★★★★★ 5.0
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Musée Grévin
This museum's most famous murder scene uses the ACTUAL knife from 1889! You're standing on Boulevard Montmartre where newspaper owner Arthur Meyer built one of Europe's oldest wax museums because his readers wanted to see the faces behind their news stories. Inside that grand entrance, Charlotte Corday's real knife and Jean-Paul Marat's actual bathtub are waiting for you! Each wax figure takes six whole months to create - that's longer than your summer vacation times three! Get ready to hunt for Voltaire, who's been standing here since 1879!
Did You Know?
- Musée Grévin was founded in 1882 by journalist Arthur Meyer, who wanted to bring the newsmakers of his newspaper Le Gaulois to life in three dimensions—a revolutionary idea at a time when photographs of celebrities were rare, making the wax figures a vivid, interactive extension of the news.
- The museum’s flamboyant Belle Époque architecture features gilded interiors, marble staircases, and a historic Italian theater with over 200 seats, which was listed as a historical monument in 1964; this theater also hosted the world’s first projected cartoon, 'Pauvre Pierrot,' in 1892 and saw early performances by cinema pioneer Georges Méliès.
- Around 15 different craftspeople—from sculptors and painters to hair implanters and ocular prosthetists—collaborate to create each lifelike wax figure, and the museum even once displayed a real guillotine in a dramatic historical scene until a visitor recognized the severed head as that of her son, prompting its removal.