On Sunday, at around 9:30 a.m., robbers broke into the Parisian museum‘s Apollo Gallery using a cherry picker and an angle grinder to steal nine pieces of jewelry worth an estimated $102 million in less than eight minutes. Could the heist have been prevented? ARTnews contacted experts to find out.
Most agreed that the theft could have happened anywhere. James Ratcliffe, director of recoveries and general counsel at the Art Loss Register, called the heist “a case of working out where there is an opportunity and taking advantage of it. I would be surprised if they hadn’t thought about other museums. We know that other French museums have been targeted.”
He was likely referring to the Natural History Museum in Paris, which was robbed just one month prior to the Louvre theft. A woman has since been charged in connection with that theft. Meanwhile, the House of Enlightenment, Denis Diderot in Landres was heisted the same day as the Louvre.
It’s not just France, of course. A collection of valuable artifacts from Romania were stolen from the Drents Museum in Assen, the Netherlands, earlier this year; the objects have yet to be found. In 2019, the Dresden crown jewels in Germany were also stolen, but luckily, were mostly recovered and are now back on display. That same year, Maurizio Cattelan‘s 18-carat gold toilet was taken from Blenheim Palace in England; it remains unrecovered.
Many museums do have security systems in place to prevent similar heists, but they aren’t always foolproof. Unfortunately, in the case of the Louvre, security concerns went unchecked until it was too late. In June, the Louvre was forced to close when gallery attendants, ticket agents, and security officers walked out in protest of what they described as inadequate staffing. Security concerns, Louvre staff alleged, had resulted in “untenable” working conditions.
“With museums, where they fall down is on the trainings and on doing drills [for] how they would handle these situations if they did happen,” said Mari-Claudia Jiménez, a partner and global co-head of the international law firm Withers.
“It’s hard for museums because they’re balancing these two objectives, security and access, that are inherently contradictory things,” Jiménez acknowledged. “It’s very difficult for public and private museums that are meant to be open to the public to think about how to limit the ways that people can view and engage [with] things.”
In a hearing before the French Senate, Louvre director Laurence des Cars requested “the installation of a police station” at the museum in light of the theft. Some 200 of the nearly 2,000 staff positions at the Louvre have been cut over the last 15 years, with 138 security agents reduced between 2014 and 2023.
But even an increased security presence may not prevent a heist. In the case of Louvre, Ratcliffe asked: “Even if there was a security guard in the room, what were they supposed to do when faced with two men with chainsaws?” While security guards can help identify potential threats to artworks, they are not always armed.
“The more you do to control access, the more you limit public enjoyment of work,” Jiménez added.
Surveillance technology can help. Some years ago, institutions tried employing GPS trackers, placing them in the frames of paintings. But this method itself proves faulty: paintings can easily be removed from their frames, and it’s impossible to embed trackers into the canvases without damaging them. Some experts said that art institutions must evolve past this tactic, drawing on strategies used by high-end commercial businesses.
Simon de Burgh Codrington, a fine arts insurance expert at Risk Strategies, pointed out that France has a long history of what he described as “high-end jewelry theft in Paris.” It might not be a coincidence that these heists occurred at museums, not stores. “While it happened to the Louvre this time, was it perhaps just [aimed at] a cultural institution because their security isn’t as aggressive as Bulgari or some of the other big jewelers?” de Burgh Codrington asked.
“In terms of security, cultural institutions have lagged behind commercial institutions because they’ve had to up their ante due to the problems they’ve had,” he continued. “They need to take from the playbook of the top jewelers.”
While there is not one single answer to the problem, de Burgh Codrington suggested what he called “onion layers of security.” These include a multitude of measures, among them high-quality security cases, cameras and CCTV, alarms, bolstered guarding, and even moving certain items to new locations. “Maybe high-value jewelry items shouldn’t be on the perimeter” of the building, he said of the Louvre.
An official report written prior to the theft allegedly indicated that the Louvre’s security systems were deemed outdated and inadequate. The audit said that the museum lacked efficient CCTV equipment. Upgrades were repeatedly postponed and only installed in refurbished rooms in the museum. (Both the Louvre and the French government stressed that the museum’s security did not fail after the audit was leaked.)
Perhaps most importantly, de Burgh Codrington stressed that institutions and governments alike need to stop thinking about these objects purely from a cultural standpoint. While they do often have invaluable heritage, their materials also have calculable value, making them a target for thieves looking to cash in.
“In terms of recovery, I think the Louvre and the French authorities have done the right thing by immediately publicizing what’s been taken. That just makes it bit harder for people to get [the gold] melted down and [the diamonds] recut for circulation,” Ratcliffe said.
To make matters worse, the stolen Louvre objects were reportedly uninsured. Art theft expert Anthony Amore said, “The museum or the government needs to start thinking about putting out a very sizable reward” in an effort to dissuade the thieves from “break[ing] these things up. They will have a plausible way to monetize their crime because the important thing is getting them back.”
A lawyer, who would be legally bound by attorney-client privilege, could in theory broker such kind of reward deal, Amore added, without the thieves becoming implicated in the crime.
Ratcliffe cautioned, however, that “there are very good policy reasons why you might not offer a reward. You don’t want to encourage this kind of activity in future.”
