AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Tucked between the Louvre's colonnades and the green expanse of the Tuileries Garden, the Place du Carrousel is one of central Paris's most layered public squares. On the surface it reads as a wide, elegant forecourt framed by a gilded Napoleonic triumphal arch; below it hides one of the city's best-known surprises, the glass-and-steel Inverted Pyramid that skylights the underground Carrousel du Louvre. It is a place where royal pageantry, revolution, empire and contemporary architecture all sit within a few steps of one another.↗
For visitors, the square works as a hinge on the great walk between the Louvre Museum and the Champs-Élysées, and as a quieter, grander way to enter the museum than the famous Pyramid above the main courtyard. Whether you stop to read the carvings on the arch, duck downstairs to the pyramid's tip, or simply watch the light move across an open space that once held a palace, the Place du Carrousel rewards a slow fifteen minutes as much as a deeper exploration.↗↗
A square built on a vanished palace
The name "carrousel" goes back to 1662, when Louis XIV staged a lavish equestrian display here, in what was then the courtyard of the Tuileries Palace. For two centuries the ground belonged to royalty rather than the public, and it was a grim stage during the Revolution: a mob forced the royal family into the Tuileries, hundreds of Swiss Guards were massacred on its steps in August 1792, and for a stretch in 1792–1793 the guillotine stood on the square itself, claiming thirty-five lives.
