The Napoleon III Apartments at the Louvre: What to Expect and Why You Shouldn’t Skip Them

Most people, when they visit the Louvre, head straight for the big names: the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace. And yes, they are impressive. You cover miles of marble floors, crane your neck at ceiling after ceiling, and leave slightly dazed and definitely footsore.

But what most people don’t realize is that tucked inside the Richelieu Wing, on the first floor, is a set of rooms that has nothing to do with ancient history or Renaissance painting. Eleven rooms, around 900 square meters, decorated from floor to ceiling in gold, crimson velvet, and crystal. 

These rooms give Versailles a run for its money and have some of the most over-the-top interiors you will ever see in your life. I was there last week, and the apartments were the main reason for my visit. 

Before we get into it, one thing I will say is that the Louvre is huge. Doing it on your own without a guide is overwhelming, tiring, and confusing. I had a guide this time, after making the mistake of going it alone last time. It also means no queuing because even with a ticket, you queue. Below is the tour I took, and it was fantastic.

The History Behind the Name

Here’s the first thing to know: Napoleon III never set foot in these rooms as a resident. He lived in the Tuileries Palace, the grand complex that once enclosed the western end of the Louvre, before it was burned to the ground in 1871 and demolished a decade later. The name refers to the style of the era, not the man himself, and the Louvre’s own website calls them the “so-called Apartments of Napoleon III.”

What they actually are is the official state apartments of the Minister of State, the most powerful administrative position in the Second Empire. Napoleon III ordered them built as part of his expansion of the Louvre between 1857 and 1861, connecting the old palace to the Tuileries. The architect was Hector Lefuel, who had strong opinions about every curtain, wall hanging, and painted ceiling, and made sure everyone knew it.

The minister who was supposed to move in, Achille Fould, fought Lefuel at every turn over the details. He lost the argument in the most anticlimactic way possible: he was out of office before the rooms were even finished. It was his successor, Count Alexandre Walewski, who threw the inauguration ball on February 11, 1861, and got to enjoy what Fould had spent years arguing over.

After the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, the Ministry of Finance moved in and remained for over a century, leaving only in 1989, when President Mitterrand’s Grand Louvre project turned the entire building over to the museum. The apartments opened to the public in 1993, closed again in September 2023 for a major nine-month restoration, and reopened in June 2024 looking better than they have in decades.

The Private Apartments

The first rooms you pass through are the petits appartements, the private quarters where the minister and his family actually lived day to day. They’re relatively quiet spaces, decorated in Louis XV style, with none of the theatrical excess that’s coming. Think of them as the calm before the storm.

They were designed to feel like a wealthy bourgeois home, which by any normal standard is still extremely comfortable. But their real purpose in the layout is contrast. By the time you step through into the state rooms, the shift in scale and ornamentation hits you immediately.

The Grand Salon

Nothing prepares you for the Grand Salon. It is the largest and most important room in the apartments, and standing in the doorway the first time, it takes your breath away. I’d seen pictures of it, but they didn’t do it justice, and mine don’t either. Every surface is gilded or upholstered in crimson, and the ceiling feels miles above your head.

When the furniture was cleared out, it became a ballroom. When the chairs were arranged in eleven rows facing the adjoining drawing room, the doorway between the two spaces became a stage, with a musicians’ platform installed above it. One room, three functions. The minister could host a dinner, a theatrical performance, or a full imperial ball without changing venues.

The chandelier alone is worth the trip. It’s one of the biggest in Paris, fitted with more than 180 light bulbs, and lowered to just above floor level by pulley when it needs cleaning. When the restorers cleaned it during the 2023 to 2024 restoration, the crystal prisms started throwing rainbows across the walls again for the first time in years.

Under the chandelier sits a circular ottoman called a borne, a piece of furniture specific to Second Empire drawing rooms, where guests could sit back-to-back in a ring. Around the room are Louis XV-style armchairs, standard two-seat sofas called confidents, and the three-seat version called an indiscret, a name that needs no explanation when you see how little privacy three people sitting in a triangle actually have.

The Theatre Drawing Room

The next room is the Salon Théâtre, and the clue is in the name. When the Grand Salon was set up for a performance, this was the stage. The two rooms worked together, with the audience in the Grand Salon looking through the doorway at the performers here, and the musicians’ platform sitting above the opening between them.

The decoration follows a music and flowers theme throughout. The ceiling is carton-pierre, a decorative stucco designed by the sculptor Murgey and packed with flower vases, angels playing instruments, and musical trophies. At the center is an oval painting by Auguste Gendron, The Seasons of the Flowers, dating from around 1850. 

On the walls hang full-length portraits of Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie, painted after originals by the German court painter Franz Xaver Winterhalter. The originals, created in 1853, were almost certainly destroyed when the Tuileries Palace burned in May 1871. These copies were returned to the room in 1994 as part of an effort to restore the salon to its Second Empire appearance. 

