Louvre Director Warns Museum Could Close Without $1.24 Billion Renovation

By Tom Whitfield

The Louvre could close to the public entirely unless France funds a renovation priced at $1.24 billion, the museum's new director, Christophe Leribault, warned on Wednesday.

"Whoever forms the next government must keep in mind that if the Louvre is not repaired, updated and transformed, it will very quickly fall behind and will eventually have to close its doors to the public," Leribault told Le Figaro. "That would be a disaster."

The warning carries weight. The museum received 9 million visitors in 2025, and it holds works by Leonardo da Vinci, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix alongside its collection of ancient artifacts. Leribault, who started earlier this year, has inherited an institution whose management and security systems have drawn as many headlines as its collection.

What happened a year ago?

In October 2025, thieves stole French crown jewels collectively valued at $102 million during a daytime heist. Some of the jewels have still not been recovered. The controversy that followed pushed the previous director, Laurence des Cars, to resign.

Leribault replaced her. He has since framed the renovation, begun under des Cars, as a security project first. "Security must be integrated from the outset into all our choices," he told the Financial Times.

The renovation's path has been anything but smooth. The expansion plan, originally priced at $788 million, drew protests from Louvre staff who argued it privileged relocating the Mona Lisa to its own gallery over fixing systemic problems. In February, the museum postponed the competition to select an architect for the project.

Then, in May, with Leribault at the helm, the museum reversed course and named Selldorf Architects and Studios Architecture Paris as winners of the competition. By that point, Leribault had already put the project's cost at $1.24 billion — a figure that has grown by more than half a billion dollars from the earlier estimate.

What does this change for the Louvre?

In practice, it puts the museum's future in the hands of French politics. Leribault addressed his warning directly to "whoever forms the next government," meaning the renovation depends on a government that does not yet exist. No funding commitment appears in his remarks.

He also shut down the hope for a cheaper route. "There is no easy, miracle 'surface' solution," he said in the Le Figaro interview. "Everything is interconnected, everything is linked."

That statement cuts both ways. It justifies the full $1.24 billion scope — security, infrastructure, crowd flow, all at once. It also gives officials no partial option to hide behind if the money is not forthcoming.

What is not said matters too. Leribault offered no timeline for when the museum might "fall behind" or close, no breakdown of the $1.24 billion, and no detail on which parts of the aging infrastructure pose the most immediate risk.

The stakes are nonetheless concrete. A museum that took 9 million visitors in 2025 now says, through its director, that its doors could shut without state investment — one year after a $102 million theft and one director's resignation. Whether the next French government answers that warning will decide the question.