After Louvre Crown Jewels Heist, Macron Replaces Museum Chief as Crises Mount

A brazen theft, then a swift reckoning

On an autumn Saturday morning, tourists lined up beneath the Louvre’s glass pyramid when a small gang of thieves pulled up outside the former royal palace with a truck-mounted ladder. Within minutes, they had broken a high window, climbed into the Galerie d’Apollon and sliced into display cases holding France’s crown jewels. By the time alarms sounded, eight pieces of Napoleonic-era jewelry—worth an estimated 88 million euros—were gone.

Four months later, the fallout from the daylight heist has helped topple the head of the world’s most visited museum and forced France to confront how it manages one of its best-known symbols.

On Feb. 24, President Emmanuel Macron accepted the resignation of Louvre president-director Laurence des Cars, the first woman to lead the institution in its 228-year history. The next day, the government appointed Christophe Leribault, an art historian who had been running the Palace of Versailles, to succeed her.

The rapid handover caps what France’s culture press has called an “ugly year” for the Louvre: a spectacular robbery, a multimillion-euro ticketing scam, water leaks that damaged collections and historic interiors, and rolling strikes by staff who say the museum is close to breaking point. The crisis is unfolding as the Élysée pushes a vast “Louvre New Renaissance” renovation plan that could cost more than 1 billion euros and reshape how visitors experience the museum.

Macron hailed des Cars’ departure as “an act of responsibility,” according to official readouts. Critics in the cultural sector argue she has become the most prominent casualty of deeper governance problems and years of underinvestment in routine maintenance and security.

The Oct. 19 heist that exposed the Louvre’s vulnerabilities

The robbery on Oct. 19, 2025, proved a turning point.

According to prosecutors and investigators, four thieves used a truck equipped with a ladder or crane to reach an upper-floor window of the Galerie d’Apollon about half an hour after the museum opened. They smashed the window, entered the gallery and used power tools to cut open the vitrines containing part of France’s remaining crown jewels.

In roughly six to eight minutes inside the museum, they seized eight historic jewels, including pieces that once belonged to Queen Marie-Amélie, Queen Hortense and Empress Marie-Louise. The Paris prosecutor’s office later put their economic value at 88 million euros and said their historic significance was “inestimable.”

A ninth piece—the Crown of Empress Eugénie, one of only three crowns of French rulers still in the country—was also taken but later found badly deformed on the pavement outside the Louvre. Most of its emeralds and diamonds were recovered, and the museum has since launched a high-profile restoration project overseen by a panel including des Cars and experts from leading Paris jewelry houses.

Police have arrested several suspects and placed them under formal investigation, but none of the stolen jewels has been recovered.

Audit findings, blurred oversight, and “chronic” underinvestment

Beyond the missing treasures, what most shocked officials was how exposed the museum had been.

A state audit by the Cour des comptes found that by 2024, only 39% of the Louvre’s rooms were under video surveillance, even though earlier assessments had flagged security vulnerabilities more than a decade earlier. Plans to extend CCTV coverage and modernize alarms were launched late and were not expected to be fully in place until the early 2030s.

A parliamentary inquiry went further, describing the Louvre as a “state within a state” and pointing to sluggish decision-making and blurred lines of responsibility between the museum’s leadership, the Ministry of Culture and the presidency.

Culture Minister Rachida Dati said preliminary investigations revealed “a chronic underestimation of the risks of a break-in and underinvestment in security measures.” A senior police security adviser who inspected the site told lawmakers he was “stunned” by the number of malfunctions uncovered.

Des Cars publicly acknowledged what she called a “terrible failure” and said camera coverage and security staffing had been insufficient. Allies note that many delayed works predated her appointment in 2021.

Ticket fraud case adds to institutional strain

Security lapses were not confined to the palace walls. In February, Paris prosecutors announced that nine people had been indicted over what they allege was a decade-long ticket-fraud scheme that cost the Louvre more than 10 million euros.

Two museum employees and several tour guides are accused of repeatedly reusing entrance tickets for different visitor groups, exploiting multiple access points and lax controls on how many times a code could be scanned. Investigators say the suspects also split large tour groups to avoid official fees and paid bribes to compliant staff to bypass checks. Authorities seized close to 1 million euros in cash and hundreds of thousands of euros in bank accounts they believe are linked to the scheme.

Kim Pham, the Louvre’s general administrator, told reporters that at an institution welcoming nearly 9 million people a year, “which museum in the world, with this level of attendance, would not at certain moments have some issues of fraud?” She said the museum had tightened its ticketing system and limited how many times a ticket can be validated.

