Mona Lisa’s smile has to be earned. On this All Saints’ Monday, dozens of visitors throng the queue set up in the Salle des Etats of the Louvre Museum, opposite the Mona Lisa. To admire the most famous portrait in the world, you will have to wait about ten minutes, respect a safety distance delimited by different cords, and above all, do not drag on. “Don’t block the exit of the line, please clear the corridor!” Shouts in English a young supervisor of the museum, calling to order a group of tourists planted in front of the exit of the queue. “We do as usual: we observe the visitors, we see if there are groups forming or strange behavior… If ever anything happens, we are instructed to quickly isolate the person and to ensure that there are as few images as possible”, justifies one of the guards to L’Express. At his side, five of his colleagues scrutinize the flow of visitors, analyzing the slightest suspicious movement. And for good reason.
Last May, a 36-year-old man dressed as a woman and seated in a wheelchair suddenly left the crowd to throw a whipped cream cake on the board, calling on visitors to “think of the Earth”. “There are people who are destroying the Earth. […] that’s why I did this. Think about the planet!”, he declared before being arrested. Protected since 2005 behind armored glass, the 16th century painting by Leonardo Da Vinci was not damaged, and the Paris prosecutor’s office announced a few days later the opening of an investigation for “attempted degradation of a cultural property”. But since then, the supervisors of the museum are more attentive than ever. “We have all heard of climate activists who try to degrade the paintings . We are careful, but zero risk does not exist”, indicates one of them. Especially since all the works exhibited at the Louvre do not benefit from armored glass. “We make rounds, we are ready to act very quickly if there is a problem. But we are never safe from anything … If someone throws themselves on a painting all of a sudden, we unfortunately cannot anticipate it”, regrets another.
The guards of the largest museum in Europe are aware that for several weeks, the degradation of certain works is a very real threat. Last Sunday, the management of the Musée d’Orsay, located less than a kilometer away, filed a complaint for “attempt to deliberately damage a work of art”, after a young woman tried three days earlier , to vandalize several exposed paintings. While the museum does not wish to communicate further on the issue, the newspaper The Parisian affirms that this visitor would have first intended to stick to theSelf-portrait in Saint Rémy of Van Gogh, before trying to throw soup on a canvas by Gauguin – a process identical to the latest actions carried out by various environmental activists, all over Europe.
“Maximum Security”
In the middle of summer, activists from the Italian collective Ultima Generazione stuck their hands to the base of the Laocoon Group, sculpture exhibited at the Pio-Clementino Museum in the Vatican, to demand an end to the exploitation of gas and oil. In mid-October, activists from the environmental movement Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup on the masterpiece The sunflowers by Van Gogh exhibited at the National Gallery in London – and protected by glass -, while others stuck to the painting’s protective glass a few days later The girl with the pearl by Vermeer, exhibited at the Mauritshuis in The Hague (Netherlands). Same scenes at the Melbourne Art Museum (Australia), where members of the environmental collective Extinction Rebellion stuck their hands on the plexiglass protection of the painting Massacre in Korea by Picasso, or at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, where two activists glued themselves last Sunday to a pole supporting the skeleton of a dinosaur more than 60 million years old.
In such a context, how to protect the priceless works exhibited in French museums? Questioned by L’Express, most of the major national establishments did not wish to disclose details of their security devices, so as not to reveal them to the general public. “But I can assure you that the security is maximum,” slips a security guard responsible for searching visitors at the entrance to the Louvre museum. “Everyone goes through the metal detector, and the bags are placed one by one on the conveyor belt to be checked. No weapon, sharp object or glass bottle passes”, he specifies. For visitors who attempt to return with food in hand, the latter will be thrown away. But with “30,000, even 40,000 or 50,000 visitors per day”, it can happen “that a sandwich placed at the bottom of a bag or a plastic bottle of water passes the checks”, admits a security guard.
The Louvre-Lens, for its part, indicates that it has given “the instruction to its security teams to implement increased vigilance in the exhibition spaces and at the entrance gates”. The checks, “already systematic via the scanning of personal effects in particular, are reinforced”, specifies the establishment. At the Grévin museum, general manager Yves Delhommeau explains that he asked his teams to “search the bags even more thoroughly” than usual at the entrance to the visit route, where two additional security guards have also been hired. . In this period of high attendance due to school holidays, “four to five” additional supervisors also control the visit route. While the wax reproduction of King Charles III was entarred a few weeks ago at Madame Tussauds in London, the director fears that “symbolic figures”, such as Presidents of the Republic, could be targeted by environmental activists. Already, the statue representing Russian President Vladimir Putin was recently removed from the visit route “in order to avoid any degradation” – in 2014, it had been stabbed by a Femen activist.
“Device Emphasis”
But for other museum officials, such as Bruno David, director of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, these recent intrusions “do not justify additional security measures”. “We already have guards and filters at the entrance. In the event of action, we will favor dialogue to avoid increasing the problem, and damaging certain works in the gallery”, he explains. Especially since to protect the works, “there are already very heavy and very qualitative devices in French museums, with increased human surveillance, video protection devices, distancing barriers, motion detectors”, recalls Guy Tubiana, security expert advisor to museums in France. “There has obviously been an increase in the devices in various museums in France, but we cannot say more for obvious reasons”, specifies to L’Express this police commander, in particular responsible for preventing and monitoring possible acts. malicious intent, theft, damage or illicit trafficking of cultural property.
But the specialist admits: despite all the efforts put in place, “we cannot enter an airport configuration, and search each visitor to make sure that they have not hidden a tube of glue in their clothes” . Despite “extremely solid and very professional” surveillance devices, which can reach a cost of “several million euros per year and per museum”, a “determined and well-organized person will always be able to achieve their objective and degrade a work”, confirms Laurent Parise, commercial director and shareholder of the Ile-de-France DPSA security agency, which works in particular with the Luxembourg museum, the Jacquemart André museum and the Maillol museum. For his colleague Steeve Fontaine, co-founder of the company 3SA Conseils specializing in the management of risks related to the reception of the public for various museums and performance halls, “the most important thing now is to invest in people” . “Human surveillance is the only one that can analyze the weak signals of a possible attack, such as the clothes worn by the militants, the groups that form suddenly, fleeting glances or a visit route that directs towards a single work”, he believes.