An ugly year for the Louvre: where does the world’s biggest museum go from here? | France

More than a year ago, Laurence des Cars, the intellectually brilliant (albeit cantankerous) former head of the world’s largest and most visited museum, wrote a somewhat alarming note to his boss, France’s minister of culture.

Des Cars, who resigned as president of the Louvre on Tuesday, lamented the extreme state of disrepair of the iconic museum’s buildings and galleries.

He said the Louvre was overcrowded. Facilities were substandard and technologies were hopelessly outdated. Water was coming from the ceilings. Severe temperature fluctuations damaged works of art. The museum had reached “an alarming level of obsolescence.”

But he had the answer. Just a week later, as the first woman to head France’s most prized cultural institution stood next to Emmanuel Macron in front of its crowning attraction, the Mona Lisa, the French president proudly unveiled his radical, ambitious, €1 billion Louvre: New Renaissance plan for the museum’s renovation.

The immediate future of Des Cars and the Louvre seemed assured. Unfortunately next year had other plans. Ongoing staff strikes, a decade-long ticket scam, avalanche of aging infrastructure problems and, most prominently, a daring daylight robbery of the €88m (£77m) crown jewels intervened.

No one doubts that the Louvre needs work. It is a city within a city, spread over a vast area of ​​360,000 square metres. Originally a sturdy 12th-century castle, it expanded into a gilded royal palace in the 16th century and became a museum in 1793, following the French Revolution.

Its multi-layered architectural texture includes more than 400 rooms and approximately 14 kilometers of corridors. Its collection includes more than 600,000 items, of which approximately 35,000 are on permanent display. It is the largest museum in the world. It is not designed for this purpose.

In its current version, the Louvre is planned to host approximately 4 million visitors per year. Last year, it attracted 9 million visitors, helped by famous attractions such as the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo and the Winged Triumph of Samothrace.

Surely something had to be done. What’s the question? And to what extent this should be dictated by the projection of the cultural power of the state (and the polishing of France’s presidential ego).

The des Cars project, which Macron enthusiastically supports, includes necessary repairs and visitor improvements, as well as giving the famous portrait of Leonardo da Vinci its own room with independent access.

This will require excavating massive new exhibition spaces beneath the Cour Carrée, the museum’s eastern courtyard. The Louvre will also be adorned with a “new grand entrance” in the Colonnade de Perrault, located on the east side of the museum.

Numerous critics of the project characterize it as a pharaoh. The cost, estimated at more than €1.1 billion, came under heavy criticism from the state auditor and Louvre staff, who felt the money could have been spent much better. Experts question the point.

“It is unnecessary and harmful,” said Didier Rykner, editor-in-chief of art news site La Tribune de l’Art. “But des Cars convinced Macron. He sees this as the kind of grand legacy project that French presidents like to leave behind.”

The Louvre’s last major renovation in the 1980s was commissioned by the late president François Mitterrand and included the striking glass pyramid designed by Chinese American I.M. Pei that serves as the museum’s current entrance.

Previous leaders had given France museum-monuments such as the Pompidou Center (Georges Pompidou), a new national library and opera house (Mitterrand), and the Museum of Indigenous Arts on Quai Branly (Jacques Chirac).

Macron has a close relationship with the Louvre. He chose it as the backdrop for his 2017 presidential victory speech. But the fate of the cultural legacy that the current president sees as his signature is starting to look a little less certain.

Many in the French art world clearly believe this is why des Cars has survived so long: Macron, who leaves office next spring, did not want to risk his flagship heritage project, despite a succession of misfortunes many and varied.

The museum’s decaying infrastructure has seen two water pipes burst this month alone, including the Denon wing that houses the Mona Lisa. In November, more than 300 documents in the Egyptian Library of Antiquities were soaked by another flood.

The Campana gallery, famous for its Greek ceramics, closed late last year due to “structural weaknesses” in the beams supporting the upper floor. Offices in another part of the Sully wing were moved due to the risk of floor collapse.

