The Louvre was a palace before it became a museum. Kings, emperors, ministers and courtiers wandered its maze of hallways long before the first museum visitors arrived. And the palace’s dazzling past is best reflected in the Napoleon III Apartments.

The expansion of the Louvre under Napoleon III in the 1850s, known at the time and until the 1980s as the Nouveau Louvre or Louvre de Napoléon III, was an iconic project of the Second French Empire and a centerpiece of its ambitious transformation of Paris. Its design was initially produced by Louis Visconti and, after Visconti's death in late 1853, modified and executed by Hector Lefuel. It represented the completion of a centuries-long project, sometimes referred to as the grand dessein ("grand design"), to connect the old Louvre Palace around the Cour Carrée with the Tuileries Palace to the west. Following the Tuileries' arson at the end of the Paris Commune in 1871 and demolition a decade later, Napoleon III's nouveau Louvre became the eastern end of Paris's axe historique centered on the Champs-Élysées.

The project was initially intended for mixed ceremonial, museum, housing, military and administrative use, including the offices of the ministère d’Etat and ministère de la Maison de l'Empereur which after 1871 were attributed to the Finance Ministry. Since 1993, all its spaces have been used by the Louvre Museum.