PARIS — After months of pressure, the Louvre has a new director.
Christophe Leribault was named to lead the landmark on Wednesday, half a day after the previous director, Laurence des Cars, resigned. The leadership change at the world’s most-visited museum comes after the October crown jewels heist and a string of failures that battered confidence in one of the country’s most prized institutions.
The rapid handover is meant to restore order at a museum hit by a punishing run of crises: the heist, labor unrest, water leaks, aging infrastructure and a suspected, decade-long $12 million ticket fraud scheme.
It also protects a politically loaded project for President Emmanuel Macron, who has made the Louvre overhaul a signature cultural legacy plan as he eyes the end of his term next year.
The government cast Leribault, a veteran museum director, as the steady hand for a battered institution, with responsibility for both the Louvre’s security overhaul and its modernization.
An 18th-century specialist trained at the École du Louvre, Leribault has led France’s biggest museums, including the Petit Palais and the Musée d’Orsay.
He most recently ran Versailles, one of France’s biggest heritage sites, with heavy visitor traffic and an annual budget of about 170 million euros ($200 million).
His résumé makes him a crisis-era choice: a curator-administrator shaped by France’s museum system and used to public scrutiny, large crowds and the mechanics of state cultural power.
Des Cars was not just any museum chief. Appointed in 2021, she became the first woman to lead the Louvre — a symbolic break at a palace built for kings.
For many in France’s cultural world, her departure finally answered the question that had hung over the Louvre since the heist: how could a breach of that scale happen at one of the country’s most symbolic institutions and no top official fall?
Macron’s office accepted her resignation as an “act of responsibility,” while saying the museum now needs calm and fresh momentum for security and modernization projects.
On Tuesday, she told Le Figaro that she had become a lightning rod and could no longer carry out the museum’s transformation in the same institutional climate.
The 88 million-euro ($102 million) jewels hei