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- Cover of the Louvre’s final draft of the video surveillance master plan (July 2022)
- See the image in its page
We have already had the opportunity to highlight the relentless lies of Laurence des Cars regarding her alleged priority given to the security of the Louvre and to the implementation of the master plan. This had indeed been launched by her predecessor, but had not yet begun to be realised, as the calls for tender had just been issued.
The president-director of the Louvre had declared before the Senate Cultural Commission that the master plan: “will implement a new hypervision system in the museum control posts, allowing exhaustive and comprehensive monitoring of all information from the security system. It will reinforce the perimeter protection of the establishment, in particular the video surveillance and intrusion detection system, which will be modernised and extended.”
A few weeks later, before the French National Assembly commission, she specified that a first draft had been submitted to her in spring 2022, “therefore six months after [her] taking office”, and that she found it incomplete “because it did not take into account, in particular, and this is obviously the full cruelty of this situation today, the question of perimeter videos, the therefore external coverage of the building, that the renovation of the command posts was not sufficiently taken into account, and notably with regard to hypervision technology.”
By saying this, Laurence des Cars brazenly lied before the French national representation. For we were able to obtain the final drafts of these master plans, issued by the companies Risk&Co and Alternet, notably the final draft of video surveillance (version 2, dated 22 July 2022), that of the network infrastructure (version 1, dated 12 May 2022; version 2, dated 29 July 2022 and version 3.1, dated 5 December 2022) as well as that of the arrangement of the command posts (version 2, dated 10 January 2022).
All these documents prove, on the contrary, that the issues of perimeter protection, renovation of command posts and even hypervision technology were perfectly integrated. These final drafts allowed, within a few months, the launch of tenders. All this was postponed by several years to include these projects in the “Louvre Nouvelle Renaissance” project.
Before the French National Assembly Cultural Commission, Laurence des Cars did not hesitate to take up the title of our article: “the Louvre Nouvelle Renaissance project is the problem, not the solution”, to invert it several times: “the Nouvelle Renaissance project is the solution, not the problem”! We can, however, prove, once again, after our numerous articles, after the report of the Ministry of Culture Inspectorate, and after the report of the Court of Auditors, that lying has become second nature for the Louvre. How can a senior civil servant such as the president-director of the Louvre stoop to utter so many falsehoods before parliamentarians, in complete impunity, supported by the backing of the President of the Republic? It is now a genuine state affair. The urgency is not only the departure of the president-director of the Louvre, but the immediate abandonment of the “Nouvelle Renaissance du Louvre” project.
Le Monde has moreover just revealed a new document damning for the museum: in 2018, Van Cleef & Arpels had conducted an audit, which pointed to the window of the Apollo gallery as one of the greatest risks of intrusion into the museum, highlighting the absence of video surveillance and the possibility of entering at this point via a goods lift. The president of the Louvre claims to have become aware of this document only after the theft of 19 October. But how can one still believe her?