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- Its opening was symbolic, following the fall of the monarchy and the transfer of royal, church and aristocratic art into national property.
- The museum began modestly, with 537 paintings and 124 other objects displayed mainly in the Grande Galerie.
- Under Napoleon, the Louvre was renamed Musée Napoléon, and thousands of artworks were later restituted after his defeat in 1815.
- The Louvre later added major works and modern features, including the Mona Lisa’s return after theft and I. M. Pei’s 1989 glass pyramid.
On 10 August 1793, in the midst of the French Revolution, a former royal palace opened as a museum belonging to the nation. The Louvre would go on to house some of the world’s most recognisable works of art, but its transformation from fortress to palace to public museum tells a story every bit as dramatic as the treasures inside it.
On this day 233 years ago, the Louvre opened in Paris as the Muséum central des Arts de la République.
The date was deliberately symbolic. Exactly one year earlier, on 10 August 1792, revolutionaries had stormed the Tuileries Palace and brought about the effective fall of the French monarchy. Now, works that had once belonged to kings, aristocrats and the Church were being presented as the cultural property of the nation.
It was a remarkable change in meaning. A building created to protect royal power was becoming a place where ordinary citizens could encounter art.
Before the museum, there was a fortress
The Louvre’s history had already stretched across six centuries before its first museum visitors arrived.
Around 1190, King Philippe Auguste ordered the construction of a fortified castle on the western edge of Paris to defend the city. It became a royal residence in 1364 and was repeatedly enlarged and transformed by successive French rulers. Under Henri IV, the enormous Grande Galerie was built between 1595 and 1610, eventually becoming one of the defining spaces of the museum.
By the 18th century, however, France’s monarchs were primarily associated with Versailles. Ideas had also begun circulating about turning the Louvre into a permanent home for the royal art collection.
Then came the Revolution.
In 1791, the National Assembly formally designated the Louvre as a place for the arts. After the monarchy fell, the royal collections became national property, alongside works confiscated from churches and aristocrats who had fled revolutionary France.
The principle behind the new museum was revolutionary in its own way: art that had symbolised private privilege and royal authority could now serve public education.
What did the first Louvre visitors see?
The scale of the original museum was modest compared with today’s Louvre.
Its first catalogue listed 537 paintings and 124 other objects, displayed primarily in the Grande Galerie. That surviving 1793 catalogue is now held by France’s National Library.
Today, the Louvre has more than 400 rooms and around 35,000 works on display, while its online database contains records for more than 500,000 works across its collections. The museum describes its holdings as spanning almost 10,000 years of art history.
There is also a curious detail about the famous opening date. The Louvre itself says the museum opened symbolically on 10 August 1793, then closed again almost immediately for further work. The public returned on 18 November. So the date remembered as the Louvre’s birthday was as much a political statement as the beginning of ordinary museum life.
From revolutionary museum to Napoleon’s showcase
The Louvre’s history soon became more controversial.
During Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise, the museum was renamed the Musée Napoléon, while military campaigns across Europe brought enormous quantities of art to Paris.
Following Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, thousands of seized works were returned to their countries of origin. The Louvre notes that around 5,000 artworks were subject to restitution after the fall of the Empire, dramatically reducing collections that had been expanded through conquest.
Not everything went back. Veronese’s enormous The Wedding Feast at Cana, for example, had been removed from Venice by Napoleon’s troops in 1797. It remained in France after officials argued that transporting the nearly 70-square-metre canvas again risked damaging it, and another painting was offered in exchange. Today it hangs directly opposite the Mona Lisa.
This history means the Louvre is not simply a monument to artistic achievement. It also reflects centuries of monarchy, revolution, empire, collecting, appropriation and continuing debates about who owns cultural heritage.
The masterpieces did not all arrive at once
Many works now inseparable from the Louvre were not there when the museum opened.
The Venus de Milo, created in the ancient Greek world, was discovered on the island of Milos in 1820. It was presented to King Louis XVIII, who donated it to the Louvre in 1821. It rapidly became one of the museum’s defining works.
The Winged Victory of Samothrace, another masterpiece of Hellenistic Greek sculpture, was discovered on Samothrace in 1863. Today, the marble goddess Nike stands dramatically above the Daru staircase, positioned as though she were landing on the prow of a ship.
Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, meanwhile, entered the French royal collection long before the Revolution. Its extraordinary modern celebrity was strengthened by an event that sounds almost like fiction.
On 21 August 1911, the painting disappeared from the Louvre. It remained missing for more than two years until Vincenzo Peruggia, a former Louvre worker, attempted to sell it to an art dealer in Italy. The dealer alerted authorities and the painting returned to Paris, considerably more famous than before it vanished.
Empty walls during the Second World War
Another extraordinary chapter came on the eve of the Second World War.
Fearing bombing and invasion, French museum officials had developed plans to move important works out of Paris. On 28 August 1939, the Mona Lisa left the Louvre, followed by many of the museum’s most valuable transportable works, which were dispersed to safer locations around France.
The evacuation had been organised under Jacques Jaujard, director of France’s national museums, helping protect much of the collection during the German occupation.
The Louvre today also holds works recovered in Germany after the war that have a special status because of possible Nazi-era looting. Its database identifies these separately as Musées Nationaux Récupération (MNR) works while provenance research and restitution efforts continue.
The pyramid that Paris initially hated
Few modern additions to the Louvre have been as controversial as the structure that now symbolises it.
In the 1980s, French President François Mitterrand commissioned architect I. M. Pei to transform the museum. Pei proposed placing a vast glass pyramid in the historic Cour Napoléon.
Critics considered the modern structure an intrusion into the centuries-old palace. Yet after four years of construction, the Pyramid was inaugurated in March 1989 and gradually became one of Paris’s most recognisable landmarks.
Its purpose was practical as well as architectural. Beneath it, Pei created a central underground reception area linking the Louvre’s three wings and helping a museum designed in another age cope with millions of modern visitors.
In a sense, the controversy fitted perfectly into the Louvre’s history. The building had never been frozen in time. Medieval fortress walls, Renaissance galleries, imperial additions and 20th-century glass all coexist within the same complex.
From the king’s collection to the world’s museum
The most striking thing about 10 August 1793 may therefore be less the opening of another cultural institution than the idea behind it.
The Louvre’s creation reflected a new belief that major works of culture should not exist solely for monarchs, courts or private collectors. They could be preserved, studied and seen by a broader public.
That ideal has never been simple. The museum’s collections carry the legacies of royal wealth, revolution, colonialism, Napoleonic conquest, international archaeology, purchases, donations and restitution. Questions about provenance and cultural ownership that confront museums today are deeply intertwined with the Louvre’s own history.
But the transformation that began in 1793 endured.
Behind I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid still stands a medieval fortress and former royal palace. Inside are Egyptian antiquities, Islamic art, Renaissance paintings, Greek gods and goddesses, royal treasures and objects created thousands of years apart.
On 10 August 1793, those palace doors symbolically opened in the name of the public.
More than two centuries later, they have never really closed.
Also read: Two suspects partially admit involvement in Louvre heist
