Louvre president resigns as jewellery heist inquiry reveals ‘systemic failures’

The president of the Louvre in Paris has resigned, four months after a gang of thieves broke into the museum’s Apollo gallery and made off with €88m (£76m) of Napoleonic jewellery in France’s most dramatic heist in decades.Laurence des Cars, who had offered to step down in the immediate aftermath of the burglary, tendered her resignation to Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday in what the French president called “an act of responsibility”, the Elysée Palace said.Macron’s office said the world’s largest museum, which has suffered a string of crises in recent months, needed “calm and a strong new impetus to successfully carry out major projects involving security and modernisation”.Police investigating a suspected €10m (£8.7m) ticket fraud scheme detained nine people, including two members of staff and several tour guides, earlier this month, as the museum was still reeling from the brazen daylight heist in October.The gang used a furniture lift to break in through a window, smash display cases and steal the jewellery in seven minutes, before fleeing on scooters. Four men have been arrested and are under investigation, but the jewels have not been recovered.The thieves fled with eight items, including an emerald and diamond necklace that Napoleon I gave to his second wife, Marie Louise, and a diadem set with 212 pearls and nearly 2,000 diamonds that once belonged to the wife of Napoleon III, Eugénie de Montijo.In recent months trade unions at the Louvre have launched several days of strikes, demanding urgent renovations and staffing increases, and protesting against a rise in ticket prices for most non-EU visitors, including UK, American and Chinese tourists.The resignation came days after a parliamentary inquiry called the Louvre a “state within a state”. The inquiry’s chair, Alexandre Portier, said the burglary had revealed “systemic failures”, “a denial of risk”, and a management that was “currently failing”.Des Cars, 59, who was appointed in 2021, acknowledged a “terrible failure” days after the burglary, admitting that security camera coverage of the museum’s outside walls was “highly inadequate” and adding: “Despite our hard work, we failed.”The head of France’s state auditor last year also described the theft as “a deafening wake-up call” for the “wholly inadequate pace” of security upgrades at the museum, which “must now be implemented without fail”.The report highlighted persistent delays in the deployment of security equipment, saying only 39% of rooms in the vast museum – which had more than 8.7 million visitors last year – had been fitted with CCTV cameras as of 2024.An administrative inquiry into the theft that was completed late last year also highlighted what it called a “chronic, structural underestimation of the risk of intrusion and theft” and “an inadequate level of security measures”.