More French History

5/25/2012 03:31:00 PM |

Here we go...another museum! But this was so cool! We went to the Carnavalet Museum, which is all about French History. It's not a huge museum, but since there's so much history to France, we decided to focus on the French Revolution section.

The museum tells history through art work and artifacts. So we saw some amazing paintings of some scenes during the revolution. There were also several models of the Bastille prison, made from actual stones that were part of the Bastille. Below are some of the keys to the Bastille and some of the models:

There were also some portraits of the key leaders of the revolution. And we had to snap a picture of this guy:

Joseph-Ignace Guillotin - guess what he invented? Interestingly enough, his motive was to find a more humane way to kill prisoners. A funny/gruesome saying is that the guillotine could instantly make someone "a head shorter at the top."

We used the guide in Rick Steves' Paris book to get some background on the paintings and artifacts that we were looking at. It was really helpful! And the kids seemed engaged too.

After the Carnavalet museum, we headed over to the home of Victor Hugo. He lived in several places during his lifetime, but it was while he was living here, that he wrote Les Miserables. There were several manuscripts, pictures, and excerpts from the book on display.

Victor hugo's desk. He wrote and worked while standing.

And to close out this blog entry, I'm also including a visit to another museum (from a different day). We visited the Conciergerie, which was a prison for many of the prisoners of the revolution. I didn't get a lot of pictures because it was so dark inside. But there were several rooms set up to look like how the cells used to look when prisoners were there. The poor prisoners slept on straw, while the richer ones had cots.