Editor’s Note
This article discusses a critical report on security failures at the Louvre, following a recent jewelry theft. The findings highlight significant lapses and have been presented to the Senate for review.
The General Inspectorate of Cultural Affairs delivered its scathing conclusions to the Senate this Wednesday regarding the security flaws at the Louvre that failed to prevent the jewelry theft.
Ears were burning. Those of Laurence des Cars, the President of the Louvre. Those of her predecessor, Jean-Luc Martinez. And also those of their respective close circles, including the general administrator and his deputy, the Louvre’s numbers 2 and 3, who were unaware of past audits they should have perfectly mastered.
The ears of the Ministry of Culture also burned, which, according to the report, has not played its supervisory role in recent years regarding the museum.
After the introduction by Laurent Lafon, President of the Senate’s Culture Committee, announcing a report of “great severity, unsparing,” Noël Corbin began a cruel and factual demonstration of the museum’s functioning, or rather dysfunction, pointing to “its general failure as well as that of its supervision.”
The team led by Laurence des Cars did not “prioritize” security issues. The word was spoken.
And as proof, the President of the Senate Commission expressed astonishment: while claiming to be very concerned with the master security plan, how could they not have retrieved from the archives fairly recent audits, dating from 2017 and 2019, which had modeled the possibility of a burglary? It was one of the Louvre’s great patrons, the jeweler Van Cleef & Arpels, that warned 6 years ago about the fragility of the Galerie d’Apollon. Neither Laurence des Cars nor her two administrators knew of this report, which was nevertheless exhumed very quickly from the archives the day after the theft.
There is also a sense of anger at the idea that the success of the theft hung by a thread:
The procedures during the robbery were well applied by the Louvre agents, but the security control room was “undersized”: there were not enough screens to quickly visualize the different camera feeds.
This insufficiency had been flagged again in a document in August 2025, two months before the theft. Precious seconds were lost locating where the burglars came from, which the agents did not have time to see. The police were not properly directed and did not arrive at the famous location on the Quai de la Seine by the shortest route. They had to turn back. Decisive seconds.
The French window of the Galerie d’Apollon used by the thieves had been poorly secured since 2003. The resistance of its glass was “extremely weak,” reported the head of the inspection. The glazing protecting the jewels, however, installed during the 2019 renovation and of a thickness greater than that recommended by the audit, resisted portable grinders for three minutes, but this type of tool had not been anticipated by the security measures.
The report also questions the very long time between the start of the conception of a new master security plan in 2017 and its concrete implementation scheduled only for 2026.
The chief inspector gave a few rare compliments to the Louvre management, in truth to the previous management, emphasizing that it was “false” to claim, as had been written in the press, that the old system for protecting the Crown Jewels proved safer.