All Mariannes: France’s icon reinvented in an exhibition at the Postal Museum

The Postal Museum and artist Sylvie Castioni unveil a new face for Marianne, with the photo exhibition Toutes Marianne(e) - Liberté(e) – Égalité(e) – Fraternité(e), on view from April 15 to July 13, 2026.

In town halls, on monuments, on coins or on stamps: Marianne is a symbol of the French Republic, an icon we encounter in everyday life. After three centuries of representations, Marianne gets a new face in this show by artist Sylvie Castioni, held at the Postal Museum (formerly La Poste Museum) from April 15 to July 13, 2026.

The exhibition All Marianne(e) – Liberty – Equality – Fraternity presents 92 portraits, 92 photographs of public figures who embody a modern, diverse Marianne.

These works depict a plural, diverse society, with women of all ages and bodies that are uniquely their own. Among the new Mariannes, a number of celebrities appear, including Frédérique Bel, Anne Roumanoff, Enora Malagré, Reem Kherici, Claudia Tagbo, Sylvie Tellier, Caroline Vigneaux, and Paralympic champion Nantenin Keita...

These women reinvent Marianne—and with her, the values of the French Republic: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—by staging themselves and asserting the motto in their own terms. The Republic unfolds as multiple, diverse, sometimes startling, funny, and moving, through portraits of women who are confident in themselves and in their place in society. The artist has chosen distinct faces, unique bodies, and singular lives that all converge behind the symbol that unites.

Sylvie Castioni aims to put women in the foreground, to assert their image and their stories, in order to break a long patriarchal history that has erased too many people. The photographer uses Marianne as a lever for justice and equality, a political instrument in the fight for human rights.

The Postal Museum also delves into the image of Marianne, that emblem of the French imagination you see all around, and especially on stamps. This historical symbol is given a modern twist here by these contemporary portraits, which portray a plural, richer society.

The exhibition offers more than 90 photographic portraits, as well as moving portraits, testimonies from the women, and digital devices that pull back the curtain on the making of these works.

The Postal Museum invites us to discover an engaged exhibition, a feminist and contemporary manifesto.