Peering down at the parade of taxidermied mammals strolling regally across the spotlit stage of "La Grande Galerie" in the Museum of Natural History in Paris, I was struck by how very French the whole spectacle seemed.

In this era of heightened ecological awareness, who but the French, in their irrational quest for order, would pluck animals out of their natural habitats, strip them of their context, organize them in categories, pair them two-by-two and parade them before the public as if they were celebrants in a Mass or high-fashion manikins prancing down a designer's runway?Besides storehousing stuff, museums are windows into the psychology, temperament and philosophy of the cultures that made them. Nowhere is this more true than in France where there are museums for everything from art and animals to bread, wine and locks-and-keys.

The French began their love affair with museums in the Revolution when, after slaughtering the king, the revolutionaries had to decide what to do with the royal collections of plants, animals and art. After some debate, the fledgling government in 1793 established the Museum of Natural History and designated the then derelict and unfinished Louvre palace as an art museum.

Two centuries later those museums are the pride of French civilization. Recently restored, reinstalled and - in the case of the Louvre, expanded - they are windows into the country's past and its character.

If the natural history museum epitomizes the French penchant for rational theorizing, the Louvre's new wing exemplifies the nation's emotional attachment to the grandeur of its own magnificent past.

The Museum of Natural History is a complex of buildings in the city's botanical gardens on the Left Bank of the Seine, upriver from Notre Dame Cathedral and not far from the new national library. It's a little outside the core of the usual tourist sites but readily accessible by the metro, whose underground trains will whisk you there from anywhere in the city in minutes.

Exiting the metro at the Gare d'Austerlitz stop, you enter the vast Jardin des Plantes near the Seine and stroll along gravel paths between formal flower beds. The imposing limestone and cast-iron Zoological Gallery, which contains the Noah's Ark-like parade of critters, is at the far end of a long allee of manicured trees.

Separate buildings housing museums of paleontology and minerals are on the left. On the right are the zoo, maze, orangery and Winter Garden - a striking Belle Epoque greenhouse whose antique glass walls have been transformed by sunlight into a lovely opalescent rose-violet.

The gardens were established in 1626 by doctors of King Louis XIII as a source of medicinal herbs for the royal household. They grew during the 1700s with the addition of a maze, amphitheater, galleries and - after the Revolution - a small zoo. During the 19th century, they expanded again as omnivorous European naturalists and explorers gathered plants, animals and minerals throughout the world and shipped them back for cataloging, preservation and propagation.

The Zoological Gallery opened in 1889 and was soon crammed to the gills with 7 million stuffed birds, taxidermied mammals, impaled insects and assorted skeletons. (For an idea of what a daunting jumble it must have been, peek at the overstuffed cases of bones in the dusty, unrestored paleontological museum nearby.)

Although initially popular, the museum eventually lost public favor because the mass of its meticulously classified stuff was overwhelming. As a history of the museum dryly put it, the place suffered from "excesses of systematic expressions."

In World War II, the building's glass roof was damaged and the collections were rained upon. By 1965 it was so shabby that the building was closed and remained shuttered for nearly 30 years.

When it reopened in 1994 - after a $70 million refurbishment - the museum was vastly different. Originally, scholars threw everything they had at visitors as if to prove that the French had identified, studied, owned and ordered the entire natural world.

Now a mere 3,000 specimens are on display, organized to illustrate principles of evolution and dramatize the impact of human behavior on the environment. The other 6,997,000 are filed for scientific study on 25 miles of shelves in the museum's new three-story basement.

Nearly 1,200 of the taxidermied specimens have been restored, their skins stretched over newly sculpted forms made of resins and synthetic materials rather than the straw, papier mache and plaster used by the original taxidermists.

The parade of mammals is the dramatic centerpiece, a swath of African animals - warthogs, armadillos, deer the size of chihuahuas, turkeys, ocelots, tapir, wild pigs, zebras, elephants, giraffe - marching through a conceptual sound-and-light show in the three-story atrium.

The room is atwitter with rustling grass, bird cries and distant animal noises. In sync with the soundtrack, lights rise and fall continuously on 30 minute cycles to simulate an abbreviated day and night on the savannah. Video tapes on the display's periphery document the behavior of animals in their natural habitats.

Upper level galleries have displays on everything from genetics to the impact of human activity on biodiversity and the environment. (Lucite cubes encasing a week's worth of garbage from a typical Parisian family are sobering, especially when you imagine how much more trash a comparable American family might generate.) One chapel-like gallery is filled entirely with extinct and endangered species.

