—
## The Louvre After 1914
The Louvre that the Mona Lisa returned to in January 1914 was an institution in the process of examining what had gone wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.
The specific institutional responses are not all well documented from this period, and the more significant security improvements came incrementally across the following decades rather than in a dramatic post-theft reform. What is known is that the museum reviewed its procedures for accounting for the presence of major works, its systems for tracking workers and authorized personnel, and its physical security arrangements for the most significant objects in its collection.
The coming of the First World War, which began in August 1914 — just months after the painting’s return — meant that the Louvre, like all French cultural institutions, shifted its concerns entirely. The question of protecting major works from wartime hazards — bombing, looting, occupation — was entirely different from and more urgent than the question of protecting them from individual theft. Many of the Louvre’s most significant works were evacuated from Paris during the First World War as a precaution.
The cycle repeated in the Second World War, when the Louvre’s director, Jacques Jaujard, organized one of the largest and most systematic evacuations of a museum collection in history, moving works to châteaux in the Loire Valley and other protected locations before the German occupation of Paris. The Mona Lisa was among the works evacuated, eventually spending the war years moved periodically among several locations in the south of France.