Arrondissement 1
Rue de l’Amiral de Coligny
The Louvre Palace played a major symbolic and organisational role in the people’s explosions of 1830 and 1871.
It witnessed the defeat of Charles X‘s Swiss guards on July 29 1830, when a crowd, including many Polytechnic students, stormed it using a scaffolding for repairs that covered part of the colonnade.
Louis Vaneau, one of the Ecole Polytechnique students killed in the fighting, had the Rue Vaneau renamed after him in 1870.
After the Sedan defeat and the end of the Second Empire, Gustave Courbet chaired a meeting of Parisian artists at the Louvre on September 6 1870. It set up a Commission for the Protection of the Heritage of Paris’ museums.
On March 1 1871 a hostile crowd gathered at the Louvre to shout insults at the Prussian officers who came to visit their ‘captured’ monuments after Thiers and Favre in Versaiilais had signed an ignominious armistice to end the siege of Paris.
Two weeks later the Louvre was the headquarters of the military governor of Paris at the moment when the Versaillais government attempted to seize control of the canon that were defending Paris. This coup’s failure led immediately to the formation of the Paris Commune.
The Federation of Artists, including Aimé-Jules Dalou and Jules Héreau as well as Courbet, immediately moved into the Palace.
On April 17 a meeting held in the Antiquities Room of the museum (off the Place du Carrousel) elected a 47-strong Committee of the Artists’ Federation.
On 24 May 1871, when the Versaillais troops took over the Louvre Palace, a solitary woman stood in front of them. She was put against the gate of the colonnade and shot.
