Ministers have called for tougher penalties for art vandals after drunken intruders broke into a Paris museum and punched a hole in a celebrated work by Claude Monet.

The incident, which happened at about midnight on Saturday at the Musée d’Orsay – home to the main Impressionist collection in France - also prompted demands for tighter security to protect museums and monuments. There has been a rash of vandalism to artworks and theft from galleries and churches in recent years.

Police are using extensive security camera pictures to identify the four men and a woman who appear to have entered the museum on a whim after they rattled a door on the Seine embankment and the lock gave way. Paris was celebrating France’s rugby victory over New Zealand and an allnight arts festival at the time.

Inside, they “left a lot of mess”, according to Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister. When alarms sounded they panicked and on the way out one of the men put his fist through Monet’s Le Pont d’Argenteuil.

A four-inch (10cm) gash now disfigures the delicate oil of sailing boats on the Seine, which Monet painted in 1874 and displayed that year in the first exhibition of the school that was disparagingly dubbed Impressionism.

Ms Albanel, who was curator of the Château de Versailles until President Sarkozy appointed her to his Cabinet in May, said: “This is a mindless . . . attack on our memory, our heritage. A flaw in the security system during closed hours enabled them to commit this act of stupid vandalism.”

The museum was confident that the Monet, which was donated by a collector to the Louvre museum in 1937, could be restored, but Ms Albanel called on the Justice Ministry to consider a new law with strong penalties for damaging artworks and national treasures. “We shall have to see how to raise the penalties for intrusion into museums, churches and monuments,” she said. “The worst thing is letting people think they can get away with it scot-free.”

Recent incidents have pointed to lax security at museums and new risks to churches. Today a woman is to appear in court for painting a lipstick kiss on a picture by Cy Twombly, the American painter, in Avignon in July. Last month thieves pillaged the Cathedral of St John the Baptist in Perpignan, making off with almost all its liturgical treasures. In August an armed gang broke into the Jules Cheret museum in Nice and stole four paintings by Monet, Alfred Sisley and Jan Breughel the Elder.

In February a performance artist was given a suspended prison term for attacking a Surrealist work in the form of a men’s urinal by Marcel Duchamp at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Last year the centre had to apologise and pay damages to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art after two contemporary works were accidentally destroyed while on loan to Paris.

How to impress

When Le Pont d’Argenteuil was first shown in the Nadar gallery on the Boulevard des Capucines in 1874 the critics mocked it as a pretentious mess by newfangled modern artists. One contemporary Paris newspaper described how to paint like an Impressionist: “Dirty three quarters of a canvas with black and white, rub the rest with yellow, dot it with red and blue blobs at random, and you will have an impression of spring before which the initiates will swoon in ecstasy.”

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