Musée Grévin

The Musée Grévin stands behind a grand, ornate glass facade on the boulevard Montmartre. Arthur Meyer, a journalist who founded the Le Gaulois newspaper, opened these doors in eighteen eighty-two. He wanted his readers to put faces to the names they read about in his daily columns, so he commissioned wax figures of the people making headlines. Alfred Grévin, a famous caricaturist of the era, gave the museum his name and artistic direction, filling the rooms with scenes from contemporary political and social life.