Musée Grévin, a wax museum on boulevard Montmartre since 1882

The Musée Grévin opened on 5 June 1882 at 10 boulevard Montmartre. Arthur Meyer, editor of the daily Le Gaulois, wanted his readers to put a face to the figures in the news, at a time when photography was not yet usual in the press, and he asked the caricaturist Alfred Grévin to model them in wax.

Success was immediate. From 1883 the financier Gabriel Thomas gave the museum the means to grow. Émile Reynaud showed his Pantomimes Lumineuses here, magicians followed one another in the Cabinet Fantastique, and the Palais des Mirages arrived in 1908.

The baroque interiors of 1882 survive, as does the Théâtre Grévin, with its stage curtain painted by Jules Chéret and its high relief by Antoine Bourdelle. Gabriel Thomas’s descendants kept the house until 1999, when it passed to the Parc Astérix group. The figures themselves are always changing.

On the Grands Boulevards, the museum gathers scenes from French history and stars of film, music, sport and politics, met room after room.