On the surface, the Louvre, the world’s biggest and busiest museum, has mostly returned to normal a month after an audacious burglary that shocked France. Visitors line up outside I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid each morning to flood into the massive complex, most following the signs for the Mona Lisa. Three of the four men whom the authorities accuse of being directly responsible for the theft are behind bars awaiting trial.
But the Apollo Gallery, the long, dazzling hall that was the site of the heist, remains closed, its treasury of royal jewels still missing some of its most prized pieces. Questions continue to swirl around how one of the world’s most prestigious museums could have been so exposed. And plans for how to move forward have come under serious criticism.
At the center of that maelstrom is Laurence des Cars, the museum’s first female president in its more than 230-year history. Some, including a prominent art critic, have said she should lose her job, and she has been called to testify twice before Parliament. The criticism is particularly charged given the tumultuous state of French politics. Ms. des Cars is aligned with the country’s unpopular president, Emmanuel Macron, who handpicked her for the job and championed a grand but contested renovation plan announced in January called “Louvre —New Renaissance.”
In an interview with The New York Times, one of very few she has done since the heist, the usually reserved Ms. des Cars talked in emotional terms about walking for the first time into the Apollo Gallery after it was plundered and seeing its sliced-open glass cases where the jewels had been displayed.
“It is a wound that I will certainly carry all my life,” she said. She added that the news hit her like a physical blow, and thrust her fist into her stomach for emphasis.
Sitting in her art-book-lined office, she defended her four years in the job by pointing out that she had warned for years that security was sorely lacking and was working to get all the needed government buy-ins for an overhaul. But she said security was not her only worry.
The former palace, whose first building dates back to 1190, is in dire need of renovation and repairs. In late 2023, a water pipe hidden within the walls burst, causing the cancellation of a show. Just this week, another showpiece gallery, this one with Greek ceramics, had to close because of weak beams.
Then there is the problem that most vexes Ms. des Cars’s staff: severe overcrowding by visitors, especially around the Mona Lisa.
“When you take charge of this museum, you know very well that it is a political, diplomatic and cultural symbol and that it is constantly subject to very intense controversies,” said Ms. des Cars, 59, a specialist in 19th-century art who catapulted across the Seine from leading the Musée d’Orsay for four years to take her current job in 2021.
“I knew that from the start,” she said. “I didn’t know that I would, of course, have the current crisis to manage, but one learns a lot.”
During the parliamentary hearing on the museum’s security failings on Wednesday, one lawmaker for the opposition right-wing National Rally seemed to place the blame squarely on Ms. des Cars — and Mr. Macron. The lawmaker, Caroline Parmentier, asked why Ms. des Cars had not done more to resolve problems she herself had noted.
“Is this because, at the request of Emmanuel Macron, you were only focused on his megalomaniacal project for the Louvre’s New Renaissance?” Ms. Parmentier asked. “Is that why you neglected everything else?”
So far, Ms. des Cars has retained the public support of high-level museum staff. And in the interview with The Times, she said that the minister of culture had refused her verbal offer to resign on the afternoon of the burglary. Ms. des Cars made the offer after the two walked together down the grand Daru staircase — the 2,200-year-old Winged Victory of Samothrace rising above them — to view security footage of the break-in.
But more bad news was on its way. Just weeks after the embarrassment of the heist, France’s highest-level auditing institution, the Cour des Comptes, published a scathing audit of the Louvre covering the six years between 2018 and 2024, several of them under Ms. des Cars’s watch.
The auditors said the museum had been too focused on buying artwork and designing showrooms instead of attending to basic upkeep.
When it came to security, the report said that a 2017 audit had sounded an urgent warning, saying that there was no security master plan and that security systems were aging. Yet in the years that followed, little happened beyond technical studies, the report disclosed.
“The theft of the crown jewels is, without a doubt, a deafening alarm signal,” said the auditors’ president, Pierre Moscovici.
Perhaps more worrisome for Ms. des Cars, Mr. Moscovici joined others who had criticized New Renaissance, which was meant to correct some of the museum’s past problems and move it into the future.
Under the plan, a dedicated room would be built for the Mona Lisa and a second main museum entrance would be added, both to ease overcrowding. The New Renaissance project also includes a master plan to renovate the building’s more than 400 rooms, with their leaking roofs, broken heating and cooling systems and outdated security systems.
The auditors lambasted the plan as too expensive at 1.1 billion euros, about $1.3 billion, and said they were unsure that amount of money could be secured. They advised the museum to scrap the new entrance and the room for its most famous painting and instead prioritize “urgent restoration and modernization work.”
In the Times interview, Ms. des Cars countered that assessment. “The Louvre Nouvelle Renaissance plan announced by President Macron is not the problem,” she said. “It is the solution.”
She also said that she had pushed forward on security, including demanding a broad review that included looking at the number of perimeter cameras. A security master plan was devised, but adopting such changes in a large public institution takes time, she argued.
“You don’t launch an 80 million-euro master plan — because it’s more than 80 million euros now — just like that,” she said, snapping her fingers. “There are rules, there are stages in public procurement, there are study phases, there are phases for putting companies into competition.”
She added: “This is not a private museum. This is a public museum that needs to submit to every control.”
The sad irony is that the process for beefing up security had begun and several companies had put forward bids to do the work just four days before the thieves rolled up.
For the moment, Ms. des Cars’s administration is focusing on emergency measures demanded by the culture ministry. A new security steering committee has been named, led by Ms. des Cars, and it is taking applications for the newly created job of security coordinator.
Among the changes to be made: A hundred more security cameras will be installed on the museum’s perimeter by the end of next year, Mr. des Cars said in her testimony on Wednesday. The dearth of such cameras was identified as a key failing after the burglary.
In addition, concrete bollards and other anti-ramming devices will be placed around the building to prevent vehicles from getting close, as a truck with a mechanical ladder did during the heist. She also told lawmakers that a mobile police post would be in place during particularly busy periods and that more officers would patrol the museum’s perimeter year-round.
Some critics are still calling for Ms. des Cars to lose her job.
The influential art historian Didier Rykner has argued that if there were as many problems as Ms. des Cars reported, it was her job to fix them. On his online site La Tribune de l’Art, Mr. Rykner has written that “the accumulating evidence demonstrating the incompetence of the management under the Louvre’s presidency would necessitate the resignation of Laurence des Cars in any democracy that respects itself.”
But she has support as well. All 20 of the museum’s directors signed a public letter saying they “fully share her vision and convictions.” Internationally, leaders of 57 big art institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate group of art museums in Britain, signed a letter in Le Monde newspaper saying her “leadership and dedication to the museum’s mission, particularly as a unifying place in our fractured societies, are deeply respected.”
Even union leaders at the Louvre like Gary Guillaud, who have railed against understaffing of attendants for years, do not want to see her go. It would take more than a year for a replacement to understand the building’s failings, he said in an interview.
“Whether she did things or didn’t do things, now she has to take responsibility for them and to turn the tide,” he said. “Her eviction, for me, would be a mistake.”
Ségolène Le Stradic and Ana Castelain contributed research.
Catherine Porter is an international reporter for The Times, covering France. She is based in Paris.
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