The major French museums feared low attendance because of the Olympics. Finally, they show almost stable attendance figures for 2024, and sometimes even increasing, in particular thanks to the presence of numerous foreign tourists in the spring and during the Christmas holidays. As if the publicity given to the capital during the Olympic and Paralympic Games, combined with the reopening of Notre-Dame at the beginning of December, had finally boosted tourism at the end of the year.
The Louvre thus received 8.7 million visitors in 2024, a drop of only 3% compared to 2023. In July and August, this drop was more marked (– 14%) but the great national museum is delighted to having benefited from exceptional media visibility thanks to the passage of the Olympic flame and the presence, in its Tuileries garden, of the Olympic cauldron. Among its 77% of foreign visitors, Americans are the most numerous (13%), ahead of the Chinese (6%) who, after having been almost absent since the pandemic, are making a significant return.
Attendance on the rise at Versailles and the Center Pompidou
Same observation at the Palace of Versailles, which shows attendance for 2024 up 5% compared to 2023, with a total of 8.4 million visits. Foreigners represent 83% of the public welcomed, with Americans in the lead (15%), ahead of Italians and Chinese (6% for each of their two nationalities).
With 4.95 million visitors in 2024, down 3% compared to 2023, the Orsay and Orangerie Museums also ended the year with an honorable score, despite a sharp summer slowdown. The successes of his exhibitions “Paris 1874. Inventing Impressionism” and currently “Caillebotte. Painting Men”, attracted a large audience in particular.
The Center Pompidou welcomed 3.2 million visitors in 2024, or 22% more than in 2023 when the museum suffered from several days of strike. The success of major exhibitions devoted to Brancusi, comics and especially surrealism (already more than 520,000 visitors) explains these good figures.
More impacted by access restrictions during the Olympics, the museums of the city of Paris recorded a slight decline in their attendance with 4.8 million visitors (– 8.5%). A notable exception, the Petit Palais – which stood out for its original programming, including currently the rich Ribera retrospective – ended the year with record attendance with 1.46 million visitors.
30,000 to 35,000 visitors per day at Notre-Dame de Paris
Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral has logically attracted crowds since its reopening on December 7, with between 30,000 and 35,000 visitors per day. The most motivated sometimes had to wait up to three hours on the square before being able to enter, as online reservations were quickly taken by storm. With the end of the school holidays, The Cross was able to see that slots were again available from January 6 to 8. The diocese also recommends that visitors who have not been able to reserve a (free) ticket try their luck on site in the morning (between 7:45 a.m. and 9 a.m.) and in the evening (between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m.), when the crowds is less.
Finally, in the regions, the Fontainebleau estate also achieved record success with 1.85 million entries (+4%), while the Château de Chambord welcomed 1.18 million visitors (+3%). . The Center for National Monuments, which manages around a hundred monuments and gardens throughout the country, is delighted, for its part, to have totaled more than 11 million entries across its entire network for the second consecutive year. If access restrictions during the Olympic Games penalized certain monuments during the summer, others took advantage of the passage of the Olympic flame which highlighted them: the basilica of Saint-Denis, the Château d’If (promoted also by the film Le Comte de Monte Cristo) and the castles and ramparts of Carcassonne. As for the International City of the French Language at the Château de Villers-Cotterêts, inaugurated in October 2023, it received 260,000 visitors in 2024.
