Musee Grévin: History & children’s dream world

No one will contest that the word museum is often a turnoff to many who would rather go to the movies, watch TV, or choose a musical show for entertainment. The only museum we know that has become a major tourist attraction since the late 1790s is Madame Tussauds’ wax museum in London with various branches in Asia and the US.

However, on a recent trip to Paris, we discovered the Musée Grévin waxwork museum on Boulevard Montmartre, founded in 1882, which we thought even more entertaining. It is history, a lesson in wax figure making, costuming, architecture, continuous updating of attractions that include a Hall of Mirrors and a Theater for Magic Shows. And not in the least, The Children’s World.

Apparently, Bernard Pivot, the Grévin Academy president, is a journalist, literary critic and host of French cultural TV programs which explains his interest in bringing his training into the museum. However, even before Bernard’s time, the first animated cartoon ever projected, Pauvre Pierrot (a.k.a. Poor Pete) was screened in the Grévin in 1892. It consists of 500 individually painted images running for 15 minutes.

Yearly, four to six new French and select international celebrities from comic strips and cartoons join the Grévin like The Little Prince, Gaston Lagaffe or Scrat of the Ice Age, Obelix and Spiderman.

Ice Age, the 2002 American computer-animated comedy-drama adventure film was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars with a saber-toothed squirrel (known as Scrat) in the lead. In June 2012, on the occasion of the screening of Ice Age 4 at Grévin, the creators of Ice Age came to the Grévin and discovered that in the middle of the glacier, the intrepid prehistoric squirrel was desperately searching for a place to hide his acorn. Grévin has always offered the stuff dreams are made of since 1882. This is exactly what Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince would heartily approve of — an improbable reunion of illusion merging with reality.  

The historical part of Musée Grévin consists of around 450 characters arranged in depictions of unforgettable figures from French history as well as other countries, from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. We meet Charlemagne, Napoleon III, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Pope John Paul II, Louis XIV, Molière, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, Queen Elizabeth II, US President Barack Obama, Charlotte Corday stabbing Jean-Paul Marat  in the actual bathtub with the actual knife used, Joan of Arc, Guy Montagne, Charles Aznavour, Bruce Willis, Jackie Chan, Jean Paul Sartre, Luciano Pavarotti, Gerald Depardeau, Laurel and Hardy Comedians, the assassination of Henry IV, Nostradamus, Esmeralda and Quasimodo from Notre Dame de Paris. Newest wax characters are Zinedine Zidane and Isabelle Adjani.

This is not all, however. Musée Grévin is doing what no other wax museum would do. In the name of education, it has unveiled all the secrets of making a wax figure, step by detailed step in the Musée Grévin Wax Workshop.

It takes 150 hours to sculpt a single face, after which a plaster and “elastomere” mould is made. Into this mould, wax is cast for the face and resin for the body. Bodies are modeled in clay using stand-ins. Five hundred thousand natural hairs per figure are implanted individually. The eyes are made of glass and frequently selected in the presence of the celebrity concerned. Teeth are made by a professional dental specialist. After extraction from the mould, the wax head goes to the make-up shop to face 42 hours of painting with oil. Every tiny detail from shadows around the eyes, beauty spots, scars, are painstakingly reproduced. It is so amazing one should spend days at the workshop to really understand the process. 

Awaiting at the Hall of Mirrors is a unique sound and light show unrivaled worldwide. The audience is transported to a bewitching Hindu temple, a hostile jungle and finally, a lavishly gilded Palace of the Thousand and One Nights. Unbelievable but true. We hadn’t even gone to the Theater for Magic Shows but really that should be for another day.

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