The French Culture Minister called for tougher sentences for art vandals today after a group of intruders broke into a Paris museum and attacked one of Claude Monet’s masterpieces.

Five apparently drunk people broke into the Musée d’Orsay early on Sunday morning and punched a 10cm (4inch) tear in Le Pont d'Argenteuil by the Impressionist painter.

Christine Albanel said that after a spate of crimes against art in France it was time to introduce harsher penalties.

“It was a pure act of vandalism,” the Culture Minister told France Inter radio. “It would be good a thing to increase the sanctions for (people who vandalise) a church, a museum, a monument, because they are attacking our history.

“It’s always a heartbreak when an art object that is our memory, our heritage, that we love and that we are proud of is victim of a purely criminal act.

“We know there were four or five people, likely four boys and a girl, who entered around midnight to 1 am, broke a door that was perhaps fragile. . . It appears they were drunk.”

The minister said that Le Pont d’Argenteuil, which was painted in 1874, would be restored successfully, but suggested that the Government should help to improve museum security across France.

A security camera showed the intruders breaking into a back door of the museum. An alarm was triggered and guards arrived eventually, but not before the painting was torn and the gang were able to escape.

The footage suggests that far from a crack team of international art thieves, the group were able to break into one of the world's leading galleries on a whim after a night of drinking.

The attack came during Paris’s “Nuit Blanche”, an all-night arts festival that took on a new intensity this year as it followed France’s unexpected victory against New Zealand in the rugby World Cup.

The Musée d’Orsay, located on the Left Bank of the Seine, was not one of the institutions taking part in the celebrations.

Le Pont d’Argenteuil shows sailboats moored in front of a bridge over the River Seine, west of Paris. It was hung on the ground floor in the midst of France’s largest collection of late 19th and early 20th-century art.

The latest attack comes after a series of incidents in which art has been damaged in France. On Thursday a woman is due to go on trial for leaving a bright red lipstick smudge on a work hanging in Avignon.

Sam Rindy claims that she kissed the bright white painting by Cy Twombly, a US artist, in an act of love not vandalism.

In February a man claiming to be a performance artist was given a suspended prison sentence for attacking the surrealist work Fountain with a hammer. The ceramic urinal by French-US artist Marcel Duchamp was exhibited across Paris at the Pompidou Centre.

Security measures were also found wanting in Nice, when Monet’s Cliffs near Dieppe was among four paintings stolen from a museum in August. A month later valuable plates and chalices were taken from a cathedral in Perpignan.

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