HISTORY OF THE LOUVRE
From medieval stronghold to one of the world’s greatest museums
The History of the Louvre: How a Fortress Became the World’s Most Famous Museum
Before stepping through the doors of the world’s most famous museum and standing before its most iconic works, shouldn’t we first try to understand its history?
The Louvre carries more than eight centuries of history a vast and living fresco that has survived English occupation, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars, and whose story continues to be written to this day.
So how did the Louvre, across the centuries, transform itself into the most visited museum in the world?
To understand that, we need to go back a very long way well before the galleries, before the collections, before the glass pyramid. We need to go back to a tower.
At the beginning, there is no palace. No galleries, no collections, no visitors. There is only a tower.
1190: a fortress, not a monument
Philippe Auguste is preparing to leave for the Third Crusade. Before departing from Paris, he wants to make sure the city will hold without him. The threat is real: Normandy belongs to the English crown, and an attack from the west is entirely plausible. He orders the construction of a large stone tower on the right bank of the Seine, surrounded by walls and a moat connected to the river.
The Louvre is born that way not to be admired, but to protect. It is a military structure, designed to watch, defend, and endure. Nothing in its original form hints at what it will one day become.
When the edge becomes the centre
For more than a century, the fortress quietly fulfils its purpose. But Paris keeps growing. The city spreads outward, gradually enveloping what had once stood at its periphery.
And that is where something shifts. Without anyone truly deciding it, what had been a rampart at the city’s gates finds itself at its very heart. The Louvre changes in meaning before it changes in form.
What you can still see today
That beginning has not disappeared. Beneath the Cour Carrée, in the Sully crypt, the foundations of Philippe Auguste’s tower still stand. They are not spectacular. They are not trying to impress.
But they may be the most moving stones in the entire museum because they tell the story of the starting point, long before the palace, long before the pyramid, long before everything that came after.
The fortress fulfilled its role. But a century and a half later, it would be an event of an entirely different nature personal, brutal, intimate that would decide the next chapter of the Louvre’s story.
The Royale Residence : Charles V and the 14th Century
The Louvre does not become a royal residence out of prestige. It becomes one out of necessity and trauma.
1358: a day impossible to forget
Charles V is sixteen years old when he witnesses, at the Palais de la Cité, the massacre of his father’s advisors. The men of Étienne Marcel provost of the merchants of Paris, effectively the city’s leader burst in and kill in front of him. The young prince survives. But that day, he discovers the violence of power in the most brutal way possible.
That kind of memory does not fade. It settles in.
1364: choosing another place to begin again
When Charles V becomes king, he cannot return to live at the Palais de la Cité as if nothing had happened. Those walls are now tied to fear, blood, and that day. To live there would be to keep living it.
He chooses the Louvre. Not first for its prestige or grandeur, but because it offers something else: a place untouched in memory, somewhere the eye meets nothing painful.
He has the castle renovated new turrets, gardens, windows cut to let light in. He fills it with his collections and his library one of the most important in Europe at the time, with nearly a thousand volumes, housed in the Tour de la Fauconnerie. The austere citadel begins to look like something else.
An intimate choice that became a historic decision
This is how the Louvre enters French royal history. Not through the will of a king seeking to assert power, but through the very human need of a young man, marked by violence, who no longer wanted to look at certain walls.
Great decisions sometimes have more intimate origins than we might think.
The Louvre is now a royal residence. But a residence is not yet a palace in the fullest sense. It would take the sixteenth century, and a king fascinated by Italy, for the place to truly change its face.
The Palace: François I and the 16th Century
Before François I, the Louvre is still, in its silhouette and in spirit, a medieval fortress. Massive, defensive, turned inward.
In 1528, the king orders the demolition of the great keep. The gesture is not trivial. It is a rupture the end of one era, and the beginning of an entirely new ambition. To destroy a keep in order to build an Italianate palace around a courtyard. The Louvre ceases to be a castle. It becomes an urban palace.
Pierre Lescot and the French Renaissance
From 1546 onwards, François I entrusts architect Pierre Lescot with the reconstruction of part of the palace in the Italian Renaissance style he had encountered during his campaigns in Italy. Combined with the sculptures of Jean Goujon, the new façade gives the Louvre an elegance it had never known lighter, more rhythmic, more refined the opposite of the fortress it replaces.
It is his son Henri II who completes the west wing. For him, an extraordinary decorative programme is created conceived as a portrait of the ideal sovereign. This is where the Louvre we still recognise today truly begins. That façade is visible in the south-west wing of the Cour Carrée.
