
Temple to Reason: Musée des Confluences
Who are we and what is our place in the world? The definition of human identity and the link between what we term ‘humanity’ and ‘animality is a topic of universal debate. We question the way human beings see the world, form part of it and contribute to its transformation. Our world is one in which the living, human and non-human, interconnect with each other in a variety of ways and form a web of life. The Musée des Confluences
Michele and I are home, safe and sound in our little beddy-byes, but my blog is still in France, and I want to keep it that way for a while.
I want to start this post by saying – confessing, really – that when Michele first mentioned she wanted to see the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, I thought it was an art museum, much like the art museums we have been visiting in every city we have been to. It isn’t. As Michele was researching hours and location, she discovered that the museum is billed as a science center and anthropology museum.
When we walked in later than we had planned because of a very nice, late morning breakfasst of oysters – that I augmented with the largest, tastiest, prawn I have eaten since Hong Kong in 2009 – I thought the musée would be a natural history museum similar to my favorite, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, or a science museum like the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. It was like neither, and yet it was kind of both.
But the Musée des Confluences is a museum unlike any I’ve seen before. Every science and natural history museum I’ve visited, and every National Park I’ve been to, presents their information as immutable certainties. This museum doesn’t. This museum presents its information as what we currently think. In my mind, that is a significant difference.
Too many of us think our opinion is the Truth, and we hold these collected Truths as dogma. That attitude makes much of the country distrustful of us coastal elites and our allied experts. The Musée des Confluences presents a more nuanced and softer picture. An information card, for example, states: Human beings use observations and the laws of physics in an attempt to understand the origin and evolution of the universe. The prevailing cosmological model, called the Big Bang, portrays the Universe as a system in expansion that might have begun around 13.8 billion years ago.


The Musée des Confluences is not an art museum, but, starting with the building – in which the actual museum, the display rooms, are on the second floor giving the building a feeling of standing on its tippy toes like an oil derrick, or, as we learned at the museum, a mammoth – the displays are often as much art as information.

The museum building was designed by an Austrian firm, Coop Himmelb(l), an out-of-town architectural firm that I had never heard of (I’ve ranted about out-of-town architects enough, so I’ll just let it go). BTW, the fact that I’ve never heard of Coop Himmelb or their founders should not be taken as a judgment on the firm, just a judgment of my ignorance of current, important, architects and buildings. BTW, the name of the firm, Coop Himmelb, is a pun on blue sky, and the company’s tagline is Himmelblau is not a color but an idea of creating architecture with fantasy, as buoyant and variable as clouds. So they do sound sort of with-it.
The Musée des Confluences is named for the confluence of the Saône and Rhône Rivers. This area has a long and rich human history, and the accumulated detritus from that long history comprises much of the museum’s collection. Confluences also represents the coming together of three major local archaeological collections: the Natural History Museum of Lyon, the Guimet Museum in Lyon, and the Colonial Museum of Lyon, which, in turn, were the result of the confluence of previous collectors, going all the way back to the brothers Gaspard and Balthasar de Monconys who started collecting in the 17th Century.
The combination of these three disparate collections could have easily resulted in a chaotic and disorganized mess, but it didn’t; it resulted in a wonderful and fascinating museum that combined the best of both old-timey museums, as a collection of whatever the original collectors were collecting, and less stuff but more teaching about the stuff. Michele and I stayed, fascinated, until they kicked us out. I wholeheartedly recommend the Musée des Confluences to anyone visiting Lyon.




Before I conclude this post, I would like to make a final, probably unnecessary, comment. The museum has a display of three females, from left to right, Homo floresiensis, Homo sapiens – that’s us – and Homo neanderthalensis that were all inhabitating different parts of our planet at the same time. We are the only ones left and, by most accounts we wiped out the other Hominins (maybe because the Homo floresiensis and Homo neanderthalensis women didn’t modestly cover their breasts, but probably not).