Last Sunday, four offenders executed a meticulously planned theft of some of France’s last remaining crown jewels in just a few minutes. Using a basket lift and disc cutter, they broke into the Louvre Museum through a window, smashed display cases, and vanished with eight pieces of historic jewelry, including tiaras, necklaces, and brooches once belonging to Queen Marie-Amélie, Queen Hortense, and Empress Eugénie. These 19th-century jewels survived revolutions and restorations alike, until now.
The thieves left a single earring of the sapphire set behind in the ornately decorated Galerie d’Apollon, while Empress Eugénie’s crown was discovered damaged by the side of the road, seemingly dropped during their getaway.
The Louvre, the world’s most visited museum, remained closed on Sunday and Monday due to what it called “exceptional reasons.” France’s specialized Central Office for the Fight against Trafficking of Cultural Property (OCBC) and the Paris Prosecutor’s Office have launched investigations, and the stolen jewels were added to INTERPOL’s Stolen Works of Art database.
The Galerie d’Apollon at the Louvre Museum (photo by Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images)
This is not the Louvre’s first jewelry heist, or even its first break-in, underscoring that prestige alone cannot substitute for proper security. In a cultural landscape weakened by years of austerity, this preventable theft is a symptom of systemic neglect.
It was, in many ways, the perfect storm. CCTV in a third of the galleries was not working. New display cases, designed to improve preservation, had just been installed with fewer integrated security measures. Ongoing renovation plans exposed structural vulnerabilities, and museum staff, strained by years of mass tourism pressures and chronic underfunding, had repeatedly gone on strike. An anonymous Louvre security worker attributed the heist to obsolete equipment and drastic budget cuts, concerns long raised through the union. This was confirmed in a recent French Court of Auditors report that found security at the Louvre to be outdated, with a significant number of rooms lacking video surveillance and persistent delays in updating security systems. In a confidential memo sent to the Culture Minister in January, Louvre President Laurence des Cars warned about “worrying levels of obsolescence.” On top of this, the stolen jewels were not privately insured. The Louvre, like so many major institutions, is stretched perilously thin.
Securing historic monuments that double as museums is undeniably complex. Amid heightened concerns over visitors using artworks for political statements, as with the infamous climate protest “soupings” of recent years, security likely focused its attention on pat-downs and bag checks while the museum’s perimeters remained undersecured.
The case containing the French crown jewels in the Galerie d’Apollon, which was broken into on Sunday (© 2020 Musée du Louvre; photo by Antoine Mongodin)
Some fear that rising gold prices motivated the theft. The Louvre robbery is the latest in a string of high-value jewelry and gold thefts from museums across Europe, including the theft of gold samples from the Paris Natural History Museum in September, the theft of an 18-karat gold toilet from Blenheim Palace in the UK in February, golden Dacian treasures stolen from the Drents Museum in the Netherlands in January, and the 2019 jewelry heist at the Green Vault of Dresden’s Royal Palace in Germany. If rising gold and gemstone prices motivated the theft, it is highly unlikely that the jewels will ever be recovered, as they will almost certainly be broken apart or melted down and sold piecemeal.
The stolen jewels are more than iconic objects of immense socio-cultural, historic, and economic value. They are also products of a long history of colonial extraction. The sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, pearls, and other gemstones they contained were mined across Asia, Africa, and South America. These regions were systematically exploited for their cultural and natural resources to enrich European courts and empires. For example, Empress Eugénie’s diadem is set with 3,007 diamonds and 212 pearls. Now largely depleted through centuries of overharvesting, these natural pearls would have come from the Persian Gulf or Indian Ocean. Fueled by slavery, French colonial outposts and broader European networks funnelled such valuable resources to royal courts and elite collectors, where they were transformed into symbols of wealth and power.
Though still celebrated as emblems of national prestige today, these objects carry with them a history of exploitation, colonization, and violence. Their display in the Louvre is inseparable from these broader legacies of empire. This heist is heartbreaking for France, just as generations of origin communities have long suffered the looting and exploitation of their cultural and natural heritage.
The diadem of Empress Eugénie is set with 3,007 diamonds and 212 pearls from the Persian Gulf or Indian Ocean. (© 2015 GrandPalaisRmn, musée du Louvre; photo by Stéphane Maréchalle)
Sunday’s theft has reignited urgent questions about how, and why, museums protect their collections. Effective heritage protection requires sustained government investment, specialized law enforcement, and cross-sector collaboration. Emerging forms of art crime cannot be countered with upgraded cameras and alarms alone; they call for more proactive commitment to institutional stewardship.
Part of that stewardship demands an ethical reckoning: a willingness to ask whether these objects should still be here at all. We need a more pragmatic, realistic approach to museum ownership and collection retention. We cannot and should not hold onto everything in our museum collections, particularly when the original owners are ready and able to take ownership of their own heritage, as exemplified by enslaved Dahomey court artist Akati Ekplékendo’s 1858 sculpture of the Vodún deity Gou, which Benin has repeatedly requested back yet is still exhibited in the Louvre’s Pavillion des Sessions. France has overall made very limited progress in living up to its own restitution guidelines and repatriation promises since President Emmanuel Macron made his vow to return colonial-looted cultural objects back in 2017.
The erosion of cultural stewardship under the weight of bureaucracy, spectacle, and historical amnesia has exposed a deeper illusion: that Western museums can indefinitely guard what was never truly theirs. It is an assumption they have long relied upon, one now cracking under the pressure of public scrutiny and historical reckoning. In an age when empires are being re-examined and calls for repatriation are growing louder, not every cultural object can, or should, remain behind glass.
