Covering the Gunzburgs’ business activities, ranging from their trading companies and alcohol concessions to the J. E. Gunzburg bank and including their interests in insurance, farming and forestry, salt manufacture and gold-mining.

Covering the Gunzburg collections formerly housed in St Petersburg, Paris and elsewhere ; objets d’art, paintings, drawings etc.

Official documents that testify to the Gunzburg family’s growing social and professional integration in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Invitations, menus and other papers marking birthdays, commemorations, marriages and other special occasions.

Residence permits, Nansen and other passports, identity cards, birth and marriage certificates etc.

Letters and memoirs attesting to the importance of intellectual, cultural and artistic life for the Gunzburgs over several generations.

From the practice of their faith and promotion of their culture to their many acts of philanthropy, Judaism has been at the heart of family life.

Official correspondence, alongside correspondence between family members and with their friends, has been preserved by the family.

Memoirs, journals, and diaries attesting to the daily and cultural life of the family across the generations (Russian Revolution, exile, World War One, World War Two).

Preserved through the upheavals of history, objects that embody the family’s story.

As founders of a number of charitable organisations, the Gunzburgs have been involved in Russia, France and elsewhere, on the side of those most in need.

Each branch of the family has carefully preserved its collection of photographs, recording daily life, travel and important occasions.

Passed down from one generation to the next, paintings, drawings and sculptures testify to the importance of culture within the family.

Covering the family’s properties, among them their Paris townhouse in Rue de Tilsitt, their house in the former French imperial military base at Saint-Germain en Laye, their palace at Millionaya Street and elsewhere in St Petersburg.

Family members experienced the First World War in different ways: the men fighting as young officers in allied armies on many of the war’s fronts, the women mobilised behind the lines. The Russian revolution forced many Gunzburgs still living in Russia to leave the country, while some family members disappeared in the chaos of revolution and civil war in the nascent USSR.

The Second World War forced many members of the Gunzburg family into exile, fleeing the Nazis and the Vichy regime, while others joined allied armies and French and other resistance movements.