Musée Grévin: Paris’ Waxwork Museum | EUROtoday

Justin Postlethwaite salutes the Paris waxworks museum the place historic figures and trendy celebrities draw the crowds…

While not fairly as scandalous and criminally critical because the October 2025 Louvre jewellery heist, the kidnapping of Emmanuel Macron’s waxwork likeness from Musée Grévin by Greenpeace activists final June was equally audacious.

Police advised reporters that the environmentalists had entered the Paris museum as vacationers, then modified garments to pose as museum employees earlier than purloining the grinning presidential doppelganger out via an emergency exit underneath a blanket. The dummy was then plonked outdoors the capital’s Russian embassy in protest at Macron’s angle in direction of French corporations that proceed to do enterprise with Russia because the invasion of Ukraine.

The mannequin was left for police to seek out, after one other photograph shoot on the Paris headquarters of vitality firm EDF to protest France’s imports of Russian vitality, and the story gave Musée Grévin some critical free promotion. More publicity adopted – this time certainly with eager advertising and marketing savvy – final November when the museum put in a brand new waxwork of Diana, Princess of Wales, carrying a duplicate of the well-known Christina Stambolian-designed ‘revenge gown’ that she wore in June 1994, shortly after Prince Charles publicly confessed to infidelity. “This bold look, which broke with British royal tradition, was quickly dubbed the ‘revenge dress’ and interpreted as an act of self-reclamation, a powerful image of assertive femininity, renewed confidence and a symbol of resilience,” mentioned a Grévin assertion.

EVER-CHANGING GALLERY

That Musée Grévin, which opened on June 5, 1882, continues to attract consideration almost 150 years later is essentially because of its ever-evolving roster of zeitgeist lookalikes reflecting traits within the worlds of cinema, pop and sport, which sit alongside historic figures from politics and science (it welcomed Marie Curie final yr). The method is nothing if not populist (it receives as much as 900,000 guests a yr), with current additions together with French social media influencer Léna Situations in December 2024. There are photograph opps galore, with everybody from rapper GIMS to Marie-Antoinette up for a selfie, with no complaints. Some 200 waxworks are on show at a time.

Recent interactive improvements based mostly on historic occasions lend the museum a real modern taste, with guests having the prospect to Paint within the Homo Sapiens Grotto; Fight alongside Vercingetorix; Participate in Napoleon Bonaparte’s Council of War; and Take half in a Parade with General de Gaulle.

The constructing by which the museum is housed, at 10, boulevard Montmartre, lends additional customer attraction, that includes a grand marble staircase; an Italian-style theater constructed in 1900 by architect Gustave Rives; the well-known Hall of Mirrors, made by Eugène Hénard for the Exposition Universelle in 1900 (it was introduced from the Trocadéro to the Grévin in 1906); and the Dome and the Hall of Columns, a baroque framework by Esnault-Pelterie, all glitzy gilt and mosaics, created in 1882 to deal with the primary waxwork celebrities.

It was all of the brainchild of Arthur Meyer, journalist and founding father of the day by day newspaper Le Gaulois, who had the concept of ​​displaying his readers the individuals who made the headlines (the press didn’t use images on the time) in 3D. He enlisted the caricaturist, theater costume designer and sculptor, Alfred Grévin, who grew to become so integral to the mission that his identify went past the door.

While the checklist of well-known faces is in perpetual evolution, one factor has not modified – pure beeswax remains to be used to craft the figures, as a result of, says the museum, “its texture is astonishingly close to the look of human skin and it keeps its shape over the years, without ever shrinking or changing color.”

www.grevin-paris.com/en

From France Today Magazine