{"id":347456,"date":"2025-08-15T20:57:19","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T20:57:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/347456\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T20:57:19","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T20:57:19","slug":"how-the-museum-shaped-france","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/347456\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Museum Shaped France"},"content":{"rendered":"

Few museums embody a country\u2019s history, values, and role in the world as much as the Louvre does for France. After a long stint as a royal palace that housed monarchs\u2019 private art collections, the Louvre opened its gates to the people during the French Revolution. Since then, the museum has played a crucial part in France\u2019s global ambitions of grandeur. Leaders from Napoleon Bonaparte to President Emmanuel Macron have relied on it to bolster the country\u2019s soft power abroad.<\/p>\n

A new book takes readers through the museum\u2019s countless staircases and hallways to present its complex past and current challenges. Adventures in the Louvre<\/a>, by former New York Times Paris bureau chief Elaine Sciolino, is enriched by hours of interviews with top museum officials, including director Laurence des Cars. Sciolino aims to help visitors find their bearings in an enormous, often overwhelming space.<\/p>\n

Few museums embody a country\u2019s history, values, and role in the world as much as the Louvre does for France. After a long stint as a royal palace that housed monarchs\u2019 private art collections, the Louvre opened its gates to the people during the French Revolution. Since then, the museum has played a crucial part in France\u2019s global ambitions of grandeur. Leaders from Napoleon Bonaparte to President Emmanuel Macron have relied on it to bolster the country\u2019s soft power abroad.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The book cover for Adventures in the Louvre.<\/p>\n

Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love With the World\u2019s Greatest Museum<\/strong><\/a>, Elaine Sciolino, W.W. Norton & Co., 384 pp., $29.99, April 2025<\/p>\n

A new book takes readers through the museum\u2019s countless staircases and hallways to present its complex past and current challenges. Adventures in the Louvre<\/a>, by former New York Times Paris bureau chief Elaine Sciolino, is enriched by hours of interviews with top museum officials, including director Laurence des Cars. Sciolino aims to help visitors find their bearings in an enormous, often overwhelming space.<\/p>\n

Every year, up to 10 million people admire the 30,000 artworks in the Louvre\u2019s exhibits, which are spread over 780,000 square feet, per Sciolino\u2019s count\u2014making it the largest, most visited museum in the world.<\/p>\n

Sciolino covers the museum\u2019s most famous artworks\u2014such as the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and the Venus de Milo\u2014as well as less well-known sections such as the Consultation Room of Prints and Drawings, where anyone can hold in their hands the original work of some of the world\u2019s greatest artists. She highlights overlooked masterpieces, such as Titian\u2019s eye-wateringly beautiful Man With a Glove, which had the bad luck of being placed near the Mona Lisa. She also suggests alternative ways to explore the museum\u2019s contents, such as by focusing on how women and people of color are portrayed or tracking the representations of food and animals.<\/p>\n

As a Paris resident blessed with free press access to the Louvre and an office just a few blocks away, I was no stranger to the museum\u2019s treasures, but it was a pleasure to go back with Sciolino\u2019s book under my arm, hunting for hidden gems. My own advice to Louvre visitors: Most people who plan to spend a whole day at the museum tend to head to the Mona Lisa first, so use the morning to explore the other wings in peace. You could even find yourself, as I did, enjoying the giant Peter Paul Rubens paintings in the Galerie M\u00e9dicis<\/a> without a soul in sight.<\/p>\n

But Adventures in the Louvre is much more than a guide for art buffs. Through the prism of the museum\u2019s transformations over the centuries, Sciolino also tracks France\u2019s changing self-image and place in the world, showing how successive French regimes have leveraged the Louvre to support their visions for the country.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A painting shows people milling about in a large high-ceilinged museum gallery with giant paintings on the walls.<\/p>\n

The exhibit design for the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, circa 1789, by Hubert Robert. DeAgostini\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

The Louvre opened to the public in 1793, and the deposed royal family\u2019s collections suddenly became accessible to all\u2014an important symbolic step to mark the tectonic shift from monarchy to the rule of the people. In the following years, Napoleon planned the Louvre\u2019s transformation into the world\u2019s first global museum. He enlarged the space, filling it with art that France had looted all over Europe, and using it to aggrandize himself\u2014to the point of renaming the museum the Mus\u00e9e Napol\u00e9on and marrying his second wife there in 1810. He built a triumphal marble arch celebrating his victories in the courtyard, officially transforming the Louvre into a showcase of France\u2019s imperial glory.<\/p>\n

