The director of the Louvre, who has not spoken since Sunday, is expected today to explain to French parliamentarians how burglars managed to steal the crown jewels at the Paris museum, which reopened its doors this morning.

After three days with the doors closed, the world’s busiest museum reopened today at 09:00 (10:00 GMT). “We’ve been waiting a long time for it to open. We had booked for today, we wouldn’t have had the chance to come back,” said a delighted Fanny, who came from Montpellier (southern France) with her daughter.

The search continues in an effort to track down the four burglars and their unimaginable loot stolen from the famous Apollo Hall. The theft caused a sensation in France and abroad and a public storm over the protection of the Louvre’s works. The investigation is “progressing,” Interior Minister Laurent Nunes told the CNews television network and Europe 1 radio station, explaining that “over a hundred investigators” have been mobilized. “I have every certainty (…) that we will find the perpetrators,” he said.

Initially described by French authorities as priceless, the stolen jewellery now has a valuation, but without taking into account its value for cultural heritage: “88 million euros“, according to the Louvre’s conservator.

The estimate makes this theft one of the most significant art thefts of recent decades, but that figure falls far short of that from the 1990 break-in at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the value of the stolen items of which was valued at at least half a million dollars.

Louvre director explains to the upper house today

In the front row on Sunday, Culture Minister Rashida Dati will let Louvre president-director Laurence de Carre, who has yet to make a public statement about the theft, speak today. She will speak at 16:30 (15:30 GMT) to the culture committee of the Senate, the upper house of the French parliament.

It will be a moment of truth for her, who in May 2021 became the first woman head of the Louvre, a world-famous museum that welcomed nine million visitors in 2024, 80 percent of whom were foreigners.

According to the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, de Carr submitted her resignation after the theft, but it was not accepted and received the support of President Emmanuel Macron. The Louvre, contacted by Agence France-Presse, declined to comment on these statements.

De Carre is expected to be questioned about security conditions in the Apollo Room that houses the Crown’s royal collection of jewels and diamonds, which numbers some 800 pieces.

The doors to the hall remain closed today, with three grey signs blocking the view and Louvre staff demanding that visitors continue on their way.

Speaking to MPs, Minister Rashida Dati ruled out any possibility “that there is a security vulnerability inside the museum as the mechanisms “worked”. Instead, he questioned the lack of security “on the public road” that allowed the burglars to install a lift and enter through a window.

A right-wing candidate for the Paris city council in municipal elections next March, she admitted that “she has for too long underestimated the security of works of art“. “We have further reduced the safety of the public,” he said.

In a preliminary report consulted by Agence France-Presse the day before yesterday, Monday, the Court of Auditors, which controls the use of public money, cited “delays in the deployment of equipment intended to ensure the protection of works” at the museum.

Laurence de Carr has long experience in museums. Before the Louvre, this expert on 19th- and early 20th-century art was president of the Parisian Orsay Museum, as well as the Orangerie Museum, which exhibits Impressionist and post-Impressionist art, including Monet’s huge Nymphéas.