The Bastille Opera, a lyric flagship inaugurated in 1989 for the bicentenary of the French Revolution, is found at the heart of a parliamentary offensive led by the National Rally. On June 24, 2025, two deputies of the Party of Marine Le Pen officially seized the Minister of Culture on the worrying state of the building and the governance of the Paris National Opera.
Caroline Colombier (Charente) and Sébastien Chenu (North) both point to a budgetary drift and a manifest failure in the maintenance of this public building. In question: an alarming diagnosis delivered in May by the Minister of Culture itself before the Finance Committee, reporting on serious structural risks and explicitly evoking the possibility of a collapse of the scene. The forecast invoice for the renovation amounts to 400 million euros, out of a total of 600 million by 2037 if we include the work planned at the Palais Garnier, at the Berthier workshops and the dance school according to the Northern deputy.
In her written question, Caroline Colombier recalls that the Bastille Opera has already cost 784 million euros to its construction and that, despite nearly 100 million euros in annual state subsidy, “Maintenance, maintenance or technical monitoring devices have not made it possible to anticipate the observed disorders”. It demands the opening of an administrative inquiry to identify the responsibilities in the degradation of the site, as well as the examination of alternative scenarios, as “Reconstruction or relocation” (sic), from the Bastille opera before validating an expense of such magnitude.
Sébastien Chenu, himself a lover of lyrical art, is mainly worried about the calendar: the work should only start in 2030, leaving still five years of operating under duress, at the risk of endangering personal and spectators. He wonders about the lack of technical alert and the financial and ethical guarantees surrounding the use of patronage. He wishes to understand “How such a national monument could be left without sufficient technical supervision to the point of requiring today a site of such considerable scale”.
Several technical expertise have confirmed the state of advanced dilapidation of the building. The glass and steel complex, designed by the architect Carlos OTT, suffers in particular from structural pathologies and failures in its technical systems. The Court of Auditors had already alerted in 2024 to the excessive energy consumption of the building and the degradation of its equipment.
The Paris National Opera provides for a gradual closure of Bastille from 2030, with a programming maintained at the Palais Garnier and in partner places.
