Louvre President Laurence des Cars resigned Tuesday, months after $102 million in French crown jewelry was stolen from the museum.
The office of French President Emmanuel Macron in a statement, as translated from French, that he accepted the resignation in the ongoing aftermath of the Oct. 19 jewelry heist that saw nine pieces worth $102 million stolen from inside the Louvre.
His statement called the resignation “an act of responsibility at a time when the world’s largest museum needs calm and a strong new impetus to carry out major security and modernization projects.”
While four suspects accused of breaking in and stealing the jewels have been arrested, all but one of the pieces taken in the act are still missing; a 19th-century crown was found damaged outside shortly after the heist.
Multiple security failures were uncovered in the aftermath of the heist.
Ms. des Cars told French legislators less than a week after the incident that the exterior security cameras were pointed in other directions and did not cover the balcony that the suspects purportedly used.
Less than two weeks after that, a French newspaper publicized internal audits showing that the Louvre previously used its own name as a password for its video surveillance system, along with the name of the company that published its security software.
In addition to the scrutiny surrounding the heist, Ms. des Cars and the Louvre have also had to grapple with employee strikes, a ticketing fraud scheme that implicated two museum employees, and infrastructure failures that resulted in water damage to a ceiling painting and books in the museum’s catalogue of material on ancient Egypt.
For her part, Ms. des Cars told French newspaper Le Figaro that the theft “cruelly highlighted what I have been warning about since my arrival” including problems like “the building’s dilapidated state, the obsolescence of the technical installations, and the massive congestion problems,” according to a report.
Mr. Macron’s office said that Ms. des Cars would now be working on “a mission within the framework of the French presidency of the G7 on cooperation between the major museums of the countries concerned.”
