The Last Time the Louvre Was Robbed

The Louvre originated as a late-12th-century fortress built to protect the French capital from English invasion. But though the iconic museum was initially constructed as a building meant to safeguard and fortify the area, thieves have managed to get through its defenses on a number of occasions and carry off priceless works of art.

The most well-known of these historic heists is perhaps the 1911 theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which established the painting as a household name. Italian handyman Vincenzo Peruggia was ultimately caught trying to sell the painting 28 months later, and it returned to the Louvre in 1914.

It remains to be seen whether the most recent robbery at the museum, during which a band of thieves stole French jewels of “inestimable value,” will end in a similar restoration. The last one hasn’t: Nearly 25 years after a thief absconded with Jean Baptiste Camille Corot’s Le Chemin de Sèvres in 1998, the 19th-century landscape painting still hasn’t been recovered.

The theft was the second at the Louvre that year. Months after a Greek artifact was stolen in January 1998, an unknown person took Corot’s small painting, which measured around 13 by 19 inches, from its frame in broad daylight on May 3. While the police blocked museum exits for nearly three hours to search the visitors present on that Sunday, the thief still escaped.

Investigators searched for fingerprints on the frame and glass that was left behind. At the time, authorities said that the artwork’s small size made it easy to hide. They believed that the painting, valued at an estimated $1.3 million, was eventually traded or stolen on the black market. 

The 1990s overall marked a critical point for the museum. Years before the Corot painting was stolen, after museum staffers announced in July 1990 that a dozen Egyptian artifacts had been missing for multiple days, Michel Laclotte, the then-Louvre director, declared a crisis in France, per the Washington Post. Other French museums reportedly faced similar robberies. 

Laclotte said that the Louvre would increase its security budget in 1991 by 10 million francs. But years later, a museum spokesperson said in 1998 that a lack of funding had prevented the Louvre from adding television surveillance cameras into all of its many corridors and rooms. The Corot painting, he said, was in a room without cameras.

The May 1998 theft prompted the museum to take stricter security measures, however. And though the stolen landscape hasn’t been found, the museum did go decades without another heist—until Sunday.