Dynastic History | Musée du Louvre — Forty Columns Out of Charlemagne's Chapel

In September 1794 the French army, having taken much of Belgium and the Netherlands, entered Aachen. In an article published in Gesta in 2024, Brigitte Buettner describes what followed as the first laboratory for the systematic removal of cultural property that successive post-revolutionary and Napoleonic administrations carried on until 1815. From Aachen the conquerors took more than movable goods. They extracted some forty columns from Charlemagne's palatine chapel.

Thirty-two of those monoliths, the ones set in the eight gallery-level arches, were already spolia when the Carolingians installed them, brought north from Rome and Ravenna at an effort and cost that Buettner reckons comparable to what it took to move them again a thousand years later. Ten of the Aachen columns were built into the fabric of the Galerie des Antiques, the Musée Central des Arts's gallery of Greek and Roman sculpture, which opened to the public in November 1800. The paperwork of the time does not describe them as medieval. It calls them, consistently, columns from the tomb of Charlemagne.

Restitution after Napoleon's fall was slow and partial. Those ten did not go back. They are in the Louvre still, and Buettner reads the failure of their return as one of the things that hardened French argument about national patrimony. At Aachen, on the cathedral's account, part of what had been taken came back after 1815 and was reset in the old places in the 1840s, with columns of Odenberg granite made up to stand in for what was missing. Accounts differ on how much came back.

The museum's visitor entrance is under the pyramid in the Cour Napoléon.

📸 Cover: the Louvre's east front, Perrault's colonnade — Cristian Bortes, 2013, CC BY 2.0 (area view / representative; the columns are inside the building).