Photo: Chabe01 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Musée de l'Histoire vivante

Museum of social and working-class history in a villa in the Parc Montreau, devoted to social struggles, colonization and the history of the Paris suburbs.

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About the museum

The museum was founded in 1937 by the Association pour l'Histoire vivante, at the initiative of communist figures from Montreuil, including Jacques Duclos. It opened on March 26, 1939, for the 150th anniversary of the French Revolution, under the direction of historian Jean Bruhat. It occupies an Italian-style villa that Théophile Sueur, mayor of Montreuil and industrialist, had built in 1874 in the Parc Montreau.

During the Second World War the collections were hidden on a farm in Seine-et-Marne; the museum reopened in 1946. In the 1960s and 1970s, declining attendance led to a partial closure. After a complete renovation, it reopened in September 1988 with an exhibition on Jean Jaurès and the French Revolution, and was granted the status of a museum supervised by the Direction des musées de France. It was awarded the “Musée de France” label in 2003.

The collections consist mainly of images and documents from the French Revolution to the 1960s, as well as archives of communist, socialist and libertarian activists. The museum also has a space dedicated to the memory of Hô Chi Minh. Its focus has shifted towards labor and social history, social movements, colonization and decolonization, the suburbs of Paris and Montreuil's industrial heritage. It also serves as a resource for researchers and an educational space for schools. The association that runs it is working to create a larger, national-level museum on the history of the labor movement.