Louvre Castle

Before leaving on the Third Crusade in 1190, Philip II Augustus ordered a new wall around Paris — the English held Normandy less than 100 kilometres away, and memory endured of the Viking siege of 845, when raiders coming up the Seine had nearly taken the city. The Louvre was planted on the right bank against the wall's western, most exposed side. The castle itself rose after the king's return at the end of 1191 and was newly finished by about 1210. Philip also wanted a secure home for his treasure and for his archives, which he had lost to Richard the Lionheart at Fréteval in 1194 and since rebuilt.

The fortress was almost square in plan, ringed by a flat-bottomed masonry moat fed by the Seine — regularly dredged, its fish sold for the profit of the royal treasury. Ten towers reinforced the perimeter, none more than a bowshot of 25 metres apart; twin towers flanked drawbridge gates on the south and east, while the west wall, facing open country, was the thickest of all and pierced by no gate.

In the centre of the courtyard stood the Grosse Tour du Louvre, a keep built around 1200: circular, 15.6 metres across and 30 metres high, its walls 4.25 metres thick at the base, ringed by its own dry ditch paved with great irregular stones. Philip chose a round keep for military reasons — attackers could sap the angles of a square tower far more easily than a curved wall. A well and a large cistern equipped it to endure a long siege, but its working life was quieter: it housed the royal archives and treasure, probably until Philip the Fair, and served as a prison — Count Ferrand of Flanders, captured at Bouvines in 1214, was held in it for thirteen years. The castle became the prototype of what is now called Philippian architecture.

Louis IX added rooms with no real defensive purpose in 1230–1240, among them the chamber later known as the Salle Saint-Louis. By the mid-fourteenth century Paris had outgrown Philip's wall; Charles V completed a new enceinte that enclosed the Louvre altogether, and the castle, its military value largely spent, could be remade as a residence — one the king prized after being menaced inside the Palais de la Cité during Étienne Marcel's revolt of February 1358. Between 1360 and 1371 his architect Raymond du Temple raised the walls from 14.5 to 21 metres, heightened the towers, cut numerous windows through the old masonry, and built the Grande Vis, a twenty-metre spiral stair adorned with sculpted figures of the king and queen.

Charles turned the north-west Falconry tower into the first French royal library: an inventory of 1373 counted 973 manuscripts on its three floors, kept behind iron bars, brass wire and painted glass, and lit at night by thirty small chandeliers and a silver lamp.

During the Hundred Years' War, English soldiers under Henry V — allied to the Burgundians who held Paris — entered the city on 1 December 1420 and occupied the Louvre Castle without a fight. They found a capital ruined by civil war and scarcity, and stayed until 1436.

The castle's destroyer was the monarchy itself. Defeated at Pavia in 1525 and held prisoner, Francis I returned to find court, theologians and Parlement grown independent; at a lit de justice held on 24, 26 and 27 July 1526 he reasserted his authority and resolved to make the Louvre his principal Paris residence. As a symbol of that authority he had the great keep demolished in 1528, and in 1546 commissioned Pierre Lescot to build a Renaissance palace on the site. Henry II pulled down the west wall for a ballroom and the south wall for the royal pavilion of 1553–1556; Henry IV erased what remained on the south, moat included, for the Grande Galerie to the Tuileries, completed in 1610 — a 'Grand Dessein' that doubled as a covered escape route in case of riot. At the gate linking the castle to the city, the young Louis XIII had Concino Concini, favourite of his mother Marie de' Medici, murdered on 24 April 1617; he later demolished the northern medieval enceinte to extend Lescot's wing, and Louis XIV took down the eastern part for the Colonnade.

Nineteenth-century works revealed that the keep and two of the four walls had only been razed to ground level, their stones tipped into the ditches as fill. During the building of the Louvre Pyramid the bases of the keep and walls were cleared, and excavation recovered hundreds of everyday objects — small games, jugs, flasks — now displayed with the Salle Saint-Louis in the museum's Medieval Louvre collection.