The French president Emmanuel Macron has announced the appointments of new leaders for two of France’s most important museums. Today (25 February) Christophe Léribault, the current president of the Palace of Versailles, has been named the president and director of the Musée du Louvre following the resignation of director Laurence des Cars yesterday (24 February) in the wake of the heist and ticketing scandal at the museum. Annick Lemoine, the current director of the Petit Palais, will take over the role of president at the Musée d’Orsay, which has been vacant since the sudden death of Sylvain Amic in August. Both appointments were proposed by the French culture minister Rachida Dati, who is expected to leave the government this week to campaign for the post of Paris mayor in March.
Léribault’s first mission, according to Macron, will be the “appeasement” of a museum which has been badly hurt by the theft of France’s crown jewels on 19 October and a string of scandals since then. He will need all his diplomatic talents to face the unions, who have led an unprecedented series of strikes, asking a rise in wages, but also to decide what to do about Des Cars’s ambitious plan of a new entrance and issues around the museum’s ageing infrastructure. Just before her departure, Des Cars presented a budget to the board, planning to spend €100m in preliminary studies for this controversial scheme, and only €17m on technical masterplans.
Léribault, 62, dedicated his PhD thesis to the painter Jean-François de Troy (1679-1752), on whom he published a monograph in 2002. He started as a curator at the Musée Carnavalet in 1990. In 2006, he joined the drawings department of the Louvre and became director of Paris’s small Delacroix Museum, located in the artist’s workshop. In 2012, he was promoted to the head of the Paris Fine Arts Museum in the Petit Palais. In 2021, he was appointed president of the Musée d’Orsay, when Des Cars left to head the Louvre. He did not stay long; less than two and half years later, he moved to the Château de Versailles, which Catherine Pégard had to leave because of an age limit. Pégard became the culture advisor of Macron and is now the most likely candidate to replace Dati as culture minister.
Lemoine, 56, is a specialist in European painting of the 17th and 18th centuries. Like Léribault, she comes from the Paris city museums, where she was in charge of the 18th-century Musée Cognacq-Jay collection, before replacing Léribault in 2022 at the Petit Palais. Lemoine wrote her PhD thesis on Nicolas Régnier and has staged critically acclaimed exhibitions including The Baroque Underworld: Vice and Poverty in Rome at the Villa Médicis and the Petit Palais, in 2014 and 2015, and Valentin de Boulogne at the Louvre in 2017. She was in charge of the art history department at the French Academy in Rome from 2010 to 2015, and the annual art history festival in Fontainebleau from 2015 to 2018.
