Colin Sheridan: Louvre thieves didn't just steal some rocks, they stole France's national pride

It reads like a blockbuster movie, but the Louvre heist raises real questions about France’s most cherished cultural institutions, writes Colin Sheridan

The basket lift used by thieves at the Louvre last Sunday. It took them seven minutes to steal the jewels. Picture: AP Photo/Alexander Turnbull

There's always been a certain romance to a heist. From The Thomas Crown Affair to Ocean’s Eleven and Gangster Granny, the thieves move with an elegance the rest of us reserve for weddings and funerals.

The plan is neat, the timing perfect, the suits pressed. Nobody bleeds. Someone, probably wearing leather gloves, says something profoundly witty as a diamond necklace drops into a velvet bag.

Last weekend, it happened again, only this time, it wasn’t Hollywood — it was Paris. Which is to say, it was almost too perfect. 

Because if you were scripting a museum robbery, you’d set it in the Louvre, the most famous museum in the world. A vault of supposed civilisation, stuffed with everything from the Mona Lisa to the brazen bling of empires. 

You’d picture four figures in high-vis jackets and hard hats, driving a truck-mounted lift to a riverside window, slicing their way into the Galerie d’Apollon — the one that houses the French crown jewels — and emerging exactly seven minutes later with roughly €88m worth of diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds. 

The Louvre director, Laurence des Cars, did what French officials do best: offered her resignation with exquisite regret. The government declined it, perhaps realising that sacking her wouldn’t reassemble the jewels. Picture: AP/Emma Da Silva

You’d imagine them escaping on vespas, helmets on, jewels tucked beneath reflective vests. Cue accordion music. Cue the opening credits. Except this wasn’t a movie. This was last Sunday morning in Paris.

In a world of digital currencies, NFTs, and contactless coffee, the very notion of “priceless jewels” feels almost quaint. We trade now in invisible wealth — numbers on screens, tokens in wallets, value that flickers at the whim of the wi-fi. 

Yet there’s something stubbornly real about a diamond. You can’t screenshot it. You can’t lose it in an internet crash. You can’t back it up to iCloud. And so, there’s a kind of poetry in this crime — romantic, stupid poetry.

A tiara once worn by Empress Eugénie was among the jewellery stolen in the heist. Picture: Maeva Destombes / Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

The thieves didn’t just steal some rocks. They stole a slice of French history. A tiara once worn by Empress Eugénie, an emerald necklace from Marie Louise, a brooch that gleamed on the neck of royalty long before bitcoin was born. 

These are the heirlooms of a vanished world — and someone, somewhere, decided to make them vanish again.

Seven minutes. That’s all it took. The alarm went off, but the guards were elsewhere, pointing tourists to the toilets. One CCTV camera was facing the wrong direction. 

By the time anyone realised the Louvre had been robbed, the thieves were halfway across Paris, probably removing their hard hats and congratulating themselves on a very good morning’s work.

The Louvre director, Laurence des Cars, did what French officials do best: offered her resignation with exquisite regret. The government declined it, perhaps realising that sacking her wouldn’t reassemble the jewels.

Now, there’s talk of a full review of museum security. There’s muttering in the senate. There are red faces all around. French police are “pursuing several leads”, but in truth, they’re chasing ghosts. You can almost picture the briefing: men in suits pointing at maps, bad coffee and stale cigarette smoke, the realisation that whoever pulled this off is already a continent away.

One senator described the heist as “a terrible failure of the Republic’s guardianship of heritage” — a rather French way of saying “how on earth did four lads with a cherry picker outsmart the world’s most famous museum?”

Because this isn’t just about jewels. This is about national pride. The Louvre isn’t merely a building — it’s France itself, polished and framed and guarded by velvet rope. 

To have it robbed, in broad daylight, by a crew with better project management than security clearance — it’s a humiliation in high-heels, red lipstick, and an angled beret.

What’s really been stolen here is not just jewellery, but the illusion of invincibility. For years, museums such as the Louvre have existed as fortresses of reassurance. The art is safe. The relics are safe. The story of who we are is safe. 

Necklace and earrings from the emerald set of Napoleon's second wife Empress Marie Louise on display in the Apollo Gallery. Picture: Hans Lucas AFP via Getty Images

But this heist has exposed something else: The under-funded, under-staffed, sometimes under-cared-for reality behind the grandeur. Unions at the Louvre had already warned of “destruction of security jobs” before this. Alarms that should have been upgraded years ago were “in the process” of being replaced. You can almost hear the bureaucratic shrug: We were getting around to it.

