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Private tours of Paris and its region, built around the people taking them.
We live in a time when the past is increasingly contested. Narratives are simplified, civilisations 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 artefacts 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.
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: rigour, warmth, and a genuine passion for the places they present.
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.
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.
Every guide at Pépin holds the national professional licence 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.
Without it, no one is legally authorised 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 specialised training in the history of civilisations, archaeology, and museology, and validated by national examinations.
Each guide at Pépin brings a distinct background, a specialisation in ancient civilisations, 19th-century painting, urban history, or architectural heritage. That difference is deliberate. Beyond their shared licence, 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.
My background is a little unusual for a guide: an engineering degree, then a Master 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.
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.
Le Monde, Libération (1, 2), France Inter, Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace, L'Essentiel (1, 2, 3), Paris Un Deux Trois Quatre
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Pépin · Paris
Private · Guided
Paris · Île-de-France