How the Louvre’s heist exposes the cracks in the world’s most secure museum

The Louvre, the world’s most-visited museum in Paris, became the scene of one of the boldest thefts in its long history on Sunday (October 19). At approximately 9.30 a.m., while tourists were filing through its corridors, a team of four intruders executed a daylight raid at the opulent Galerie d’Apollon (the Apollo Gallery), located in the south-east corner of the museum housed in a palace on the banks of River Seine.

Using a truck-mounted basket lift parked on the Seine-facing façade, the thieves ascended to a second-floor window. In a seven-minute strike, they forced the window, smashed vitrines with power tools, threatened guards with angle grinders (no firearms), grabbed a preselected set of crown-jewel pieces, and fled on motorbikes.

The museum shut for the day and about 60 odd investigators were assigned to look into the case which was described by the museum officials as “very professional.” The audacity of the move has stunned observers and art lovers, many of whom wonder how such a theft could be possible inside a museum that, on paper, is among the most secure in the world.

What was stolen

The jewels were linked to Empress Eugénie (Napoleon III’s wife), Marie-Louise (Napoleon’s second wife), Hortense de Beauharnais (Napoleon’s stepdaughter), and Queen Marie-Amélie, the last Queen of France. Eight items were carried off; a ninth (Empress Eugénie’s emerald-and-diamond crown) was dropped and later recovered, damaged. The Regent diamond, the showpiece of the gallery, valued by Sotheby’s at more than $60 million, was left untouched in the same gallery.

The high-value jewel-sets stolen included tiaras, necklaces, earrings and brooches belonging to European imperial and royal households, including pieces worn by Empresses Eugenie and Marie-Louise. The tiara, large brooch and a “reliquary” brooch (a brooch that holds a sacred relic, a symbol of Eugénie’s Catholic faith) is reputedly adorned with nearly 94 diamonds. An emerald necklace and matching earrings from the Marie-Louise set was originally offered to her by Napoleon I at their marriage.

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A sapphire-and-diamond necklace, a single sapphire earring and a tiara belonging to the jewellery set of Queen Marie-Amélie and Queen Hortense (Napoleon’s step-daughter) was among the stolen jewels. The crown of Empress Eugénie, made of gold, emeralds and more than 1,300 diamonds, was also taken but later dropped and broken; it was recovered outside the museum. While public valuation statements varied and many pieces were described as “inestimable” from a heritage-and-culture perspective, independent analysts noted that the most prominent item alone could be worth tens of millions of euros.

A brief history of thefts

The Louvre was founded as a museum in 1793, but its history began much earlier when it was built as a fortress in the late 12th century. It was transformed into a royal palace before becoming a public museum during the French Revolution. And this is not the first time that the thieves made the Louvre its target. The museum has been stolen from again and again, and each time the world acts surprised. In 1911, a house painter named Vincenzo Peruggia walked out of the museum with Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa tucked under his arm, hidden beneath his clothes. For two years, no one knew where she was. The theft made headlines across continents, sent curators into panic, and, paradoxically, turned the painting into the most famous artwork on earth.

Peruggia was caught when he tried to sell it to a gallery in Florence. His excuse was that he wanted to return the painting to Italy, from where Napoleon had “stolen” it centuries ago. The Louvre got its painting back, but the mythology of the Mona Lisa theft became bigger than the theft itself. It taught museums that fame can be a form of risk; the more iconic an artwork becomes, the more it attracts obsession, fixation, and sometimes, crime.

In 1971, the painting The Wave by Gustave Courbet was stolen and remains missing. In the 1990s, one of the more prominent losses was the 1998 theft of Le Chemin de Sèvres by Camille Corot, which has never been found. In 1983, two pieces of 16th-century Renaissance armour were stolen from the museum and only recovered in 2021 after nearly four decades. Although publicly released valuations for each item are rare, analysts treat them as “high value” heritage assets; one expert notes that stolen works from major institutions often recover only about 10 % of their value when sold illicitly.

For decades after the Mona Lisa was recovered, the Louvre tried to project an image of invincibility. The architecture was modernised, cameras multiplied, guards became a permanent part of the museum security apparatus. However, in private reports, French police and heritage agencies kept noting something that we didn’t see: the Louvre, for all its grandeur, was still vulnerable to such crimes.

