{"id":309569,"date":"2026-02-25T14:05:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T14:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/309569\/"},"modified":"2026-02-25T14:05:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T14:05:07","slug":"new-boss-takes-over-at-the-louvre-four-months-after-audacious-jewelry-heist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/309569\/","title":{"rendered":"New boss takes over at the Louvre four months after audacious jewelry heist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Four months after France was stunned by a brazen daylight heist where thieves snatched jewels worth approximately $102 million from Paris’ Louvre Museum<\/a>, the home of the \u201cMona Lisa\u201d has a new boss. <\/p>\n

Art historian Christophe Leribault, a veteran museum director, will face the challenge of restoring the Louvre’s reputation after October’s raid saw the audacious gang of thieves make off with jewelry including the French crown jewels. <\/p>\n

Leribault takes over from outgoing Louvre director Laurence des Cars, whose resignation on Tuesday was accepted by French President Emmanuel Macron, his office said in a statement<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The statement noted the resignation as \u201can act of responsibility at a time when the world\u2019s largest museum needs both stability and a strong new impetus to successfully complete major security and modernization projects.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s queens and empresses, officials told NBC News<\/a> after the robbery.<\/p>\n

A number of suspects were subsequently arrested but the stolen items have not been recovered. <\/p>\n

After the theft, des Cars described the moment as a \u201ctragic, brutal, violent reality\u201d for the Louvre and said that, as the person in charge, it had felt right to offer her resignation.<\/p>\n

She had led the Louvre since 2021, at a time when the museum was still navigating the aftershocks of the pandemic and the return of mass tourism.<\/p>\n

Many in France\u2019s 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 security in living memory.<\/p>\n

The museum has undergone a handful of other crises in recent months. In one of them, 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.<\/a> <\/p>\n

In mid-December, workers at the museum went on strike<\/a> over working conditions, forcing the Louvre to halt operations and leaving visitors stranded outside its iconic glass pyramid.<\/p>\n

French authorities have also revealed a ticket fraud scheme. Prosecutors say tour guides are suspected of \u2014 up to 20 times a day \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Des Cars was both the public face of the Louvre\u2019s modernization drive and the official left carrying the fallout from damaging failures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Four months after France was stunned by a brazen daylight heist where thieves snatched jewels worth approximately $102…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309570,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-309569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}