The security guard grabs his waist, pulls up his pants and raises his eyebrows. Jane, a 43-year-old tourist, insists. Ask him again for explanations. He invested more than 150 euros and 13 and a half hours by plane. His family arrived in Paris from Texas and visiting the museum was the highlight of the trip. The icing on the cake, she said, putting her index finger and thumb together. “Well, we won’t open,” the employee tries to decide on Monday, the first day of strike at the Louvre this week. Jane can’t believe it. No more than several hundred people queuing – and ridiculous postures delicately balanced on cement plinths to take photos – in front of the pyramid that Chinese architect Ieoh Ming Pei designed in 1993 to modernize the museum and speed up visitor entry. That was almost 33 years ago. Golden times. Since then, everything has gotten worse.
Mass tourism, aging facilities, numerous economic crises and erratic management – its previous director, Jean-Luc Martinez, was accused of art trafficking – have slowly pushed the world’s most important museum into an abyss that describes, like the poetic subtext of one of its great paintings, the lost splendor of a nation. But the great work of this catastrophe will forever remain the video of four hooded men seizing, on October 19, a set of Napoleon’s jewelry worth around 88 million euros. In broad daylight. Then came the floods, the landslides. And the strike.
“Madam, it’s closed. Why? It’s France,” the guard summarizes to Jane’s despair.
On Monday, the museum remained closed. Strike. Tuesday too. Weekly rest. On Wednesday and Thursday, it was half open, after employees decided to continue partial strikes to protest against working conditions, the aging of facilities and “the waste” of a plan called New Renaissance and presented with great fanfare by the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron. The museum fought: if it closed, it would risk an additional 400,000 euros per day. “The response from management was direct contempt, silence. Laurence des Cars (the president of the Louvre) is bunkered. But we will see if they still dare to open,” lamented the unions at the gates of the Louvre on Wednesday morning, which opened that day with closed rooms and practically no workers in key locations. Visitors, however, paid in full for the ticket, after hours of queuing.
Finally, the strikes will be lifted on Friday, Wednesday afternoon, the museum staff being half occupied, but the public being at capacity, the only way to enter without a long wait was to sneak in through a side door, access reserved for people with professional cards and thieves, since no one asked for proper accreditation. This should not be done, but it is a journalistic experiment aimed at delving into this hell described by those responsible.
Go ahead, come in.
There are virtually no security guards – they are on strike – and those who do exist devote themselves devotedly to their cell phones. Once in the center of the hall, under the pyramid, the magnetism of the Denon wing, where the main pictorial treasures are located, including the Mona Lisadissolves the journalist in a long queue which will be followed by a series of physical obstacles in certain rooms. Today, it would probably be impossible to walk through the Louvre through its galleries in nine minutes and 43 seconds, like Anna Karina, Samy Frey and Claude Brasseur. In Side stripe, by Jean-Luc Godard. You walk in small steps, slowly. But in 420 seconds, jewelry valued at 88 million can be stolen and disappear without a trace.
The posters, faded and poorly laminated photocopies, vaguely announce the proximity of the Mona Lisathe price sought by almost all visitors, as one of those pokemon in augmented reality. After climbing the stone stairs and following the human flow, one inevitably enters the motley Salle des Estates, where the work of Leonardo has shared space since 1966 with the great paintings of Paolo Veronese and the Venetian school. There are many, all impressive. The most important work, The wedding at Cana (1563). But it goes unnoticed, although it is the largest painting in the Louvre (70 square meters) due to the tourist compulsiveness of “I was here” imposed by the government. Mona Lisa (1506).
The work was stolen in 1911 by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian glassmaker from the Louvre. Today, it is still there, protected by a huge glass window. This is good news in these uncertain times for the museum which, in full psychosis following the last heist, transferred some of its most precious jewels to the Bank of France. But the Louvre, while awaiting the major renovation proposed by Macron, which plans a special room for the great hit Renaissance in style and a special entrance for those who just want to take a photo with it and leave, he has placed black fences that stiflingly enclose visitors in front of the work. Pure sadism. “No!” » shouts a security guard to a Japanese man who tries to take a photo while leaning to the side to avoid being crushed by other compatriots.
The scenes, beyond the potential viral contagion and the suffocating heat, border on human abuse. One of the installation’s catenaries falls, a German trips. A British woman laughs. And some of the hostages Mona Lisa They manage to escape, settling into the chairs normally occupied by the guards who are not there today to demand their work. “Please be courteous to museum staff,” a sign at the exit reads, perhaps too late.
