Le Creusot-Montceau Ecomuseum

In 1976 Hugues de Varine wrote in the Unseco Museum Journal: 'Instead of being there for the objects, museums should be there for people.' According to De Varine the traditional museum had become too elitist and/or had got too much involved in the commercial tourist market. The concept of the museum had to be revised in order to reposition the museum in the midst of society. To achieve this goal De Varine proposed a new kind of museum, or better said, a new image of the museum, that would be capable of serving the whole population of a nation, region, or town. This new museum would be a non-discriminative, democratic and relevant information centre, where all people of a society would be represented and participating. The most important purpose of the museum’s work would be to "communicate", or to engage in "community activities".

The museum's exhibited objects should relate to real life and the museum's activities should be close to the people in their various community centres. De Varine saw his museum (slide) 'as an intelligent instrument which provides us with answers to our questions and problems'.  These questions and problems would be real-life questions of 'real-life' people.

These just mentioned ideas and visions were made more or less concrete in the Le Creusot-Montceau Ecomuseum. In the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties the region of Le Creusot-Montceau-les-Mines had to deal with severe economic and social changes. (slide) The steel industry led by the Schneider family dynasty, on which the region’s economy had depended heavily since the 18th century, had rapidly declined and Le Creusot was left badly impoverished and the morale of its 150.000 inhabitants was very low. It was at this moment that Hugues de Varine and Marcel Evrard were asked to build a museum.



De Varine's and Evrard’s first concern was to deliver the community's population 'a tool which would enable them to understand and to control economic, social and cultural change'. Evrard and De Varine decided to build a community museum, which implied in their version that the museum would cover the whole Le Creusot-Montceau-les-Mines area and that all its inhabitants would act like the museum’s visitors, curators and critics. The museum’s staff was expected to 'live in symbiosis with the population' and to 'naturally be as discreet, modest and approachable as possible'. The museum’s collection consisted of all the objects within the community's perimeter as the museum regarded 'an object simply as part of a whole, as part of a human social, cultural or natural unit' .



As the purpose of the museum was to communicate and to initiate community activities, the museum staff started seeking interaction and contact with the population. Several working teams initiated community gatherings during which local people talked about their daily life and their worries, memories en hopes. Then the the people attending these gatherings were asked to collect stories and objects that related to their conversation topics and prepare a local exhibition about them. Conclusively with the help of numerous people from the community an exhibition was organised, which was attended by local inhabitants from nearby villages. In this way the museum staff not only initiated 'exhibitions on important themes concerning the life of the community and its environment', they also carried out 'a survey of the whole community'.  Moreover, the museum tried to bring people themselves together, 'in the midst of things belonging to them, for a sort of festival whose theme was their own history'.

If we try to characterise in a few words the Le Creusot-Montceau Community Museum experiment, we could come up with the following ingredients: democratic and egalitarian organisation, bottom-up initiatives, decentralisation, small-scale and face-to-face communication and collectivity. The museum as an antidote which enables 'the man in the street' to put up with 'economic, social, political and cultural alienation’ caused by 'a two-dimensional world of comic strips and television'.