Musée de l’Homme, anthropology museum at Chaillot since 1937

The Musée de l’Homme was created by Paul Rivet for the 1937 World’s Fair, in the Passy wing of the Palais de Chaillot, on the place du Trocadéro. It brought together the collections of the Trocadéro ethnography museum and the anthropology and prehistory collections of the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle.

Its forerunner, the ethnography museum founded in 1882 by Ernest Hamy, occupied the old Trocadéro palace built for the 1878 Exhibition. From June 1940, around Boris Vildé, Anatole Lewitsky and Yvonne Oddon, members of staff formed the Musée de l’Homme network, one of the first of the Resistance; Vildé and Lewitsky were shot at Mont-Valérien in 1942.

Rivet also installed a laboratory, university teaching and a large library. Part of the ethnographic collections later went to the Musée du quai Branly and to the Mucem in Marseille. After a renovation, the new Musée de l’Homme opened on 15 October 2015.

Across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower, in the 16th arrondissement, the museum tells the story of humankind in all its diversity. The ancestors’ shelter displays the original Cro-Magnon fossils and the head of the Lady of Cavillon, and the collections include 18,000 skulls, among them that of Descartes.