The head of the Louvre Museum resigned Tuesday, four months after a brazen daylight heist where thieves snatched jewels worth approximately $102 million, shocking French citizens who questioned how a security breach of such magnitude could have taken place.
French President Emmanuel Macron accepted Laurence des Cars’s resignation, his office said in a statement on Tuesday.
The statement noted the resignation as “an act of responsibility at a time when the world’s largest museum needs both stability and a strong new impetus to successfully complete major security and modernization projects.”
The group of four robbers was able to bypass security systems and used power tools to break into the Louvre to steal invaluable jewels once worn by France’s queens and empresses, officials told NBC News after the robbery.
A number of suspects were subsequently arrested but the stolen items have not been recovered.
After the theft, des Cars described the moment as a “tragic, brutal, violent reality” for the Louvre and said that, as the person in charge, it had felt right to offer her resignation.
She had led the Louvre since 2021, taking over one of the global museum world’s most prestigious jobs at a time when the museum was still navigating the aftershocks of the pandemic and the return of mass tourism.
Many in France’s cultural world questioned why no top official had fallen after the heist: a daylight robbery that many in France saw as the most humiliating breach of French heritage security in living memory.
The museum has been hit with a handful of other crises in recent months. Up to 400 works in one of the Egyptian antiquities libraries in the museum were damaged in December when a pipe burst because of flooding, the museum’s deputy general administrator said at the time.
In mid-December, workers at the museum went on strike over working conditions, forcing the Louvre to halt operations and leaving visitors stranded outside its iconic glass pyramid.
French authorities have also revealed a ticket fraud scheme. Prosecutors say tour guides are suspected of — up to 20 times a day — reusing the same tickets to bring in different visitor groups, at times allegedly with the help of Louvre employees, in a system investigators believe operated for a decade.
Des Cars was both the public face of the Louvre’s modernization drive and the official left carrying the fallout from damaging failures.
