Description of the attraction
The Grevin Museum is a wax museum on Boulevard Montmartre, best known in the world after Madame Tussauds.
The idea of creating a museum came to Arthur Meyer in 1881. Meyer is an interesting figure in the history of France in the 19th century. The rabbi's grandson, a boy from a modest Jewish family, became a royalist, Catholic, anti-Dreyfusar, one of the key characters in the Third French Republic. He fought a duel, fought for the return of the monarchy, owned the bourgeois newspaper Le Gaulois and opened a wax museum. It was the newspaper that gave him the idea of the museum - Meyer decided that readers would be interested to see what those who write about on the front page every day look like. (The printing equipment of that time did not yet allow printing photographs).
Meyer invited Alfred Grevin to bring the idea to life. Grevin, a cartoonist, sculptor and theatrical costume designer, took up waxing. In the end, the museum began to bear his name. The institution opened its doors in 1882 - and it was a success! In 1883, the famous investor Thomas Gabriel invested in the museum, which significantly helped to expand it, and also enriched the interiors with new valuable decorations. This is how the Grevin Theater and the Palace of Mirages (a hall where a show is shown with the help of a system of mirrors, as in a kaleidoscope; entertainment was invented for the 1900 World Exhibition), arose.
Now the museum continues the work of the three founding fathers - showing the public the faces of celebrities. Surprisingly, in the age of the Internet, people enjoy looking at wax figures and taking pictures with them. In ten pavilions of the museum there are about 500 figures depicting famous people and fictional characters: Mozart, Aznavour, Rostropovich, Picasso, Napoleon, Nostradamus, Einstein, Esmeralda, Lara Croft, Spider-Man … Part of the exhibition presents the key moments of French history: the death of Roland, the burning of Joan of Arc, the murder of Marat, and similar dramatic scenes. It is said that it is possible to confuse a visitor with a wax figure, but this is a very dubious statement. Although making wax mannequins is a laborious and time-consuming process, they do not look alive at all.