But since des Cars penned his resignation to culture minister Rachida Dati (who left her post this week to launch her bid to become mayor of Paris), repair and maintenance issues have been the museum’s least concern.

Morale is at an all-time low; The Louvre’s 2,300 employees complain of “untenable” conditions, severe understaffing and low wages. Strikes have forced the museum to close completely or partially more than a dozen times since last summer.

“Staff feel like they are the last bastion before collapse,” employee unions said in a recent joint statement. Union spokesmen speak of a “catastrophic” situation, unbearable tensions and “absurd and irresponsible” management decisions.

This month police arrested nine people, including two museum staff and two guides, over a ticket fraud scheme targeting Chinese tour groups that could cost the museum more than €10 million (£8.7 million) over ten years.

And most remarkable of all, on a Sunday in October, a gang of four broke into the museum’s Apollo gallery and stole €88 million (£77 million) of diamond-studded Napoleonic jewels in France’s most dramatic heist in decades.

Using a stolen truck with an extendable ladder, the gang reached the gallery’s completely unsecured first floor window, smashed the display cases, seized the jewelery and escaped on motorbikes in a seven-minute raid that made headlines around the world.

Four men were arrested and are under investigation, but investigators were no closer to finding the jewels. Despite Macron’s support, it was inevitable that des Cars would eventually succumb to reputational blows.

“There is very clearly a list of failures here, in many countries and in many institutions, that would have led to his departure a long time ago,” he said. Alexandre PortierConservative chairman of the parliamentary inquiry into museum security.

After resigning, des Cars said he acknowledged at least some of the apparent security failures that led to the robbery, but felt he could “pay the price today” for his earlier “prescient” warnings and proposed solution.

He was proud of the work he has done at the museum since 2021, he told Le Figarobut had weathered an “unprecedented media and political storm” and “staying the course is not enough. You have to move forward. And the conditions for that no longer exist.”

After two years at Versailles, his successor, Christophe Leribault, now has a very important job. Leribault, 62, who previously ran the Musée d’Orsay, is credited with revitalizing the Petit Palais in Paris with innovative exhibitions that have increased visitor numbers.

His tenure at the Louvre will be of a different and politically charged order. The culture ministry said the priorities were to “strengthen the safety and security of the building, the collections and the people”, restore trust and advance the “necessary transformations”.

Rykner is more specific. “Basic repairs need to be done,” he said. “Calm down the staff unions, hire more people. It’s not easy. It needs new department heads. It also needs to develop a coherent purchasing policy. It’s a huge job.”

It is unclear where the “New Renaissance” fits into all of this. Louvre’s staff unions continue to condemn a “dream” project They define it like this “untouchable”, “incomprehensible” and “far removed from the reality and needs of the Louvre”.

Saying that safety and repairs are “indispensable”, France’s state regulator, the Cour des Comptes, has been equally harsh, describing the project as a “significant financial risk” and arguing that the money should be spent on urgent repairs and improvements.

More concretely, funding is not secure: The Louvre has said 200 to 300 million euros will come from licensing fees from the museum’s Abu Dhabi franchise, while the rest will come from international donors, especially in the United States. seem quite reluctant.

The timeline is tense. A shortlist of architects was due to be selected by April this year and the project was planned to be launched in early 2027, ahead of the presidential vote in which Macron will resign. However, this process was suspended in February.

Between Abu Dhabi funds, cash reserves, ticket revenues and government subsidies, the Louvre has money to carry out basic repairs, maintenance and a more modest modernization, according to Rykner. The rest are in danger of plundering France’s heritage.

He also said it was unnecessary. “Of course the pressure on the Pyramid and Denon wing needs to be eased. The Mona Lisa needs to move,” he said. “But three additional smaller entrances would certainly be possible, and there are other options for displaying the Mona Lisa.”

Rykner said the Louvre could also use the Grand Palais, which was renovated for the Olympics at a cost of more than 500 million euros, as exhibition space. “The New Renaissance is a pure vanity project,” he said. “Leribault must resist this until the president is gone.”