Museum
The museum celebrates its 90th anniversary!
On May 20, 2026, the Pasteur Museum celebrated its 90th anniversary – a significant milestone and an opportunity to look back at the story of how Louis and Marie Pasteur's apartment became a heritage site.
Louis and Marie Pasteur moved to the Institut Pasteur in February 1889, three months after it was officially opened on November 14, 1888. Their apartment was based in the south wing of the building. Louis lived there for seven years, until June 13, 1895, when, weakened by illness, he left Paris for Marnes-la-Coquette, where he died on September 28 of that year. His wife Marie, who was born two hundred years ago this year, stayed in the apartment until her death in 1910 in Arbois. It was Marie who, in October 1895, commissioned the architect Charles-Louis Girault to build a crypt, where the couple were laid to rest.
After Marie Pasteur died, the couple's personal effects, except for the main furniture and some paintings, were transported to Versailles, to the private mansion of Marie-Louise Pasteur Vallery-Radot and René Vallery-Radot. Before they were removed, photographs were taken of the apartment and Marie-Louise drew up a detailed inventory of the objects and furniture. This inventory would prove to be a valuable resource and served as one of the bases for the future inventory of the museum. The Parisian apartment was now almost entirely empty. For more than twenty years, no one disturbed the silence – with one notable exception: Ilya Mechnikov stayed there for a period when he was ill, before his death on July 16, 1916.
During the commemorative events held to mark the centenary of Louis Pasteur's birth in 1922, delegates from foreign countries and universities visited these rooms, where flasks and microscopes, displayed in a series of glass cases installed in the Grand Salon, evoked memories of the scientist. These objects subsequently formed the first collection for the Scientific Souvenir Room.
From preservation to restoration
Émile Roux, President of the Institut Pasteur until his death in 1933, was largely instrumental in the decision not to repurpose the apartment, categorically opposing any use of the rooms. This quiet yet determined resistance turned the apartment into a place of memory long before it officially became a museum. The seeds of the future museum were also sown by Jean Binot's pioneering efforts. Binot, a laboratory head at the Institut Pasteur, took the opportunity of the Paris Exposition in 1900 to begin compiling a collection of objects that told the story of Louis Pasteur's achievements, from crystallography to the discovery of the rabies vaccine.
On February 6, 1935, the Institut Pasteur's new President, Louis Martin, announced a key decision to the Board of Governors: Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot, Louis Pasteur's grandson, had decided to donate all the furniture and objects that had belonged to his grandparents to the Institut Pasteur. Efforts to restore the apartment to its former appearance could begin, meticulously coordinated by René Legroux, considered the first director of the museum. The original layout was recreated as faithfully as possible, using the photographs and inventory of the apartment produced when Marie Pasteur died.
May 20, 1936: founding of the Pasteur Museum
On May 20, 1936, the restoration work had been completed. The apartment officially became the Pasteur Museum, directed by René Legroux. He proudly referred to himself as the "curator of the Institut Pasteur museum." It was Legroux who assembled the items left by Louis Pasteur in his successive laboratories and created the Scientific Souvenir Room, inaugurated in 1938 by French President Albert Lebrun. This room, strikingly modern in terms of its museography, contained more than a thousand objects exhibited in display cases typical of the Art Deco style of the 1930s. In 2022, it still housed equipment, microscopes and crystal models cut by Louis Pasteur's own hand.
In 1942, Denise Wrotnowska (1905-2000), a graduate of the École du Louvre and friend of René Legroux's daughter, took over and became the first dedicated curator of the museum. She gave it a prominent role within the Institut Pasteur, expanded and documented the collections, and became the leading specialist in Pasteurian history. Under her leadership, the museum became a dynamic space for memory and research.
A museum with multiple roles
The Pasteur Museum is both a science museum and an art museum, offering an outstanding example of late 19th-century interior design. It reflects domestic bourgeois life during that period and bears witness to a series of scientific achievements that changed the course of the history of medicine.
In 2012, the museum was recognized under the "Maisons des Illustres" scheme by the French Ministry of Culture, highlighting its unique nature as a place where Louis and Marie Pasteur both lived and worked, where each room is a testament to their legacy.
From the 1970s onwards, annual visitor numbers to the museum increased steadily, from 800 to more than 10,000. But in 2015, the heightened security measures adopted following the attacks in Paris led to the decision to close the museum to individual visitors. From that point on the museum was only opened for official delegations or visiting philanthropists.
The ongoing restoration of the apartment, supported by the Fondation du Patrimoine, will pave the way for a new chapter in the museum's story: the aim is to reopen this important heritage site to the public by 2030.
You can participate in the restoration of the museum!
As the museum celebrates its 90th anniversary, it needs you! The Fondation du Patrimoine has launched an online appeal to fund the restoration of the apartment that once belonged to Louis and Marie Pasteur. The cost of the work is estimated at €3,000,000. Three targets have been set: to raise €100,000 for the restoration of the artworks and furniture, a further €100,000 for all the textiles, and a final €100,000 for the original wallpaper dating from 1888.
The goal is to open this unique historical site to the public.
If you are interested in the latest museum news, have any questions or are in possession of any technical or scientific objects that can provide clues to the past activities of the Institut Pasteur's laboratories, feel free to contact the museum team at musee@pasteur.fr and follow us on social media (LinkedIn, Instagram).