly.

Kemp, Sandra, and Chiara Zuanni. "Research in Paris: Musée de l'Homme." Universal Histories and Universal Museums. Accessed November 24, 2017. https://universalhistories.org/2017/05/01/research-in-paris-musee-de-lhomm/.

"The new Musée de l'Homme: 2003-2015." Musée de l'Homme. Accessed November 24, 2017. http://www.museedelhomme.fr/en/museum/history-musee-homme/new-musee-homme- 2003-2015.

Jones, Jonathan. "The New Musée de l'Homme is so Much More Than a Racist Cabinet of Curiosities." The Guardian. October 14, 2015. Accessed November 25, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanj....

Why is this site important?

With its view of the Eiffel Tower and the Ecole Militaire, the Musée de l'Homme resorted as the headquarters for the Réseau du Musée de l'Homme rebel circle.[1] Though the resistance set shape with a common cause between Boris Vildé, Anatole Lewitzky and Yvonne Oddon to create anti-Nazi propaganda and sabotage German military installations, the Musée de l'Homme handed blessing and council to additional member conspirators.[2] Germaine Tillion was not affiliated and working for the Musée de l'Homme and was in charge of her own "sector,"[3] but she attended the anti-Nazi seminar meetings and organizations held at the museum.[4] Jacqueline Bordelet operated as a part-time typist and was cultured and well educated with an obligation to partake in anti-Nazi activity and propaganda.[5] While she was a curator to the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires and worked next-door to the Musée de l'Homme, Agnès Humbert believed she would have "gone mad,"[6] if she did not proclaim that Parisians had the right and the duty to resist German power in opposition alongside the Réseau du Musée de l'Homme.[7] These isolated intellectuals highlighted rejection to the French defeat as well as an on-the-fence posture known as attentisme that covered Parisians in humiliation and rallied together at the Musée de l'Homme.[8]

Hosting a university, museum, research laboratory, library, and a mimeograph machine in its basement, the Musée de l'Homme boasted the materials needed for the resistance to create and distribute the underground newsprint Résistance on December 15, 1940.[9] The article emphasized Parisians to unite "in a single ambition," for a "pure and free France,"[10] but only carried arrests as well as deportations and executions for the resistance members.[11] German police further infringed the Musée de l'Homme in response to the article in mid-February, 1941, and interrogated existing staff leading to the arrests of Lewitzky and Oddon.[12] Even though the Musée de l'Homme handed the resistance with the resources needed to publish Résistance and demand intelligence to London on German military schemes, initiated articles were left on café benches and public toilets and the group was alone in pressing for opposition.[13] The Musée de l'Homme has gone on to demonstrate the first resistance movement in Nazi-occupied France and serves as a memorial for the murdered and executed members in the Réseau du Musée de l'Homme.[14]

[1] Schoenbrun, Soldiers of the Night, 70.: Schlanger, "Back in Business," 1092.: Alan Riding, And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 109.

[2] Schoenbrun, Soldiers of the Night, 74-75.: Riding, And the Show Went On, 109.

[3] Agnes Humbert, Resistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France, trans. Barbara Mellor (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2008), 292.

[4] Schoenbrun, Soldiers of the Night, 70.

[5] Ibid., 71-72.: Humbert, Resistance, 293.

[6] Humbert, Resistance, 11.

[7] Riding, And the Show Went On, 109.: Margaret Collins. Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France 1940-1945 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. , 1995), 59.: Humbert, Resistance, 11.

[8] Riding, And the Show Went On, 108-109.: Harry Roderick Kedward, Occupied France: Collaboration and Resistance 1940-1944 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1985), 53.

[9] "Musee de l'Homme Museum of Mankind,".: Schoenbrun, Soldiers of the Night, 71, 73.: Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance, 59.

[10] Editorial of the first issue of Résistance, 15 December 1940. Official Bulletin of the National Committee of Public Safety. In Agnes Humbert, Resistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2008), 310.

[11] Kedward, Occupied France, 53.

[12] Schoenbrun, Soldiers of the Night, 114.: Riding, And the Show Went On, 113.

[13] Schoenbrun, Soldiers of the Night, 73.: Riding, And the Show Went On, 110, 116.

[14] Schlanger, "Back in Business," 1092.

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