This is the kind of news we would happily do without. Six months before the Olympic Games, the Louvre is preparing to drastically increase its entrance ticket. If the smartest among us were in the habit of reserving their place online at a lower cost (15 euros all the same), they will now have to pay the modest sum of 22 euros to afford the luxury of discovering the most visited the world. A dizzying increase of 29% for the on-site price which is making the art world cringe. However, we could have sworn that this company was not experiencing the crisis with its 8 million annual visitors...

Certainly, the museum had not increased its prices since 2017. In the meantime, we have nevertheless experienced two global health crises and are currently going through one of the most difficult episodes of inflation in recent years. Suffice it to say that this increase comes at a bad time for most French people. How then can we explain this extraordinary surge in prices at such a critical period? Energy, electricity, the cost of infrastructure to which is added the desire to regulate the flow of visitors by not exceeding the threshold of 30,000 heads per day... The drop in the number of daily visitors therefore accompanies this increase inevitable of the entrance ticket although its ticketing would only cover a quarter of its operating costs, the rest being financed by credits from the Ministry of Culture and by other resources, including patronage.

The Parisian institution also defended itself by recalling in a press release that “more than one in two French visitors enter the Louvre for free”. This measure concerns those under 26, the unemployed, beneficiaries of minimum social benefits, disabled people and accompanying persons, teachers, cultural professionals and journalists. For others, the pill is unfortunately a little harder to swallow.