French police officers stand in front of the Louvre Museum after robbery, in Paris yesterday. Robbers broke into the Louvre and fled with jewellery on a scooter. They used a goods lift to reach the room they were targeting. Photo / Dimitar Dilkoff, AFP
A cherry-picker, a hole cut through glass, and a smash-and-grab raid on the French crown jewels ending in a frantic escape by scooter.
The theft at the Louvre – which took just seven minutes from start to finish – had the ingredients of the kind of classic heist long immortalised in films and novels.
On their way out of the museum, the team of thieves dropped the crown of Empress Eugenie, Napoleon’s wife, which was fashioned from 1354 diamonds and 56 emeralds.
Some French politicians appeared almost swept-up in the audacity of the operation – recalling the example of the country’s most famous gentleman thief.
“It’s clear that we’re dealing with Arsene Lupin,” said Ariel Weil, the Socialist mayor of central Paris, referring to the fictional creation of Maurice LeBlanc, whose exploits inspired a Netflix series. “Up until now, it’s been a film script.”
The reality is grubbier, and less romantic.
France has become the global hotspot for organised crime gangs that seek to exploit the lax security around its vast array of historical treasures.
With every fresh raid – and there have been several major thefts within the past year – the idealistic vision of a society that expects people to admire the art it contains (and not steal it, break it down, and sell it) suffers a further blow.
Interpol lists France and Italy as the two nations most at risk of art theft, reflecting their long line of native geniuses, overcrowded museums, and acquisitive colonial history.
France has surged ahead in recent years.
Of the 60 major incidents of global art theft catalogued in Le Journal des Arts since 2009, almost half (27) have occurred within the country – a notable increase on previous decades.
In 1995, the Louvre was the victim of three thefts, but each was small in scale and possibly opportunistic.
A halberd was stolen, then a painting of a deer, and lastly a 17th century pastel.
But the robbers who broke into the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery were using a template that has become familiar from the spate of more recent raids.
The thieves operated in broad daylight, sawing into the display cases housing the Crown Jewels while wearing hoods and high-visibility jackets – the latter perhaps intended to mislead the bemused visitors standing nearby.
In the past six weeks alone, one gang stole €700,000 of gold from the National History Museum using blow torches and angle-grinders.
Another made off with €9 million ($18m) worth of Chinese porcelain from the Adrien-Dubouche Museum in the city of Limoges.
The director of the National History Museum said France was facing a “critical time for cultural institutions and museums”, citing the surge in theft.
Emile Roger Lombertie, the Mayor of Limoges, speculated that “collectors are giving orders to steal these items and are turning to high-level criminals”.
The United Kingdom has been caught up in the crime spree.
In November 2024, four thieves wearing helmets and wielding axes and baseball bats stole snuff boxes and other treasures from the Cognacq-Jay Museum in Paris, again working in broad daylight.
Two of the stolen items were on loan from the Royal Collection Trust, which received a £3m insurance payout.
The same month, gangsters fired warning shots into the air before dismembering the centrepiece of the Musee du Hieron in eastern France, Joseph Chaumet’s 1904 Via Vitae, and making off with jewels and statuettes worth roughly €6m.
Security guards at museums can appear almost as decorative as the works on the walls – and perhaps even rarer.
In the Limoges heist, they rang the alarm but by the time police arrived the suspects had escaped (and still have not been apprehended).
Less than 10% of stolen artworks are ever recovered, according to a variety of international estimates.
The five masterpieces stolen by Vjeran Tomic, the so-called “French Spiderman”, from the Musee D’Art Moderne in 2010 are among the most famous works of art now deprived from the public eye.
Tomic, who began an eight-year sentence for the thefts in 2017, said he took paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Modigliani because he “liked them”.
Openly comparing himself to Lupin, the Paris-born climber cast his burglaries in mystical, reverential tones in an interview with the New Yorker from his jail cell.
He left Modigliani’s Woman with Blue Eyes because: “it told me ‘if you take me you will regret it the rest of your life’.”
A wannabe-artist, Tomic’s thefts shared some of the elements of a Lupin story, Franck Johannes, a Le Monde journalist, told the magazine. “A spectacular robbery, perfectly organised, without violence, by a sort of artist.”
The French people retained a “certain sympathy for those who disrupt the established order”, Johannes added.
That sympathy may be running thin, given the surge in professional theft that appears to see little difference between snatching the jewels off the neck of Kim Kardashian or the historic crown of Empress Eugenie.
When a Louvre employee stole the Mona Lisa in 1911 – mistakenly believing it had been looted from Italy by Napoleon – more people came to see the empty space than were drawn to the painting itself.
Beset by political crisis, it now falls to Emmanuel Macron, the French President, to try and stop the gradual erosion of the state’s control on its most prized possessions – an unfortunate echo of his own loss of authority.
Rachida Dati, the Minister of Culture, noted yesterday that the Louvre’s president asked police for a security audit in 2023 to help the museum adapt to the “new form of organised crime”.
In June, several months after Macron promised a €700m refurbishment, staff went on strike over what they said was dangerous overcrowding.
Can the man sometimes mocked as mini-emperor recover the Crown Jewels and stabilise the ship of state?
At the moment, both feel out of hand.
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.