French authorities Monday admitted they “failed” after thieves made off with millions of dollars worth of jewelry in a brazen daytime raid at Paris’ world-famous Louvre Museum.
Four crafty criminals, posing as construction workers, got in and out of the museum within 7 minutes Sunday, stealing thousands of diamonds and other priceless jewels before fleeing on scooters — triggering fury and despair in France.
“We failed. People were able to park a furniture hoist in the middle of Paris, get people up it in several minutes to grab priceless jewels,” French Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin told Radio France.
The daring heist — whose ”incalculable” haul included gems that belonged to Napoleon’s wives — painted a “deplorable image of France,” he said.
The thieves arrived in pairs, with two in a truck equipped with a retractable long ladder used to move furniture, and the other two riding motorbikes, authorities said.
They parked the truck next to the museum on a road along the River Seine and wore yellow reflector vests to disguise themselves as construction workers while placing orange cones around the vehicle to better secure the area and cover up their motive, according to police.
They used the ladder to get up to a second-floor window, cut through the glass with an angle grinder and entered a gallery, triggering a security alarm — although the warning sound was only transmitted to headquarters guards focused on visitor safety.
The crooks then swiftly went to work.
“Inside, they smashed two display cases, ‘Napoleon jewels’ and ‘French crown jewels,’ using the angle grinder and stole numerous pieces of high-value jewelry,” police said.
Among the items stolen was a diadem, or jeweled crown, that once belonged to Napoleon III’s wife Queen Marie-Amelie and Queen Hortense; an emerald necklace and matching earrings from the collection of Napoleon’s second wife Marie-Louise, and Empress Eugenie’s bodice bow, according to the French Ministry of Culture.
The perpetrators tried and failed to set fire to their mobile ladder before fleeing the scene — and accidentally dropped an emerald-set imperial crown containing more than 1,300 diamonds that once belonged to Napoleon III’s wife, Empress Eugenie, on their way out, authorities said.
No arrests have been made so far, after the gang of four were last seen on motorbikes heading southeast out of the French capital toward the A6 highway, Darmanin said.
Officials said they have been working on improving security at the Louvre, the world’s most popular museum, for years but added that it takes time and money.
“When the Louvre Museum was designed, it wasn’t designed to welcome 10 million visitors or prepared for these new forms of criminality,” French Culture Minister Rachida Dati said in a Monday interview with Canal News TV.
But the official was also forced to explain why no alarm actually sounded in the Apollon Gallery when the robbers struck Sunday just after 9:30 a.m., half an hour after the museum opened.
When a gallery’s alarm is triggered in the Louvre, it only rings in the building’s security headquarters, where guards are trained to be focused more on safely evacuating visitors than on protecting the museum’s artifacts, she said.
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The museum, which gets on average 30,000 visitors a day, remained shut to the public Monday, with refunds offered to those who had already purchased entry tickets.
About 60 investigators are working on the case.
As of Monday, police had not announced any leads on the thieves’ possible identities.
Foreign organized-crime involvement wasn’t ruled out, but the sensational robbery is being treated as domestic for now, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau told a local TV station Sunday.
Here’s what was stolen in the brazen Louvre heist
- A diamond and sapphire tiara, sapphire earrings, and a sapphire necklace belonging to Queen Marie-Amelie, the last queen of France, and Queen Hortense.
- An emerald necklace and earrings belonging to Marie-Louise, Napoleon Boneparte’s second wife.
- A tiara belonging to Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III.
- The bodice knot of Empress Eugenie.
The robbery of part of France’s cultural heritage has sparked anger in the country, with President Emmanuel Macron vowing to bring the criminals to justice.
“The theft committed at the Louvre is an attack on a heritage that we cherish because it is our history,” he said Sunday, after furious condemnation by many conservatives.
Jordan Bardella, from the populist right-wing National Rally party, wrote on X, “This heist, which allowed thieves to steal the Crown Jewels of France, is an intolerable humiliation for our country.”
The theft was also compared to the emotional response of the devastating fire at Paris’ Notre Dame cathedral in 2019 by Culture Minister Dati.
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