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The Louvre, the most visited museum in the world and a global symbol of art, beauty and endurance, remained closed on Monday – not by war but by its own exhausted staff, who say that the Paris institution collapses from the inside.
The spontaneous strike broke out during an internal routine meeting, while the gallery attendants, the ticket agents and the security staff refused to take their posts to protest against unmanageable crowds, the chronic breach and what a union qualified as “uninformed” working conditions.
The Louvre has become a bell tower of global overchurism when it has become overwhelmed by its own popularity. While the tourist magnets of Venice at Acropolis rush to the crowd, the most emblematic museum in the world reaches its own account.
“It is the Here is Lisa Moved here, “said Kevin Ward, 62, from Milwaukee, one of the thousands of confused visitors have transformed in motionless lines under the glass pyramid of IM Pei.” Thousands of people waiting, no communication, no explanation. I guess even she needs a day off. “”
This is a rare thing for the Louvre to close its doors to the public. This happened during the war, during the pandemic and in a handful of strikes – including spontaneous outbursts on overcrowding in 2019 and security fears in 2013. But that rarely seemed like this: tourists who border the place, tickets in hand, without clear explanation for why the museum had, without warning, simply stopped.
The disturbance comes only a few months after the French President Emmanuel Macron has unveiled a decade sweeping plan to save the Louvre from precisely the problems that are now snapping up – water leaks, dangerous temperature oscillations, obsolete infrastructures and pedestrian traffic far beyond what the museum can manage.
But for workers in the field, this promised future feels distant.
“We cannot wait six years for help,” said Sarah Sefian of the CGT-Culture Union. “Our teams are under pressure now. It is not only a question of art – these are people who protect it.”
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The daily crowd of the Mona Lisa
About 20,000 people a day crowd in the States room, the largest room in the museum, just to break a selfie with Leonardo da Vinci’s Here is Lisa.
The scene is often noisy, which is jostling and so dense that many take a look at the masterpieces which flanking it – works by Titian and Véronèse which will largely ignored.
“You don’t see painting,” said Ji-Hyun Park, 28, who stole from Seoul in Paris. “You see phones. You see elbows. You feel heat. And then you are pushed.”
Macron’s renovation plan, nicknamed the “Louvre New Renaissance”, promises a remedy. THE Here is Lisa will finally get its own dedicated room, accessible via a timed input ticket. A new entrance near the Seine river is also planned by 2031 to relieve the pressure from the submerged pyramid center.
“The display, explanation and presentation conditions will be up to Here is Lisa deserves, ”said Macron in January.
A museum in limbo
The Louvre welcomed 8.7 million visitors last year, which represents more than double what its infrastructure was designed to adapt. Even with a daily ceiling of 30,000, the staff says that experience has become a daily endurance test, with too few rest areas, limited bathrooms and summer heat amplified by the greenhouse effect of the pyramid.
In a disclosed memo, the president of the Louvre, Laurence des Cars, warned that certain parts of the building are “no longer waterproof”, that temperature fluctuations endanger the invaluable art and that even the basic needs of visitors – food, toilets, signaling – fall well below international standards. She described the experience simply as “a physical test”.
“What started as a scheduled monthly information session turned into a massive expression of exasperation,” said Sefian. The discussions between workers and management started at 10:30 am and continued in the afternoon. In the early afternoon, the museum remained closed.
The complete renovation plan – with a expected cost of 700 to 800 million euros ($ 1 billion at $ 1.25 billion CDN) – should be funded by ticket income, private donations, public funds and license fees of the ABU Dhabi branch of the Louvre. Tourist prices for EU tourists are expected to increase later this year.
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But workers say that their needs are more urgent than any plan at 10 years old. Unlike other major sites in Paris, such as the Cathedral of Notre -Dame or the Center Pompidou Museum, which both undergo restorations supported by the government, the Louvre remains stuck in limbo – neither fully funded nor fully functional.
Macron, who delivered his speech on the 2017 electoral victory at the Louvre and presented it during the Paris Olympic Games in 2024, promised a safer and more modern museum by the end of the decade.
Until then, the largest cultural treasure in France – and the crowds that flock to it – remain taken between the meshes of the net.
