Une nouvelle vision du rapport entre le Louvre et l’enceinte de Philippe Auguste à Paris

A new insight on the relation between Philippe Auguste’s Louvre and the fortified wall he had built around Paris. The two great Parisian constructions undertaken by Philippe Auguste at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the wall around the city and the fortress of the Louvre, are linked by a special strategic dimension that has not been fully grasped up to now because of a misunderstanding of the relation existing between the two. The interpretation given in all the foregoing historiography states, without any material proof, that the city walls continued along the eastern moat of the fortress. Fifteenth-and sixteenth-century images show, however, that the wall simply stopped at the fortress. Although surprising in appearance, this configuration is nonetheless the only one that allows the Louvre to assume its strategic role correctly : that of a fortress fully independent from the city, able to play the role of a veritable hypertrophied portal thanks to its two entries that open onto the city and the countryside, and thus assuring the king’s control of Paris.