When the Bayeux tapestries cross the channel at the British Museum next year, some in Paris hope that their fellow citizens can enjoy it for free, or at least at a cheap price.
this Financial Times French officials lobbying French citizens for discounts or free entry, a “test” that British negotiators were rejected and that it “never happens.”
This move is very unusual. Although French museums rarely offer free entry to their citizens, the British Museum does not charge a permanent collection, although special exhibitions usually require paid tickets. Nevertheless, this demand emerged in a wider cultural exchange: as a loan that portrayed the Norman conquest of 1066 for 900 years, Britain would send Sutton Hoo’s treasure and the medieval Lewis Chessmen.
According to the original ambitions of French negotiators. foot. They reportedly borrowed the Rosetta Stone, the most famous artifact of the British Museum. The proposal failed: the basalt slabs seized by Britain from the French-Egypt campaign in 1801 were considered unshakable. (For those who forget history, this stone is the key to the seminal deciphering of ancient hieroglyphs by French linguist Jean-François Champolion.)
President Emmanuel Macron has made the tapestry loan a symbol of Anglo-French friendship. George Osborne, chairman of the British Museum, called the exhibition “a blockbuster exhibition of our generation.”
The voyage of the tapestry was first proposed in 2018 by then Prime Minister Theresa May, but was repeatedly delayed due to concerns about the vulnerability of the artifacts and logistical challenges. The loan was finally confirmed during Macron’s state visit this summer and is scheduled to be exhibited at the British Museum from September 2026 to July 2027, avoiding clues.
