Witnesses to the attack at the Louvre museum on Friday (February 3) described hearing gunshots and then falling to the floor.

A French soldier shot and wounded a man armed with a machete and carrying two bags on his back as he tried to enter the world-renowned museum in what the government said appeared to have been a terrorist attack.

"We heard at least four gun shots. At first I thought it was fireworks, the noise of fireworks but then I said to myself, 'It's not possible, we're in France, it's not fireworks. There's something happening, but we didn't know what.' And right away, after the shots I heard all the people, a colleague maybe, who were shouting 'get out, get out!' And so I tried to get out but I didn't succeed because my colleague made a sign asking 'Go down, go down'," a woman who worked in a shop in the Carrousel du Louvre, who didn't wish to give her name said.

"I was working, I didn't see anything, I just heard the gun shots. Two shots and then several in a row after," another woman working in a boutique said.

On Friday, about 1,250 visitors were kept inside for a time after the attempted attack, authorities said.

France has been hit by a series of militant Islamist attacks over the past two years in which more than 230 people have been killed.

The soldier who fired at the machete-wielding man was from one of the patrolling groups that have become a common sight around Paris since a state of emergency was declared across France in November 2015. It remains in force.