The Louvre Museum’s director resigned Tuesday, ending months of questions in France’s cultural world over why no top official had stepped down after the October crown jewels theft.
Laurence des Cars’ departure closed a bruising chapter for the world’s biggest museum. It got here because the Louvre faces a widening narrative of an establishment spiralling uncontrolled.
Within the last yr alone, the museum has endured the high-profile jewels theft from the Apollo Gallery, water leaks that damaged priceless books, multiple staff walkouts and a wildcat strike over poor working conditions, mass tourism and understaffing.
That scrutiny intensified again in recent weeks, when French authorities revealed a suspected decade-long ticket fraud scheme — carried out under their noses — linked to the museum that investigators say can have cost the Louvre 10 million euros ($11.8 million).
President Emmanuel Macron accepted des Cars’ resignation as “an act of responsibility” at a moment when the Louvre needs “calm” and latest momentum for security upgrades, modernization and other major projects, in keeping with a press release from his office.
Macron wants to present des Cars a brand new mission during France’s presidency of the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations, focused on cooperation amongst major museums, the statement said.
For a lot of in France’s cultural world, the resignation answers months of head-scratching over why no top official had fallen after the heist: a daylight robbery that many here saw as probably the most humiliating breach of French heritage security in living memory.
Brazen theft
Thieves took lower than eight minutes in October to steal crown jewels valued at 88 million euros ($102 million) from the Louvre, in a weekend operation that stunned visitors, exposed glaring vulnerabilities and left one among France’s most symbolically charged collections in criminal hands.
Several suspects were later arrested, however the stolen pieces remain missing.
Des Cars, one of the vital outstanding museum directors in Europe, had reportedly offered to resign on the day of the robbery, however it was initially refused by the culture minister.
In remarks after the theft, she described the moment as a “tragic, brutal, violent reality” for the Louvre and said that, because the person in charge, it had felt right to supply her resignation.
She had led the Louvre since 2021, taking up one among the worldwide museum world’s most prestigious jobs at a time when the museum was still navigating the aftershocks of the pandemic and the return of mass tourism.
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Multifaceted crisis
The most recent announcement is the newest in a string of blows for the crumbling former royal palace, amid growing complaints that the museum’s infrastructure and staffing haven’t kept pace with the crowds pouring through its galleries.
In June, a wildcat strike by front-of-house staff and security employees forced the Louvre to halt operations, stranding hundreds of tourists outside the glass pyramid and underscoring the depth of anger amongst employees over overcrowding, understaffing and what unions called untenable working conditions.
Staff said that the pressure of day by day visitor flows — particularly across the Mona Lisa — had turn into unmanageable and that promised reforms were arriving too slowly.
The resignation got here at an especially punishing moment, lower than two weeks after French authorities revealed the separate ticket fraud scheme.
That case widened scrutiny beyond the jewels robbery and toward the museum’s day-to-day controls.
Fraud scheme
Prosecutors say tour guides are suspected of — as much as 20 times a day — reusing the identical tickets to bring in numerous visitor groups, at times allegedly with the assistance of Louvre employees, in a system investigators consider operated for a decade.
In a rare interview just days ago with The Associated Press after the fraud case was made public, the Louvre’s No. 2, general administrator Kim Pham, said that fraud at an establishment the scale of the Louvre was “statistically inevitable.”
He argued that the museum’s sheer scale — hundreds of thousands of tourists, multiple checkpoints and a sprawling historic complex — makes it uniquely exposed.
But he also acknowledged shortcomings, and said that the museum had tightened validation checks and increased controls.
Recent Renaissance
The succession of crises has put latest political weight on a project Macron has heavily championed: the Louvre’s sweeping overhaul plan, branded the “Louvre Recent Renaissance.”
Unveiled by Macron in January 2025, the renovation, which could take as much as a a long time, goals to modernize a museum widely seen as overstretched and physically worn down by mass tourism.
The plan features a latest entrance near the Seine River to ease pressure on I.M. Pei’s pyramid, latest underground spaces and a dedicated room for the Mona Lisa with timed access — all intended to enhance crowd flow and reduce the day by day crush that has turn into a logo of the Louvre’s success and its dysfunction.
The project is predicted to cost roughly 700 million-800 million euros ($826 million-$944 million), with funding from ticket revenue, state support, donations and Louvre Abu Dhabi-related income.
Macron has framed the overhaul as a national priority, comparing its ambition to other landmark French restoration efforts and casting it as a part of a broader defence of French cultural prestige.
However the events of the past yr — staff unrest, security failures and now alleged fraud — have sharpened doubts over whether the Louvre can hold the road operationally, while preparing for a costly, years-long transformation.
That tension defined des Cars’ final months in office.
She was each the general public face of the Louvre’s modernization drive and the official left carrying the fallout from damaging failures.
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