On a balcony overlooking the central display is a wonderfully witty ensemble of flamingos whose long necks protrude gracefully from tall, narrow glass cases as if the curators were acknowledging their inability to constrain nature in human categories. This being France, the flamingos beguiling posture recalled manikins whose awkward poses are designed not to mirror nature but to engage the eye and display plumage.

The flamingos set me to musing about why this museum seemed so different from traditional natural history museums in the United States. Exhibition formats are continually evolving here, too, of course, but U.S. natural history museums have traditionally displayed their specimen in elaborate, life-like dioramas complete with grass, trees, rocks and painted backdrops that give viewers the illusion of encountering the critters au natural.

By contrast, everything in the Paris museum seemed a bit unnatural.

Many of the 19th-century displays are still on view, meticulously stuffed with row upon row of related insects, birds, butterflies, fish, flamingos. The cataloging is so exhaustive, however, that it's as if the creatures had been invented to demonstrate the theory rather than the theory developed to describe them.

It was the French philosopher Rene Descartes who made the god-like observation: "I think, therefore, I am." Gazing at the coyly tortured flamingos in their cases, and the dramatic parade on the darkened plain below, I fancied that these critters had sprung into being in response to a curatorial injunction: "We think, therefore, you are."

If the subtext of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle is French rationalism, the leitmotif of the Louvre is the nation's obsession with the magnificence of its own history and culture.

The essential Frenchness of the Louvre was amplified in 1993 when the museum expanded into the Richelieu wing, a huge arm of the palace that had been occupied by the French finance ministry from 1871 to 1989.

The additional space allowed the museum to reinstall its entire collection including a lot of French sculpture and paintings rarely if ever shown before.

Again the metro is the best way to get there. The Palais Royal-Louvre metro stop connects directly with a ritzy underground arcade lighted by its own inverted-pyramid skylight. From there a shop-lined concourse leads straight into the pyramid entrance court, which opened in 1989. Access to the Richelieu wing is on the left or north side of the court.

The wing is built around two immense courtyards that architect I.M. Pei covered with glass and converted into sculpture courts. These light-washed, indoor-outdoor spaces are fabulous sites for the dramatic sculptures now gracing them. The Cour Marly is the most spectacular, a place alive with plunging steeds and dashing stone figures from Marly, a favorite chateau of Louis XIV, who commissioned the sculptures for its gardens in the early 1700s.

Surrounding galleries, which open directly into the court, are filled with wonderfully expressive sculpture, ranging from pious Virgins of the Middle Ages to haughty busts of 17th-century courtiers.

Many of the artists are little known outside France, and their accomplishments are a revelation, whether depicting eight, life-sized, stone mourners carrying the 1480 tomb of Philippe Pot, duke of Burgundy, or a winsome 16th-century royal mistress garbed as Diana the huntress embracing a stag atop an immense garden urn.

The Richelieu wing also houses the restored apartments of Napoleon III, who ruled France from 1848 to 1871 and finished building the Louvre. The rooms are dizzying in their excess. Originally used for official receptions and dinners, they exemplify the over-the-top Second Empire style with acres of brocaded red velvet upholstery on ornately gilded furniture under blizzards of crystal chandeliers.

The advent of the Richelieu also has improved access to parts of the museum's collection often closed in the past - especially Flemish, Dutch and German paintings, including work by Cranach, Durer and others that are now installed in a suite of intimate galleries.

Some of the French and Northern European paintings have not fared so well, unfortunately. Artificial lighting and dull wall colors suck the life out of many pictures. One of the Louvre's prizes - Peter Paul Rubens' allegorical life of Queen Marie de Medici - has been disastrously treated. The 24 immense pictures, completed by Rubens and his workshop between 1622 and 1625, have been moved from a flattering, red-plush salon in the museum's Denon wing to an austere green chamber in the Richelieu, where nasty aqueous light casts a sickly pallor onto the fleshy Queen and her dimpled attendants.

View Comments

Still, the sheer amplitude and magnificence of French art at the Louvre is overwhelming. There are 73 galleries of French paintings and another 33 of sculpture. Plus, there are some 35 rooms filled with more than 5,500 religious and secular ornaments of sundry types from rock-crystal reliquaries and 13th- century Parisian ivories to 16th-century Limoges porcelains, 17th-century Gobelin tapestries and 18th-century gilt furniture.

Much of the Louvre's French art has royal, imperial or at least aristocratic origins. Encountering mile after mile of it in this sumptuous context conveys a whiff of the grandeur, exuberance, luxury and even the delicious decadence that was France.

After visiting the Richelieu, it's easier to understand why the French may even cherish their overblown reputation for hauteur.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)

Join the Conversation
Looking for comments?
Find comments in their new home! Click the buttons at the top or within the article to view them — or use the button below for quick access.