But there is another part of the Louvre, rather less frequented, that seems to belong to a different world. Although it does indeed receive its share of visitors, it is unlikely to be the reason for which they have come to the museum. To reach it, one descends into the earth, into something like twilight or even night, to find the remains of the original Louvre: the fortress that Philippe Auguste built at the end of the twelfth century and the palace into which it evolved under Charles V, late in the fourteenth century.

For fully two hundred years after the last visible traces of the medieval Louvre were razed to the ground in 1660, these subterranean realms were completely forgotten. Not until 1866 did the archaeologist Adolphe Berty, on a hunch, begin to excavate the site. He discovered the intact remnants of the soubassement, the twenty-one-foot-high foundation of what had once been the eastern and northern walls of the palace, hidden beneath the modern Cour Carrée. But these stunning discoveries would soon be forgotten by all but a few scholars, not to be seen again for another century. Only when the great work began on the Grand Louvre, that pharaonic labor initiated by President François Mitterrand in the mid-1980s, was a systematic excavation finally undertaken, not only of the original palace, but also of the Cour Napoléon, where I. M. Pei’s Pyramide now sits, and—several hundred meters to the west—the area surrounding the Arc du Carrousel.

The circumstances under which the Louvre came into being, as well as the reasons for its construction in the first place, are intimately involved with the form and nature of Paris itself at the end of the twelfth century. Consider the magnificent opening of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris (better known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame): “Today it is three hundred and forty-eight years, six months and nineteen days since the Parisians awoke to the clamor of all the bells resounding mightily in the threefold enclosure of the Town (la Cité), the University and the City.”

There is nothing arbitrary in that wording. “The Town, the University and the City” succinctly sum up the tripartite division of Paris from medieval times down to the French Revolution (Hugo was writing about the 1480s). The town occupied the Île de la Cité, the largest island in the Seine and the natural bridging point between its right and left banks. This island had been the center of government and religion as far back as the Roman Empire, when, seven hundred feet west of today’s Notre-Dame, a palace was built that would serve for a thousand years as the official residence of the kings of France. Immediately to the south, on the left bank, rose the university, established in the year 1200 through the consolidation of several preexistent monastic schools. And finally there was la ville, the city. Not accidentally, Hugo mentions this part last. It had neither the royal and ecclesiastical glamour of the Île de la Cité nor the prestige of the schools and monasteries of the Left Bank. And yet, by the time the Louvre, in its earliest form, was completed around 1200, la ville accounted for most of Paris. This was its center of population and seat of commerce, the home of a restless and enterprising bourgeoisie. For centuries to come, the growth of Paris would occur here, while the Left Bank largely stagnated. And the immoderate growth of this part of Paris forced the king, Philippe II, to build the fortress of the Louvre.

Known to history as Philippe Auguste, he was one of the ablest and most powerful monarchs of the Capetian dynasty that ruled France from 987 to 1328. But when he ascended the throne at fifteen, in 1180, few kingdoms were in as weak or perilous a state. The realm he inherited was almost entirely blocked from the Atlantic by the Angevin kings of England, Henry II, Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland, who controlled the western third of modern France from Normandy down to the Pyrenees. To make matters worse, a wedge of English-controlled land jutted eastward along the Massif Central, cleaving his kingdom in two. Meanwhile, the eastern third was in the hands of the Duke of Burgundy, hardly a trusted ally. All told, the territory that Philippe ruled at the outset of his reign constituted barely a third of modern France, and even this was chipped away at many points by ecclesiastical lands ultimately subject to the pope in Rome. By the end of his forty-three-year reign, however, he had wrested most of Western France from the English, and greatly increased the crown lands, the territory that belonged to him outright, the source of his power and wealth.

