Our Full History - France, 1770-1802
Through talent and determination, a young girl named Marie Grosholz came to be numbered among the
most famous of English institutions.
1761Marie Grosholz, later known as Madame Tussaud, is born in Strasbourg.
1770Marie's mother's employer, a doctor called Philippe Curtius, opens an exhibition of life-size
wax figures at the Palais Royale in Paris. Marie learns the art of wax modelling from him.
1777Marie models the famous author and philosopher, Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire.
1780Marie becomes art tutor to King Louis XVI's sister and goes to live at the royal court in Versailles.
1789 - The outbreak of the French RevolutionMarie returns to Paris, later helping Curtius to mould the
heads of some of the guillotine's victims - among them her Versailles acquaintances.
ENGLAND - TRAVELLING PERIOD, 1802-35
1794Marie Grosholz inherits Curtius's collection of figures.
1795She marries François Tussaud, an engineer, but leaves him eight years later to bring the collection
on a tour of the British Isles.
ENGLAND - BAKER ST BAZAAR, 1835-84For the next 33 years, she lives the exhausting and precarious life of a travelling
showman, moving from town to town with her caravans, organising advertising, and encouraging newspaper anecdotes,
or organising charity benefits to bring in useful patrons.
She suffers shipwreck in the Irish Sea, and fire during the Bristol Riots of 1831. Yet, throughout the travelling
years, new figures are constantly introduced.
1835Madame Tussauds settles into a permanent home in The Bazaar, Baker Street, London.
"Visitors entering the Bazaar from Baker Street proceed to a saloon richly decorated with mirrored embellishments.
Here sits an aged lady, with an accent which proclaims her Gallic origins. Were she motionless, you would take her
for a piece of waxwork. This is Madame Tussaud, a lady who is in herself an Exhibition."
- from an 1842 guidebook
1846Punch Magazine coins the name "Chamber of Horrors" for Madame Tussauds separate room where
gruesome relics of the French Revolution are displayed.
1881Madame Tussaud dies. In her old age, supported by two sons, she had achieved great success. She
had resisted a U.S. buy-out, her memoirs had been published, and her portrait was painted by a court painter.
She had been immortalised by Dickens (as Mrs Jarley) and caricatured by Cruikshank.
MOVE TO MARYLEBONE ROAD
1884Madame Tussauds grandson, Joseph Randall, directs the move to the present site in Marylebone Road.
FIRE & RE-BUILDING 1925-28
1925Fire guts the whole building, destroying not only almost all the wax figures and their costumes,
but priceless furnishings, paintings and relics too.
Fortunately, many of the old head moulds were saved, and from these the Exhibition was rebuilt, opening 3 years
later with the addition of a large Cinema and Restaurant.
WAR BRINGS ABOUT PLANETARIUM
1940A German bomb destroys the Cinema. Ironically, the figure of Hitler is one of the few figures to survive unscathed.
1958Madame Tussauds opens the Commonwealth's first Planetarium on the site of the old cinema.
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