Behind the Louvre Heist: What’s Been Learned So Far

This week, I began working on a post about the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. I’d read several articles and listened to podcasts about the heist, which is full of surprising twists. However, on Monday morning, as I perused a list of Le Monde’s top stories, I learned that once again, thieves had entered the Louvre and this time walked away with a hefty pile of crown jewels. The French news outlets compared the magnitude of the crime to the disappearance of da Vinci’s masterpiece more than one hundred years ago. However, last Sunday’s caper is far more sophisticated and may cost the most visited museum in the world far more than a single missing portrait.

Recap of the Heist

On October 19, 2025, a small team of thieves carried out their cataclysmic attack on the museum with breathtaking efficiency. The operation unfolded in under seven minutes. The Louvre had opened its doors to visitors at 9:00 am. At 9:30, two men on motorcycles arrived, followed by a cherry picker truck carrying two more men. The truck positioned itself on a sidewalk abutting the Louvre. Dressed in the yellow and orange vests of city workers, the men from the truck set up a perimeter of construction cones and then climbed into the truck’s loading basket, which elevated them to a second-floor balcony.

With zero fanfare, the men climbed onto the balcony and using an angle grinder, a power tool that cuts through glass, broke through an exterior window. This set off an alarm, but the undeterred culprits climbed through the window and into the Apollo Gallery. This voluminous hall is home to the French Crown Jewels. The thieves quickly walked to two display cases where each man again utilized an angle grinder to break the glass protecting the jewels, setting off additional alarms wired to each case.

At the moment of the break-in, there were three museum attendants in the gallery and a dozen or more visitors. Within minutes, they were joined by two more attendants. These people are not security guards. They are there to assist visitors, and in keeping with their job function, they focused on evacuating the room and closing all entrances. One attendant remained behind, filming the robbers as they worked, in the hopes that the footage might be helpful to police. When asked by a reporter if he was scared, the videographer said he never felt threatened. The thieves were single-mindedly focused on the task before them. As long as he stayed out of their way, he felt safe.

After emptying the cases of their contents, the men matter-of-factly regained the basket and descended the boom. Less than four minutes had elapsed with the thieves inside the building. One astute visitor had the foresight to locate the escape route from a window in another wing of the building. His vigilance yielded a 30-second video that shows the robbers in the basket as it descends the boom. The relatively casual pace of the basket gives the impression that the villains were still quite calm and in control of the operation underway. However, you can hear the approach of police sirens in the background.

Temporary construction walls obstructed the view of the truck bed from inside the museum. However, eyewitnesses on the street say the criminals tried briefly to light the truck on fire. When a security guard ran toward them, they abandoned a jerrycan and a blowtorch and hopped on the back of the waiting motorcycles. Surveillance cameras tracked their route through Paris, traveling eastward along the right bank of the Seine until they reached a ring road known as the Périphérique, then circling clockwise until they reached the A6 autoroute. At the time of this writing, authorities had not released further information about where they might have headed from there.

Valuing the Haul

The thieves managed to bag the entire contents of both display cases, which included:

• A sapphire and diamond tiara, necklace, and single earring belonging to Queen Marie-Amélie, the last queen of France, and Queen Hortense of Holland who married Napoleon’s brother and gave birth to Napoleon III, the last emperor of France.
• An emerald and diamond necklace and earring set that Napoleon gave to his second wife, Marie-Louise, as a wedding gift.
• A pearl tiara that belonged to Napoleon III’s wife, Empress Eugénie.
• A large multi-diamond brooch, known as the “reliquary brooch”.
• A diamond-studded bodice bow.
• An ornate gold crown with diamonds and emeralds that belonged to Empress Eugénie.

However, at some point during their flight, they dropped the crown, which experts claim would have fetched the highest price. It’s interesting to note that while Napoleon III and his wife had crowns, they were never used in a coronation ceremony. The new regime wanted to distance itself from any suggestion of authoritarian rule. Instead, the couple commissioned them for the 1855 Paris Exposition, an international fair meant to showcase French glory and imperial prestige. Still, if you want to disassociate from royal rule, you might want to avoid crowns (both commissioning and wearing them) altogether.

The day after the robbery, France’s Minister of the Interior held a press conference, noting the magnitude of loss and stating that the cost to France and to the Louvre was inestimable. Placing a price tag on such items is difficult because part of their value lies in their history. Each piece’s storied provenance augments its value.

For example, according to Le Monde, two of the large diamonds in the reliquary brooch were given to Louis XIV by Cardinal Mazarin, who served the king in many capacities, including as Chief Minister. A third diamond adorned Louis XIV’s justaucorps until over a century later, when Marie Antoinette had the stone set in an earring. Finally, Empress Eugénie, who worshipped her beheaded predecessor, utilized all three stones in the reliquary brooch. So, the thieves walked away with two centuries of history, as well as some hefty gems.

