Louvre Palace

In 1190, preparing to leave for the Third Crusade, Philip II ordered a wall built around Paris and set a fortress outside its junction with the Seine, on the road to the Duchy of Normandy still held by his English rivals. Completed in 1202, it was nearly square at seventy-eight by seventy-two metres, moated, ringed by ten round towers and centred on the cylindrical keep called the Grosse Tour du Louvre. Louis IX added the first chapel and the ceremonial Grande Salle in the 1230s. Ferdinand, Count of Flanders, was imprisoned there after Bouvines in July 1214 and held for over a decade; in 1303 the second meeting of the Estates General sat in the Grande Salle.

A new city wall begun by the merchants' provost Etienne Marcel in the late 1350s and continued by Charles V in the 1360s enclosed the castle, greatly reducing its military value. Shortly after becoming king in 1364, Charles V left the Palais de la Cité, which he associated with Marcel's insurgency, and made the Louvre a royal residence for the first time. His architect Raymond du Temple remade it as the joli Louvre, painted as the October leaf of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. The court did not stay: long after the Hundred Years' War ended in 1453 the kings still preferred the Loire châteaux, Fontainebleau or Vincennes, and the Louvre fell into disrepair as an arsenal and a prison.

Francis I ordered the old keep demolished in 1528 and in 1546 commissioned the architect Pierre Lescot and the sculptor Jean Goujon to rebuild the Louvre in Renaissance style. Lescot replaced the medieval western wing with the Lescot Wing and lined its ground-floor guard room with monumental caryatids: the room where, on 4 December 1591, Charles de Guise had four members of the Conseil des Seize hanged from the ceiling. Work stopped in the late 1560s as the Wars of Religion gathered momentum.

Catherine de' Medici began a separate residence to the west in 1564, on the site of old tile kilns, the Tuileries, and a letter of March 1565 shows her already considering a building to link the two. Henry IV took up that Grand Dessein, raising the Grande Galerie along the riverbank from early 1595, about 460 metres long. In July 1609 he moved the mint into it from the Île de la Cité.

Louis XIII began the Pavillon de l'Horloge in 1624 to Jacques Lemercier's winning design, but work halted in 1628, and from 1643 to 1652 the palace stood empty while the royal family sat out the Fronde, the Grande Galerie serving as a wheat warehouse. King and court ceremonially re-entered on 21 October 1652. For the east front, Jean-Baptiste Colbert summoned Gian Lorenzo Bernini from Italy in 1665, but none of his five designs was approved; the colonnade begun in 1667 came instead from a committee of Louis Le Vau, Charles Le Brun and Claude Perrault.

Louis XIV had left at the start of 1666, after his mother Anne of Austria died in her ground-floor apartment, and never lived there again; from the late 1670s the building money went to Versailles. After the court's definitive departure in 1682 the palace filled with academies, artists, craftsmen and squatters. Louis XVI was brought back to the Tuileries on 5 October 1789, the guillotine stood on the Place du Carrousel from 21 August 1792 to 11 May 1793, and the Louvre Museum opened in the palace in 1793.

Napoleon appointed Pierre Fontaine architect of the Louvre and the Tuileries in December 1804; with Charles Percier he finished the Cour Carrée between 1805 and 1810. Napoleon III joined the two palaces at last: Louis Visconti drew the plan and died in December 1853, and Hector Lefuel built it at such speed that the Nouveau Louvre was inaugurated on 14 August 1857.

At the end of the Paris Commune on 23 May 1871 the Tuileries Palace burned, as did the Louvre's imperial library; troopers, firemen and curators saved the rest. The Third Republic resolved in 1882 to erase the Tuileries ruins and did so in 1883. François Mitterrand launched the Grand Louvre in September 1981, moving the Finance Ministry out of the Richelieu Wing; I. M. Pei's glass pyramid and the Hall Napoléon beneath it opened on 29 March 1989, the Carrousel du Louvre and the rebuilt Richelieu Wing followed in 1993, and the Carrousel Garden's renovation was completed in 2001. Parts of the palace have been classified historical monuments since 1888, and the museum, which uses most of the building, shares it with the École du Louvre in the Flore wing and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in the Marsan wing.