New World Museum (Musée du Nouveau Monde)

About

Since 1982 the museum has occupied the Hôtel Fleuriau, a Parisian-style mansion built in 1740–1750 for Jean Regnaud de Beaulieu around a courtyard closed by a large gate. In 1772 it was bought by the Rochelais merchant Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau, who had made his fortune in Saint-Domingue, where he owned a plantation near Port-au-Prince, and who extended it with a garden wing around 1780. His family lived here until 1974; the mayor Michel Crépeau then wanted a museum of the New World for the city.

Labelled “Musée de France” since 2002, its nearly 2,200 works tell of La Rochelle’s economic and cultural ties with the Americas: the discovery of the continent, La Rochelle and the Antilles, New France, the United States and the Native Americans, and the way Europeans imagined America from 1650 to 1850. It was the first museum in France to address the slave-trade past of a French port and to show objects linked to the slave trade and slavery in the Antilles.

Among the highlights: a view of the port of La Rochelle (1762) after Joseph Vernet, Rébellion d’un esclave sur un navire négrier (1839) by Édouard-Antoine Renard, irons from a slave ship, tokens stamped “ABF” with the initials of Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau, a Sauk war club (around 1760), a Great Lakes canoe model and a large set of photogravures by Edward S. Curtis, shown in rotation.

Visitor information

Closed on Tuesdays and on 1 January, 1 May, 14 July, 1 November, 11 November and 25 December.

On the map

Sources: museedunouveaumonde.larochelle.fr · Wikipedia (Musée du Nouveau Monde). The phone number given by the former version of this site was wrong and has been corrected. Checked 14 October 2026.