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- Emmanuel Macron during his speech at the Louvre in front of the Mona Lisa
Screen copy of the video - See the image in its page
Emmanuel Macron’s speech at the Louvre, in which he wished to appear as the savior of a museum he has never cared about until now, was sewn with white thread. We had already known for two years that the Louvre’s president, Laurence des Cars, and the French President of the Republic wanted their "Grand Louvre", with an entrance on the Colonnade side, new exhibition rooms and - this information was a little more recent - a special room for the Mona Lisa to remove it from the overall circuit to relieve congestion in the Salle des États, the Grande Galerie, and more generally this whole wing of the Louvre. The project will be called "Nouvelle Renaissance du Louvre". A sort of rerenaissance. "Renaissance", the name of the president’s party! "Renaissance" like the Mona Lisa! That’s too much.
As we wrote yesterday: yes, isolating the Mona Lisa is a good idea, and yes, the Louvre needs new entrances. Is it smart to dig this new room under the Cour Carré? Why not... On the other hand, it’s a very bad idea to create just one new, large entrance on the colonnade side, when several smaller entrances are needed at various points in the Louvre [1], and why create new exhibition halls that aren’t a priority, since that’s what the Grand Palais is for? And why, above all, launch - there was already talk of this two years ago, and he said so today [2] - an international architectural competition?
An international architectural competition to design an entrance to a classified monument and create underground rooms? We may have been assured by Laurence des Cars that Perrault’s Colonnade would not be damaged, but this risk obviously cannot be ruled out. After his gesture concerning the stained-glass windows at Notre-Dame, the President of the Republic will probably want one at the Louvre. Megalomania at work.
What about the question of the palace’s dilapidation, which we also mentioned in our article on Monday? He was quick to dismiss it, announcing that everything was going to be refurbished, or nearly so - because, of course, that’s a lot less glamorous. And in just six years this time, rather than five.
Of course, no details were given. Nothing about the causes of these malfunctions at the museum: as with Notre-Dame, no one is to blame. Nothing either about the current Louvre president’s ability to carry out a project she should have started three years ago. And nothing about the financing: how much will it cost? We’re now talking about the crazy figure of almost a billion euros, with around 500 million for each part of the project. Who will pay? If half, as we wrote, seems easy enough to find, what about the other half? Entrance fees (including a differentiated rate for foreigners from outside the European Union [3]), payments from Abu Dhabi as well (which is the least we can do, as we said), and sponsorship would all have to contribute. But nothing is said about the origin of this patronage. If several hundred million euros are needed to build this project, it’s highly unlikely that a popular fundraising campaign will be a real success. Will Bernard Arnault put his hand in his pocket to ensure the flow of visitors to the Samaritaine, which is currently suffering from a lack of traffic? This is a hypothesis that has been circulating for the past two years, even if it has since been weakly denied. He assures us that virtually no money will be forthcoming from the public purse. As was the case for the reconstruction of the Saint-Denis spire, where this promise was also made but not kept?
The icing on the cake is Emmanuel Macron’s tribute to Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, who has spent her two terms making the capital disappear with his passive complicity. The City of Paris is to take charge of redeveloping the street in front of the Colonnade. We can fear the worst, unless, as in the case of the Concorde, it chooses to set up a committee of experts (see article).
As for the major work to be carried out on the Palais du Louvre, which will fortunately be done without closing the museum, we can only hope that it will be subject to all the necessary measures that we have been demanding for a very long time for work on historic monuments. Just imagine the consequences of a fire caused by these works...
Unfortunately, we’re afraid we’ll have to face a new heritage battle. It never ends.