Tag:heritage:operator=mhs

Heritage protection of Monuments Historiques and Sites in France.

Under the responsibility of the Ministry of Culture, heritage in France is mainly protected through the Monuments historiques and sites programme. It applies both to immovable (architectural) and movable objects and includes two levels of protection: classified or inscribed.

It covers more than 45,000 architectural monuments (around 30% of which are classified).

Since 2018–2019, the resources listed by the Ministry of Culture have been published on the “Open Heritage Platform”, a public database aggregating several components, notably:

• the Mérimée database, covering French architectural heritage (including the 45,000 listed or classified historical monuments),
• the Palissy database, covering French movable heritage (including nearly 300,000 listed or classified historical monuments).

These are comprehensive inventories and therefore include both protected resources and resources that are simply inventoried.

While most movable objects (furniture in the strict sense, paintings, etc.) are not relevant to OSM, several are nevertheless naturally mappable: roadside crosses, groups of statues, fountains, funerary slabs, etc.

Other attributes

The other attributes required for an object with heritage:operator=mhs are at minimum:

• The level of protection: heritage=2 for a classified monuments historiques object and heritage=3 for a inscribed monuments historiques object.
• The object reference ref:mhs=*. Historically, this is the reference in the Mérimée database, but practice has led to the appearance of movable objects (for example, a fountain classified as a monuments historiques) that are mappable in OSM and for which it has been necessary to use the reference from the Palissy database. As the references in these two databases do not overlap, this does not create any insurmountable contradiction.

See also

• Heritage protection in France
• Monuments historiques and sites
• Open Heritage Platform (POP)