The Louvre’s Jewel Cases Should Have Bought More Time

The robbery at the Louvre on Sunday was almost brilliant in its simplicity. About half an hour after opening, a four-man crew parked a truck-mounted freight lift^[1] beneath the Apollo Gallery, cut through a window with a disc cutter, sawed open two display cases and fled on scooters.^[2] The Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, said a witness reported one of them shedding a yellow vest, the uniform of anyone with a reason to park a lift against a building. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez put the whole operation at seven minutes. The thieves got away with eight pieces of royal and imperial jewelry^[3] and left a ninth, Empress Eugénie’s crown, behind as they fled. We picture modern thieves as hackers. This crew needed a vest, a lift and a disc cutter, in daylight, at the most visited museum in the world.^[4] The lesson is narrow. The Louvre does not need to become a bank vault, but its gold and gems need the protection of one.

By the culture ministry’s account,^[3] alarms on the outer window and on both cases went off, and the five guards in and around the gallery followed the security protocol: they called the police and put people’s safety first. A museum agent foiled an attempt to burn the thieves’ truck, and no one was hurt. But an alarm only reports a break-in. A case has to slow one down, and these two, which the ministry itself calls high-security, gave way in minutes.

Staff had warned about security before the robbery. The Associated Press reported that they walked out in June over overcrowding and understaffing^[4] and complained that “crowding and thin staffing are straining security.” On Sunday, the SUD union protested “the destruction of security jobs.”^[5] The museum’s annual reports count 1,372 surveillance agents in 2017^[6] and 1,285 in 2023,^[7] 6% fewer. Attendance was 8.1 million in 2017 and peaked at 10.2 million in 2018,^[8] and it was nearly 8.9 million in 2023, according to that year’s report. The 2024 report^[9] switches to a different category, 1,167 reception and surveillance staff excluding sales and booking, so the comparison stops at 2023. Annual totals can neither establish nor rule out the staffing problems employees raised, and they cannot show how the Apollo Gallery was covered that morning. Beccuau said the thieves threatened the guards with the disc cutters,^[2] and no one should ask an attendant to face a spinning blade. The cases had to buy time, and barriers and detection should give guards safer ways to respond, so that none has to choose between personal safety and the jewels.

Louvre surveillance agents and visitors, indexed, 2017 to 2023

Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin was blunt on France Inter on Monday: “nous avons failli,”^[1] we have failed, because thieves could put a freight lift on a public street and get people up it in minutes. A skeptic would go further. The crown jewels are rich people’s stuff, the argument goes, and museums hoard wealth anyway, so why should the average person care? And a museum that can afford better security but cannot protect its collection has a weak claim to keep it. The first argument mistakes the owners for the history. Every country’s history holds good and bad, and these pieces are part of France’s, down to who wore them and where they have been. Their value as a record does not depend on admiring their owners, and breaking them up for sale would erase it. Alexandre Giquello, president of the auction house Drouot Patrimoine, judged the pieces “totally unsellable in their current state,”^[5] and the AP quoted Tobias Kormind,^[4] managing director of 77 Diamonds, saying professional crews “often break down and re-cut large, recognizable stones to evade detection.” A recut sapphire is just a sapphire. That is cultural destruction, not Robin Hood. The second argument states a fair condition. The lapse is on the museum, and it can’t point fingers. The Louvre keeps its claim to the collection only by protecting it.

Museum gold draws thieves. Last month burglars broke into Paris’s Natural History Museum with an angle grinder and took €600,000 in gold samples.^[10] France’s central office against trafficking in cultural property told AFP^[5] this month that gold objects are especially at risk because “the security of a museum does not equal that of a bank.” The Louvre already knows how to protect its most famous object: the “Mona Lisa,” 250 meters from the Apollo Gallery, sits behind bulletproof glass.^[4] The gold and gems deserve cases built to outlast a crew with a disc cutter, a second barrier that keeps visitors a step back, and the perimeter detection the Louvre’s new security plan calls for.^[3] Visitors will see the jewels from a little farther away, under more cameras. That is a small price for keeping them in one piece.