Musée de l'Homme

Stand on the wide stone terrace of the Trocadéro for a moment. The paving is pale and smooth under your feet. Across the river, the Eiffel Tower fills the view, and the wind off the Seine carries the voices of street sellers and tourists. Turn your back to that view, though. Behind you, in the curved wing of this long, cream-coloured palace, is a museum about all of us. It is the Musée de l'Homme, the Museum of Mankind.

The building around you is the Palais de Chaillot. It was built for the International Exposition of 1937, the world's fair that Paris hosted just before the Second World War. Its two curved wings open like arms toward the river. Between them, the empty terrace frames the tower. Look up at the facades and you will see lines of gold lettering cut into the stone. These are short texts by the French poet Paul Valéry, written for the building. They speak about art, knowledge and the treasures kept inside.

This palace replaced an older one. In the late nineteenth century, an earlier Palais du Trocadéro stood here, a building with Moorish towers made for an earlier world's fair. It held a museum of ethnography, a collection of objects from cultures around the globe. When the old palace came down, its collections passed to a new institution. In 1937, the anthropologist Paul Rivet opened the Musée de l'Homme in this wing. His idea was simple and bold for the time. One museum would tell the story of humanity as a single family.

Here is the first thing many visitors miss. Only a few years after it opened, this museum became a centre of resistance. In 1940, after Germany occupied Paris, a group of staff members began to organise against the occupation. They printed one of the first clandestine newspapers of the French Resistance. Its name was simply Résistance. The network included young researchers such as Boris Vildé and Anatole Lewitsky. Historians still call it the Musée de l'Homme network.

The story ended in tragedy. The network was betrayed, and many members were arrested. Vildé, Lewitsky and several others were executed by firing squad in 1942 at Mont-Valérien, a fortress west of Paris. The ethnologist Germaine Tillion was also connected to the group. She survived deportation to the Ravensbrück camp and later became a respected scholar. Today she rests in the Panthéon. So as you walk these calm galleries, remember that people who worked here risked everything for their freedom.

After the war, the museum grew into a major place of research. But by the early twenty-first century, its role was changing. In 2006, a new museum opened downriver, the Musée du quai Branly. Much of the ethnographic collection, the masks, textiles and sculptures from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, moved there. The Musée de l'Homme closed in 2009 for a long renovation. It reopened in 2015 with a new purpose and a new design.

Today the museum belongs to the National Museum of Natural History, the same institution that runs the Jardin des Plantes. Its focus is three big questions. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? The galleries follow human evolution, the diversity of our species, and our relationship with the planet. It is a museum of science as much as of culture. And it is also a research centre, with laboratories working behind the public spaces.

Inside, notice the light. The renovation opened the building to the sky and to the river. Wide windows look out toward the Eiffel Tower, so the city stays with you as you walk. The floors are smooth, the spaces are open, and the displays use clear glass cases. Sound travels softly here. You may hear children reading labels aloud, or the low hum of a school group gathered around a skeleton.

Now for the treasures. The museum holds one of the most important prehistoric collections in the world. Look for the Venus of Lespugue, a small figure of a woman carved from mammoth ivory. It was found in a cave in southwest France and is tens of thousands of years old. Its shapes are exaggerated and almost modern. Nearby are human skulls from the Cro-Magnon shelter in the Dordogne, among the first remains of early modern humans ever studied in Europe.

Here is the second surprise. The collection includes a skull long said to belong to René Descartes, the seventeenth-century philosopher who wrote, I think, therefore I am. Descartes died in Sweden, and his remains travelled a strange road back to France. The skull carries old inscriptions written on the bone by its earlier owners. Whether every part of the story is true is still debated. But it is a strange feeling to stand in front of it.

The galleries also look at living people. Displays cover language, food, the body, and the ways humans adapt to heat, cold and altitude. One section explores how all humans share almost all of their genes. The message is the same one Paul Rivet had in 1937. Human differences are real, but they are small, and we are one species. In a museum that once worked in the age of empire, that message carries weight.

When you finish, come back out onto the terrace. Walk to the stone balustrade and look down. The Trocadéro gardens drop toward the river in green slopes and fountains. On summer days, children run near the water and the air smells of cut grass and warm stone. Across the Seine, the tower rises in its brown iron lattice. From here, the city feels both ancient and very new.

Take one last look at the gold words on the wall behind you. This palace was built for a world's fair, survived an occupation, and changed its purpose more than once. Inside, it keeps the bones and tools of people who lived long before Paris existed. As you walk away, notice the crowd around you, all ages and accents, all one family. That is exactly what this museum was made to show.