2024-01-06 16:00:04
The entrance to the Louvre Museum, in Paris, in June 2022. STEFANO RELLANDINI/AFP
Boosted by tourism, French museums and monuments are almost all showing increasing attendance. The Louvre occupies, unsurprisingly, the top of the podium, with 8.9 million visitors in 2023, an increase of 14% compared to 2022, but below the spectacular peaks before Covid-19. The management of the largest museum in the world plans to maintain the level of 30,000 daily visitors in 2024.
The Palace of Versailles is returning to its audience before the Covid-19 pandemic, with 8.1 million entries, including 18% Americans. Same start at the Orsay and Orangerie museums, which have more than 5.1 million visitors, or at the Quai Branly, which recorded an increase of 40% compared to 2022. Record attendance also in the fourteen managed sites by Paris Musées, which welcomed 5.3 million visitors in 2023. The 2,455,663 entries recorded by Universcience, the establishment which covers the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie and the Etincelles space at the Palais de la Découverte, in Paris, finally confirm the French appetite for science.
The smallest Parisian establishments are also doing well. The Montmartre Museum, managed by the private group Kléber Rossillon, shows an astonishing increase of 44% with 180,000 visitors, which is mainly due to the formidable exhibition “Feminine Surrealism? », which recorded more than 110,000 entries in five months.
Great (and good) exhibitions
Because there is no miracle: the big (and good) exhibitions are sold out. Thanks to “Manet/Degas” which, in four months, attracted 669,160 visitors to Orsay, or to the exhibition “Shocking! The surreal worlds of Elsa Schiaparelli”, which garnered more than 330,000 tickets at the Museum of Decorative Arts, or almost half of its audience for the year. The blockbusters “Basquiat × Warhol, à quatre mains” and “Mark Rothko” (which continues until April 2) allowed the Louis Vuitton Foundation to end 2023 with a balance sheet – up – of 1.5 million entries.
The improvement is also confirmed in the region. Opened in June 2022, the Cosquer cave, reconstituted in the Villa Méditerranée, in Marseille, was full with 800,000 visitors. With 555,607 entries, attendance at the Louvre-Lens exceeds the 2019 scores by 4.2%, but marks time compared to its anniversary vintage of 2022. If anniversaries are conducive to rebound, the MuCEM, in Marseille, has moderately benefited from the celebration of its 10th anniversary. The counters at the Marseille museum stabilize at around 1.3 million visitors, most of them attracted by the breathtaking view from the terrace designed by Rudy Ricciotti.
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