The Louvre Museum in Paris is “at a crossroads” and “at the breaking point” of its operational capacities, requiring a massive financial investment, the museum’s new director, Christophe Leribault, stated today before the French Senate.
“We can state it bluntly: despite its grandeur, despite the daily commitment of its teams, this is a Louvre that is at its breaking point. The facilities and infrastructures are reaching the end of their life cycle,” the art historian said.
Christophe Leribault, who previously presided over the Palace of Versailles, was appointed director of the Louvre last February by the French government, with the core mission of improving security and modernizing the most visited museum in the world.
In the senate, Leribault said the institution is “at a crossroads” due to the urgency of building interventions, which represents a structural “wall of investments.”
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“Obviously, this is not what people want to hear,” the official acknowledged, citing as an example the necessity to remove more than 10,000 Greek vases so that rehabilitation works can be carried out in one of the Louvre’s galleries.
Another demand placed on the new director is to continue the “Louvre – New Renaissance” project, which he described today as an “absolute necessity,” with a budget currently estimated at more than one billion euros.
Christophe Leribault was appointed by the French government after the previous director of the Louvre Museum, Laurence des Cars, submitted her resignation months after a high-profile heist exposed the museum’s major vulnerabilities.
On October 19, 2025, a group of thieves took only a few minutes to enter the museum’s Galerie d’Apollon via a freight elevator, quickly smash two of the three display cases installed in late 2019 to hold jewels, and escape with eight pieces valued at an estimated 88 million euros.
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Regarding security matters, Christophe Leribault announced today the creation of a brand-new control center for October and the implementation of a new perimeter video surveillance system for the museum starting in January 2027.
“Of course, we have installed additional cameras as a matter of urgency in locations where a surveillance gap was identified, but it is impossible to recreate an entire new network with hundreds of cameras without reinforcing the technical infrastructure,” he said.
In addition to the heist in October 2025, the Louvre Museum announced in February that it was the target of a massive ticketing fraud scheme, which caused a financial deficit exceeding 10 million euros.
Furthermore, a flood was reported affecting the library of antiquities due to a failure in pipes whose degraded state was well known, alongside a water leak that damaged a 19th-century painted ceiling, forcing the institution to temporarily close several rooms.
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Since December, the museum has also been experiencing periodic worker strikes, which have repeatedly led to the partial or total closure of the world-famous cultural institution.
According to the specialized publication The Art Newspaper, the Louvre Museum maintained its position as the most visited museum in the world in 2025, recording a staggering nine million admissions.