Despite their pedigree, the fact that such pieces are clearly recognizable makes them difficult to unload, thereby reducing their value. For example, the Louvre acquired Eugénie’s diamond-studded bow knot in 2008 for 6.72 million euros ($7.8 million). Were they to auction it off today, a buyer might need to bid as much as 20 million euros to own it. The value of fenced jewelry on the black market, however, is 10% to 20% of its legitimate value, at best 1-2 million euros.

Indeed, the day after the robbery, a snarky editorial in the Guardian quipped that the Louvre was lucky that “the philistine thieves skipped the museum’s real treasures in favour of dull royal knick-knacks”.

The Sum of Parts

Speculation regarding what the pieces are worth, if sold in their pre-existing arrangement, may be grounded in wishful thinking. Were the thieves philistines, or shrewd schemers who plan to dismantle the jewelry and sell off the individual gems, melting down the gold and platinum settings? And, as far as the operation is concerned, what pieces in the Louvre’s collection would be easiest to abscond with: a bag full of jewels, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, or the iconic statue Venus de Milo? Royal knick-knacks might be dull but in this case, they’re the clear choice.

Another clear advantage of stealing crown jewels (which I’ve seen no reports on) is the location of the gallery that houses them. Scanning the exterior of the Louvre, you’ll be hard pressed to find a balcony, let alone one that borders a street and abuts an area where a vehicle may be parked without obstructing traffic. The fact that this perfectly composed entry and exit point lies at one end of the Apollo Gallery makes it an obvious target. It’s shocking to read that there was only one security camera in that room, and that it faced west, and thus had no view of the breached window or the balcony beyond!

Estimates of the value of the individual jewels are even harder to pin down. When dismantled, the booty’s worth would be reduced even further, with the historical value lost forever. Might the thieves be following a similar game plan as the scallywags who carried off a royal swindle in 1785, stealing a diamond necklace destined for Marie Antoinette and rushing it out of the country, where it was broken apart and sold on the black market?

Early in the week, many figureheads spoke out about who might be behind the robbery. Such conjectures included wealthy Middle Eastern princes, Vladimir Putin trying to make France look bad, and billionaire businessmen devoid of moral character. The simplest and most likely scenario, however, is one that involves the destruction of the original pieces. Most investigators believe that an organized crime group planned the operation and hired local career criminals to carry it out. If this is the case, the jewelry has already been deconstructed into its roughly 8,700 diamonds, 34 sapphires, 38 emeralds, 200 pearls, and an unknown number of grams of gold and platinum.

Rent to Own

One of the first pieces of evidence seized upon by investigators was the origin of the cherry picker truck. The thieves found the vehicle on an online rental site, and posing as professional movers, they arranged for the truck’s delivery to an address in none other than the town of Louvres, France!

(Ever wonder how the owners of your Parisian Airbnb managed to get that pull-out sofa bed into their 5th-floor, elevator-less, spiral-stairway condo? Now you know.)

On October 10, when the owner of the truck arrived at the drop-off point, two men threatened him and drove off with his truck without paying. The man immediately filed a report with the police. Nine days later, as reports of the Louvre break-in flooded all French media outlets, the man immediately recognized his mobile manlift and notified authorities.

Because of eyewitnesses like this, authorities say they are confident they will find the men who carried out the robbery. Those who planned it and the stones that were taken, however, will be much harder to pin down.

The truck’s owner was not the only party to identify the instrumental machine. Employees at the German company Böcker Agilo also recognized it as having rolled off their factory floor. A wisecracker in their marketing team seized upon the moment to fashion a new advertisement.

Restoring More than a Security System

Since Monday, the usual barrage of finger-pointing and political outrage has dominated much of the news coverage. The museum’s president, Laurence des Cars, appeared before the Senate on Tuesday for questioning. Appointed by Emmanuel Macron in 2021, she is the first woman to hold the post. Since her appointment, she has repeatedly signaled that the world’s most popular museum is underfunded, with insufficient personnel, degrading buildings, and a woefully inadequate security system.

In January of 2025, Macron announced plans for a “new renaissance” of the Louvre that included adding a new entrance, a dedicated space for the Mona Lisa, and an expanded security system. All would be paid for, he promised, by increasing ticket prices for non-EU visitors. With a price tag estimated at between 700 and 800 million euros, the project’s financing seems shaky.

According to the Louvre, the museum receives about 9 million visitors per year. In 2024, the year when Paris hosted the Olympic Games, 13% of those visitors were American, another 6% were from China. Statistics are not available for every country, but in 2023, China, Japan, and South Korea combined, represented only 2.5% of the museum’s visitors. Even if half of the museum’s visitors come from outside the EU, their ticket price would need to be double that of EU residents over the next 10 years to reach 700 million euros. So far, such distinctions in ticket prices have not been put into place.

There has also been talk of finding private donors to fund upgrades to the building, much as happened after the fire that destroyed the roof of Notre Dame. Given the effectiveness of that fundraising program, there’s good reason to believe that the world’s benefactors will again come to the rescue. Whether I ever get a chance to see Empress Eugénie’s emerald earrings is not of major concern. If they remain forever lost, so be it. However, I’m fully behind doing whatever it takes to rehabilitate and secure one of the world’s greatest museums.