E-Paper
It’s Not Just the Louvre: French Museums Are Losing the War With Thieves
Minimal security and the high price of gold have fueled nine heists over the past year. ‘It’s actually much easier to raid a museum than a jewelry store.’
Barely 24 hours had passed since thieves had broken into the Louvre Museum and stolen France’s crown jewels when the mayor of Langres, a walled medieval town in Eastern France, received a troubling phone call.
The director of the town’s museum was on the line to report that it too had been robbed. Thieves had penetrated the Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot overnight and gone straight for a display case housing its collection of historic gold and silver coins.
“It’s as if the city’s jewels have been stolen,” said Pierrick White, the mayor’s chief of staff.
The brazen robbery of the Louvre on Oct. 19 grabbed the world’s attention, because it targeted an iconic institution and a nation’s crown jewels. But the Louvre robbery was just one of nine different heists that have taken place in France over the past year.
Five French museums have been hit since the beginning of September alone—one of them twice—including at the stately Museum of Natural History in central Paris and the Musée du Désert, located in a remote hamlet in southern France. Few of the stolen works—including precious porcelain and gold crosses and statues—have been recovered.
As the robberies pile up, French officials are waking up to an unsettling reality: France is awash in cultural treasures but has minimal resources to protect them from thieves. Successive governments have collapsed over efforts to rein in the country’s budget deficit, leaving the state too cash-strapped to invest in meaningful security upgrades for the more than 1,200 sites classified by the government as museums.
President Emmanuel Macron’s administration is currently scrambling to take a census of the country’s most valuable artworks to determine which cultural sites will get reinforced first.
The rest of Europe has seen four known museum heists over the past year.
With the price of gold and other metals soaring, museums in France—and more broadly across Europe—have emerged as easy prey for thieves. Museums tend to have lighter security than traditional targets like banks, with many monitored by aging surveillance and alarm systems that are slow to alert police. Museum guards are often unarmed, and valuable works are kept in vulnerable display cases rather than vaults.
“Some criminals have understood that museums are not impregnable cultural fortresses,” said Pierre Noual, a French lawyer specializing in cultural heritage law. “It’s actually much easier to raid a museum than a jewelry store,” he added.
Many of the continent’s museums are located in historic palaces, mansions and other structures that were built centuries ago to house noble families, not to counter modern security threats. The Louvre, once the home of French royalty, has myriad entry points like windows and balconies, including the one thieves scaled to reach the Galerie d’Apollon and make off with $102 million in jewels.
Museums trying to upgrade the security of historic buildings have to navigate a thicket of bureaucracy to secure permits. They also have to absorb the cost of modernizing infrastructure that underlies any surveillance system.
The Louvre has been planning for years to spend more than $90 million to double the number of cameras outside the building and build new command posts with modern surveillance technology. To monitor the museum’s 2.6 million square feet of floor space, however, officials said they first need to rewire the facility with 60 kilometers in cabling.
The surge in the value of gold and other precious materials is boosting the incentives for thieves to target museums with “melt value,” or collections that can be broken down for their raw material. Most museum heists in recent years—including ones in Germany, Italy, the U.K. and the Netherlands—have involved collections rich in gold.
“A growing number of thefts seems to target museum artifacts with high material rather than just artistic value,” said Bernd Ebert, general director of the Dresden State Art Collections.
A $3.8 million coin
The blueprint for hitting museums with melt value was established in Germany in 2017 when a group of thieves led by Wissam Remmo, a 20-year-old member of a Lebanese-German crime family, decided to target Berlin’s Bode-Museum, located on an island along the Spree River.
Remmo identified a weak point in the domed, neo-Baroque structure: a second-floor window that opens into the changing room for male security guards. The window had been disconnected from the alarm system after a defect caused repeated false alarms.
He had inside help. An acquaintance of the Remmo family had taken a job as a museum guard, according to court documents. Before clocking out on the evening of March 25, the guard left the window open from the inside. That meant Remmo and two accomplices only needed to remove an exterior glass plate to get in.
Inside there was no video surveillance, and only one unarmed guard on night patrol. The 61-year-old guard would disarm the museum’s alarm system whenever he made the rounds in its galleries, providing Remmo’s crew with an opening.
The thieves marched past the Bode-Museum’s paintings and sculptures, making a beeline for their target: a giant, 220-pound coin bearing the profile of Queen Elizabeth II.
Known as the Big Maple Leaf, the coin was one of five commemorative pieces forged by the Royal Canadian Mint in 2007. It was made of 99.999% gold—a rarity and the result of a sophisticated chemical process.
After smashing its display case, the men hauled the coin on a roller board back to the changing room. They then dropped it out the window, carried it across the river bridge in a wheelbarrow and fled in a car parked near the embankment.
The coin, which was valued at 3.3 million euros (now around $3.8 million), was never recovered. The thieves cut the coin in smaller pieces to sell it off, leaving their clothes, cars and homes sprinkled with gold dust of extraordinary purity. Police tracked down Remmo and his accomplices, but didn’t jail them while they awaited trial.
