Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation — Attraction in Besançon

Our visit to the citadel lasted virtually all of the day's opening hours, but there was a significant part we didn't get to.

We followed the audio tour of the citadel, had lunch then visited the Museum of Resistance and Deportation, which didn't leave us with enough time to visit the other on site museums.

The effect of occupation on the lives of citizens and their responses is well presented with many personal artifacts adding to the effect of drawing the visitor in, to give a sense of the people who's stories are told.

The current temporary exhibition is entitled "Valise" and looks at how an everyday object can, on the one hand, contain a person's entire worldly goods with everything else lost, be used as a means of survival carrying black market goods, or as a means of fighting back against the oppressor by carrying printing equipment to forge passes or produce propaganda, or concealing radio equipment that can be used to send and receive information that can help to turn the tables.

This exhibition also brought to mind an area of history that particularly interests me, that of escape and evasion. Probably the most valuable piece of equipment that an escaping PoW could possess was a suitcase for, no matter how good forged paperwork might be, travelling a long distance empty handed was bound to arouse suspicion. A second thing was an escapee (I think from Colditz) who realised that the Gestapo were with the regular guards at a railway station thoroughly checking everyone; in a stroke of genius he stole someone's suitcase and ran off with it without chase, for a far more important task was at hand searching for an escaping PoW than to waste time on a...

Un musée que j'adore et dont j'attendais la réouverture avec beaucoup d'impatience ! Il était très bien fait avant la rénovation et est toujours aussi passionnant aujourd'hui. Vraiment complet, retrace l'Histoire dans un ordre chronologique, grande diversité de pièces historiques exposées (objets de détenus, illustrations, photographies, vidéos, audios...), le tout dans trois langues différentes (Français, Anglais, Allemand) pour rendre le musée accessible au plus grand nombre.

La seule raison pour laquelle je ne donne pas 5 étoiles est parce que certaines finitions sont à revoir... Dans certaines vitrines c'est à vous de deviner quel texte explicatif correspond à quel objet car il manque le système de numérotation ; pour la vidéo à voir à l'entrée du musée on vous propose de choisir votre langue en appuyant sur un des trois boutons mais il n'est pas précisé quel bouton correspond à quelle langue donc à vous de deviner ; on vous propose un panneau tactile pour consulter les biographies de personnes exécutées à Besançon mais dans les biographies des codes informatiques du style "

Almost everything is in French, so worth grabbing an audio guide if you're English. A lot of information and historical photos and artifacts. The Citadel housing this museum was used to hold and execute POWs during WWII, adding extra weight to the location. Worth going out of your way to visit if you're in the...