Leonardo da Vinci and the Mona Lisa
François I also transforms the Louvre through art. Passionate about Italian painting, he invites Leonardo da Vinci to France in 1516. The master settles at the Château du Clos Lucé, near Amboise, and brings several paintings with him. Among them is the one that will become the most famous of all: the Mona Lisa.
It is therefore under François I that the work enters the French royal collections five centuries before it would end up behind bulletproof glass, contemplated daily by thousands of visitors.
A palace that asserts power through beauty
Under François I, the Louvre ceases to be a simple residence. It becomes a palace that asserts power differently no longer through the thickness of its walls, but through the elegance of its façades and the quality of what it holds.
Perhaps that is where everything truly begins. Not the museum yet but the idea that a great place can speak through art.
But the sixteenth century is not only the century of the Renaissance. Behind those new façades, the kingdom is tearing itself apart. The Louvre is about to find itself at the centre of a much darker history.
The Fracture and the Grand Design: 1572 – 1610
The Louvre does not pass through the sixteenth century unscathed. It emerges marked in its memory and transformed in its scale.
24 August 1572: the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
In an attempt to reconcile Catholics and Protestants, Catherine de Medici arranges the marriage of her daughter Marguerite to Henri de Navarre, one of the leading Protestant princes, at the Louvre. Days after the wedding, an assassination attempt ignites the powder keg. Charles IX orders the elimination of the Protestant leaders lodged at the Louvre for the occasion. Very quickly, the violence spirals out of control. More than 3,000 victims across the capital.
The Louvre therefore carries another memory: that of a palace of ceremony turned, in a single night, into a place of blood.
Henri IV and the Grand Design
Henri de Navarre becomes king as Henri IV. He brings the Wars of Religion to an end. In Paris, he launches major building works with a clear objective: to enlarge the Louvre, complete the Tuileries, and link the two palaces into a single ensemble. This is what will be called the Grand Design.
He raises the Petite Galerie, extends the Tuileries toward the Seine with the Pavilion of Flore, and begins the long wing running along the river nearly 500 metres that will become the Grande Galerie. For the first time, the Louvre takes on the dimension of a truly monumental complex.
Henri IV is assassinated in 1610, only steps from the Louvre. But the Grand Design survives him. It becomes the guiding thread of the entire architectural history of the Louvre for more than two centuries.
The seventeenth century could have been the century of completion. Everything seemed to point in that direction. And yet, just as the Louvre was approaching a new form of grandeur, its destiny shifted again.
The Unfinished Palace: Louis XIV and the Awakening
The Louvre does not lose its greatness under Louis XIV. It gains a different kind unexpected, almost in spite of him.
The colonnade and the Galerie d’Apollon
Louis XIV revives the works with ambition. His minister Colbert is convinced that a great building programme is also a way to display the power of a nation. After the fire of 1661, the Galerie d’Apollon is redecorated in a programme that explicitly links the king to the imagery of the sun. The colonnade the product of a collective effort between Le Vau, Le Brun, and Perrault becomes one of the masterpieces of French classicism.
1678: the departure that changes everything
But Louis XIV feels confined at the Louvre, and even in Paris. In 1678, he transfers the government to Versailles and settles there permanently. He abandons a Louvre that is still unfinished.
That departure creates an immense void. The academies move in. Artists open studios. Inside the Cour Carrée, stalls, cabarets, and small shops begin to multiply. The palace loses its original function but gains another: an artistic life.
In 1699, Louis XIV authorises the Académie Royale de Peinture to exhibit its artists in the Grande Galerie. By 1725, the Salon is held in the Salon Carré. Each year, thousands of Parisians come to the Louvre to see works of art.
The museum does not yet officially exist. But its spirit is already there.
For centuries, the Louvre had been a place of power. You did not walk in freely. You were invited, admitted, tolerated or not. In 1793, everything changed.
From Palace to Museum: the Revolution and the 19th Century
The Louvre does not become a museum by decree alone. It does so because an entire era had decided that art belonged to everyone.
10 August 1793: art becomes the heritage of all
The Revolution does not create the museum out of nothing. It gives political form to an idea that had been taking shape since the eighteenth century. Diderot and the encyclopédistes had been calling for it since 1765: to open the royal collections to everyone.
Exactly one year after the storming of the Tuileries, the Louvre opens its doors to the public. In the Grande Galerie, along the Seine, 537 paintings from the former royal collection are displayed for the first time to anyone who wishes to see them. Entry is free.
The gesture is powerful, almost radical. Ordinary people walk through rooms they could never have entered just a few years before.