Remmo used the leniency to pull off a second heist. This one targeted the Dresden Royal residence, a Renaissance palace that houses the Green Vault Museum. He and an accomplice cut the power to the surrounding area, creating a diversion that allowed two others to raid the building under the cover of darkness. They smashed display cases with axes and made off with 21 pieces of jewelry encrusted with more than 4,300 diamonds—a haul valued at more than 116 million euros.
Remmo and other family members were convicted of both heists, but the group returned some of the stolen jewels as part of a plea bargain. Remmo received prison sentences totaling 10 years and nine months for both robberies.
The heists inspired other thieves across Europe, because they exposed the lax security at museums as well as a lack of tough penalties from the criminal justice system, according to Christopher Marinello, a Venice-based lawyer specialized in recovering stolen art.
“That activated copycats,” Marinello said.
Months later thieves broke into Blenheim Palace in the U.K. and ripped out a functioning toilet made of 18-karat solid gold by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Museums in the Bavarian town of Manching, Germany, and Gardone Riviera, in northern Italy, were hit with robberies in the years that followed.
‘Incredible history’
The contagion spread to France in late 2024 and exploded once the price of gold began to surge.
French authorities were blindsided as thieves of all stripes, from lone wolves to organized groups, made quick work of its museums.
In the predawn hours of Sept. 16, a single thief used an angle grinder to cut through two doors at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. The thief then used a blowtorch to open a display case holding 13 pounds of gold nuggets from Bolivia, Russia, Guyana, Australia and the U.S., making off with an estimated $1.73 million in gold.
The theft went undetected until a cleaning lady arrived for work in the morning and alerted authorities. Days later, police detained a 24-year-old Chinese woman in Barcelona while trying to dispose of melted gold that French prosecutors suspected came from the Paris museum.
A week later, on the night of Oct. 6, a thief entered a side door of the Musée du Désert, dedicated to the history of Protestantism in the Cévennes, a mountainous region in the south of France. The museum, located in the historic home of a 17th-century Huguenot leader, doesn’t have on-site security.
The thief encountered no resistance as he broke a display case with a sledgehammer and helped himself to around 100 gold Huguenot crosses, according to curator Denis Carbonnier, who saw the security footage. The alarm went off but it took 30 minutes for the private security company to arrive at the museum. The thief was gone in less than five minutes.
The Musée du Président Jacques Chirac, which holds valuable gifts the late president received during his years in office, was hit by back-to-back robberies. Four hooded men stormed the museum on Oct. 12, threatening staff and visitors with a shotgun and knives before stealing the cash register and a collectible watch. Later that day, police detained four suspects.
The following night, the museum was raided by a group of thieves who stole jewelry and watches worth more than $1.1 million.
The onslaught of robberies stretched a unit of 30 police officers tasked with leading investigations into museum thefts across the country. As the museum heists mounted, the French government took no discernible action to counter the outbreak or boost protection at its top museums.
By now, a four-man squad of thieves was preparing to hit the biggest museum in the world.
On Oct. 19, the thieves parked a truck-mounted lift below a balcony of the Louvre in broad daylight along one of the busiest thoroughfares in Paris. The truck was right in one of the blind spots of the Louvre’s aging security camera system. The move allowed them to quickly reach an upper gallery and steal a host of jewels, including an emerald necklace that Napoleon gave to his second wife.
Hours later, Culture Minister Rachida Dati appeared on TV from inside the Louvre, looking shocked. When the interviewer asked her how such a theft was possible, she replied that it was “an old problem.”
“For 40 years, there was no interest in securing these major museums,” she said.
The government ordered prefects across the country to identify and protect the country’s most valuable works. The interior ministry sent out an internal bulletin warning police around the country of an “acceleration” in heists.
The effort came too late for the Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot in Langres.
Local authorities had been discussing potential security improvements for the museum, such as installing a metal shutter at the entrance, but the moves were delayed for financial reasons. Tickets sales don’t cover the cost of running the museum, which relies on the city and private donors.
Any changes to the museum also require the approval of the central government in Paris, because it is housed inside a French Renaissance mansion that is classified as a historical monument.
When the building was renovated in 2011, a construction worker discovered a cache of 18th- and early 19th-century gold and silver coins that would be added to the museum’s permanent collection.
“It is a treasure with an incredible history, and therefore people were attached to it,” said White, the mayor’s chief of staff.
The night of Oct. 19, the thieves broke through the main door of the museum and went straight for the gold coins, which were kept in a display case and valued at more than $30,000. The break-in triggered an alarm, but an employee who checked on it entered through a side door for staff and didn’t notice anything unusual, White said.
Only when employees arrived at the museum the next morning did they notice the coins were missing. White couldn’t believe the museum had been robbed just hours after the Louvre heist had put the country on alert.
“These are pretty extraordinary circumstances,” White said.
Write to Noemie Bisserbe at noemie.bisserbe@wsj.com, Stacy Meichtry at Stacy.Meichtry@wsj.com and Bertrand Benoit at bertrand.benoit@wsj.com