The Woman Behind the Style

Standing in the Grand Salon, it’s easy to focus on the architecture and the furniture and miss the bigger story. These rooms are decorated in what the French call the Napoleon III style, but a significant part of what you’re actually looking at came from the taste and influence of one woman: Empress Eugénie.

Born Eugenia de Montijo in Spain in 1826, she married Napoleon III in 1853 and immediately understood that her position made her an instrument of imperial image-making. Fashion was political. The way the court looked, dressed, and entertained sent a message to the rest of Europe, and Eugénie took that seriously.

Her great obsession was Marie Antoinette. She studied her, collected objects associated with her, and drew heavily on her aesthetic in everything from jewelry to interior design. It was Eugénie who drove the revival of Louis XVI design elements across Second Empire interiors, the flower baskets, the tied ribbons, and the neoclassical motifs that appear throughout the apartments. The cabinetmaker Fourdinois, whose furniture fills the Grand Salon, held an imperial warrant specifically from the Empress.

On the fashion side, Eugénie made Paris the undisputed capital of the world’s clothing industry. She chose the British-born designer Charles Frederick Worth as her primary couturier, thereby effectively inventing the concept of the fashion house. 

Worth dressed not just the Empress but heads of state across Europe, and the great state balls at the Tuileries functioned in the same way as a modern runway show: whatever Eugénie wore, the rest of the world copied within months.

The portraits of Napoleon III and Eugénie that hang in the Salon Théâtre are copies of originals painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, the German court painter who captured the imperial couple in their prime.

Winterhalter was Eugénie’s favorite, and the official portraits he produced of her became the most widely circulated images of the Second Empire. The originals were almost certainly destroyed in the Tuileries fire of 1871. The copies here date from 1857 and were returned to the room in 1994.

What Eugénie understood, and what the rooms reflect, is that luxury at this level was a statement of power.

The Terrace Drawing Room

The Petit Salon de la Terrasse is smaller, with rounded corners rather than sharp angles, and it opens onto a terrace that once overlooked the Tuileries Palace. That view is gone. The palace burned during the final days of the Paris Commune in May 1871, and the ruins were demolished in 1882. What you see from the terrace today is the Tuileries Garden.

The ceiling here is painted to look like an open sky, a trick that makes the room feel considerably taller than it is. The Rococo wall consoles are attributed to Fourdinois again, keeping the decorative language consistent with the Grand Salon. It’s a lighter, airier space, and after the intensity of the previous two rooms, it’s a welcome shift.

The Dining Rooms

The apartments have two dining rooms, a small one and a large one, designed to connect for big receptions. Their style shifts noticeably from the drawing rooms. Where the salons are Louis XV in feel, the dining rooms go full Louis XIV: darker, more architectural, and heavier in their decoration.

The small dining room is paneled in wood painted to imitate Boulle marquetry, the technique of inlaying tortoiseshell and gold on an ebony ground that was fashionable under Louis XIV. The furniture, by the cabinetmakers Grohé Frères, is ebonized wood with gilded bronze appliques, keeping the same dark-and-gold palette throughout. What lifts the room is a trompe-l’oeil painting by C. Héron, tucked into a recess and designed to add a sense of lightness to an otherwise serious interior.

The large dining room seated 42 guests, which tells you something about the scale of entertaining that happened here. The painter Louis Godefroy Jadin was commissioned to cover the walls with hunting scenes: falconry, hounds, and in the curved recess at the far end, deer caught in nets. 

Hunting scenes were a standard choice for dining rooms of the period, a way of signaling wealth and landed status even in the middle of Paris. Above all of this, the ceiling opens into a painted sky edged with a trompe-l’oeil stone balustrade, the same trick used in the terrace drawing room to add height to a formal space.

The Restoration: What’s Different Since 2024

The apartments closed in September 2023 for a nine-month conservation campaign. The difference is visible. The painted ceilings have been cleaned of thick grime that had built up over decades, and details that were barely legible before are now sharp. The cracks have been stabilized and retouched in what restorers call an illusory style, meaning the repairs are invisible to the eye.

The chandeliers, wall sconces, and torchères were all taken down, cleaned, and rehung. The lighting color temperature across all eleven rooms has also been adjusted to something warmer and more muted, which suits the interiors far better than before.

The Petit & Chatain conservation-restoration group carried out the work alongside the Louvre’s own painting, framing, and gilding units: eleven rooms, 900 square meters. 

Practical Information

The Napoleon III Apartments are in the Richelieu Wing, Level 1, rooms 543-548. Entry is included in standard Louvre admission with no separate ticket required.

Photography without flash is allowed throughout, and the warm, gilded interiors are worth taking your time over.

The Napoleon I collection is right next door, with his coronation throne from the Tuileries Palace and the sword used at French coronations for centuries. The wider decorative arts galleries in the Richelieu Wing are fantastic as well, and the Richelieu Wing café terrace has views over the Cour Napoléon if you need a break.

Access is via the Richelieu entrance on the Rue de Rivoli, or through the main pyramid entrance following signs for the Richelieu Wing.