FRANCE: The pride of France, the world's largest and possibly most beautiful museum, is out of control, a report by French government auditors has warned. More than a quarter of the Louvre's collection of some 400,000 objects is closed to the public daily because staff take up to four hours in coffee breaks. Poor security is aggravated by the absence of a comprehensive inventory of the museum's treasures.
These alarming conclusions are contained in a 10-page segment of the annual report which the Cour des Comptes will send to President Jacques Chirac at the end of this month.
Much of its contents were leaked to Le Figaro yesterday. In its editorial, the right-wing newspaper suggested the Louvre has become "a fantastical cultural construction, maintained by national pride and the vanity of politicians". The ill-functioning museum is "a symptom of the French illness," the editorialist Armel le Héliot wrote. "We think big, very big. We invest millions of francs . . . in pharaonic projects to show off the building and its precious collections."
The writer Michel Braudeau has described the Louvre, with its 60,000 square metres of floor space, as "this immense splendour of worked stone, whose galleries and colonnades unfold along the edge of a slow river". It became the site of a royal palace during the Crusades, and was restored as the "Grand Louvre" during Francois Mitterrand's 14-year rule. Mitterrand wrested the Napoleon wing from the Ministry of Finance and installed a glass pyramid designed by I.M. Pei in the main courtyard.
The museum's outgoing director, Mr Pierre Rosenberg, and his successor, Mr Henri Loyrette, may welcome the report. For it identifies their single greatest problem: 60 per cent of the Louvre's 1,900 employees do not fall under their authority. As civil servants employed by the otherwise occupied Ministry of Culture, curators, security guards and receptionists do what they want to.
Because of strikes related to negotiations enacting a 35-hour working week, and an unwritten rule that says employees in contact with the public are entitled to a half-hour break for every half-hour they work - not counting meal times - more than a quarter of the museum was closed to visitors at any given time last year. "You want to see Vermeer or Rembrandt?" Le Figaro noted. "Don't show up on Monday or Saturday! You want to see oriental antiquities? Don't venture there on Friday or Sunday!"
To make matters worse for the Louvre's director, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux creamed off €9.15 million of the museum's earnings last year, to redistribute it - égalité oblige - to poorer museums elsewhere in France.
Some of this was returned to the Louvre in the form of acquisitions, publications, exhibitions and guided tours, but the two parties disagree on the amount.
Anecdotes in the auditors' report show the devastating effects on security. The Louvre's director fired the chief of security when a masterpiece by the 19th-century painter Jean Baptiste Camille Corot was stolen in broad daylight in May 1998. It took the Ministry of Culture seven months to confirm the dismissal, during which the fallen security chief received salary and bonuses. He then continued inhabiting an apartment inside the Louvre, rent-free, until October 2000.
This is not the first time the Louvre has seen chaos. Henri IV began lodging painters there at the end of the 16th century. By the reign of Louis XV, careless artists had started countless fire and floods in the palace. Its courtyards were filled with shops, bars and prostitutes. When Napoleon decided to make the Louvre a showcase for the art he pillaged all over Europe, it took him 15 years to clean the place up.