Here is a louvre museum facts thing nobody puts on the postcards. The building you are walking through is not a museum. It is four buildings, stacked on top of each other over eight hundred years, with a museum poured into the cavities. The medieval fortress is still in the basement. The Renaissance palace is still upstairs. Napoleon’s wing is still on the north. The 1980s glass pyramid is the newest skin. You can walk from one century to another by taking the wrong staircase, and if you know what you are looking at, the louvre museum is not telling you its own story so much as letting you catch it in the act.
Most guides will give you twelve bullet points. World’s most visited museum. Used to be a palace. Mona Lisa stolen in 1911. Pyramid opened in 1989. None of those bullet points tell you anything you couldn’t read on the back of a ticket. The good stuff — the stuff that makes you stop walking and actually look at the room you are in — is in the seams between the layers. Here is where to find them.
Layer one: the fortress nobody sees
In 1190, the French king Philippe Auguste was about to leave for the Third Crusade. He was worried that while he was away fighting Saladin, the English king Richard the Lionheart — a cousin, a rival, and at the time the most feared soldier in Europe — would come up the Seine and sack Paris. Philippe built a fortress on the north bank of the river, on the western edge of the city, to stop him. Square plan, four corner towers, a dungeon in the middle, a moat fed from the Seine. It was called the Louvre. Nobody now is completely sure where the name comes from. The two main guesses are a word for a wolf-hunting lodge and a Frankish word for a fortified enclosure. Neither guess is satisfying. The name is older than the records.
Richard never came. The fortress held. For two hundred years it did exactly what a fortress is supposed to do, which is mostly sit there. By 1360 the city had grown past it and a new wall had been built further out, leaving the Louvre as a leftover military object inside a civilian Paris. Charles V, the same king who started the library that became the Bibliotheque nationale, began to convert it into a palace. He put in windows. He added galleries. He kept the dungeon.
Here is the fact nobody tells you. The dungeon, the moat, and part of the original outer wall are still there. In 1984, when the architects were digging the foundations for the Pyramid, they found the whole medieval footprint intact under the Cour Napoleon. The moat had been filled in. The walls had been buried. The keep had been shaved down to the level of a cellar and topped with parquet. They excavated it. They left it in place. You can now walk down a ramp under the Pyramid, follow the outer wall of Philippe Auguste’s castle, and stand inside the base of the twelfth-century keep. The stones are the original stones. There is graffiti on them from medieval prisoners. The museum above your head weighs thirty thousand tons. The fortress holds.
Most visitors walk past the entrance to the medieval Louvre on the way to the Egyptian antiquities and don’t go in. It is the most underrated twenty minutes in the building.
Layer two: the palace
Francois I decided in the 1520s that the Louvre, as a palace, needed to be brought up to date. He was a French king who had been captured by the Spanish at the Battle of Pavia and spent a year in a Spanish prison reading Italian books, and when he got out he came home obsessed with the Italian Renaissance. He brought Leonardo da Vinci to France in 1516 and installed him in a manor house in the Loire, where Leonardo died three years later with — so the story goes — the Mona Lisa still in his luggage. Francois bought the painting from Leonardo’s heirs. That is how the Mona Lisa got to France, and eventually to the wall it hung on until 1911.
Francois also started tearing down the medieval Louvre. He commissioned a new wing on the site of the old keep, designed by Pierre Lescot in a pure French Renaissance style with Italian detailing. The Lescot wing is the oldest surviving above-ground part of the palace. It is the southwest corner of the Cour Carree. If you stand in the courtyard and look at the sculpted facade with the carvings of Victory and Fame, you are looking at a 1546 building that was the first and best example of French Renaissance architecture. Nobody looks. Everybody is staring at their phone trying to find the entrance to the Pyramid.
After Francois came Catherine de Medici, who extended the palace westward toward the Tuileries, and Henri IV, who connected the Louvre to the Tuileries with a long gallery running along the Seine. That gallery is the spine the Grand Gallery now sits on. Louis XIII added floors. Louis XIV started the Cour Carree expansion that would take three more kings to finish. Then, in 1682, Louis XIV did something that changed the Louvre forever. He moved his court to Versailles.
The palace was abandoned. For about a hundred years. Kings did not live there. Artists squatted in the empty rooms. By the 1770s, the Louvre was a slum with a roof. Officially royal, practically derelict. Painters’ studios in the old apartments. Printers in the basement. Laundry hanging in the Cour Carree. It was the worst-maintained royal residence in Europe.
This is a louvre museum facts entry nobody uses. The palace spent a century as a squat.
Layer three: the museum
The French Revolution turned it into a museum almost by accident. In 1793, the new republican government needed to do something with the royal art collection, and the most visible royal building was sitting empty on the Right Bank of the Seine. A decree of August 10 opened the “Museum central des Arts” in the Grand Gallery. They hung four hundred paintings on the walls. Tickets were free three days out of every ten. Paris, which had never been allowed inside the royal collections, came to look.
Napoleon expanded the museum by the method Napoleon expanded everything, which is to say by war. Every army he sent into Italy, into the Netherlands, into Spain, into Egypt, came home with crates. Veronese’s Wedding at Cana was taken off a wall in Venice and sawn in half to fit on a boat. The Horses of Saint Mark were pried off the basilica facade. Papal paintings came out of the Vatican. At its peak in 1813, the Louvre held more art than it had rooms for, and about half of it had been seized. After Waterloo, the Allies spent months trying to get it all back. Some of it went home. Most of it did not. The Horses of Saint Mark went back to Venice. The Wedding at Cana stayed in Paris because the curator argued, successfully, that the canvas was too fragile to move. (It was not too fragile to move, but the bluff worked.) Napoleon’s wing, on the north side, was built during this period to house the overflow.
