The lessons from the brazen heist at the Louvre

The Louvre has been targeted before—most famously in 1911, when the “Mona Lisa” was stolen—but not on this scale

It took two masked thieves just seven minutes to slip through the window of the Galerie d’Apollon, pierce the security glass of two display cabinets using disc cutters, and make off with nine items of Napoleonic and royal jewellery. At 9.30am on October 19th the pair used a truck-mounted ladder to break in to the Louvre; they left the same way, before escaping on scooters with two accomplices. In their haste they dropped one looted piece.

A security employee with a dog stands near the glass Pyramid of the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, October 20, 2025. (Reuters)

The raid strikes at the heart of the French state—and of the art world. With nearly 9m visitors in 2024, the Louvre is the most popular museum anywhere. A former royal palace in the historic centre of Paris, it is made up of over 400 galleries, displaying 35,000 works of art. Spanning civilisations from Mesopotamia to Europe, the collection also links France’s royal and imperial past with its republican present. President Emmanuel Macron called the heist an attack on “our history”.

All of the eight items seized, described as “priceless” by French officials, were part of the national collection of crown jewels. Kept in the museum’s most sumptuous gilded gallery, they include the emerald-studded necklace and earrings given by Napoleon to Marie-Louise for their wedding in 1810, and a tiara made up of 212 pearls, 1,998 diamonds and 992 rose-cut diamonds belonging to the Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s wife. The thieves also bagged a necklace, an earring and a tiara from the sapphire collection.

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The Louvre has been targeted before—most famously in 1911, when the “Mona Lisa” was stolen—but not on this scale. Arthur Brand, a Dutch specialist in art theft, compares the heist to the snatching of 13 works of art, including Vermeer’s “The Concert” and Rembrandt’s “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee”, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. Until now Europe’s biggest post-war museum theft was in Amsterdam in 1991, when criminals made off with 20 paintings including Van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters”. But “the Louvre is the ultimate heist,” says Mr Brand. “Nobody thought anybody would dare to steal from the Louvre.” The brazenness is worthy of a Hollywood script. Indeed in “Lupin”, a hit French crime series, the protagonist pinches a diamond necklace once owned by Marie Antoinette from the museum.

In reality, museum theft is surprisingly common. France has witnessed a number of recent heists from smaller museums. An analysis of 40 museum thefts between 1990 and 2022 by Sandra Clopés and Marc Balcells, published in April, classifies five main types of raid. The most common, accounting for 15 of the heists, is a stealth raid: thieves make off with artworks without alerting security agents. “Smash-and-grab” raids, like the one at the Louvre, are the second-most common, accounting for 11 of those analysed. Over half the items taken are paintings; only 4% are jewellery. Less than half are recovered. The Louvre thieves, says an art valuer in Paris, will dismantle the pieces, sell the gold and recut the precious stones. There is no market, he says, for the items themselves.

In Paris, minds are now focusing on what went wrong and how to stop it happening again. Gérald Darmanin, the justice minister, said the raid had given “France a dreadful image”. That a truck could be parked outside the Louvre on a busy street on a Sunday morning without raising suspicion is worrying enough; that the thieves could make off with crown jewels despite setting off alarms poses serious questions about the museum’s security.

The “trick is to slow thieves down”, says Mr Brand. In most cases, note Ms Clopés and Mr Balcells, “thieves were faster stealing the pieces than the sensors alerting security forces.” In a leaked report France’s national auditor points to “persistent” delays in deploying modern security equipment in the Louvre. Laurence des Cars, the museum’s director, raised the problem when she took over in 2021. But, as in all public museums, budgets are tight. Rachida Dati, France’s culture minister, talked this week of “40 years of neglect”. Nobody wants to accept responsibility, but the political pressure is rising for a head to roll.