Musée de la Légion d’honneur, at the Hôtel de Salm since 1925

The Musée de la Légion d’honneur et des ordres de chevalerie opened in 1925 by the rue de Lille, in the Palais de la Légion d’honneur, the Hôtel de Salm. General Dubail, Grand Chancellor, launched it, and a subscription among holders of the Legion of Honour and the Military Medal paid for it.

The Hôtel de Salm was built in 1782 by Pierre Rousseau for Prince Frederick III of Salm-Kyrburg. It has been called the Palais de la Légion d’honneur since 1804. Burnt during the Commune in 1871, it was restored by a subscription of the decorated. The museum fills a wing built from 1922 to 1925 on the site of the old stables.

The Grand Chancellery’s holdings grew with the Bucquet and La Tour d’Auvergne Lauragais collections, foreign gifts, Cambacérès’s case of decorations in 1982 and Achille Murat’s collar of the Order of the Two Sicilies in 2002. Antonio Spada deposited his in 2008.

Facing the Musée d’Orsay, in the 7th arrondissement, it is the only museum devoted to phaleristics: orders of chivalry and religious orders, French royal orders, souvenirs of the First Empire, foreign orders and French decorations from 1789 to the present, and more than 300 portraits.