Musée de la Résistance nationale, National Resistance Museum in Champigny-sur-Marne, France

The Musée de la Résistance nationale occupies a 19th-century mansion in the Vercors park beside the Marne at Champigny-sur-Marne. The three-storey building has a pale grey facade, a dark slate roof with two brick chimneys and a white-framed dormer, and a banner reading "MUSÉE DE LA RÉSISTANCE NATIONALE" behind a tall black metal fence. Since February 2020 the exhibition and education spaces have been housed in the larger Aimé-Césaire site.

The idea of a national resistance museum was launched in 1965 with backing from local authorities, former resistants and deportees, unions and citizens. From 1985 the museum occupied a 19th-century mansion in the Vercors park beside the Marne at Champigny-sur-Marne. In 2000 the Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac conservation and research centre opened, and in February 2020 the exhibition spaces moved to the larger Aimé-Césaire site.

The museum's name refers to the Conseil national de la Résistance, the body that united the movement's networks. Its collections come from more than 4,000 donations gathered since the 1960s, including clandestine newspapers and tracts. Among the holdings are the original manuscript of Paul Éluard's poem "Liberté" and the last letter of Guy Môquet, written before his execution.

The museum's main site is in the Vercors park on the edge of the Marne, in Champigny-sur-Marne east of Paris. Since February 2020 the exhibition and education spaces have been in the Aimé-Césaire space, a former departmental teaching documentation centre, while the renovated Jean-Louis-Crémieux-Brilhac space holds the collections and welcomes researchers. The association also runs sites in Bourges, Châteaubriant, Givors, Montluçon, Nice and Varennes-Vauzelles, so check which site you are heading for.

Among the holdings are the original manuscript of Paul Éluard's poem "Liberté" and the last letter written by Guy Môquet before his execution. The museum also keeps the photographic archive of the newspaper Le Matin, some 320,000 images, and photographs by Robert Doisneau.