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Museum · Paris 9e Arrondissement, Paris
| Monday | 09:30 – 19:00 |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | 09:30 – 19:00 |
| Wednesday | 09:30 – 19:00 |
| Thursday | 09:30 – 19:00 |
| Friday | 09:30 – 19:00 |
| Saturday | 09:30 – 19:00 |
| Sunday | 09:30 – 19:00 |
Checked 2026-08-24 · Source
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Set the group type to family in the planner and the day window contracts to about three quarters of a solo day.
Musée Grévin is a wax museum on Boulevard Montmartre, opened in 1882. The journalist Arthur Meyer founded it as a wax-work gallery of current events in the style of a newspaper brought to life, at a time when a wax tableau of a recent event served the role a photograph or a newsreel would take over decades later. He worked with the sculptor and caricaturist Alfred Grévin, whose name the museum carries and who designed many of its early figures and stage sets.
The museum predates its better-known London counterpart's arrival in continental awareness by decades in the French context, and it has kept adding contemporary figures ever since opening, which is part of why it still draws visitors more than a century after the format that inspired it — illustrated news — has largely disappeared.
Checked 2026-08-24 · Source
Wax figures fill themed rooms: French historical scenes and monarchs, Napoleon and the Revolutionary period, and a large contemporary section of film, sport, music and political figures grouped so visitors can walk among them and pose alongside, rather than viewing the figures from behind a rope as in a conventional museum display. The Palais des Mirages, a hall-of-mirrors illusion theatre built around 1900 for that year's Universal Exposition, survives as one of the museum's oldest attractions and runs a short rotating light show inside its mirrored chamber, using the same infinite-reflection trick that made it a sensation when it first opened, and it is one of the few attractions from that Exposition still operating in its original form anywhere in the city. The nineteenth-century interior itself — the gilded Hall of Columns and the Cabinet Fantastique — is part of what is on display, not just a backdrop to the figures, and its stucco and mirror work is original to the museum's founding decades, giving the building itself a period atmosphere that a purpose-built modern gallery could not replicate.
Checked 2026-08-24 · Source
About ninety minutes to two hours covers the full route including the Palais des Mirages show, longer for anyone stopping for photographs at each themed room, and families with young children often move more slowly through the contemporary section where recognisable figures draw the most attention.
Checked 2026-08-24 · Source
Open daily. Weekday mornings run quieter; school holidays and weekends draw the busiest crowds given the central boulevard location, and the museum sits close enough to the Grands Boulevards shopping district that it often gets folded into a longer day out along that stretch, particularly around the winter holidays when the boulevards themselves are decorated and busy.
Checked 2026-08-24 · Source
Paid entry, and combined tickets with other central Paris attractions are sometimes offered as bundles, a common practice among the city's privately run attractions rather than something specific to this one museum. The figure shown on this page is the one currently published.
Checked 2026-08-24 · Source
Métro Grands Boulevards, on lines 8 and 9, sits close by on the Right Bank's central shopping stretch, a short walk from the museum's entrance on the boulevard itself, in a part of the city dense enough with covered passages and department stores to combine easily with other shopping and sightseeing on the same afternoon.
Checked 2026-08-24 · Source
This is a wax and stagecraft museum, not a fine-art collection — set expectations accordingly, and visitors expecting a conventional history museum sometimes find the mix of eras and celebrities disorienting on a first walk-through. Figures of contemporary celebrities are rotated as fame fades or new figures are added, so a specific current figure is not guaranteed to still be on display on any given visit. Flash photography is restricted in some rooms to protect the wax finish, and the Palais des Mirages show runs on a schedule rather than continuously, so timing a visit to catch it matters and asking staff for the next showing time on arrival avoids missing it.
Checked 2026-08-24 · Source
Figures are posed for visitor photographs throughout, and this is one of the more photograph-friendly museums in Paris for that reason, with several rooms laid out specifically so a visitor can stand beside a figure for a portrait. The gilded Hall of Columns is itself a popular backdrop independent of the figures in it, and the mirrored chamber of the Palais des Mirages photographs unlike anywhere else in the building, its repeating reflections making even a simple phone photograph look elaborately staged.
Checked 2026-08-24 · Source
It opened in 1882, founded by journalist Arthur Meyer with sculptor Alfred Grévin.
Yes, in concept — a wax museum of historical and contemporary figures — though Musée Grévin predates Tussauds' Paris outpost and has its own separate history.
Yes, contemporary figures rotate as public fame changes, so the roster is not fixed.
Around ninety minutes to two hours for the full route.
Generally yes, and figures are posed for it; flash is restricted in some rooms.
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Source: OpenStreetMap contributors, Wikidata ·
