The Doll Museum wasn’t nearly as creepy as I thought that it would be. Well, aside from the fact that the whole collection was the loving work of a father-son team, who did things like sew clothing for their little preciouses, but that’s another matter.
It’s not really much of a museum, either: six rooms, of which half are for special exhibitions (currently, some arty concept-fashion dolls who are shown shaking their bare, and disturbingly realistic, tatas). The other three rooms show the permanent collection, which focuses almost exclusively on 19th century, porcelain-headed, professionally-made, female dolls. The signage (in French and English) goes into lots of technical details about production processes, but doesn’t really address more interesting sociological questions (although there are some attempts in this direction in the two cases of Japanese- and colonialist-influenced dolls).
It’s probably a good place to deposit a visiting grandmother while you go hang at the nearby Centre Pompidou, or a venue for covert anthropological observations on the Parisian yelling-centric method of child raising.
