The Louvre, art museum on the rue de Rivoli since 1793

The Musée du Louvre opened on 10 August 1793, on the rue de Rivoli, in the former palace of the kings of France, on the first anniversary of the fall of the monarchy. The Revolution showed the public the masterpieces of the Crown collection.

The palace is eight centuries old: Philip Augustus built a fortress here in 1190, Francis I began turning it into a Renaissance palace in 1546, and Napoleon III completed the ‘Grand Design’ in 1857. Renamed the Musée Napoléon in 1803, the Louvre received the treasures of the Italian campaigns, most of them returned in 1815. In 1911 Vincenzo Peruggia stole the Mona Lisa, found again in 1913.

In 1981 François Mitterrand launched the Grand Louvre: the Finance Ministry left the palace, and I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid opened in 1989, eight hundred years after the first Louvre. Today the museum holds more than 500,000 works, over 36,000 of them on display.

In the heart of the 1st arrondissement, its nine departments run from Antiquity to 1848: the Venus de Milo, the Seated Scribe, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Code of Hammurabi and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. It is the most visited art museum in the world.