The anatomy of a heist

If the history of heists at the Louvre is any indication, it’s clear that thieves are often insiders — restorers, technicians, contractors, even guards. They know the blind spots, the timing of patrols, the weak points of storage rooms.In most museums, including the Louvre, security relies on what’s called deterrence theatre: visible guards, CCTV signage, motion sensors that make visitors feel that they are being watched every second. But what actually keeps the art safe are the mundane, often invisible routines: inventory checks, chain-of-custody logs, and digitised databases that track an object’s every move. When those systems break down or get delayed, it creates the kind of gap a thief can slip through.

The Napoleon jewellery theft seems to have exploited exactly that. Reports suggest the pieces disappeared days before anyone noticed, which means the museum’s internal monitoring lagged behind its security technology. Once the museum went public, the police investigation became as much about tracing the artefacts as about tracing accountability: who was in charge, who signed off, and who hesitated to sound the alarm.

This, however, isn’t unique to the Louvre. The British Museum admitted last year that hundreds of items had been missing from its storage for over a decade. Italy’s national galleries have quietly recovered looted or misplaced works every few years. In that sense, the Louvre isn’t exceptional, it’s just too much in the public eye to hide its errors because of its enviable position as the world’s largest museum.

The economy of the untraceable

Now, the question is why do thieves steal from the Louvre at all when they perhaps know well that they can’t sell a stolen artefact from there in any legitimate market? Stolen art works, which lives in a kind of shadow economy, rarely resurface intact. Some end up hidden in private collections, others are sold to underground buyers who care about possession more than provenance. Sometimes they’re dismantled for raw material: melted gold, recut stones, stripped metals. The Napoleonic jewels are a good example. Their true worth has to do with history; once stripped of their context, they become untraceable.

Interpol keeps a record of more than 50,000 stolen artworks, many taken from European museums. Fewer than ten percent have ever been recovered. What makes the Louvre’s losses unique is the symbolism. When Vincenzo Peruggia walked off with the Mona Lisa in 1911, he claimed he was returning it to its rightful home in Italy. A century later, other thieves might not couch their motives in patriotism, but the impulse is similar: to challenge the idea that cultural perfection and control are possible.

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That contradiction runs through everything the Louvre does. Its greatest strength — its openness — is also its biggest risk. Ten million visitors pass through its doors every year. Every corridor, every guided tour, every contractor entry point is a potential breach. The museum has spent years trying to strike a balance between access and security. After a protester smeared cake on the Mona Lisa in 2022, protocols were tightened. But three years later, the heist happened anyway. Because the truth is, the Louvre can’t become a fortress. It isn’t a bank; it’s a public trust. It’s supposed to represent France’s idea of culture as an open good, accessible to all.

Art and ownership

In recent years, France has come under increasing pressure to return the objects it took during the colonial era. Much of its collection came through conquest, appropriation, or colonial expansion. From Napoleonic campaigns in Italy and Egypt to colonial missions across Asia and Africa, entire collections were built on taking. Earlier this year, the French government even passed a bill making it easier for national museums to repatriate colonial-era collections.

To be fair, the Louvre isn’t the worst offender — the Musée du quai Branly, also located on the bank of Seine River near the Eiffel Tower, holds more of those disputed artefacts — but it remains the symbol that gets pulled into every conversation about ownership and restitution. Every time there’s a theft or scandal, it drives home how fragile the whole arrangement is. You can surround art with guards, glass, and laser sensors, but you still cannot stop the thefts altogether. Because if even the most protected museum in the world can be breached, how secure is its claim to hold the world’s treasures in the first place?

India is right at the centre of the conversation around restitution. Earlier this year, a cache of ancient jewels linked to the remains of Buddha at Piprahwa in modern-day Uttar Pradesh, was finally sent back to India after 127 years abroad. They were almost auctioned off in Europe before India intervened. That story says everything about how the ground is shifting: what was once kept in museum cases under the banner of “world heritage” is now being re-examined as something taken, displaced, sometimes stolen.

The theft, tragically, comes at a time when French President Emmanuel Macron has been working on a major modernisation project — announced in January this year — for the Louvre. The extensive overhaul, estimated to cost at least €800 million, will reimagine the museum’s infrastructure and the visitor experience. On Sunday, the renovation work around the Apollo Gallery had left temporary scaffolding and work lifts in place, the same kind of access point used in past Louvre thefts. To make matters worse, staff shortages and overlapping duties meant slower internal checks. The thieves used those gaps to their advantage. The story of thefts at Louvre, it seems, keeps circling back on itself.