The Louvre’s attraction is its history, that’s also its weakness

PARIS – How do you solve a problem like the Louvre? Perhaps you can’t.

The world’s most famous and most-visited museum started as a medieval military fortress, then became a palace. It took a revolution to turn it into a museum. Royals and rulers renovated it more than 20 times, satisfying their vanity but leaving behind an incoherent structure that sits on 25 different levels and stretches for half a mile. It exhibits over 30,000 of its 500,000 artworks in more than 400 rooms.

And it is this convoluted history and identity that make the Louvre a structure that is so difficult to monitor, oversee and protect.

“The Louvre is a palace that doesn’t have the logic of a museum,” said Mr Gerard Araud, the president of the Society of Friends of the Louvre. “It is a universe unto itself.”

The brazen and seemingly effortless robbery on Oct 19 of eight pieces from the collection of crown jewels at the museum has wounded its leadership and put a spotlight on the Louvre’s security protocols, which have been tested over the years by break-ins and thefts.

Not since Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian who had worked as a glazier at the Louvre, stole the Mona Lisa in 1911 has the reputation of the museum been so damaged by a security blunder. Since Oct 19, charges of lax protection at the Louvre have been so relentless that the French Senate has called Ms Laurence des Cars, the museum’s director, to explain herself in a hearing on Oct 22.

A confidential draft report by the Cour des Comptes, France’s highest-level auditing institution, faults the Louvre for an inadequate video surveillance system in all three of its wings, huge reductions and delays in spending for security in recent years, and a flawed sense of overall priorities. The document indicates that spending on security in 2024 was far lower than it was 20 years ago.

In the Richelieu wing, which holds paintings by Poussin, Dürer and Vermeer, as well as the ancient Persian and Mesopotamian collections, only 25 per cent of 182 rooms are covered by surveillance cameras, according to the report.

There have been “considerable delays in the raising of the museum’s technical facilities to modern standards,” the report said, according to a partial copy seen by The New York Times.

The report blames the museum’s leadership for focusing on new projects rather than “indispensable work” needed at the museum. The Louvre “has abundant resources of its own that it should use as a priority for urgent work,” the report says.

The jewels under the Louvre’s care reflect the ups-and-downs of French history through the centuries that the building has endured. From François I to Marie Antoinette, Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Eugenie, French royals amassed a mountain of gems. They wore them in crowns, rings, brooches, bracelets, earrings and necklaces, placed them atop scepters and on thrones, or closeted them away. Through wars and royal rivalries and revolutions, tens of thousands of these jewels remained with the French state.

They have long been a target of thieves.

As for thefts inside the Louvre, a break-in that was in some ways similar to the one on Oct 19 happened in December 1976 when three masked burglars broke into the museum at dawn. They climbed a cleaning crew’s scaffolding, smashed unbarred windows, clubbed two guards, broke a glass showcase, and grabbed a diamond-studded sword that had belonged to King Charles X, who ruled in the early 19th century, during a period when the monarchy was restored.

The sword has never been recovered. It is listed on the Louvre website as “not on display.”

In 1998, a thief removed “The Path of Sevres,” a small landscape painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, from its frame in broad daylight. It hung in a room without a surveillance camera. The thief escaped; the painting, valued at an estimated US$1.3 million (S$1.7 million), was never recovered.

As scores of investigators continue to search for the perpetrators of the Oct 19 heist, they are also struggling to understand what went wrong with the Louvre’s security.

The Louvre is protected by a double layer of human security: a staff of guards (almost 1,200 in 2024, according to the Louvre) and a permanent 52-member force of firefighters, who are part of the French military.

The security guards have long complained about their working conditions, and even senior Louvre officials admit the workers’ status and training could be improved.

“Civil servants aren’t very well paid in France,” said Mr Denis Fousse in an interview in 2022, before he retired as the Louvre’s director of visitor services and security. “You take the exam and then we train you. We are not a profession where there is a security guard school.”

The firefighters, on the other hand, are well-drilled and are the first line of defence against fire and floods, and the ones designated to remove artworks in an emergency.

The theft on Oct 19 has depleted what was already a diminished collection of crown jewels. In the years after the founding of the Third Republic, the parliamentary government created in 1870 from the ashes of Napoleon III’s empire, an anti-monarchical republican fervour swept France. In 1887, France held a grand 11-day public auction of most of its crown jewels.

Gems were torn from their settings; jewelled ornaments were broken up. Diamond merchants, importers and jewellers from around the world descended on Paris for the auction, and more than 77,000 stones were sold. Charles Lewis Tiffany, the founder of Tiffany & Co, was the largest buyer, scooping up just over a third of the inventory.

For several decades, the Louvre has struggled to buy back, piece by piece, jewels from the collection when they came up for sale.

The irony of the current theft is that some of the crown jewels stolen had been sold in the auction and later bought back for the Louvre. Now they are gone again. NYTIMES