Throughout his reign, Philippe was constantly on the move. In addition to embarking on the Third Crusade to the Holy Land and vanquishing the English at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, he centralized the administration of his kingdom and crushed the Albigensian heretics in Provence. And yet, some of his greatest contributions were made in Paris itself. At this time the capital was undergoing an energetic urban development that, relative to its earlier condition, could be compared to its expansion under Henri IV in the seventeenth century or under Napoleon III in the nineteenth. Although it is common to treat the capital, and even the French monarchy itself, as weak and marginal at this time, no city of the second rank could have built one of the largest and greatest cathedrals in Christendom, Notre-Dame de Paris. Louis VII had begun construction in the 1160s and Philippe Auguste, his son, substantially completed the work by 1200. At this time as well, the convent schools on the Left Bank were consolidated into what would become one of the finest universities of Europe, the Sorbonne. Meanwhile there could be no greater testament to the vigor of the Right Bank than the new commercial area of les Halles, which Louis VI created in 1137 and Philippe Auguste greatly expanded early in his reign. At the same time, he enlarged the nearby cemetery known as the Cimetière des Innocents, thus creating one of the largest open spaces in a city that had very few of them. And for the first time, he paved over some of the city’s principal streets. As cause and consequence of these actions, in the year 1200 the city’s population surpassed one hundred thousand for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire.

It was precisely this frantic pace of development that moved Philippe to construct a great wall, or enceinte, more than three miles in circumference, around his capital. And the Louvre itself was nothing more or less than a consequence of the wall. This structure was to be but a small part of a vast system of fortifications that would comprise twenty castles throughout France. Because an English onslaught was most likely to come from the northwest, Philippe began to fortify the Right Bank, the northern half of the city, in 1190, just before he embarked on the Third Crusade. This part of the wall was completed in 1202. The less urgent fortification of the Left Bank began in 1192, shortly after Philippe’s return, and was built by 1215. In one of the ironies of history, however, Philippe Auguste’s massive system of fortifications ultimately proved unnecessary, since he conquered and annexed Normandy in 1204, effectively ending the English threat.

Formed of mortar and rubble and faced with blocks of dressed limestone, the wall of Philippe Auguste was ten feet wide and twenty-five feet high. It was punctuated, at intervals of two hundred feet, by seventy-seven towers, while four massive towers, each more than eighty feet tall, guarded the points where the ramparts met the Seine. Although a few remnants of the wall are still visible on the rue Clovis and rue des Jardins Saint-Paul, as well as in some of the basements, back alleys and parking lots of the Left Bank, it has otherwise left little trace beyond what we can infer from certain lingering street patterns.

As impressive as these defensive walls surely were, one great tactical problem went unaddressed: the English could simply float down the Seine, slip through the iron chains suspended across the river from the Tour du Coin to the Tour de Nesle—the two large defensive towers to the west—and stand a good chance of entering the city unobserved. And so Philippe Auguste decided, soon after he returned from the Holy Land in 1191, to protect this weak flank with a fortification that initially stood, not in Paris itself, but on a plot of land just beyond the western border of the walls that now defined the capital. For centuries, the people of Paris had been in the habit of referring to this area as le Louvre. And so, by the early thirteenth century, shortly after its construction, the fortress was already being called le manoir du louvre près Paris, roughly translated as “the castle in the area known as ‘the Louvre’ next to Paris.”¹

Perhaps the most intractable mystery of the Louvre has to do with the origin and meaning of its name. Over the centuries many hypotheses have been proposed, and all of them appear to be wrong. Of the two most prevalent explanations, one was put forward by the seventeenth-century French antiquary Henri Sauval, who claimed to have found an ancient Anglo-Saxon glossary—which no one since has ever seen—that contained the word loevar, which apparently meant “castle” in the Saxon language. (It is also worth noting that many of Sauval’s contemporaries firmly believed that the Louvre was not five hundred years old at the time of his writing, but well over a thousand and that it had been built by the Merovingian king Chilperic, who died in 584.) A more popular but even less plausible derivation is based on the similarity between the words louvre and louve, the latter word being French for she-wolf. According to this theory, the land now occupied by the Louvre was once infested by wolves or, alternatively, was used to train dogs to hunt them down.

