French President Emmanuel Macron announced last January a project aimed at reviving the Louvre museum. The Head of State, imbued with the solemnity of a leader who links his fate to that of the most important art gallery in the world, promised a major reform to put an end to the decline of the museum, whose infrastructure, organization and maintenance were failing. Literally. A year later, the chaos that engulfed the Louvre was unimaginable. After the spectacular theft of the crown jewels in October and a water leak which caused significant damage to a documentation gallery on the Egyptian period, the art gallery is heading towards a strike from December 15, a few days before the Christmas holidays.
On Sunday, all of the museum’s union organizations (CFDT, CGT and SUD) presented a renewable strike notice from Monday, December 15, to protest against “degraded working conditions” and “insufficient resources”, according to the AFP agency. The summons was presented to the Ministry of Culture and was unanimously approved during a general assembly which brought together “around 200 people” Monday morning at the Louvre auditorium, according to the unions.
The unions denounce what the museum management itself announced a year ago in a document leaked to the press: the Louvre is going through a process of unsustainable degradation of its space. Furthermore, employees are focusing on the lack of staff and on the management of President Laurence des Cars, at the head of the institution since 2021, to whom they criticize “pyramidal and compartmentalized” management. “Every day, museum spaces are closed well beyond what was planned in the guaranteed opening plan, due to lack of sufficient staff and also due to technical breakdowns,” denounce the unions in a letter addressed to the Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati.
“The public now has only limited access to the works and is hampered in their movements. Visiting the Louvre has become a real obstacle course,” they also say. According to them, “the various internal alerts remained unanswered” and what was expressed “in front of the national and media representation by the management of the Louvre does not allow us to hope for an awareness commensurate with the crisis we are going through”. It is for this reason that they are requesting a negotiation directly with the Ministry of Culture, “because of the unprecedented deterioration of the internal social climate and the need to obtain answers from the competent authorities”.
The last major renovation of the Louvre took place in the mid-1980s, when François Mitterrand occupied the Elysée Palace. Then, among other things, Ieoh Ming Pei, one of the world’s most prolific and revered architects, was commissioned to design and build the great glass and iron pyramid that would serve to accommodate visitors in a more orderly manner. Then the chaos ended. But the great era of mass tourism begins. And even this reform does not maintain environmental and comfort standards today.
The unions also point to “increasingly brutal human resources management” and “conflicting instructions”. The last social movement, on June 16, lasted only a few hours. This time, the strike could last a long time.
Meanwhile, and after several arrests and three suspects incarcerated, the police have still not found the stolen jewelry. Their value, 88 million euros, and the fact that they cannot be sold in their entirety, suggest that they could already have been dismantled.
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