Louvre President Laurence des Cars Resigns

The President of the Louvre Museum, Laurence des Cars, has resigned just days after a parliamentary inquiry into its most recent theft.

De Cars resignation comes four months after a gang of thieves broke into the museum’s Apollo Gallery, carting away Napoleonic jewelry worth €88m (£76m) in what is now termed France’s most dramatic heist in decades.

59-year-old Des Cars, who was appointed in 2021, tendered her resignation to French President, Emmanuel Macron. Cars had acknowledged days after the theft ‘a terrible failure’ admitting that security camera coverage of the museum’s outside walls was ‘highly inadequate’ and adding, “Despite our hard work, we failed.”

Meanwhile, a 2025 report by the Head of France’s State Auditor indicated persistent delays in the deployment of security equipment, saying only 39 percent of rooms in the vast museum, which had more than 8.7 million visitors last year, had been fitted with CCTV cameras as of 2024.

Similarly, an administrative inquiry into the theft, which was completed last year, highlighted what it called a ‘chronic, structural underestimation of the risk of intrusion and theft’ and “an inadequate level of security measures”.

Macron, who called De Cars’ resignation ‘an act of responsibility, said the world’s largest museum, which has suffered a string of crises in recent months, needed a “calm and a strong new impetus to successfully carry out major projects involving security and modernization.”