Before it was a palace or a museum it was a castle built to stop an invasion. In 1190, leaving for the Third Crusade, Philip II Augustus walled Paris and anchored the wall's most exposed point — the Right Bank, facing downriver — with a garrison fortress. It was demolished, forgotten for two centuries, and then found again. You can walk around its base, indoors, today.
Built against the English
The threat came from the west. The Anglo-Norman Plantagenets held Normandy, and their garrisons sat downstream on the Seine. The Right Bank was growing fast and was the vulnerable side.
Philip Augustus ordered a stone city wall, and put a nearly square fortress of Parisian limestone at its weakest hydrological point, ringed by a wet moat fed from the Seine.
It was purely military. No royal apartments, no decoration — a garrison, and nothing else. Everything the Louvre later became was built on top of a building designed to hold a siege.
Lost, then found twice
By 1660 the medieval structures had been razed to ground level to clear space for the expansion of the Cour Carrée, and within a couple of generations nobody knew exactly where they had stood.
In 1866 the archaeologist Adolphe Berty worked from historical ground plans and dug beneath the paving of the Cour Carrée. He found and cleared the foundations of the northern and eastern walls of the medieval castle — then documented them and had them backfilled, to keep the courtyard flat. They stayed buried for another century.
The Grand Louvre excavations of 1984–1989, the largest archaeological campaign ever undertaken in Paris, uncovered them again. This time they were kept open. The medieval moat and the base of the keep are now part of the visit, underground, and most people walk past the entrance to them on the way to the paintings.
The name is older than the building
Luvra is recorded in the seventh century, centuries before this fortress existed.
That kills the popular explanation that the museum is named after louvres, the slatted openings — those came far later. The likelier roots are the Latin lupara, a wolf-den, or the Saxon lauer, a watchtower.
The pyramid does not have 666 panes
I. M. Pei's glass pyramid opened in 1989, and the number attached to it in popular culture is 666, courtesy of an erroneous 1980s construction brochure and then The Da Vinci Code.
The count verified by the Louvre and by Saint-Gobain, who made the glass, is 673 panes — 603 rhombi and 70 triangles.
The theft that made the Mona Lisa famous
On 21 August 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian decorator and glazier who had worked in the building, took the Mona Lisa from the Salon Carré. It was missing for two years and was recovered in Florence in 1913.
His motive was a mistaken one: he believed Napoleon had looted the painting from Italy and that he was repatriating it. The painting had in fact entered the French royal collection centuries before Napoleon was born.
The best-known version of the escape — the painting hidden under his smock — does not work. He was too short and the poplar panel too large for that to be physically possible.
What did happen is better. Peruggia's exit was blocked by a locked service door whose handle he had already removed with a screwdriver. A passing museum plumber named Sauvet saw a man struggling with a door, assumed he was a fellow tradesman, and used his own pliers to open it for him.
The painting was not especially famous before the theft. The two-year manhunt made it the most famous painting in the world.
The convoy
Between 25 August and 3 September 1939, days before war was declared, the director of the national museums, Jacques Jaujard, evacuated the entire collection to châteaux in the countryside in a convoy of 203 trucks.
The crates were coded rather than labelled, so that nobody handling them knew what they carried: a yellow circle for valuable, green for major works, and three red circles for global treasures. The crate with the Mona Lisa in it had three red circles.
Géricault's Raft of the Medusa was too big for any crate. It travelled flat on an open truck under a blanket, and passing through the town of Versailles it touched an overhead high-voltage cable and blacked out the entire municipality. For the rest of the journey, men walked ahead with insulated poles lifting the wires.
When Count Franz von Wolff-Metternich of the German Kunstschutz arrived at the Louvre, he found it empty — and then quietly worked with Jaujard to keep it that way.
Four things almost everyone believes that aren't true
| Claim | Verdict | What is actually the case |
|---|---|---|
| It is named after slatted "louvre" windows | False | Luvra is recorded in the 7th century. Probably lupara, wolf-den, or Saxon lauer, watchtower |
| The pyramid has 666 panes | False | 673 — 603 rhombi and 70 triangles. The myth came from a bad brochure and a novel |
| The collection is royal loot and Napoleon's spoils | False | Less than a quarter came from royal holdings; most is revolutionary confiscation, purchase and donation |
| Peruggia hid the Mona Lisa under his smock | False | He was too short and the panel too large. A plumber unlocked the door for him instead |
The Louvre became a public museum by revolution, not by gift. After the monarchy left for Versailles in 1682 the palace was half-abandoned, occupied by academies from 1692 and squatted by artists. The collection opened to the public in 1793, and the institution has grown ever since by bequest and purchase rather than conquest — which is why the "it is all loot" line, though it has real cases behind it, does not describe the collection as a whole.
Hear this one standing in front of it
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Written from Wanderlight's research dossier for The Louvre Museum — the same one the narration is written from. Where the evidence is thin, this page says so rather than rounding the uncertainty up.