This presentation examines the Musée National du Bardo in Tunis, Tunisia – one of the largest and most influential museums in the Arab world. The Bardo was first inaugurated as the Musée Alaoui in 1888 by the French-created Direction des Antiquités et Arts. Although the Alaoui Museum was nominally a public institution throughout the Protectorate era, the collection was organized primarily for the use of European researchers. Public galleries featured little to no explanatory wall text, and a French-language museum guide was available only for purchase. In 1956, Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba renamed the museum the ”Musée National du Bardo,” eliminating the association with the Husaynid Beylical dynasty and signifying that the collection would now be truly accessible to the Tunisian public. However, this presentation will demonstrate that it was not until the 1970s that staff at the Bardo museum truly began to democratize the formerly elite institution by creating a service éducatif that implemented a series of progressive mediation programs. Museum educators encouraged curators to write wall text presenting the collection in layman’s terms (vulgarisation), trained museum workers to conduct guided tours in Arabic, designed curricula for school children, and created special events and programs to open the collection to the public. I argue that the innovative techniques employed by the service éducatif - still unique among Tunisian museums – significantly democratized the formerly elite, inaccessible institution enough to make space for modern art, popular art, and ethnographic exhibits in addition to its prodigious archaeological collections. At the same time, the efforts of the service éducatif worked to integrate the Musée du Bardo into the national consciousness of the Tunisian populace.