Now, the getting-around-to-it has turned into a national scandal. The Apollo Gallery remains closed. The display cases lie empty. And the broken window — the point of entry — is drawing almost as many visitors as the jewels once did. There’s a metaphor: Tourists queuing to photograph absence.

In an age where “assets” are measured in megabytes, this theft says: Old currencies still count. The thrill of possession, the pulse of risk, the idea that something solid and rare can still be taken by hand — it’s perversely romantic.

But it also poses an uncomfortable question: what happens when we treat heritage like data? When we cut museum staff, replace guards with motion sensors, and assume “security” is just another software update? 

The Louvre is a reminder that you can’t outsource vigilance. History demands human watchfulness — the kind you can’t download.

It’s tempting to think of the stolen pieces as insured assets. And yes, the insurers will pay. The Louvre will recover. The gallery will reopen. Life will go on.

But these weren’t just jewels. They were fragments of a vanished monarchy, of a France that once believed in crowns and ceremony and divine right. When those thieves smashed the glass, they weren’t just breaking cases — they were cracking the continuity between past and present. 

And yet, there’s something almost poetic about it. France, the eternal theatre of revolution, has once again seen its crown jewels carried away by the people.

A French forensics officer examines the cut window of the gallery where the thieves broke in. Picture: Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

So, what happens now? After the embarrassment fades and the press conferences end, how does the Louvre — and every other museum — respond? Well, like all great embarrassments, we can expect an overcorrection. There’ll be new biometric locks, AI-assisted motion sensors, guards with bodycams, and drones scanning the courtyards after dark. 

The Louvre, once a palace of art, will begin to resemble an airport for paintings. But therein lies the dilemma: how do you make a place feel open and sacred when it’s increasingly ringed with hardware? In the short term, we’ll see the tangible stuff — realigned cameras, reinforced windows, geo-fenced entry points. The security consultants will have a field day. 

Yet the real challenge isn’t technological, it’s philosophical. Museums trade on trust. They must feel porous, welcoming, and accessible. The minute they harden into bunkers, something vital is lost. Because security, at its best, is invisible. The more you see it, the less you feel free.

The Louvre’s task now is not to turn itself into a fortress, but to build faith again, faith that history is being watched over by something more than sensors. Maybe that means better staffing, not just better software. Maybe it means treating security as stewardship, not surveillance. Or maybe it means admitting a simple truth: That no lock is ever perfect, and no jewel ever truly safe. Especially if it was stolen in the first place.

A surveillance camera on a facade of the Louvre museum, three days after historic jewels were stolen in a daring daylight heist. Picture: AP Photo/Thibault Camus

Already, smaller French museums have reported attempted break-ins — what one official called “the contagion effect”. Once someone proves it can be done, others start rehearsing their own schemes. And not just in France. 

The Met, the British Museum, the Prado — all have begun quiet reviews of their own. The Louvre’s humiliation is contagious. If the world’s most secure museum can be robbed with a furniture lift and a sense of confidence, what’s to stop anyone else?

By midweek, the Louvre reopened, minus one room. Reporters gathered. Tourists shuffled past the yellow tape. In the movie version, a small boy would be overheard asking his mother, “So, is this where they stole the jewels?” And with gallic indifference she would reply “Bah oui, mon ami. Mai c’est de l’histoire ancienne”. That’s ancient history now.

Every generation gets the theft it deserves. The Victorians had train robbers. The ’60s had bank jobs. We get the Louvre — because our crimes must be cinematic, global, and hashtag-friendly.

Somewhere in a garage, someone’s probably dismantling a tiara, one diamond at a time. Somewhere else, a consultant is earning a fortune explaining why the camera faced the wrong way.

And the rest of us? We sip our Saturday coffees and think, well, at least they didn’t take the Mona Lisa. Maybe that’s why we secretly love stories like this. Because while the state frowns and the insurers groan, the rest of us can’t help but grin. 

There’s something human about it — the cunning, the daring, the audacity of ordinary people reaching, quite literally, for the crown jewels. It reminds us that even in a world of code and clouds and crypto wallets, beauty still has weight. Treasure still sparkles. 

And behind every pane of glass, a heartbeat quickens at the thought of taking it. As I write, the Louvre is installing new cameras. The guards are rechecking passes. The French senate is holding hearings.

And somewhere, in a quiet apartment, perhaps on the outskirts of Paris, someone is polishing an emerald under a single lamp, smiling, while us mere mortals are left to marvel at the oldest story there is — the one where the world’s most precious things are never quite as secure as we like to believe.

Because you can lock up art and you can insure jewels. But you can’t insure against imagination.