For unions representing the Louvre’s roughly 2,100 employees, the revelations reinforced a long-running complaint: that internal controls and staffing levels have not kept pace with the museum’s global success.

Strikes, crowding, and a building under stress

From mid-December, unions including the CGT, CFDT and Sud launched rolling strikes. They cited understaffing, mounting security concerns following the heist, and what they called “increasingly deteriorated working conditions” amid record visitor numbers.

“Staff feel today like they are the last bastion before collapse,” one joint union statement said.

Overcrowding is central to the dispute. The Louvre’s galleries were designed to accommodate about 4 million visitors a year, according to internal planning documents. In 2024, it counted 8.7 million entries—around 70% of them by foreign tourists.

In a memo later leaked to the press, des Cars warned that “visiting the Louvre is a physical ordeal,” citing long waits to approach major works, a shortage of seating and toilets, and poor conditions in parts of the palace, including problems with water-tightness and climate control.

Those warnings took on new urgency as incidents highlighted the vulnerability of the historic building.

On Nov. 26, 2025, water from an obsolete heating and ventilation system that had been shut down for months accidentally flooded the library of the Egyptian department, damaging between 300 and 400 scholarly journals and documents. Curators said the material was not unique, but its loss was a serious blow to researchers.

In February, a burst pipe above room 707 caused water to leak onto a 19th-century painted ceiling, tearing the canvas in places and lifting paint. The room was closed to the public. Elsewhere, a suite of nine galleries of ancient Greek ceramics was shut over fears about ceiling stability.

A separate section of the Cour des comptes report concluded that the Louvre’s management had too often prioritized “high-profile and attractive operations” over basic maintenance and safety systems.

Macron’s “New Renaissance” plan and the funding fight

That criticism has complicated debate over Macron’s “Louvre New Renaissance” plan—a multiyear overhaul he launched in early 2025 and has closely associated with his presidency.

Initial estimates for the 10-year program put its cost at 700 million to 800 million euros. More recent figures cited by officials and media outlets have climbed as high as 1.15 billion euros. The project includes major security and surveillance upgrades, repairs to aging infrastructure, a new visitor entrance closer to the Seine and redesigned underground circulation areas. One widely discussed element is a separate, specially ticketed room for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, intended to ease congestion in the pyramid’s main hall.

Macron has called the project a “New Renaissance” for France’s premier museum and emphasized that only a “very small part” will be funded directly by taxpayers. The rest, he and his aides say, will come from higher ticket prices, private partnerships and revenues from the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

From Jan. 14, the standard ticket price for non-European Union visitors rose from 22 euros to 32 euros, a 45% increase. The government expects the hike to generate 15 million to 20 million euros a year toward the renovation.

Union leaders and some cultural commentators have criticized that approach as shifting the burden of modernization onto foreign tourists, while leaving unresolved questions about staffing and day-to-day upkeep. Others warn that extensive construction could add risk in a complex already facing leaks and structural scares.

A new director, and an overhaul of governance

With des Cars gone, Christophe Leribault will now be responsible for navigating those pressures.

Born in 1963, Leribault is a specialist in 18th-century painting who has spent his career in French museums, from the Musée Carnavalet to the Delacroix museum and the Petit Palais. He led the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie from 2021 to 2024 before taking over the public establishment that runs the Palace of Versailles. He was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2023.

At Versailles, Leribault oversaw a site that—like the Louvre—must reconcile mass tourism with the conservation of a fragile historic monument. Supporters say that experience will be crucial as he tries to rebuild staff morale, restore public confidence in security and carry out or reshape the New Renaissance program.

The Ministry of Culture has also appointed Philippe Jost, who directed the reconstruction of Notre-Dame Cathedral after the 2019 fire, to study a “deep reorganization” of the Louvre’s structure and operations.

What comes next for France’s flagship museum

For now, visitors continue to file past the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Mona Lisa, often unaware of the legal cases and institutional debates swirling around them. Conservators are working to repair a damaged crown, engineers are inspecting ceilings and pipes, and technicians are installing more cameras.

How the Louvre emerges from this period—more secure and better funded, or more commercialized and constrained—will shape not only its own future but also wider debates over how far governments can rely on tourism and private money to sustain public culture. In the palace on the Right Bank, the country’s past is on display, but so are the choices it faces about what kind of museum it wants to be.