I want to tell a story but I don’t know where to put it in context, so I’ll start with the story as an aside. There are a lot of different species of beetles in the world, more than any other species, by far. There are probably more than 400,000 species of beetles, compared to only about 9,000 species of birds. This story is attributed to various people but, in Quote Investigator, they attribute it to British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane: who found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, ‘God has an inordinate fondness for beetles.’” End aside. 

Stephen Jay Gould wrote that there are two basic kinds of museums in the world, the old-fashioned museum that is a collection of stuff and the new kind of museum that has much less stuff but much more explanation. As I remember, he used the example of a Natural History Museum in Pennsylvania that had replaced a display of thousands of beetles, all found within a 60-mile radius of the museum, with a couple of the more impressive beetles and a large plastic model of a beetle showing how the hard covering over the wings works. The original museum implied the incredible variety of beetles while the new museum had a note that said there were more species of beetles than members of any other group in the animal kingdom. 

The Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart is a great example of the new museum and almost every museum in France is an example of the old-fashioned museum. The Eauze Musée Archéologique Le Trésor d’Eauze, in Southwestern France – shown in the top picture – which has hundreds, maybe thousands, of Roman coins lined up on shelves with almost no explanation, is a good example. Of course, the Louvre is another example; and the Cité de l’Automobile, Collection Schlumpf, Musée Nationale in Mulhouse, France, is still another..in this case an example on steroids.  

The name says it all – and, I hope, the picture above does also. This is a city of automobiles, the biggest collection of cars in the world (mostly French cars, and, really, mostly Buggatis and racing cars). Now the collection is a French National Museum although it is run by Culturespaces, who says they are the leading private cultural operator in the management of monuments, museums, art centres, temporary exhibitions, and immersive digital exhibitions. The whole experience is very French starting with a new bridge and entry to the museum which is still housed in an old warehouse and then entering the actual inner sanctum itself through a red curtain. 

The Collection itself was started by two brothers Hans and Fritz Schlumpf who were Swiss citizens but lived in the French city of Mulhouse. In the mid-1930s, they invested in a wool spinning mill, eventually took it over, and, over the next 40 years, they bought out most of the rival mills in the area becoming very rich in the process. Both brothers,  but Fritz especially, were collectors. Fritz started with stamps, then tin soldiers, and finally, cars.

There collecting started slowly, in the 50s when a lot of people were selling their old 30s cars during the post-war boom, and then picked up steam in the summer of 1960 with the purchase of 40 cars including ten Bugattis, three Rolls-Royces, two Hispano-Suizas, and one Tatra. 

During the next 15 years, Fritz bought everything he could get his hands on and, as word of the collection grew among  car people, he was able to buy some usually unavailable cars, most of the French Gordini racing cars in existence, several retired Ferrari racing cars from the factory, a couple of race cars from Mercedes, and several Lotuses from the private collection of racing driver Jo Siffert. At one point, Fritz sent a letter to every member of the Buggati Registry offering to buy their cars, in any shape. 

By the mid-60s, the collection had grown quite big and the brothers housed it in a former mill that also housed a large restoration facility and, more or less, kept it out of sight. Even though the Schlumpf mills were losing market share, mostly to plants in Asia, they continued to buy cars many of them financed by selling defunct plants and equipment. By 1976, the changing world caught up with the Schlumpf brothers and they started laying off workers. In March of 1977, after several strikes, the workers broke into the factory only to be surprised by a huge collection of cars. Everything went downhill fast from there ending with the brothers fleeing to Switzerland and the French government impounding the cars for back taxes. Since then, the collection has gone through a series of quasi-private owners ending with Culturespaces which enlarged the collection with the addition of cars from the French National Collection.  

As we got to the end of this huge warehouse, filled with cars, we began to think it was not as huge as we first thought because the entire end wall was a mirror. Except that, behind the mirror, was another room filled with race cars.

I have always thought that, if I had to come down on one side or the other of the old new/museum world, I would come down on the old museum side. Now I am not sure, Michele and I were getting pretty burned out on cars by now, and we had skipped whole rows. Now, at last, we had pretty much come to the end…

except there was a whole nother warehouse filled with luxury cars. This is like the Louvre of car collections and like the Louvre, it goes on forever. The last space, for a reason unknown to me, is much darker than the main room or the racecar room, and walking into it is slightly disorienting. 

We cruised through the last room, only stopping briefly to look at cars that deserved much more attention including TWO Bugatti Royales. One of which is the Coupé Napoléon, one of Ettore Bugatti’s personal cars (one of 18 bought from the family in 1963).   

When we spent the afternoon at the Mercedes Museum, I felt we had pretty much seen it. Would I go back, if I were in the area? definitely but, if I never go back, that’s fine. The Cité de l’Automobile, however, is different. I felt like we just scratched the surface and we were, if not exhausted, pretty tired. It seems to me that the difference between the”old” museum and the “new” museum is who is being serviced (OK, I know this word doesn’t really work, but entertained doesn’t work either, maybe nourished). New museums are trying to teach their visitors, the assumption is that the visitor doesn’t know much about the subject, while old-style museums are more elitist, they assume that the visitor already knows about the subject and they present the material in a way that deepens the visitor’s understanding. That may or may not be true for us after visiting the Cité de l’Automobile, but one thing I now know for sure; The Schlumpf brothers had an inordinate fondness for cars.