For Paris's Immigration Museum, Terrorism Spurs Tourism
- 2017-08-03
- The National Post
After the terrorist attacks of November 2015, attendance dropped at most Paris museums. A fall in tourists, combined with locals’ avoidance of large and crowded spaces, reduced the number of visitors to the Louvre, the Chateau de Versailles and the Musee d’Orsay.
Not so, however, to the National Museum of the History of Immigration.
After the violence, perpetrated partly by descendants of North African immigrants to France and Belgium, visitors came to the museum to learn about the circumstances of immigration from North Africa, according to Benjamin Stora, the museum’s director and a leading historian who specializes in Algeria. “People came to see what had happened in this history,” he said. “What was this complicated history? So our visits didn’t fall.”