Mitterrand's Grand Louvre: A Republic Writes Itself in Glass

The Louvre and Tuileries walk is mostly about kings and emperors, and its third stop is the one place where it turns modern: the glass pyramid in the Cour Napoléon. This guide gives you what the Louvre itself says about the Grand Louvre and the pyramid, and corrects a few things that circulate about both.

What stood there before

Before the Pyramid, the Louvre's own account says, the Cour Napoléon held two squares created by Hector Lefuel, Napoleon III's architect, and a car park for cars. The Richelieu wing along the Rue de Rivoli was then the Finance Ministry's. The Grand Louvre was the plan to give the whole palace to the museum.

The pyramid: dates and numbers

I. M. Pei was named in July 1983 with the backing of President François Mitterrand; the Louvre says nothing of a competition, so we say only that Mitterrand backed him from the start. After four years of building the Pyramid was inaugurated on 29 March 1989. It is about 21 metres high and 35 metres wide at the base, covering 1,000 square metres. Saint-Gobain made the extra-white glass after two years of research, and the steel frame, about 6,000 bars and 2,150 joints, was built by firms that specialised in ship rigging. There are five pyramids in all: the big one, three small ones that light the three entrances, and the inverted pyramid in the Carrousel du Louvre, with 84 diamond panes and 28 triangular ones, its glass hidden in the planting above. We give no pane count for the large pyramid, because the figures in circulation disagree, and the 666 story is just a story.

What it lines up with, and what it does not

The Louvre states that, because of the bend of the Seine, the palace and the Tuileries gardens are not on one axis, and that the Pyramid and the Arc du Carrousel do not line up. Pei's answer, according to the museum, was to place a statue of Louis XIV in the line between them. Pei is quoted in the Louvre's text saying that he had worked as a landscape designer rather than an architect, and that he was inspired by Le Nôtre more than by anyone else.

The critics

The Louvre's own account admits the opposition, which denounced a pharaonic building site. We do not quote any percentage of public opinion, and we do not repeat the stories about American press headlines that circulate in English, because we could not trace them to a source.

Two things people get wrong

Mitterrand's announcement of 24 September 1981 was not about the Pyramid; it concerned the Finance Ministry leaving the Louvre so that the whole palace could become the museum. And the medieval fortress of the Louvre is not under the Cour Napoléon: its keep lay under the Cour Carrée. The excavations in the Cour Napoléon in 1984 to 1986 found instead a medieval faubourg, with streets, a church to Saint Thomas and the Quinze-Vingts hospital.

The rest of the program

The Institut du Monde Arabe and the Opéra Bastille belong to the same period of presidential building, but neither is on a Roamer walk and neither is covered by the research we have checked, so we say nothing about their details here.

Walking it

Take the Louvre and Tuileries walk and read the Pyramid as one sentence in a long argument that runs from the Colonnade to the Place de la Concorde. The full story of the pyramid has its own guide: the Louvre Pyramid, decoded. For how the nineteenth-century rebuild changed the same city, see Reading Haussmann's Paris, and for where this newest layer sits above the older city, see Paris in layers.