Napoleon, Champollion, the Winged Victory
Napoleon pushes that logic much further. Renamed the Musée Napoléon in 1803, the Louvre receives thousands of works brought back from campaigns in Italy, Egypt, and across Europe selected by Vivant Denon, who follows the armies to choose the most exceptional pieces from conquered territories.
In 1821, the Venus de Milo enters the Louvre. In 1826, Champollion becomes curator and structures the museum’s first Egyptian collection. In 1883, the Winged Victory of Samothrace takes its place at the top of the Daru staircase, where it still stands today. The Louvre is no longer simply expanding. It is building its own mythology.
Napoleon III and the final form
It is under Napoleon III that the old dream of the Grand Design returns with force. Between 1854 and 1857, it is almost a new palace that emerges with exuberant decoration on every façade. The Richelieu wing to the north, the Denon wing to the south where the Mona Lisa hangs today are built. The Louvre takes on the general structure it still retains.
In 1871, insurgents of the Paris Commune set fire to the Tuileries. The blackened ruins stand for more than ten years before being demolished. The open space we know today that is the one left behind.
Perhaps that is where the story pauses for the first time. Not the museum yet complete but the idea that a place can change its very nature by changing its memory.
The palace was now the one we still recognise. But the twentieth century would give the Louvre yet another dimension: that of worldwide myth, vulnerability, and survival.
The Grand Louvre: Mitterrand’s Pyramid
The Louvre does not become fully itself through the passage of time. It does so through a decision that cuts clean.
1911: the theft of the Mona Lisa
On 21 August 1911, the news caused a sensation: the Mona Lisa had been stolen. The painting did not reappear for two years hidden in the modest apartment of Vincenzo Peruggia, a former museum worker who had unhooked it one early morning and walked out with it under his coat. It took more than 24 hours to discover the theft.
The theft revealed the museum’s weaknesses. But it also helped turn this masterpiece into the most famous and most mysterious painting in the world. Legend is sometimes built through absence.
1939: saving the works before the war
On the eve of the Second World War, Jacques Jaujard organises the evacuation of more than 4,000 works in just a few days. Convoys of lorries leave Paris for Chambord, then for châteaux scattered across the country. When the Germans arrive, they find galleries that are almost empty.
The museum survives through anticipation, method, and a remarkable steadiness of nerve.
1981: to refound, not to renovate
In the early 1980s, the Louvre already exists. But it only half-exists. The Richelieu wing is still occupied by the Ministry of Finance. Visitors arrive, hesitate, search. The grandeur of the palace overwhelms as much as it welcomes.
That year, Mitterrand decides. He transfers the Ministry of Finance to Bercy and gives Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei a clear mission: create a new entrance. The concept is as simple as it is audacious a glass pyramid at the centre of the Cour Napoléon, opening onto an underground hall from which the museum’s three wings can be reached: Richelieu, Sully, Denon.
This is not about renovating at the margins. It is about refounding.
Before the main works begin, around a hundred archaeologists uncover the remains of the medieval keep and of Charles V’s city wall. The future of the Louvre first required a rediscovery of its buried past.
1989: the shock, then the obvious
When the pyramid is inaugurated, it divides opinion deeply. Too modern, too foreign to the royal palace surrounding it. It is compared to a department store. To Disneyland. The debate is fierce. And that is perhaps precisely why it makes such a mark what divides us makes us think.
With time, what once shocked becomes self-evident. Its 21 metres of height and 603 glass panes finally give the Louvre what it had always lacked: a single, legible, human-scaled entry point for something so immense.
On 18 November 1993, the Richelieu wing opens to the public exactly two centuries after the museum’s first opening. A symbol in itself.
This is not simply a change of entrance. It is a change of era. Before it, the Louvre was a palace that contained a museum. After it, it becomes a museum that inhabits a palace open to the world, and at last fully itself.
Author’s note: This text was written with the intention of sharing and transmitting knowledge, not as an academic work. Its author is not a historian. Some details or interpretations may not reflect current historiographical consensus. For a rigorous approach, please refer to the sources listed at the end of this document
Références : Musée du Louvre, Histoire de l’architecture du Louvre ; Musée du Louvre, Une pyramide pour symbole ; Musée du Louvre, Du palais au musée : les appartements du ministre ; Musée du Louvre, De La Joconde aux Noces de Cana – Salle des États ; Musée du Louvre, Rapport d’activité 2019 (chronologie du Grand Louvre) ; Louvre Éditions / Librairie du Louvre, Mémoires du Louvre.
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