This museum of fine art and archaeology was born of the generosity of a local patron of the arts, Antoine Vivenel (1799-1862), who amassed a large collection reflecting his taste for Antiquity and the Renaissance. As early as 1839, he donated all of this heritage to his home town and spent lavishly to create a model institution, the Musée des Études, housing more than 4,000 works of art, a plaster gallery and a free school for teaching the arts.
Since 1952, the museum has been housed in the mansion bequeathed to it by Count René Personne de Songeons, and has been enriched by various donations and the results of local archaeological digs. Spanning prehistory to the 19th century, its collections bear witness to the richness of European and non-European cultures.

From the collections of the Musée Antoine Vivenel, a superb collection of religious sculptures from the medieval and Renaissance periods has been on display since 2012 in the renovated cloister of this former abbey.

The large collections of figurines by Alfred Ternisien and Arthur de Marsy bequeathed to the town of Compiègne between 1901 and 1927, together with the huge diorama of the Battle of Waterloo created by Charles Laurent, encouraged the creation of a museum of historical figurines in 1949.
Transferred to the former Hôtel de la Cloche, the museum reopened in 1984 as the first museum of its size devoted to the world of historical figurines. It boasts a collection of almost 155,000 pieces, 45,000 of which are on display, providing a vast panorama of the history of France and Europe.