Napoleon also renamed the museum after himself. For a while it was the Musee Napoleon. The name did not survive his fall.
The louvre museum napoleon apartments
Here is a thing most people do not realize. Those gilded reception rooms on the north side of the building, the ones in the Richelieu wing with the thirty-foot ceilings and the red velvet and the chandeliers — those are not Napoleon I’s apartments. They are the apartments of Napoleon III’s minister of state, built in the 1860s during the Second Empire. The louvre museum napoleon apartments that everyone photographs for Instagram belong to the wrong Napoleon. It is Napoleon III, the nephew, who ran France from 1852 to 1870 and who built out most of what the Louvre looks like today, including the entire Richelieu wing and the second Cour Napoleon facade. His minister lived in those rooms until the Second Empire collapsed in 1870. Then the rooms went into storage. Then, a century later, the Louvre opened them to the public as preserved period interiors.
They are the most elaborate nineteenth-century state rooms open anywhere in Paris, they are free with a Louvre ticket, and they are usually empty because the crowds have all gone to Denon. If you want to feel what a Second Empire reception looked like — velvet walls, mirrored dining rooms, a theater the size of a small opera house — walk up the Richelieu staircase and turn right. Budget half an hour.
The pyramid and the upside-down pyramid
The Louvre pyramid, designed by the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei and opened in 1989, was the third act of a renovation that Francois Mitterrand had launched in 1981 as part of his Grands Projets — a series of big architectural gestures meant to mark his presidency on the city. The pyramid was the most controversial. French newspapers called it Egyptian, pharaonic, an alien object on a national building. A petition circulated to stop it. Mitterrand pushed it through anyway.
It has seventy-three interior panes of glass and six hundred and three exterior panes, made by a French manufacturer that had to invent a new process to get the glass clear enough. Pei wanted it to disappear. For the pyramid to work as a roof, it had to let enough light through that you couldn’t see the glass itself, only the shapes behind it. The final mix of sand in the glass was so pure it had to be sourced from a specific quarry in the Saint-Gobain region.
There is also a second pyramid, upside down, hanging from the ceiling of the underground Carrousel mall. Most people walk past it without looking up. It is the only pyramid in Paris where the point is down, and the point stops about a meter above a small stone pyramid on the floor that points back up. The two tips almost touch. This is the detail Dan Brown used in The Da Vinci Code. It was not built for Dan Brown. It was built because Pei wanted a mirror of the outside pyramid, and a room with a light source suspended from the ceiling needed something to hold the eye.
A real louvre museum facts list
Let me give you the facts version that most guides won’t. These are the things I would tell a friend over a glass of wine.
The building was a fortress for 200 years, a palace for 300 years, a museum for 230 years. The museum is the newest and shortest of the three phases, and in another 70 years it will be the second-shortest. Think about what that means when you are standing in the Cour Carree.
The Mona Lisa was not famous until she was stolen in 1911. Before that she was one of maybe forty “great paintings” in the Louvre. The theft made her a news story. The news story made her a global celebrity. When she came home two years later, she came home famous.
The Louvre’s collection has about 480,000 objects. About 35,000 of them are on display at any one time — roughly eight times what the Musee d’Orsay shows in the building across the Seine. The rest are in storage, in a warehouse outside Paris that is not open to the public and that has its own internal road network to move things around.
The most-visited single object in the Louvre is the Mona Lisa. The second most-visited is the Venus de Milo. The third is the Winged Victory of Samothrace. The fourth — in a surprise to the museum’s own curators when they started tracking foot traffic in the early 2000s — is the Code of Hammurabi, a 3,800-year-old black basalt stele from Babylon, about as tall as a person, engraved with the oldest surviving written set of laws in the world. It is in the Richelieu wing’s Mesopotamian antiquities gallery, usually without a crowd, and it is the oldest object on this list by about three thousand years. Stand in front of it with Chiaro and the laws are read out in the order Hammurabi had them carved, which is the only order in which the stele starts to make sense.
The building has a post office. An internal pharmacy. A fire station with actual firefighters on duty. A barber shop used by the staff. A pneumatic tube system for moving documents that still worked in the 1980s. An internal road in the courtyard for museum trucks. A chapel nobody goes to. A fencing hall used by the French national team, underneath the Denon wing, not open to the public.
None of this is on the official tour.
What to look for when you walk in
Enter through the Pyramid. Go down to the medieval Louvre first. Touch the twelfth-century wall. Walk up into the Cour Carree and stand in the courtyard looking at the four sides. Each side is a different century. Francois I’s Renaissance facade to the southwest. Catherine de Medici and Henri IV to the west. Louis XIV’s classical facade to the east — the Colonnade, which faces the church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois and is the first example of French classicism applied to a royal building. Napoleon III’s wing is the last addition, on the north, in the style nineteenth-century Paris called “neo-everything.” Every time the building got a new floor it got a new style. That is why the Cour Carree does not look like a single building. It is not.
Then go inside. Pick a wing. Walk slowly. The louvre museum is big enough that you will never see all of it, and that is not a failure. It is the point. It is a palace that ate a fortress and then a museum ate the palace, and you are standing inside a thousand years of France trying to figure out what to do with itself.