Cour Carrée: The Fortress Under the Louvre
Why is it significant?
Stand in the middle of this vast, silent square of pale stone and turn slowly on your heels. Four palace façades close around you, carved with gods, garlands and royal monograms, and on a quiet morning the only sound is your own footsteps.
Key Facts
| Place | Cour Carrée: The Fortress Under the Louvre |
|---|---|
| Address | Cour Carrée, Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.86040, 2.33910 |
| Part of Walk | Glass Roofs and Royal Secrets: From the Louvre to the Covered Passages of Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in the middle of this vast, silent square of pale stone and turn slowly on your heels. Four palace façades close around you, carved with gods, garlands and royal monograms, and on a quiet morning the only sound is your own footsteps. Most visitors rush past to the glass pyramid next door... and miss the place where the Louvre was born.
Around 1190, before leaving on crusade, King Philip Augustus built a wall around Paris. Its weakest point was here, on the west, facing the English kings who then ruled Normandy. So he planted a fortress on the riverbank: a square of thick walls, a moat, and in the middle a great round keep. That castle was the first Louvre, a military building, a treasury and a prison, not a palace at all.
And it is still under your feet. In the 1980s, when the museum was being dug out for its new entrance, archaeologists found the base of the keep and the stone walls of the dry moat. Today you can walk along them in the basement of the museum, touching blocks laid eight hundred years ago, some still marked with the signs of the masons who cut them.
Above ground, the kings kept rebuilding. In 1528 Francis the First tore down the old keep, and from 1546 his architect Pierre Lescot raised the first Renaissance wing, the one on your west side with its sculptures by Jean Goujon. Louis the Thirteenth and Louis the Fourteenth quadrupled the courtyard into the square you see now. Then, in 1682, Louis the Fourteenth left for Versailles... and the Louvre was abandoned half-finished, its rooms let to artists, academies and squatters, some wings without a roof for decades.
The east façade, the long colonnade, is a story of wounded pride. Louis invited the great Bernini from Rome in 1665 to design it, then quietly rejected his plans and gave the job to French architects. It was the moment Paris decided it no longer needed Rome to tell it what was beautiful. Now walk west through the passage under the clock pavilion, towards the light of the glass.