Your Licensed Private Guides in Paris

We live in a time when the past is increasingly contested. Learning to read it is a way of thinking for yourself.

Our conviction

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 how human societies came to understand themselves, and they remain one of the best ways to understand our own time. The questions those societies faced, about power, faith, beauty and justice, are often closer to ours than they seem.

Learning to read what our ancestors left behind is a way of thinking for yourself, beyond received ideas and the comfort of easy answers. It starts with simple questions: who made this, for whom, and why does it look the way it does? Asked in front of the real thing, they turn a statue, a painting or a building into a witness rather than a backdrop.

Children take to it surprisingly early. Give them the right story in front of the right object, and they are often the ones who ask the best questions.

What we pass on is not a list of dates, but a habit of asking why.

Liberty Leading the People, by Delacroix, in the Louvre — Eugène Delacroix, *Liberty Leading the People*, 1830 · The Louvre

No two groups are the same, and every tour is built for the people in the room.

Our approach

Built around the people in the room

Pépin is a small team of licensed guides-conférenciers, personally chosen for their expertise and their ability to make history feel alive for any audience. Every guide shares the same values: rigor, warmth, and a genuine passion for the places they present.

We adapt to you

No two groups are the same. A family with a ten-year-old and a retired historian require completely different tours of the same gallery. We know that, and we build accordingly.

Our guides are trained to read a room, to follow a question wherever it leads, and to find the connection between a 3,000-year-old statue and something that happened last week.

Always private

Every Pépin tour is exclusively yours. No shared groups, no strangers, no compromises. It means every member of your group gets real attention, every question gets a real answer, and the pace of the tour is always yours to set.

From a couple to a larger party, we accommodate groups of any size on request.

The Château de Versailles seen across the flower beds of its gardens — Versailles, seen from the gardens

The state license required to guide in France’s national museums. Not everyone in Paris holds it.

Our credentials

The carte professionnelle nationale

Every guide at Pépin holds the national professional license required by French law to guide in national museums and monuments. This is not a certificate or a training course. It is a state qualification issued by the French Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Tourism, and not everyone who calls themselves a guide in Paris holds it.

Mandatory by law

Without it, no one is legally authorized to guide tours in France's national museums and monuments. It is obtained after a Master's degree in art history, fine arts, or a related field, followed by a dedicated additional year of specialized training in the history of civilizations, archaeology, and museology, and validated by national examinations.

Continuous education

Each guide at Pépin brings a distinct background, a specialization in ancient civilizations, 19th-century painting, urban history, or architectural heritage. That difference is deliberate. Beyond their shared license, our guides pursue continuous professional development, return regularly to the places they present, and follow current research in their field. What you get is not a standard tour delivered by a standard guide.

The upper chapel of the Sainte-Chapelle and its stained-glass windows — The Sainte-Chapelle, one of the national monuments where the card is required

Simon, Max and Pol: three licensed guides, three ways into Paris.

Our guides

The people who guide you

Every Pépin guide holds the national license, and each one brings a different way into the city.

Simon

Founder · guide-conférencier since 2023 · born and raised in Paris

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.

In the press Le Monde, Le Nouvel Obs, Libération (1, 2), France Inter, L'Essentiel (1, 2, 3), Paris Un Deux Trois Quatre

Max

Guide-conférencier · born and raised in Normandy, came to Paris to study and never left

I came to guiding through Egyptology: a Master’s spent deciphering tomb inscriptions, then the carte professionnelle nationale de guide-conférencier. Years with texts nobody had read aloud for three thousand years taught me patience, and a taste for the small detail that changes everything.

In front of a sarcophagus or a statue of a pharaoh, I want people to stop seeing a relic and start seeing a person: someone who loved, feared and hoped, much as we do. Once that connection is made, the whole museum reads differently.

Pol

Guide-conférencier · born and raised in Versailles

I trained as an architect before turning to art history and the carte professionnelle nationale de guide-conférencier. I still look at a city the way I learned to then: how it is built, how light falls on it, why a street bends where it does.

Paris is the best possible classroom for that. Whether we are in front of a Monet at Orsay or climbing toward Sacré-Cœur, I want you to leave with eyes that keep noticing, long after the tour is over.

Founded by Simon in 2026. A French word for a seed, and in Normandy, for an umbrella.

Our name

Why Pépin

Simon founded Pépin Paris in 2026, to give one name to a way of guiding he had been practicing for years: private, prepared in advance, and built around the people in the room.

For each tour, he works with licensed guides he knows and trusts, chosen for the place and for the group.

How to say it

/pe.pɛ̃/, roughly pay-PAN, with the final n barely sounded, as in the French vin.

What it means

A seed, the pip inside a piece of fruit. We chose it for what we hope a tour leaves behind: a small seed that keeps growing long after the visit.

And in Normandy

A pépin is also an umbrella. A handy thing to have in Paris, too.

The Orangerie of the Château de Versailles and its orange trees — The Orangerie at Versailles, where orange trees have wintered since Louis XIV

History is not decoration