About

The Tour Musée

The Tour Musée stands at the Porte de Soissons, one of the fortified gates in the walls of the town of Coucy-le-Château. It belongs to the AMVCC (Association de Mise en Valeur du Château de Coucy), a non-profit association under the French law of 1901, founded in 1972, which looks after its upkeep and its content. A handful of volunteers from the association’s cultural outreach branch keep it alive.

What we show there

Coucy is often told through its lords, the Enguerrands. We look instead at those who cut the stone of the château, farmed the lands of the castellany, worked wood, leather and clay, or stood guard in the town, in the 13th and 14th centuries. The lords remain present, because they weigh on everyone’s life, but they are not the main subject.

The Middle Ages seem close, yet they are often as foreign to us as a distant culture. Our records try to help people understand this gap rather than smooth it over.

Our method: invent nothing

Every statement rests on an identified source: manuscripts, accounts and charters, published objects and excavations, and the work of historians, which we cite. A historian reviews the texts before they are published. The details are on the Method page.

The phone, an addition

The panels are complete in themselves. The phone adds what paper cannot carry: a voice, an animation, a video. There is nothing to install and no account to create; the camera image stays on your device. The animations are drawn, in the style of the panels.

Practical information

• Address: Porte de Soissons, 02380 Coucy-le-Château-Auffrique.
• Free admission.
• The ground floor is accessible to people with reduced mobility; the upper floors are not.
• For opening hours, please ask the AMVCC on +33 3 23 38 88 93.

Respect for visitors

• No advertising, no cookies, no collection of personal data.
• Anonymous, aggregated visitor measurement, hosted by the association, helps us know whether the panels are used.
• A video hosted by YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion or PeerTube only loads if you ask for it (see the legal notice).
• Site and content hosted in Europe, using free software.

Within the AMVCC

The association also runs the Seigneurie de Coucy, its living history troupe, which re-enacts daily life in the seigneury between 1340 and 1360.

This site is a volunteer project created by Thibault Santonja, who also took its photographs. Its code is free (MIT licence) and its texts are reusable (CC BY-SA 4.0). Contributions are welcome; the Credits page names those who have taken part.