Are you the Rain Man? If so, you’ll love this museum, which chronicles in painstaking detail every nuance of the history of the French postal service, mostly by the use of terrible dioramas. No aspect is too small to escape attention – for example, there are scale models of postal service train cars from 1845, 1848, 1860, 1870, 1926, 1973, 1979, and 1984 – because, of course, we’re all burning to know about the sweeping developments in in-route mail sorting between ’73 and ’79. Frustratingly, someone got a little too much grant money to update the place, because anything that you would actually want to see is obscured behind techno-gismos. E.g., there’s a room which displays all of the postage stamps put out by the French state… but the LIGHTS ARE TURNED OUT so that digital projections can play. Seriously? Not letting people see your collections? Kinda lame.
The museum has a special exhibition space on a separate floor of the building. Until March they’re showing “From Hermes to Text Messages… Or, the Saga of Messages,” which bears a somewhat bizarre relationship to the museum’s permanent collections, in that (1) the exhibition covers literally everything covered by the permanent collections, i.e., the history of sending messages in France, but (2) the exhibition adds more, e.g., sending messages in antiquity and in other parts of the world, and (3) the exhibition is much, much better than the permanent collections, because of more interesting choices of objects and better signage. It’s still pretty school-kid centric – I kept having to bend down to see into low-hung display cases – but there was just enough information and cool objects for me, like a collection of beautiful seals or an explanation of how people folded their letters before the invention of envelopes. The most heart-breaking thing was a display-case full of letters thrown from Germany-bound trains during WWII – some of them with documentation showing that they actually got to their destinations, sent by people who picked them up from the tracks.