What is important, and often overlooked, is that the Louvre was never formally designated as such, but gradually assumed the name of a preexisting feature of the right bank of the Seine as it flowed through medieval Paris. Thanks, however, to the inexhaustible industry of the first archaeologist of the Louvre, Adolphe Berty, whose six-volume Topographie historique du vieux Paris (1866) is a monument of nineteenth-century science, it is certain that the area was designated Luver in 1098, nearly a century before the Louvre itself existed, and that as early as the ninth century, the name Latavero was applied to this part of the French capital. With his punctilious reverence for the truth, however, Berty claimed to have no idea what the word meant, although he suspected that it was of Celtic origin. In any case, he recognized that the form Latavero precluded any connection to louve or to its Latin cognate lupa.² As for the castle itself, it appears to have been known initially as the tour neuve, or in the Latin of Guillaume le Breton, turris nova extra muros (the new tower beyond the walls).³

This area of Paris, directly to the west of the wall of Philippe Auguste, lay near what in ancient days had been the main road through the right bank of the Seine: it lives on today as the rue Saint-Honoré and the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Although traces of farming, burial and the occasional hut came to light through excavations carried out during the creation of the Grand Louvre in the 1980s, the area largely remained in its natural state until Philippe Auguste came to power.

Before his accession, nothing of note had ever happened in this part of Paris, with one crucial exception. Between 885 and 887, the Normans, a Viking clan, descended from Scandinavia into the Île-de-France region and laid siege to the area of today’s First Arrondissement, west of le Grand Châtelet. Included therein was the Church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, directly across from today’s Colonnade du Louvre, the museum’s easternmost extension. These nomadic invaders, however, had no interest in conquering the city: they wanted only to extort tribute from the Carolingian emperor Charles the Fat. This he was happy enough to give them, before sending them on their way to plunder the neighboring region of Burgundy. Once the invaders had left, the Parisians responded by erecting their first new city walls since antiquity, extending roughly one kilometer along the Right Bank from the Church of Saint-Gervais in the Marais to Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. The western limit of the wall, like that of Philippe Auguste’s wall three centuries later, lay just east of the modern Louvre.

Philippe was well aware that, by the last quarter of the twelfth century, a change had come over Paris. After nearly a thousand years of torpor or decline, the city had begun to expand to the north and to the east, but also, in a very limited degree, to the west. When Thomas à Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in his cathedral in 1170, a wave of revulsion and sorrow reached many parts of Europe, including Paris. Perhaps only a few months later, but decades before the fortress of the Louvre had even been conceived, a church was dedicated to him just beyond where the fortress would rise thirty years later, on the land where I. M. Pei’s Pyramide stands today. In 1191, a decade before the Louvre was completed, perhaps before its cornerstone was even laid, a document referred to this church as the hospital pauperum clericorum de Lupara, the shelter of the poor clerics of the Louvre.⁴ It was more commonly called Saint-Thomas du Louvre, and it remained standing into the 1750s. That church appears to be the first substantial structure ever built on the land now occupied by the Louvre Museum.

Not surprisingly, then, his Louvre was no thing of beauty and was never intended to be. Standing just beyond the western limit of Philippe’s new walls, ninety miles from the English Channel and thirty-five from lands occupied by the bellicose king of England, its simple, uninflected square-massing was not really meant to be seen at all, except by the marauding English troops, whom it was intended to cow into retreat. Other than the soaring donjon—its central tower—that rivaled the belfries of Notre-Dame, the bulk of the fortress was largely invisible from inside the capital, especially from the right bank, where the many intervening structures would have made it difficult to see. The castles and fortifications of France are among the finest works of medieval architecture: one thinks of the hard splendor of the walls of Carcassonne or the combined solidity and grace of Pierrefonds in Picardy. But the Louvre of Philippe Auguste knew nothing of such presence or grace. No contemporary image of it survives, and what we know of it is only what can be inferred from the archaeological remains of its successor, the palace of Charles V, completed two centuries later. From this evidence it appears to be the progenitor of all those drab barracks, blockhouses and flak towers of a later and far less chivalrous age.

Its four massive walls, rising forty feet, were entirely bereft of ornament. To the north and east were curtain-walls, purely defensive structures that extended—like curtains—between the towers. To the west and south, the corps-de-logis—the living quarters as opposed to the fortifications—...