The Musée comtois is closed for renovation until April 18, 2025.

Comtois Museum Promoting dialogue between cultures and societies

Discover Franche-Comté society from a different angle thanks to the Musée Comtois collections. Between tradition and modernity, ancient and contemporary testimonies, more than 100,000 objects are preserved and invite a cross-reflection between past and present.

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My visit to the Musée comtois

With 15 rooms spread over three levels, the permanent exhibition features numerous objects, portraits and testimonials from the late 19th century to the present day. Key themes include domestic life, legends and beliefs, the performing arts, borders and migration in Franche-Comté.

On the top floor of the museum, an exceptional collection of puppets awaits you. It illustrates the local craze for this form of live entertainment, the richness of creation and the freedom of expression of Franche-Comté artists.

During your visit, you'll notice the predominance of photography, with photographs by the museum's founder, Jean Garneret, and the Folklore Comtois association (from the 1930s to the 1990s), but also older collections, such as the glass-plate photographs of the d'Orival family (late 19th, early 20th century), and the works of contemporary photographer Marc Paygnard, featuring the women, men and children of the region, which will be on display from April 19, 2025.

Agenda

Exhibition - Sur le vif: Photographs by Marc Paygnard

Daily, April 19 to November 2, 2025

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Marc Paygnard's view

A humanist photographer born in 1945, Marc Paygnard has traveled the world, but has also passionately photographed the women, men and children of Franche-Comté, his adopted region since 1973. Capturing life's comical or poetic scenes, Marc Paygnard's eye focuses above all on what unites people, leading us to reflect on how we form community with others.

Marc Paygnard's photographs can be found in numerous public and private collections, including the Musée Nicéphore-Niepce in Chalon-sur-Saône, the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, and MoMA in New York. The Musée Comtois is therefore extremely fortunate to have 468 original prints in its collections. This donation will be showcased in 2025 in a temporary exhibition and in the museum's permanent collection.

Discover the collections

The Musée Comtois collections owe a great deal to one man: Abbé Jean Garneret. Inspired by the Scandinavian model, he embarked on field ethnology in order to safeguard a world that was disappearing under the impact of the century's great economic and social changes. From the 1930s onwards, he collected objects that were witnesses to Comtois life, on his own initiative and then at the request of the Direction des Musées de France and the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires.

Created in 1946 and housed at the Citadelle since 1960, the Musée comtois has enriched its collections thanks to numerous donations from private individuals. Not forgetting the Folklore Comtois association, which played a key role in the museum's development: in 2007, for example, it donated a major collection of negatives to the City of Besançon.
Some of the collections have been digitized and are available online on the Mémoire vive website of the City of Besançon, and on the Portail des Arts de la Marionnette.

Discover our online collections.