only 138<\/a> have been installed since 2019. A third of the rooms in the Galerie d\u2019Apollon, and 75% of rooms in the Richelieu wing, the museum\u2019s largest, have no CCTV whatsoever.<\/p>\n\u201cA third of the rooms in the Galerie d\u2019Apollon, and 75% of rooms in the Richelieu wing, have no CCTV whatsoever.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an appearance before French senators on Wednesday, a distressed-looking des Cars emphasised that no one is protected from such \u201cbrutal criminals\u201d, not even an institution like the Louvre \u2014 and the security personnel are \u201creally upset\u201d about the robbery.<\/p>\n
The spirit of \u201cnothing to do with us, mate\u201d has been strong, too, among the five major unions who represent the Louvre\u2019s 2,000-strong staff, which have called over 20 strikes that have either completely or partially closed the Louvre over the last two decades, as well as repeatedly forcing the closure of the room that contains the Mona Lisa due to understaffing. The Communist CGT union in particular has been denouncing \u201cchronic underfunding, building maintenance issues, and lack of personnel for surveillance\u201d while praising \u201cthe guards\u2019 professionalism during [last Sunday\u2019s] incident\u201d.<\/p>\n
Much of the blame has naturally fallen on des Cars, 59, who was appointed to the role of President-Director in 2021 after four years as director of the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay. A 19th-century art specialist who grew up in a famous French writing dynasty, she became the first woman to helm the Louvre in its 228-year history. Last year, she appointed another woman as the Louvre\u2019s Head of Security: Dominique Buffin, 46, a former police officer specialising in art theft.<\/p>\n
Buffin has been accused of being a \u201cdiversity hire\u201d \u2014 though she clearly has the qualifications for the job. What she probably does lack, however, is the political, administrative, financial and social clout to bang on the table and make the point that the security situation at the museum is untenable. Des Cars herself does have such clout \u2014 she is a favourite of Emmanuel Macron. However, she has chosen to please the President with glittering events (haute couture shows, a chic new museum entrance and caf\u00e9, Olympic and sports-themed \u201canimations\u201d, fund-raising gala dinners and balls) and is seemingly far less interested in the boring upkeep of the actual galleries.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs in so many cultural establishments in France, the money goes to highly visible glitz,\u201d a board member of a couple of smaller Paris and provincial museums explains. \u201cRedoing the electricity circuitry is always postponed. Only one third of the Louvre\u2019s galleries are outfitted with security cameras, usually a single one in most rooms. Why should museums be different from schools, universities, train tracks, state buildings? It\u2019s no secret that France\u2019s vaunted infrastructure, our 20th-century pride, is near collapse.\u201d<\/p>\n
The view is echoed across France\u2019s industries. In so poor a state is French infrastructure that SNCF, which operates most of France\u2019s railways, has been forced to slow down its regular train schedules as a safety precaution. \u201cIt takes almost half an hour more to get from Paris to Cherbourg as it did in the Nineties,\u201d complains a Parisian banker.<\/p>\n
There have been warnings. In France\u2019s Court of Auditors leaked wide-ranging, highly critical excerpts of a forthcoming report on the Louvre\u2019s operations from 2019 to 2024 \u2014 detailing delays, misspending, security black holes, conceptual flaws and general complacency. However, neither Buffin nor des Cars seized the occasion to make an unholy fuss. There were few incentives to do so and many reasons not to. France is a country of institutional and personal conformism. It hates tall poppies, whistleblowers, disruptors, lone riders, and dynamiters of the hallowed status quo. Not only would they lose their jobs; they wouldn\u2019t find another, ever, as they would be viewed as \u201cpersonnes \u00e0 probl\u00e8mes\u201d, i.e. capable of independent organisational thought.<\/p>\n
This applies doubly to Frenchwomen in positions of power. The country certainly has its share of image-savvy diversity candidates promoted far beyond their intellectual and technical capacities (S\u00e9gol\u00e8ne Royal, the former socialist presidential candidate, springs to mind, as does the former Minister for Education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem). However, it also has many instances of competent women isolated from networks of power within male-dominated domains. Here, an understanding of unspoken ties, sometimes decades-old, is the key to holding one\u2019s own. Any authority a woman might hold is fragile, with higher risks to weigh against possible rewards.<\/p>\n
The publication of the Court of Auditors report on the Louvre, which was slated to come out in January, has now been brought forward to the end of November. It may put an end to des Cars\u2019 and Buffin\u2019s careers \u2014 assuming they haven\u2019t already fallen on their swords by then. However, it is unlikely that it will make much of a change to the downward spiral of French state competence, especially considering the country\u2019s political crisis and crushing national debt.<\/p>\n
It is even unlikelier that the theft will be considered as an indicator of the general state of the country. The French will keep being drip-fed news of discrete scandals, one after the other, seemingly unrelated, and witness the breakdown of the world they once knew.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last Sunday\u2019s theft of eight major pieces of Napoleonic jewellery from the Louvre Museum has prompted many fatuous…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":520762,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[34,2000,299,36,169355,34833],"class_list":{"0":"post-520761","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-emmanuel-macron","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-france","12":"tag-heist","13":"tag-louvre"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115420386381141444","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=520761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/520762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=520761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=520761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=520761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}