Last March, Laurence des Cars, the Louvre’s director, was at the top of her game. Dressed in a harlequin-print gown, she played hostess to a fundraising “Grand Dîner” gala at the museum during Paris Fashion Week. Guests wandered through “Louvre Couture,” the first fashion exhibition in the museum’s 232-year history, before dining among the marble sculptures in the glass-ceilinged Cour Marly.
Admittedly, this was no Met Gala, with its themed costume ball and Instagrammable arrivals. But it was the world’s most renowned and popular museum, so boldface names did not shy away. Anna Wintour arrived in Givenchy couture. Also in attendance were Grammy-winning rapper Doechii and Victoria and David Beckham; designers John Galliano, Iris van Herpen, Rick Owens, and Jean Paul Gaultier; actors Keira Knightley, Michelle Yeoh, Kelly Rutherford, and Dev Patel; models Naomi Campbell, Eva Herzigová, and Tyra Banks; and the perennial big donors Stephen and Christine Schwarzman.
Des Cars greeted the Anglophones among them in almost flawless American-accented English—delivered in a low, throaty purr—which she learned from her New York–born step-grandmother, Marta Labarr, a onetime minor film-and-stage actress. Some of des Cars’s American fans began to whisper that she might be tapped as director of the Metropolitan Museum itself one day. “I’m someone who is, by nature, discreet, reserved,” she said in her office in November. “I’m not an outgoing person. I don’t spend my life in the media. I don’t spend my life at parties. I work a lot.”
Just a few weeks before the gala, at the behest of des Cars, President Emmanuel Macron had stood in front of the Mona Lisa to announce a grand makeover of the museum that would ease overcrowding and provide a new entrance and underground galleries for Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. He called it the “New Renaissance.”
This being France, criticism of the initiative—and of des Cars, whom Macron named as the museum’s first female director in 2021—was swift. She was accused of rushing an overly ambitious, costly project while the politically weak Macron was still in office. Still, the backlash was manageable.
Then disaster struck—the brazen robbery of eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels, valued at more than $100 million, in October. The theft coincided with a damning report by the Cour des Comptes, the government’s auditing department, that stated the museum had no security master plan and advised it should funnel funds into much-needed infrastructure repairs rather than an ill-conceived building project.
More problems followed. In November, structural weaknesses in the building’s beams forced the closure of the Campana Gallery, which holds antique Greek ceramics. A water leak damaged hundreds of antique books in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities, and workers demanding more pay, increased hiring, and better working conditions began a series of rolling strikes that shut down the museum.
Then disaster struck—the brazen robbery of eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels, valued at more than $100 million.
Des Cars’s reputation seemed to unravel. Her boss, Minister of Culture Rachida Dati, had refused des Cars’s offer to resign on the afternoon of the burglary. But Dati is a political animal who is running for mayor of Paris in March. Once an ally of des Cars, she now saw her as a liability.
Dati appointed Philippe Jost, the senior civil servant who oversaw the reconstruction of Notre-Dame, to work alongside des Cars to “profoundly reorganize the Louvre.” “If I had been in her position,” says a former head of a French cultural institution who has known des Cars for years, “I would have resigned rather than accept such deep humiliation.” But when she was asked by a France Inter radio journalist in December whether she should resign to protect the institution, des Cars responded with cold anger. “Do I have to resubmit my resignation every day in the face of new crises?” she asked.
How did des Cars fall from grace so quickly? First, she suffered the misfortune of running an impossible institution. Unlike the Met, which was built as a museum, the Louvre started as a medieval military fortress, then became a palace for kings that was turned into a museum only after the French Revolution. Renovated and expanded more than 20 times, it has evolved into an irrational, 400-room structure that has fallen into disrepair—with rusty water pipes, leaky roofs, crumbling walls, outdated lighting, and inadequate security cameras, air-conditioning, and toilet and dining facilities.
Then there was bad management. The Louvre is an elitist world unlike any other French cultural institution, with arcane rules and layers of bureaucracy, secrecy, and suspicion. “[It is] the cultural equivalent of North Korea,” says one senior French cultural official. Management problems had worsened under her predecessor, Jean-Luc Martinez, whose authoritarian style sidelined curators and administrators. During his tenure, a security audit warned that the balcony used by the burglars in the October theft could be accessed by a freight elevator. But the audit was placed into the archives and never seen by des Cars when she took charge. Martinez has denied accusations of security negligence during his tenure.
Finally, des Cars’s own personal style has contributed to her problems. An expert in 19th- and 20th-century art, with decades of museum experience, she had come to the Louvre with impeccable credentials. Her full surname, de Pérusse des Cars, denotes an aristocratic line that dates back hundreds of years. Indeed, her family is so embedded in French history that, during World War II, its Château de Sourches was used to hide the Louvre’s treasures, including Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.
In a palace like the Louvre, her noble blood both helped and hurt. She earned a reputation as someone who was so cold that she did not say “Bonjour” to museum employees when she encountered them. When I asked her about this accusation in an interview a few weeks after the theft, she protested. “It is not true. No, no, no!” she said. She defended her management style, saying that she had held several question-and-answer sessions with hundreds of employees in the Louvre’s auditorium. “None of my predecessors did that!”
I asked des Cars whether this was the moment for her to launch an opération séduction—a charm offensive. “I’m not into opération séduction,” she said flatly. “Laurence’s problem is that she has no friends,” says one senior museum administrator who has worked closely with her. “She doesn’t let people in.”
“Do I have to resubmit my resignation every day in the face of new crises?”
In one of our many conversations over the last five years, I urged des Cars to describe her ultimate goal for the Louvre. “I want it to enchant,” she said. Alas, she is not seen as an enchantress. I asked her what kind of a Louvre-goer she is when she walks through its halls. A flâneur? A minimalist homing in on one artwork? An eternal explorer such as Henri Loyrette, a former Louvre director and her mentor, who once told me, “I have known the Louvre for 60 years, but every time I go, I discover something new.”
Des Cars confessed that she did not have the luxury of discovery. “Each visit I make in the galleries should be useful. There is generally a problem that must be solved, a decision that must be made. How long does it take to go to this gallery? Is it tiring? Is there a toilet? Is there an elevator? If I can’t walk, or if I am with young kids, what do I do? The graphic signage is awful, so where do I go? Dealing with constraints—financial, technical, the reality of the building. There’s no school for running this. There’s no user’s manual. There’s no parachute.”
The drama continues. On January 12, the Louvre was closed once again by a staff strike. In another swipe at des Cars, Dati sided with the strikers, calling their demands “legitimate.” But, in a win for des Cars, Jost seems to have been knocked out of the role he was given to reorganize her museum. And so, at least until Macron decides whether to renew her mandate in September 2026, des Cars struggles on. “This is perhaps the fight of my life,” she says.
Elaine Sciolino is the former Paris bureau chief of The New York Times and the author of six books. Her latest, Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum, will appear in paperback in March
