The Louvre will continue a re-birth. Standing for the ever -mysterious smiling Mona Lisa, French President Emmanuel Macron announced the “new Renaissance” of the Paris museum on Tuesday afternoon, which must be completed in 2031. In the coming years, numerous renovation work will be carried out and far -reaching changes will be made: this is how the Mona Lisa will have its own space and there will be an extra entrance for the museum. Art lovers: no panic, the museum remains open.
The previous recodes of Le Louvre The 1980s, when President François Mitterrand was built, among other things, the Glass Pyramid for the museum in which the entrance is located. “The pyramid was built for receiving four million visitors a year,” said Macron in the Louvre, “but now the museum receives nine million visitors annually and in the future it will be twelve million.” According to the president, that is a ‘gift’, but the museum must be able to handle those numbers.
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Rows of hundreds of meters
It has been clear for years that the Louvre is not possible. Every day countless visitors clump together for the Mona Lisa, which means that the space where she hangs is constantly packed, while other parts of the museum are much less visited. On the square in front of the pyramid there are often rows of hundreds of meters long. In the open reception room below, due to poor ventilation, certainly in the summer, it is often stuffed – unpleasant for visitors and employees.
There are also problems with maintenance: in 2023 an exhibition had to close suddenly because there were leaks. Lifts and escalators are continuously defective – the press also had to go up on a stationary escalator on Tuesday. And the building is not well equipped for high temperatures, which are increasingly prevented due to climate change. The pyramid opened with a lot of bombing in 1988 works like a greenhouse, and elsewhere in the museum there are large temperature differences that can endanger art.
The museum’s renovation will cost around 700 to 800 million euros
‘Epicentrum’
Museum director Laurence des Cars has been asking politics for years for help for a major renovation: with an (initially unanswered) letter to Macron, conversations with successive prime ministers and ministers of culture. The file was arrested when at the beginning of 2024 Rachida Dati took office as Minister of Culture, since then she has been working with DES CARS on the new plans.
Des Cars took the word briefly on Tuesday, and Dati was in the room, but it was Macron who announced the honor to announce the definitive plans.
In a swollen speech, he praised the museum as an “epicenter of the art history of our country” and underlined how important the museum is for him. With this, a few weeks after the reopening of Notre-Dame, the president knows how to connect two major cultural projects to his name in a short time.
The biggest changes are the creation of the separate space for the Mona Lisa – for which visitors will have to buy a separate ticket – and the extra entrance. Whether it becomes just as striking as the pyramid is still unclear: a competition will be written out among architects for the design. Furthermore, the layout of the museum will be re -viewed, there will be extra exhibition rooms and investments will be made in modernization and new educational programs.
The ‘rebirth’ will cost around 700 to 800 million euros, as leaked out earlier. “A very small part of the minor” will come from the French state treasury, sources emphasized around the president – knowing that a major state investment would not fall well now that France is struggling with a huge national debt (just under 3,000 billion euros at the end of 2024). The rest of the financing comes from the branch of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi and donations. And Macron confirmed on Tuesday what Minister Dati announced last year: the ticket prices for visitors from non-European countries will go up from the beginning of 2026.
Possibly additional advantage of these higher prices: fewer visitors.
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