Michel Brissard wants to transmit memory through his collections

Since its reopening on June 1, the Vierville museum, closed in 1993, had welcomed twelve thousand people despite the lack of advertising. The report explained this recovery by the passion of Michel Brissard.

His museum was full of rare objects, including optical devices, a Goliath tank and an Enigma coding machine found in an attic unpacking, but also posters, photographs, cigarettes and other witnesses of daily life. The presentation remained simple: few labels, glider ropes for the railings and many pieces, pressed against each other.

The collector told his beginnings in the Eure-et-Loir, interested in war memories told in the family, then his research in the countryside for remains then abandoned. Four years earlier, the industrial group where he had worked for thirty years as an executive had initially pushed him, an experience that he evoked with difficulty.

A friend had almost by chance led him to the sale of the collection of the previous museum. Seduced by Vierville and by the old cinema now empty, he had found a favorable reception from the mayor. The municipal desire to maintain a museum on this place of memory met his desire to make his passion a profession.

Opened quickly, the establishment exceeded its expectations and received praise of the guest book. Above all, he retained the emotion of Jules Desgrain, who returned three times in a day to see the jacket worn on a morning in June 1944, the laughter of young Japanese walking in a caterillet and the signs of affection of veterans' wives.

Michel Brissard considered himself a custodian rather than the owner of history. He wanted to build an educational tool for future generations, especially young people attracted by Spielberg's film. Despite the administrative difficulties and the purchase proposals from foreign collectors received from the opening, he intended to keep his pieces, improve their presentation and, if possible, enlarge the museum to better explain these years of war.

Reconstructed or uncertain passages:
- The left edge of the cut is cut; the precise age of the beginning of the collection is not legible and has not been reconstituted.

Archive image: https://vierville.cordelle.eu/PhDoc10/1999Sept22-Musee%20%282%29.jpg