Are Parisian museums overheating?

8.7 million admissions to the Louvre, 4.9 for Orsay and the Orangerie, 3.2 for Pompidou: in 2024, the major Parisian museums will be full. But these figures are also synonymous with overcrowding of infrastructures.

Lhe Olympic Games ultimately did not have that much impact on attendance at major Parisian museums. At the Louvre, attendance, like that of the Musée d'Orsay, remained stable in 2024 (with 8.7 and 4.9 million visitors respectively). But these ever-higher figures, evidence of worrying overcrowding, are not necessarily encouraging. The Louvre has implemented a daily capacity of 30,000 tickets in order to make the public's journey more fluid, but visitors remain focused on the signposted path towards the museum's iconic work, the Mona Lisa, at the cost of a degraded quality of visit. At the Louvre, the masterpiece can be discovered at this price.

At the head of the museum, Laurence des Cars knows that flow management, costly in terms of personnel and infrastructure, is a major issue. Closed rooms, overused sanitary facilities, exhaustion of surveillance staff: in addition to these consequences, overcrowding weighs on the wear and tear of the historic building of the Palais du Louvre. “Our ambition is to protect […] an encounter rich in meaning and pleasure with our collections and this monument like no other. Over the coming years, we will continue to deploy our efforts to invent new paths to the works of the Louvre and the Tuileries gardens,” explains the president and director in a press release. One of these new paths could be that of the opening of the colonnade of Perrault, to the east of the palace. This project, desired for several years, is still awaiting arbitration from the Élysée and the support of very generous patrons. The work, necessarily expensive, could however decongest the flows currently too large to be supported by the entrance to the pyramid alone.

Floors wear out…

On the other bank, in Orsay, the 2024 figures are all as good, or worse, depending on the perspective chosen. With 794,000 visitors for “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise. In recent months, the museum has reached historic temporary exhibition attendance. That is to say a daily gauge of 7,000 visitors per day, a not very encouraging figure, as highlighted in an article on the site The Conversation, which generates altered visiting conditions, where the aesthetic experience rhymes with forced promiscuity. As for Versailles, whose attendance figures have not yet been released, even the Court of Auditors was already worried in 2023 about overcrowding in terms of“wear and tear of heritage […], and overall comfort of visit. A vast construction site also awaits Christophe Leribault, appointed head of the castle in 2024.

These museums will not be able to do like the Calanques of Marseille, which, to fight against overcrowding, do not hesitate to employ a “demarketing” strategy, and have introduced drastic gauges since 2022. While ticketing revenues have become vital for the economic model of museums, and state funding is decreasing, millions of visitors seem essential to ensure their operation. Except that in the meantime the floors of the palaces are wearing out, like the rocks of the coves.