The Night the Louvre Was Emptied
The evening of 28 August 1939 — four days before Germany invaded Poland and three days before Britain and France declared war — the lights in the Louvre stayed on long after midnight. Museum staff, curators, and volunteers worked through the night wrapping, padding, and crating the collection's most important works. The Mona Lisa was taken from its wall, placed in a specially built case lined with red velvet, and loaded into one of a fleet of trucks waiting in the courtyard.
This was not improvised. The Louvre's director, Jacques Jaujard, had spent years preparing for exactly this contingency, after watching the systematic looting of art during the Spanish Civil War. He had identified châteaux across the Loire Valley as emergency repositories. He had trained teams. He had pre-built packing crates. And he had negotiated in advance with the owners and administrators of more than eighty properties.
Chambord was the first and largest of the eighty-three repositories — the primary vault, receiving the most significant works in the first convoys.
What Was Stored at Chambord
The list reads like a fantasy museum. Among the works that spent time at Chambord between 1939 and 1945:
- Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa — arrived in its red velvet case in September 1939. Returned to Paris by truck in 1945, having survived without damage.
- Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Guiding the People — the iconic image of the 1830 Revolution, all 260cm × 325cm of it, transported rolled in a protective cylinder.
- Paolo Veronese's The Wedding at Cana — the Louvre's largest painting (677cm × 994cm), which had been removed from the wall in the Salon Carré only once before in its history.
- Michelangelo's Slaves — the two unfinished marble figures now in the Louvre's Michelangelo Gallery.
- The Lady with a Unicorn tapestries — the six medieval tapestries now in the Musée de Cluny in Paris.
- Thousands of paintings, sculptures, antiquities, and decorative objects from the Louvre, the Musée de Cluny, and other national collections.
Historians estimate that the total evacuation programme protected approximately 4,000 paintings and 250,000 individual objects. Chambord alone held thousands of works during the peak period of 1939–1940. The full inventory has never been published in comprehensive form.
The Mona Lisa's Journey
The Mona Lisa did not stay at Chambord for the entire war. Jaujard and his team moved works between repositories repeatedly, both to reduce risk of discovery and to respond to changing military situations. The painting made at least five separate moves during the six years of occupation:
Chambord (first arrival)
Arrives from the Louvre in its red velvet case, housed in the château's interior rooms. A small team of museum staff lives at Chambord throughout the winter to monitor conditions and respond to any problems.
Louvigny, then Loc-Dieu Abbey
As German forces advance rapidly through northern France, the most important works are moved south. The Mona Lisa travels by ambulance — to avoid drawing attention — first to the Château de Louvigny in the Sarthe department, then to the Cistercian abbey of Loc-Dieu in Aveyron, deep in the unoccupied zone. Chambord, now in occupied territory, retains the bulk of the collection under direct German supervision.
Montal, then Ingres Museum in Montauban
The painting moves again — to the Château de Montal in the Lot, and subsequently to Montauban, where it is stored in the Ingres Museum. At each location, a team of curators maintains the climate conditions and documentation. The painting is examined at every move for any signs of damage.
Return to Paris
Following the Liberation of Paris in August 1944 and the end of hostilities in Europe in May 1945, the Mona Lisa is transported back to Paris. It returns to the Louvre in pristine condition — the evacuation programme, despite its scale and duration, did not lose a single significant work.
The German Presence at Chambord
After the fall of France in June 1940, the Louvre's evacuation team faced an agonising situation. Chambord was in the occupied zone — under direct German administration — but the châteaux south of the Loire were technically in the Vichy Free Zone, outside German jurisdiction. The most important works had been moved south. But the enormous quantities of objects that remained at Chambord were now under the scrutiny of German art officers.
The most dangerous moment came when Hermann Göring, who had been systematically looting art collections across occupied Europe through the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), attempted to claim French national collections as war prizes. Jaujard and the Vichy culture minister, Louis Hautecoeur, fought this in negotiations throughout 1940 and 1941, deploying bureaucratic obstruction, diplomatic argument, and careful management of what the Germans were actually shown.
The French national collections — including the works at Chambord — were ultimately protected by a combination of diplomatic resistance, the structure of the 1940 Armistice (which technically protected French state property), and the efforts of individual curators who risked considerable personal danger to maintain control of the repositories.
While the French national collections survived largely intact, private collections were not protected. Jewish-owned art collections across France were systematically seized — thousands of works disappeared into the ERR's crates and were shipped to Germany. Many have never been recovered. The contrast between the fate of state property and private property at Chambord's location is a painful part of this history.
After the War: Returning Home
The process of returning the evacuated works to Paris began in late 1944 and continued through 1945. It was slower than the evacuation — some works had been damaged by damp or temperature fluctuation in the repositories, and everything required careful condition assessment before it could travel. The formal reinstatement of the Louvre's collection to its galleries was completed in 1947.
Jacques Jaujard received the Légion d'honneur for his role in protecting the collection. He went on to serve as Director-General of Fine Arts in France. The curators and volunteers who had lived in the Loire Valley châteaux for six years — maintaining temperature records, fighting damp, negotiating with German officials — received rather less recognition.
Why You Won't See a Plaque
There is no permanent exhibition at Chambord about the wartime art depot. The château's permanent displays focus on the Renaissance and the history of François I and Louis XIV. The wartime chapter — arguably one of the most extraordinary things to have happened at this building — is mentioned in some guidebooks and documented in academic histories, but it is not part of the standard visitor experience.
This is part of why we built this page. It is one of the most remarkable stories connected to Chambord, and it deserves to be known.
Visit Chambord — and Know the Full Story
When you walk through Chambord's stone rooms on your Chambord Castle tour, you are walking through the same spaces where the Mona Lisa spent the winter of 1939–1940. The rooms are furnished differently now — the wooden crates and climate-monitoring equipment are long gone — but the stone is the same stone. A guide who knows this history will show you which rooms were used, what the challenges were, and how close it came to going differently. Tours from $152 per person from Paris.