The signage is confusing. Location plans, more difficult to decipher than those of Ikea. Everyone finds themselves in the same space, crowding around the most coveted works. If there is hubbub, there is a masterpiece. Although in some sections the phenomenon can be confused with the mess at the door of some bathrooms with broken toilets. There are many.
We suddenly rebel and try to go in the opposite direction. but here it is Freedom leading the people (1830), by Eugène Delacroix – with the people, yes, but blinded by the flashes -, and the spectator can only see a crowd. Like the one who traveled desperately on board Medusa’s raft (1818), by Théodore Géricault, a few meters away, although difficult to see in the increasingly dim light of the room, despite the fact that today the sun enters through the skylight.
The problem is not new. This has been hammering home management’s conscience for years. Art historian Didier Rikner, a specialist in the institution, believes that “the Louvre is today a museum adrift”. “The museum experience is terrible. There are closed rooms and a lack of signage which concentrates people in the same places and leaves empty rooms like those in the museum. vermeers. The bathrooms are sad. And on Wednesday and Friday, the entire second floor is closed between nine and ten thirty,” he criticizes.
Organizing the human tide is not easy. The Louvre welcomes around 30,000 residents every day. Typically hosted in hourly feeds. It is possible that this Wednesday afternoon will be busier than usual due to the strike. There are nerves among the visitors. “What pain, mom” (Pain in the ass)protests an Anglo-Saxon boy. The vigilantes, however, remain serene in this spiritual strike, with a body present. And poor Leonidas too, who waits there The Battle of Thermopylae (1814), by Jacques-Louis David, just at the pass where the historic confrontation was going to take place. A strip as narrow for the Persians as the museum corridor, a little cracked in the ceiling, where visitors now dodge, pressed against each other like the public attending the enormous The coronation of Napoleonpainted by the same author a few years earlier. It’s incredible. And it doesn’t matter when you read this and what the museum looks like.
The museum experience, which could be the leitmotif of this drama, has changed enormously since the last major renovation of the Louvre, where it welcomed some 2.8 million visitors per year. No infrastructure resists. The workers at the Palais Garnier – the opera house – are these days in solidarity with those at the Louvre. “We are the same,” explains one of the union spokespersons. The museum pyramid was supposed to receive four million visitors a year. But their growth has been exponential. Then, the pandemic created the mirage of more sustainable, measured and selective tourism. I end up being the opposite. The world has decided to take back what was theirs. Quickly, compulsively. Today, visits are approaching 10 million.
Else Müller, spokesperson for the SUD Culture union, believes that “everyone has seen that this museum is poorly managed”. “And we, who are closely linked to this place, to its works, to its history, experience it as a martyrdom. The roof has already collapsed, the jewelry has been stolen, rooms have been flooded… The only thing we want is to pass on this heritage to future generations,” he laments. That, and a legitimate raise too.
Paris loves riots. And the Louvre, built on the banks of the Seine at the end of the 12th century, was for centuries the official residence of the kings of France, until Louis XIV, tired of the rebellious crowds of Paris, abandoned it for Versailles. Today, these feverish hordes have changed their appearance and motivations and roam the rooms armed with guides and brochures. Although there is no adaptation. Of all kinds. A man in a wheelchair desperately searches for the elevator that will take him from one floor to another, much slower than the one used by the thieves on the morning of October 19.
The president of the museum, before the Senate commission of inquiry into the theft of the jewels, admitted Wednesday that the museum is going through a “crisis” and suffers from “disorganization” in terms of security. interviewed in France InterDes Cars estimated that she still has enough credit to remain at the head of the Louvre, the museum she has directed since the end of 2021 (she is the first woman to do so). “I’m in charge, I’m running this museum in the middle of a storm, that’s very clear, but I’m calm and determined to support the 2,300 Louvre agents,” she declared, adding that she assumes her “daily share” of responsibility for the poor functioning of the museum.
The problem, say the unions – but also the Court of Auditors – is that management has given priority to the purchase of works of art rather than improving the conditions of the infrastructure. Also on security issues. The report from France’s highest auditing institution accuses the Louvre of having an insufficient video surveillance system in its three wings, of having implemented severe cuts and delays in security spending in recent years and of showing poor prioritization.
At the end of the visit, before crossing the ancient medieval structure of the museum to reappear in the room under the pyramid, Athanor (2006), a mural by Anselm Kiefer, manages to confuse the gray, grainy and material appearance of its imposing relief with a leak from the ceiling. So much so that, as sometimes happens in contemporary art, it is difficult to know with certainty where the artistic work ends and the accident begins.
On Friday, employees decided to vote in favor of ending the strike and ending a week of suffering. However, the problems will still be there on Monday. The greatness of the museum and its stratospheric works of art, regardless of the problems it faces, too.
About The Author
