After a prolonged period of internal turmoil that has included a widely publicized heist, striking workers, two structural leaks, and a ticketing scam, the Louvre has lost its director.
On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron said he had officially accepted the resignation of Laurence des Cars, who had led the Louvre since 2021.
“Ms. Laurence des Cars has submitted to the President of the Republic her letter of resignation from the presidency of the Louvre Museum,” a short statement from Macron’s office said. “The head of state accepted it, welcoming an act of responsibility at a time when the world’s largest museum needs calm and a strong new impetus to carry out major security and modernization projects and the ‘Louvre – New Renaissance’ project.”
Macron’s office said he had “thanked her for her work” and praised des Cars for “her undeniable scientific expertise.”
In a statement, des Cars said, “Through both hardship and success, directing the Louvre has been the honor of my professional life. I have devoted all my energy and determination to it. Not a single minute of my time has been wasted in service to the Louvre.”
She continued, “Over the past five years, numerous initiatives have been undertaken to transform the Louvre Museum. I want to pay tribute to your work, to those of you who serve the Louvre daily with professionalism and passion. These initiatives could not have been carried out without the strength of the ‘Louvre collective.’”
The last year has been a tumultuous one for des Cars, and not only because of the heist that took place in broad daylight last October, one of the most brazen instances of art theft in history. During that heist, thieves absconded with nine pieces of jewelry said to be worth more than $100 million. Only one of the items stolen, a Empress Eugénie’s crown, has so far been recovered; it was damaged when the thieves dropped it, and the Louvre said it is working to restore it.
Des Cars previously tried to resign as scrutiny heightened around her, but culture minister Rachida Dati declined to accept the offer. She then went on to call the Louvre’s security systems “inadequate,” echoing remarks she had made internally prior to the theft.
Yet the heist has not been the only source of woe at the Louvre, the world’s most widely visited art museum.
Workers have said that the museum’s infrastructure is failing, something des Cars even suggested herself when she wrote, in an internal memo from January 2025, of a “proliferation of damage in museum spaces, some of which are in very poor condition.”
On more than one occasion, a leak has forced the Louvre to attend to that infrastructure. One such leak just barely missed an exhibition to devoted to the early Renaissance painter Cimabue, and another reportedly damaged documents related to the museum’s holdings of ancient Egyptian art.
In response to these developments, Louvre workers have led multiple strikes, forcing the museum to shutter to the public for multiple days in the past year. In December, for example, some 400 workers at the Louvre—close to 20 percent of the museum’s full workforce—led a stoppage. Three unions representing those workers signed a statement that denounced the “increasingly deteriorated working conditions” at the museum. Wages and understaffing were also pressure points, according to the unions.
These developments have made the Louvre the subject of frequent reports in the media, often negative in nature. Just last this month, for example, the museum garnered attention for a ticket fraud scheme that cost the Louvre $12 million. High-ranking figures at the museum have claimed it was “inevitable” that such an old institution would fall prey to a scam like this one.
Amid all the scrutiny deriving from these reports, the Louvre has put the brakes on one big project: a planned $778 million expansion that the museum indefinitely postponed this month. The expansion would have added a new 33,000-square-foot gallery for the Mona Lisa, the Leonardo da Vinci painting that regularly generates huge crowds.
Des Cars joined the Louvre in 2021, having formerly directed the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie. The appointment made her the first woman ever to lead the Louvre.
Her leadership was not entirely without success. A Jacques-Louis David retrospective staged last year was acclaimed by critics, with the New York Times’s Jason Farago terming it a “once-in-a-generation” show, and the museum made steps toward solving the Mona Lisa overcrowding problem, a perennial issue that no other Louvre director has managed to solve.
Des Cars also made steps toward modernizing the Louvre’s collection, which contains relatively few works from the 20th and 21st centuries. The museum recently acquired its first video, a piece by Mohamed Bourouissa. South African–born painter Marlene Dumas, meanwhile, recently became the first female contemporary artist ever collected by the Louvre last year, with nine of her works now permanently on display at the museum.
Yet her short tenure was also marked by the understanding that the Louvre, a museum of titanic importance to anyone who cares about art history, was vulnerable to the same pressures as most other aging institutions. Des Cars said as much in her statement on Tuesday in which she called the Louvre “fragile.”
“Leading the Louvre Museum and building its future requires uniting all efforts and energies around common goals,” she said. “This clarity in direction is currently lacking: how can we transform the Louvre without providing it with the resources to achieve its ambitions? This situation hinders the successful implementation of change, while the Louvre cannot accept the status quo. Under these circumstances, I believe I am no longer able to fully exercise the responsibilities entrusted to me. This is why I have submitted my resignation to the President of the Republic.”
