The man who runs the Louvre says the world's most-visited museum could one day have to lock its doors for good. Christophe Leribault, the museum's president-director, warned this month that unless the palace is repaired and transformed, it will fall behind and, in his words, "will eventually have to close its doors to the public. That would be a disaster." The major injection of public money he says the work needs cannot even be approved until after France elects its next government next year.
The transformation he is defending is the Louvre New Renaissance, the plan President Emmanuel Macron announced in January 2025 after the museum's own leadership warned that parts of the building were no longer watertight and that a visit had become "a physical ordeal." The government puts the project at 700 to 800 million euros over ten years: a new entrance beneath the eastern colonnade by 2031, a dedicated room of its own for the Mona Lisa, and a restoration of the oldest parts of the palace. France's state auditor has since put the full cost at 1.15 billion euros and warned of significant risks of the bill growing further. The museum stays open while the work goes on — no authority in France has announced any years-long shutdown, and the plan was designed from the start to run without interrupting operations.
Who pays is the fight. Macron designed the project to run on the museum's own money — ticket sales, sponsors and licensing — rather than the taxpayer's. Since January, visitors from outside Europe, Americans among them, have paid about 45 percent more for a ticket than Europeans pay. Leribault said this month that three quarters of the work will be financed by the ticket office, that the United Arab Emirates is putting in 300 million euros, and that some 360 million euros still has to be found from private patrons. His predecessor's leaked warning described the other side of that bargain: old plumbing, galleries that leak, rooms where the temperature swings enough to threaten the art itself, and nearly nine million visitors a year moving through a building designed for half that number.
Over all of it hangs the morning of October 19, 2025, when four men with a lorry-mounted lift broke into the Apollo Gallery in daylight and took eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels, worth an estimated 88 million euros. A Senate inquiry later found that only one of the two cameras covering the break-in point was working. The jewels have never been recovered. The museum's director at the time, Laurence des Cars, told senators the security failure was a "terrible failure" and offered her resignation; she left the post this February, and Macron called her departure an act of responsibility. Since then a gallery of Greek ceramics has been closed until further notice over fragile beams, and a burst heating pipe has damaged a ceiling painted in 1819. The staff who guard the collection have walked out repeatedly over understaffing, and their union's answer to the ten-year plan is blunt. "We cannot endure six more years waiting for solutions," said Sarah Sefian of the CGT-Culture union. "It isn't only about preserving art — it's about protecting the people who safeguard it."
The museum has also been caught, twice this month, in the unrest now shaking France. It closed on October 19 when student protesters blocked its entrances, and it closed again on October 24, alongside the Musée d'Orsay and the Picasso Museum, as a precaution while Paris braced for more demonstrations. The protests have drawn Washington in. President Trump wrote that "France is burning," and told reporters the turmoil "has to do with immigration, not schools, not anything," saying he had told Macron to close France's borders and that "Paris is going to be a Muslim city very soon." Macron, asked about the foreign commentary, called it "stupid comments" from leaders who are "campaigning at France's expense," and said some of the images circulating were fabrications. For the Americans who make up a large share of the Louvre's foreign crowds — and who now pay the higher non-European ticket price that is meant to pay for saving it — the museum's fate is being argued over on two continents at once.
What happens next sits with France's voters. Leribault says the security programme is already moving, with 83 million euros committed to new cameras, new perimeter surveillance and a new head of security. But the overhaul itself waits on the election: whichever government forms in Paris next year will decide whether the state writes the cheque its director says stands between the Louvre and the slow decline he describes — a building that keeps taking in nine million visitors a year while the repairs it needs keep getting more expensive.
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