PARIS — The world’s most visited museum, the Louvre, shut its doors Monday as workers staged a strike to protest deteriorating labor conditions and what they describe as unmanageable tourist crowds. With banners strung across the museum’s famous glass pyramid and union members chanting beneath it, the closure was less about disruption than about visibility — both theirs and that of a strained cultural institution nearing its tipping point.
At the heart of the protest is a problem that has come to feel almost endemic across European cultural sites: too many tourists, too few protections. According to the CGT-Culture union, the museum welcomes up to 45,000 visitors a day, many of them funneled into narrow galleries not designed to withstand the crush of iPhone flash photography and global selfie diplomacy. “The Louvre is suffocating,” the union declared in a press release, emphasizing a crisis not just of logistics but of care — for the artworks, for the visitors, and especially for the people who work there.
The strike isn’t unprecedented — staff have walked out before, including in 2019, when surging attendance was similarly cited. But this time feels different. It’s not just the crowds, it’s the larger sense that working in a museum — often imagined as a kind of genteel cultural service — has become physically and emotionally untenable. Security personnel, ticket-takers, and gallery attendants are reportedly stretched thin, struggling to monitor the sheer volume of visitors while navigating delayed recruitment and increased demands.
This is, of course, about more than just numbers. The Louvre’s Mona Lisa, perhaps the most visited — and barricaded — artwork in the world, has become a symbol of the disconnect between access and experience. Visitors wait in line for hours only to glimpse the portrait from behind a thick pane of glass, flanked by security and elbowed by strangers. In such conditions, art’s transformative potential is reduced to a bucket-list transaction, and the staff mediating that moment are left to absorb its chaos.
“Preserving the quality of the visitor experience must go hand in hand with respect for the working conditions of staff,” the CGT-Culture union stated, reminding us that cultural institutions are not mere spectacle machines but civic spaces, and that labor is their hidden infrastructure. It’s a sentiment increasingly echoed in museums worldwide, from MoMA to the British Museum, where staff have begun to demand what the art itself cannot: sustainable environments.
For now, tourists milling about the Louvre’s courtyard seem confused, holding tickets they can’t use. But the message is clear. The museum, like many others, is struggling to balance mass appeal with basic functionality. And its workers — often overlooked in favor of masterpieces — are demanding to be seen. Maybe, for once, we should look at them.