Sciolino illustrates how the Louvre remained central to France\u2019s official narrative about its own global prominence well after the era of Napoleon, all the way to the current Fifth Republic. In the 1980s, Socialist President Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand launched the Grand Louvre project, which added roughly 300,000 square feet of usable space and built the famous glass pyramids designed by Chinese American architect I.M. Pei. The initiative had to do with Mitterrand\u2019s \u201ctwo obsessions: the glory of France and his own legacy,\u201d Sciolino writes.<\/p>\n

Since the 2000s, France has used the Louvre as an instrument of soft power abroad. One of the book\u2019s chapters is devoted to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, a spin-off of the museum in the United Arab Emirates\u2019 capital greenlit by French President Jacques Chirac in 2007 and inaugurated by Macron a decade later. As part of the deal, France received a whopping $1.1 billion for the lease of the Louvre\u2019s name by the new museum for 30 years, as well as for its expertise and loan of artworks.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A man wearing a head covering looks at a painting in a gilt frame showing nude women bathing.<\/p>\n

A visitor looks at Venus and Nymphs Bathing, a painting by French artist Louis Jean Fran\u00e7ois Lagren\u00e9e that is part of artworks featured at Abu Dhabi\u2019s planned Louvre Museum, on April 21, 2013. Karim Sahib\/AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n

As part of the museum deal, the UAE also ordered 40 Airbus A380 aircraft and billions of dollars\u2019 worth of weapons from France. Many French academics and museum curators criticized the agreement with the UAE, citing the country\u2019s poor human rights record, the risk of watering down the Louvre brand, and the giving away of precious collections in exchange for economic gains. In 2006, a column<\/a> in leading French newspaper Le Monde even said the move was tantamount to \u201cselling your soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Sciolino doesn\u2019t emphasize enough that the France-UAE deal was hardly the only initiative of its kind in recent years. A similar partnership was established<\/a> from 2006 to 2009 between the Louvre and Atlanta\u2019s High Museum of Art, which received just under 200 exhibits, including paintings<\/a> by Raphael, Velazquez, and Rembrandt, in exchange for $6.4 million to help restore the Parisian museum\u2019s decorative arts galleries.<\/p>\n

Nor is French cultural diplomacy limited to the Louvre. During a visit to the United Kingdom in July, Macron announced<\/a> that France would loan the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry to the British Museum starting in September 2026, a move designed to underscore improved relations<\/a> between the two countries.<\/p>\n

The tapestry is widely accepted to have been made in England and depicts events before the Norman conquest of the country, but it hasn\u2019t left French soil in over 900 years; by Macron\u2019s own admission<\/a>, France has long been reluctant to consider letting the masterpiece out of the country. The agreement was one of several deals<\/a> clinched during the trip, from immigration to nuclear deterrence.<\/p>\n

\"Macron<\/p>\n

Macron casts a shadow on the exterior of a columned building as he walks forward into a courtyard.<\/p>\n

French President-elect Emmanuel Macron arrives to deliver a speech outside the Louvre in Paris on May 7, 2017. Philippe Lopez\/AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n

Culture, art, and the Louvre have played an important role in Macron\u2019s domestic political narrative, too. Sciolino notes that Macron chose the Louvre as the backdrop for his victory speech after he was first elected president in 2017. Cameras followed<\/a> him as he walked across the courtyard to the notes of the European anthem, all the way to a stage placed in front of Pei\u2019s lighted pyramid.<\/p>\n

Eight years on, Macron\u2014who lost much of his political clout after a snap election that he called last year produced no clear parliamentary majority\u2014has made the Louvre a central axis of his efforts to build his legacy. In a speech<\/a> in January in front of the Mona Lisa, Macron announced a major overhaul of the museum, including the creation of a separate section to house Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s painting and the opening of a new entrance to alleviate overcrowding at the current main access at the pyramid.<\/p>\n

The project will also entail a less flashy but badly needed modernization of the Louvre\u2019s aging buildings, which are plagued by leaks, cracked roofs, and moth invasions. The goal is to increase museum capacity to 12 million visitors per year\u2014over 3 million more than in 2024.<\/p>\n

Though Adventures in the Louvre does mention the ongoing debates about these changes, it presumably went to press too early to include mention of Macron\u2019s decision to step in. But the political significance attached to Macron\u2019s Louvre initiative is hard to overlook. In his speech, Macron described it as \u201ca new step in the nation\u2019s life\u201d that is \u201cimportant for our country\u2019s culture but also for the battles we are fighting.\u201d The project has been labeled \u201cLouvre New Renaissance,\u201d echoing the name<\/a> of Macron\u2019s party.<\/p>\n

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