Paris for Free: Sights That Are Always Free

Sights, museums, and monuments that are always admission free in Paris

art museums | cultural heroes | cemeteries | oddball sights

Art Museums

Musée Carnavalet (Museum of the History of Paris)

— Isn't it grand when one of the freebies in town is a the museum dedicated to the city itself?...

Musée du Petit Palais (Little Palace)

— A bombastic building left over from the 1900 Universal Exposition stuffed with what would be the greatest museum mixing painting, sculpture, decorative arts, and ancient statuary in Paris—if only the Louvre weren't just down the street...

Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris)

— Nothing wrong with the Pompidou or the Musée d'Orsay—but if you want to get your modern art fix for free, you gotta head for the city's run gallery of 20th-century masters...

Musée Cognacq-Jay

— A private collection of 18th-century art housed in a gorgeous 18th century Marais mansion...

Cultural Heroes

Maison de Balzac (House-Museum of Balzac)

— The house-museum of towering French author Honoré de Balzac, prodigious of belly and prolific of literary output...

Maison de Victor Hugo (House-Museum of Victor Hugo)

— The place des Vosges is one of the most elegant of Paris's residential squares, one in one of its elegant houses the great Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables...

Musée Curie

— Visit the laboratory where two generations of Curies produced three Nobel Prizes, and their good works continue to be carried on by Madame Curie's Institute of Radium...

Musée Edith Piaf (Museum of Edith Piaf)

— Life was not always so rosy for "the little sparrow," née Edith Gassion in 1915...

Cemeteries

Cimetière Père-Lachaise, de Montmartre, et

de Montparnasse

—

I may be wrong, but there's a good chance Paris contains more famous dead people than living ones: Proust, Molière, Oscar Wilde, Isadora Duncan, Sarah Berhardt, Chopin, Bizet, Edith Piaf, Ingres, Gertrude Stein, Degas, Dumas, Sartre, Baudelaire...

Oddball Sights—Only in Paris

Musée de La Parfumerie Fragonard (Perfume Museum)

— Leave it to the Fench to have a museum devoted to perfume (OK, leave it to the Fragonard company, who admittedly have a vested interest in the subject)...

Musée du Fumeur (Museum of Smoking)

— Only in Paris would they have a museum devoted to the art, history, and cultural phenomenon of drying out nicotine-saturated leaves, lighting them on fire, and inhaling the poisinous fumes...