Assailant arrived in France at end of January

Louvre evacuated after soldier 'fires at attacker'

Man 'armed with machete shouted Allahu Akbar'

Attacker was carrying two bags, two machetes

Solider 'slightly wounded' in attack

PM says attack was clearly 'terrorist in nature'

Timeline: Terror attacks in France

French soldiers shot and critically wounded a man who shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he attacked them with a machete on Friday at the Louvre, the world’s most visited museum.

Police sources said the attacker was a 29-year-old with Egyptian identity papers who arrived in France last month. He was reportedly identified on Friday night as Abdullah Reda Refaei al-Hamamy.

A group of British students were among the hundreds of panicked visitors at the Louvre who were rushed to secure rooms inside the sprawling museum after the assault.

The attack, which President François Hollande said was clearly an act of terrorism, was the latest in a series of deadly assaults in France over the last two years, most of them claimed by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

The man was carrying two backpacks when at around 10am local time he approached four soldiers patrolling at the entrance to the underground Carrousel du Louvre shopping mall, which lies beneath the museum.

They told him he could not bring his bags into the mall.

"That's when he got the knife out and that's when he tried to stab the soldier," said Yves Lefebvre, a police union official.