Paris has launched a massive manhunt after brazen thieves carried out a jaw-dropping daylight heist on the Louvre, stealing nine of the museum’s most priceless treasures, including a £100 million crown, in just seven minutes.
The gang of several ‘highly organised criminals’ arrived outside the world’s most visited museum at about 9.30 am local time on Sunday. At the same time, thousands of tourists enjoyed a day out at the attraction.
Masked and wielding angle grinders, the gang parked up their scooters outside the Apollo Gallery (Galerie d’Apollon), home to jewels belonging to Napoleon Bonaparte, his wife Josephine and a string of subsequent Emperors and Empresses.
They then extended a freight elevator, resembling a giant ladder, from the back of a flat-bed truck and propped it up against the wall of the gallery, which King Louis XIV opened in the 17th Century.
The targeted wing of the Louvre, on the River Seine side of the museum, was undergoing building work when the gang struck. Employees had formerly opposed understaffing at the museum in June.
After scurrying to the top of the ladder, they used an angle grinder to penetrate through the museum’s exterior window, before ascending into the Salle 705 exhibition room.
In a whirlwind seven-minute heist, they prised open two display cases and crammed away nine pieces of the 23-item Napoleon and Josephine Bonaparte collection, Le Parisien reports.
The treasures included the Eugénie Crown, embellished with thousands of diamonds and emeralds and worn by Napoleon III’s empress consort Eugénie, which was later discovered tossed below a window of the Louvre and broken into pieces.
The gang is also thought to have stolen a priceless necklace and brooch from Salle 705.
By 9.40 am, they were out of the Louvre, disappearing into the Paris morning on their scooters just as police began to arrive.
When they got there, officers discovered the huge elevator was left up against the museum’s historic stone walls.
Additional images showed what seemed to be an angle grinder on the front seat of a truck, parked outside the Louvre and surrounded by police tape.
On a busy day in the French capital, thousands of terrified tourists were stuck inside the famous structure during a hasty evacuation before being led out onto the streets.
Forensics teams were later spotted outside the Louvre, examining the elevator and the truck on which it stood.
The historic Eugénie Crown, presented to the empress consort in 1855, was sold at auction in 1988 for $13.5 million (£10 million) before being donated to the Louvre four years later. It is now worth tens of millions of dollars, expert Josie Goodbody told the Daily Mail.
Salle 705 also boasts Eugenie’s diamond bodice bow, although it is not yet known if this was taken.
It is home to the Regent diamond, viewed by many as the most beautiful in the world, which was strangely not stolen, according to Le Parisien.
After being crowned Emperor and Empress of France in 1804, Napoleon and Josephine amassed one of the most remarkable jewellery collections ever known.
Many of the pieces were robbed from royalty during the French Revolution, while others were taken from around the country’s sweeping Empire, which grew rapidly under the emperor’s rule.
The Louvre, with its iconic pyramid entrance, also features Leonardo Da Vinci’s 16th-century masterpiece Mona Lisa.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez confirmed an investigation had been launched into ‘theft and criminal conspiracy to commit a crime’ by an organised gang.
The Banditism Repression Brigade of the Judicial Police (BRB) is leading the enquiry, along with the Central Office for Combating Trafficking in Cultural Property.
Mr Nuñez said: ‘It was necessary to close the Louvre to visitors, primarily to preserve traces and clues so that investigators could work calmly. The evacuation of the public took place without incident.’
He added: ‘We can’t prevent everything. There is great vulnerability in French museums.
‘Everything is being done to ensure we find the perpetrators as quickly as possible, and I’m hopeful.’
The busy Quai François-Mitterand, which extends along the Louvre’s buildings, was closed off to traffic until about 4 pm on Sunday.
The Élysée Palace said that President Emmanuel Macron was being ‘informed of the situation in real time’.
Those stealing historical art pieces or jewellery usually work for dealers who will be unable to sell the priceless items on the black market.
Instead, the treasures will be kept hidden and enjoyed by the master criminal who authorised the raid.
Rachida Dati, France’s Culture Minister, said: ‘I am on site alongside the museum staff and the police.’
She confirmed a criminal enquiry had been launched, and that detectives were liaising with museum staff.
According to Ms Dati, nobody was hurt during the raids, while a Louvre spokesman confirmed the museum was shut ‘for exceptional reasons’.
On June 16, staff at the Louvre staged a protest over the museum’s lack of staff and overcrowding.
Thousands of people lined up outside the museum as a result of the protest, which postponed the tourist attraction’s opening until the afternoon.
High-end art heists are not uncommon in Paris, including at the Louvre, which opened in 1793 after acting as a palace since the late 12th Century.
The most notorious was in 1911 when the Mona Lisa was taken, causing a global outcry.
An employee of the most well-known art museum in the world, Vincenzo Peruggia, spent the night hiding in a cupboard to steal the artwork.
It was recovered two years later when he attempted to sell it to an antiques dealer in Florence, Italy.
Before Sunday’s daring heist, the last theft at the Louvre took place in 1998 when Le Chemin de Sevres (The Sevres Road), by 19th-century artist Camille Corot, was plucked off the wall without anyone seeing. It remains missing to this day.
Authorities have often promised to increase security at several galleries located across the city, yet the most recent raid still occurred.
Axe-wielding thieves targeted an exhibition of small objects at the Musée Cognacq-Jay in Paris on November 20, 2024.
Seven extremely valuable snuffboxes, including two that were loaned by the British Crown, were among their loot.
The daytime raid led to an insurance payout of more than £3 million to the Royal Collection Trust.
In 2017, three art thieves were sentenced to up to eight years in prison for stealing five masterpieces worth nearly £100 million from the Paris Museum of Modern Art.
A burglary in May 2010 saw works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse vanish from the same gallery.
This is extremely irresponsible of the Louvre, but then Paris and France have been in decline for some time now, and now these priceless and irreplaceable pieces may never be recovered.
So, not one person in the entire crowd, or security saw anything unusual about people arriving in face masks, a truck with an elevated ladder, nor somebody cutting open the roof of the Napoleon wing, plus the alarms were not activated. The Louvre is highly protected; you can’t even get past the front door without a full inspection and a metal detector. Inside job perhaps?
No doubt they will be out of the country, heading to the Middle East, because they do love our precious gems.
Only in France will they riot over the price of a baguette, but then leave £100 million of gems guarded by a bloke on his lunch break. Mind you, have you seen the price of those baguettes? Sacré Bleu.
It seems like the entire thing was extremely well planned – better get Inspector Jacques Clouseau on the case, and this is why you should never leave your louvre windows open.
If the wing was under construction like they said, whoever was working on it would have been accompanied there by security, and then they would have been given a pass, so you have to admire them, whoever they were – nobody got injured in the process of this heist. No doubt, soon they will be making this into a movie.
This should never have happened. The Louvre should have had far better security to deal with any possible theft like this. It’s not like they don’t make enough money every year to afford the best. Security may as well have left the door open for them.
If I were to hazard a guess, this heist was something that was extremely well planned, and whoever did it was hired by someone who wanted these particular objects with very deep pockets.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 