History is not decoration
Who guides you in Paris, and why we do it.
In progress New website: details may change. Our new website is still being built. Photographs and tour details may not yet be final, so please contact us or write to contact@pepinparis.com to confirm anything before you book.
Who guides you in Paris, and why we do it.
Why we guide
We live in a time when the past is increasingly contested. Narratives are simplified, civilizations reduced to slogans, facts bent to serve an argument.
Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Renaissance Italy, revolutionary France are not decorative heritage. They are the tools through which human societies have understood themselves, and through which we can understand the present.
Learning how to read the artifacts our ancestors left us, and understanding them, is today a form of resistance. Against manipulation, against received ideas, against the comfort of easy answers. It is also something we can give children early: not a collection of dates, but a habit of asking why.
That is why we became guides.
Where to look
Guiding, for us, begins with showing you where to look. Take one painting, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, back on its wall in the Louvre since its restoration in 2024. Everyone knows it from a distance. Up close, it holds a few surprises.
Start with the colors. Delacroix left green, orange and violet off his palette and built the whole scene in a range of grays, so that three colors stand out above the smoke: the blue, white and red of the flag.
Under the yellowed varnish, Liberty’s dress looked plain yellow. Cleaned, it shows how Delacroix painted it: gray first, then golden yellow laid on in varying densities. The gradient sets her apart from everyone else in the scene, almost divine.
Look down at the man lying in the foreground. A thin line of blood runs from his ear. It was always there, but no one could see it before the restoration.
At the very bottom left lies a worn leather shoe that nobody had noticed: the varnish had blended it into the paving stones. We will look for it together. The full story, in our Journal
Every tour works this way, and every tour is private: a family with a ten-year-old and a retired historian will not stop in front of the same details.
“How he knows as much as he does is a mystery to me, but it was enough to keep both me and my 12 year old son riveted for 3 hours.”
Who guides you
My background is a little unusual for a guide: an engineering degree, then a Master’s in Cultural and Scientific Communication, before I obtained the carte professionnelle nationale de guide-conférencier in 2023. That mix shapes how I build a tour: rigorous about facts, attentive to how ideas land.
I see guiding as a form of teaching. Showing someone where to look when their eyes don't know where to go. A few hours in front of the right work can change the way you see a place, a culture, and people. That conviction is at the heart of every tour we give.
Texte à valider (cartel et carte pro)About the card. It is the state license required to guide inside France’s national museums and monuments, issued after a Master’s degree, a further year of specialized training and national examinations. Every Pépin guide holds one.
In the press Le Monde, Libération (1, 2), France Inter, L'Essentiel (1, 2, 3), Paris Un Deux Trois Quatre
What stays
What we hope, after a few hours with a Pépin guide, is that something stays: a question, an image, a connection you did not expect. A seed that might grow long after the visit is over. And that one day, in the most unexpected place, something will take you back to that conversation you had in Paris.
SimonFounder of Pépin Paris
pépin/pe.pɛ̃/French for a seed, the pip of a fruit. Hence our name.
Guests, afterwards
“We still talk about all the things you showed us.”
“We still talk about what I call ‘our magical morning at the Louvre with Simon.’”
Plan your visit
Tell us where you would like to go, when you are in Paris, and who is in your group. We reply within 48 hours.
Admit one group
Pépin · Paris
Private · Guided
Paris · Île-de-France