The Jean-Claude Boulard – Carré Plantagenêt Museum said goodbye to its public on October 31 during a day of events organized to mark its closure. For at least the next two years, the Manceaux will have to make do with the Tessé Museum of Fine Arts alone, while the archeology museum enters a period of work.
Appointed in September 2025 as head of the Le Mans museums, Manon Six took over the project led by her predecessor Alice Gandin, current director of the Museum of Hunting and Nature in Paris. Five million euros are planned for the overhaul of the Carré Plantagenêt route, which will house the collections of the Green Museum, permanently closed more than a year ago. The future Le Mans natural and cultural history museum will retrace the evolution of the territory from the formation of the Earth to the present day, combining geological, paleontological, archaeological and ethnological collections.
Opened in June 2009, the Jean-Claude-Boulard Museum – Carré Plantagenêt covers a wide period, from prehistory to the medieval era. It preserves remarkable archaeological works, such as the 84 gold staters from the Trésor des Sablons, discovered accidentally in 1997, the Plantagenêt enamel, a funerary plaque representing the Count of Anjou Geoffroy Plantagenêt, or the Venus of Rextugenos, an ancient sculpture from the 1st century. Its reopening will mark the arrival of new pieces in its collections, such as the fossilized remains of the Saint-Rémy-du-Val elasmosaur, a 165 million year old marine reptile discovered in 1864 in Sarthe, which belonged to the former Green Museum.
However, as reported by the daily West Francethe renovation of the museum raises some misunderstandings among visitors. It must be said that the project has evolved considerably since its first mention by Mayor Stéphane Le Foll, at the start of his first mandate in 2020. It was then a question of an in-depth overhaul of the cultural landscape of the city, which planned to distribute the collections of municipal museums between the Carré Plantagenêt and the Tessé Museum.
In April 2023, the town hall announced the adoption of a program to restructure the archeology museum to make it a natural and cultural history museum dedicated to the territory of Le Mans, drawing on its collections as well as the funds of the Green Museum and part of that of the Queen Bérengère Museum, closed in 2022, and whose building was sold three years later to a private group to be converted into a luxury hotel. The project included the expansion of the Carré Plantagenêt exhibition rooms, the restructuring of the reception hall, the creation of a new educational workshop and a painting workshop, for a budget estimated at more than 14 million euros.
At the end of the municipal council meeting in January 2025, the Carré Plantagenêt project was significantly scaled down to focus solely on the scenographic overhaul, due to budgetary constraints. Of the 5 million euros planned, 3 million are devoted to the scenography and 900,000 euros to technical improvements. The extension of more than 25% of the areas accessible to the public has been abandoned: the course will remain in its current 1,237 m².
As for the Tessé Museum, the work which was to expand its surface area was postponed until 2034. The project for a conservation center for the reserves of the Le Mans museums, estimated at 13.5 million euros, was maintained, without a start date for the work having been indicated.
