The original purpose of the Musée social was to preserve documents from the Social Economy pavilion of the Exposition Universelle (1889). This exposition, one hundred years after the French Revolution, had recorded the many changes in thought about the organization of society that had followed. The project to create the museum came from a meeting of Jules Siegfried, Léon Say and Émile Cheysson with count Joseph Dominique Aldebert de Chambrun in 1894.