Pavillon de Flore

The Pavillon de Flore marks the southwestern corner of the vast Louvre Palace complex. You are looking at a structure that was originally built between sixteen hundred seven and sixteen hundred ten to physically bridge the gap between the Louvre and the long-lost Tuileries Palace. While the original pavilion served as a royal link, the building you see today is almost entirely a mid-nineteenth-century reconstruction. Napoleon the Third ordered the demolition of the old structure because it had fallen into severe disrepair, tasking architect Hector-Martin Lefuel with creating a replacement that embodied the ornamental grandeur of the Second Empire style.