The Louvre Palace

All around you is the Louvre Palace, its wings adding up to hundreds of metres of façade. Yet it all began with something far more modest and defensive: around 1190, King Philip Augustus built a fortress here to protect Paris, where his city wall met the Seine on the west side.

1From castle to palace

In the fourteenth century, Charles V turned the fortress into a residence and gathered a famous library in one of its towers. In 1546, Francis I commissioned Pierre Lescot to build a Renaissance palace to replace the old castle: this is the origin of the Cour Carrée, the square courtyard to the east. For more than three centuries, each monarch added something, galleries, pavilions and wings, until Napoleon III completed the whole.

2The people's museum

Louis XIV left the Louvre for Versailles in 1682. A century later, the Revolution opened a public museum here: inaugurated on 10 August 1793, it displayed the royal collections to every citizen.

I. M. Pei's pyramid, inaugurated in 1989, scandalised many Parisians. Today it is the museum's main entrance.

Beneath the courtyard, in the basement, you can see the foundations of the medieval castle, uncovered during the excavations of the 1980s.

3What to look out for

• The pyramid, about 21 metres high, with just over 600 diamond-shaped panes.
• The equestrian statue of Louis XIV, a lead copy of a work by Bernini, beside the pyramid.
• The sculptures on the façades, with illustrious French figures along the cornices.