AFTER THE SIGNING of the Munich Agreement, the Louvre’s art had returned to its galleries along with museumgoers and seeming normality, but behind the scenes, the museum administration intensified efforts to prepare for war. The Louvre’s head architect had envisioned several huge bomb shelters under the building to protect not only museum personnel but also the administrative staff of the Musées Nationaux headquartered in the palace and the staff and students of the École du Louvre, a training ground for curators and those in related disciplines. Underground rooms were dug, walls erected and the whole of it strengthened by a forest of metal reinforcing bars.
In the basements and storerooms stood wagons and baskets ready to move items and huge wooden cylinders on which to roll the largest paintings. Storerooms were also filled with huge quantities of packing material—special paper, cotton batting and other padding—plus ladders, tools and nails for securing the crates, and other supplies. Two thousand crates had been ordered for the 1938 evacuation, though only a small number of them had been used for the quickly aborted operation. In anticipation of a much larger evacuation, the museum administration ordered thousands more crates and additional packing materials. When there was no more room in storage areas, crates sat openly in the exhibition galleries, a reminder that all was not business as usual.
For works that could not be evacuated, specialists examined ways to reduce humidity levels in basement rooms and determined the resistance of walls to potential direct bomb strikes and the permeability of rooms to gas attacks. The museum purchased almost a million sandbags to protect windows and artworks that were to remain on site and assessed the quantity and location of sandbags and sand supplies to battle fires from a bomb hit; especially vulnerable were the museum’s ancient wooden roof beams.
The curators devised ways to pack and transport the large paintings and redesigned the baskets and wagons to speed the movement of paintings from gallery to staging areas. The staff codified a labeling system for crates to identify their contents. Each crate would have the initials “MN” for Musées Nationaux, plus several letters indicating the department of the museum, among them LP for the Louvre’s Paintings Department, LR for the Greek and Roman Antiquities and LB for the contents of the library and archives. Each crate was also assigned a unique number.
Curators refined priority lists and evacuation routes within the museum and assigned teams of people to specific sectors. Workers carefully measured the dimensions of each item as well as the elevators and stairways, in order to match items to evacuation routes. They also held practice drills to be sure that, in the case of a bomb alert, the major works could be immediately rushed to the basements.
The museum administration hired specialized workers, including professional packers, movers and woodworkers and searched for volunteers, knowing that staffing would be difficult as men went to war. The museum’s administrators were also painfully aware that it would be difficult to obtain enough vehicles because the best ones would be requisitioned for military duty. Planners searched for large capacity trucks designed to expedite smooth loading and unloading, ideally enclosed ones that would hide contents from curious eyes and protect the works in case of rain. But such vehicles would be hard to come by; the museum would have to settle, in part, for openback trucks and tarps to cover the crates. For months, they searched for vehicles and negotiated contracts for their use. Meanwhile, they continued to evaluate the possibility of water transport.
Successfully developing and coordinating all these arrangements under difficult circumstances and inspiring commitment and solidarity from the entire staff, from guards to curators, would require the multi-faceted talents of an extraordinary person. Though nobody could know it yet, protecting the collections in the years to come would also require unfathomable energy, nerves of steel and an unwavering will to do the right thing. In fact, the Musées Nationaux had such a person in Jacques Jaujard, its deputy director, a man who, unlike virtually every other senior person in the Musées Nationaux administration, had no art or art history training or experience before he came aboard in 1926. Instead, he had been an insurance salesman and then a journalist who dreamed of being a man of letters. Yet by 1933, the finely dressed, usually quite serious and always quite private Jaujard was made deputy director of the Musées Nationaux and by 1939 he had been handed the lead role in preparing the museums for war. Jaujard would be appointed acting director in December 1939 and director in September 1940 at age 44. By early 1939, he was already known for his diplomacy. In the years to come, the unlikely hero would become known for far more.
JACQUES JAUJARD
In March 1939, Hitler seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia and by early summer it was clear that Poland was next. By mid-July, France’s ambassador to Germany had repeatedly warned the French Foreign Minister of “Germany’s obvious preparations for the possibility of an impending war … and to be prepared for any eventually from August onwards.” By the first days of August, with tension in the air throughout Europe, the Louvre had begun final preparations for war.
Horse-drawn wagons pulled up alongside the museum to unload piles of wood fiber for packing. In the Tuileries Garden adjacent to the museum, workers dug trenches for some of the outdoor sculptures. Other workers yet again piled sandbags in front of many of the Louvre’s windows. They also laid thousands more sandbags across the floors of the attics, placed stocks of sand everywhere and tested fire extinguishers. By August 5, every department had portable electric lamps, gas masks and pharmacy supplies in case of an enemy attack while the staff were preparing the collections. A watchtower was in place atop the roof of the Salon Carré—the room next to the Grande Galerie’s eastern end where the Mona Lisa was displayed until World War I; from the roof, firemen could keep a lookout for falling projectiles.
By early August, Jaujard faced a serious shortage of vehicles for the evacuation. Though he had estimated that thirty vehicles were critical, to be used in multiple waves of convoys, military authorities informed him that they could only cede seventeen. Then he learned that five of the seventeen had been requisitioned, leaving him with only twelve. Though he quickly signed contracts with the owners of the twelve trucks—and soon with some others—he knew the measures could be for naught if the owners themselves were called up for military duty. By the time of the evacuation, he would successfully beg and borrow additional trucks.
WORKERS PROTECTING LOUVRE WINDOWS AS WAR APPROACHES
After the many years of preparing, revising and prioritizing lists of the items to be evacuated, final lists were made, reflecting almost 4,000 paintings and many thousands of sculptures, antiquities and objets d’art. Each item was quickly tagged with a colored sticker, part of the plan arranged years before: red for top priority, green for the most significant among the rest and yellow for lower priority works. The fifty or so most prestigious works received two red stickers. Mona Lisa alone received three stickers. Staff were trained in meticulous procedures for removing artwork from walls. Instructions indicated when two or more workers were needed for removal and provided that paintings should face the wall as they were set down and, above all, never to lay a painting flat on the ground. Not only could they be damaged by nearby tools, nails and other evacuation supplies but in the rush, anyone might lose their balance and step right into the middle of a masterpiece.
Final security plans for the transport were also in place. Each convoy would be accompanied by two senior staff members of the Musées Nationaux, one preceding the convoy and the other following, both in passenger vehicles. Armed guards would be aboard the vehicles and police on motorcycles would escort each convoy.
Late on August 23, Germany and the USSR signed a non-aggression pact. At day’s end on August 24, London’s museums closed and began their evacuation preparations. On Friday August 25, Great Britain and Poland concluded a pact of mutual assistance; it meant that war was imminent. At 5 p.m. that day, the Louvre received the long-awaited order: Start packing.