Natural History Museum (Marseille)

Brief information

The Natural History Museum in Marseille operates inside the Palais Longchamp, and this detail immediately changes the scale on which the place is read: collections of nature are housed not in a separate scientific building, but in a palace built according to the plan of Henri-Jacques Espérandieu. Since 1869, the museum has been located here together with the Museum of Fine Arts, so the building itself brings together two different ways of looking at the world: through natural specimens and through art.

The museum was founded in 1819 and changed several addresses before moving, among them the Bernardines’ chapel. That is why its current arrangement is important not only as a shell for the collections: the Palais Longchamp marks the moment when a scattered collection received a permanent home and became part of the city’s major cultural space.

What to notice first

It makes sense to view the museum as a set of halls with different ways of ordering nature. The Salle safari connects world fauna with imports through the port: here, natural specimens are read through Marseille’s maritime links. The Salle de Provence, by contrast, narrows the view to the local flora and fauna of Provence, and this contrast helps separate the “distant, brought in” from the “one’s own, regional.”

Next, you can compare two more analytical sections. The Salle d’ostéologie presents comparative anatomy, that is, the structure of bodies through bones and forms. The Salle de préhistoire, sur l'évolution shifts attention to prehistoric society and evolution. Together, these areas explain that the museum is arranged not as one long list of rarities, but as several frames for comparison: geography, local nature, the structure of the organism, and the origin of humankind.