The Musée des Archives Nationales is installed in the Hôtel de Soubise, an early eighteenth century aristocratic residence in the Marais whose interior represents one of the highest achievements of French Rococo decoration. The building is most associated with the Salon Ovale of the Princesse de Soubise, designed by Germain Boffrand in the 1730s — a room that architectural historians have measured and written about for two centuries and which is still more beautiful than the descriptions suggest. The collection covers French historical documents from the Merovingian period to the present: letters, treaties, constitutional papers, and the records of French administration in their original material form. The museum receives visitors without significant queuing at most times; the building's scale and the nature of the collection means it rarely draws the foot traffic of the larger museums. The Hôtel's courtyard is accessed from the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois and presents itself without announcement — a significant eighteenth century building behind an ordinary door in an ordinary street.
Le Marais, Paris, France