Musée d’Histoire Jean Garcin

The Musée d’Histoire Jean Garcin (Jean Garcin History Museum) in Fontaine-de-Vaucluse presents the history of the town and region during the Second World War, including daily civilian life under the Vichy Regime and German occupation, local resistance activities, and works created by local poets, authors, and artists in reflection of their experiences. The museum is named for Fontaine-de-Vaucluse-native Jean Garcin (1917 - 2006), a local resistance figure and leader in the Movements Unis de la Résistance (Unified Movements of Resistance) under the name ‘Colonel Bayard’ from 1943.

Collections contain more than 10 000 individual objects and are largely standard civilian items preserved from the community’s experiences and daily lives during and following the war: this includes ration booklets and rationing documents, art, posters, photographs and publications, and mock-ups of the wartime interiors of rooms in town buildings including a house, school, bakery, library, and the mairie (town hall). These materials are presented in three main, themed exhibition spaces:

• ‘Daily Life of the French Under Occupation’: The trauma of defeat; the creation of Vichy and the Révolution Nationale; daily life under restrictions and privation; the process of collaboration; anti-communism, anti-freemasonry, and anti-Semitism; Pétainist press and publishing.
• ‘Resistance in Vaucluse’: Organization, networks, and activities; period documents and written and recorded testimonies from local resistance members and witnesses; local resistance placed within the national context.
• ‘Liberty of the Spirit’: Wartime arts and literature, and its creation, distribution, and reception; censorship; the role of foreign press; clandestine writing and publishing.

The Musée d’Histoire Jean Garcin was opened by the Départment de Vaucluse in July 1990, drawing on local private collections; French-American film art and production designer Willy Holt contributed to the interior design. The museum is intended “to provide an enduring testimony to recent history while going beyond the anecdotal towards the expression of a universal ideal.”