The Louvre Museum in Paris is closed after masked thieves stole priceless jewels in what officials have described as a seven-minute heist in broad daylight.
Shortly after the museum opened on Sunday morning, two bandits used a lift on a truck to break into its Galerie d'Apollon, which houses the French crown jewels and other treasures, through a second-floor window. That's according to the Paris prosecutor's office, which is looking for four male suspects.
The thieves smashed display cases, stealing what a Louvre spokesperson described as eight items of "inestimable cultural and historical value." They then fled toward a nearby highway on high-powered scooters. Two pieces of jewelry — including the crown of Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III — were found near the museum afterward.
The heist deals a huge blow to one of the most popular museums in the world, which houses valuable works like Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and has drawn some 9 million visitors in recent years.
But it's not a first. Thieves have raided the Louvre multiple times over the decades — and once managed to snatch Mona Lisa herself right off the wall.
A heist made the Mona Lisa famous
The Louvre was built in the 12th century as a military fortress, and by the 14th century was used as a royal residence and art collection center.
The revolutionary government opened the Louvre as a public museum, the Musée Central des Arts, in 1793. It displayed art that had previously been held in the royal collection, embodying the Enlightenment ideals that had ignited the French Revolution four years earlier.
The Louvre now boasts some 35,000 works on permanent display. And despite its fortified history, it has fallen victim to multiple high-profile security breaches, including the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa.
On a Monday morning that August, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had briefly worked at the Louvre, donned his old uniform, walked into the museum and, when the coast was clear, took the painting right off the wall. He slipped it out of its frame in a nearby stairwell and carried it out of the building underneath his smock.
At this time, the Mona Lisa was not widely known outside the art world. And because the museum was in the practice of briefly taking paintings off the walls to photograph them, the Mona Lisa's disappearance went unnoticed for a whopping 28 hours — at which point it quickly became international news.
"The Mona Lisa becomes this incredibly famous painting, literally overnight," writer and historian James Zug told NPR in 2011, a century later.
In fact, the heist got so much attention that Peruggia decided not to try to sell it and stashed it away in the false bottom of a trunk instead.
He did try to sell it more than two years later, approaching an art dealer in Florence who immediately grew suspicious and alerted authorities. Peruggia eventually pleaded guilty to stealing the painting — saying he wanted to return it to its native Italy — and was sentenced to eight months in prison.
The heists didn't stop there
The Louvre and its works survived Nazi Germany's occupation of France during World War II, thanks to Jacques Jaujard, the director of France's national museums.
On the eve of the war, Jaujard, with the help of staff and volunteers, secretly arranged for the Mona Lisa and thousands of other masterpieces to be evacuated to the French countryside to protect them from looting.
But Nazi forces did systematically loot tens of thousands of works from Jewish families and wealthy collectors during the war. Many of them were returned to France through postwar government efforts, but have not been reclaimed. The Louvre began displaying them in 2018, as part of a renewed push to reunite them with the heirs of their original owners.
The postwar period saw a string of bold daytime art thefts, as National Geographic reports.
In May 1966, thieves stole five pieces of antique gold and ruby jewelry from the airline cargo terminal at JFK Airport in New York City. The pieces were on their way back to the Louvre after being displayed on loan at a Virginia museum.
The New York Times reported that two months later, detectives found the jewelry in a grocery bag as it was being passed "from one man to two others in exchange for an envelope containing $2,900." All three were arrested.
A decade later, in December 1976, three masked men broke into the Louvre and stole what the New York Times described as "the priceless diamond-studded sword of King Charles X." That theft bears striking similarities to Sunday's events.
A museum spokesperson told the paper at the time that the trio "climbed a metal scaffolding set up by workers cleaning the facade of the former palace and smashed unbarred windows on the second floor," then smashed a display case to grab the sword. They clubbed two guards and "raced into the Apollo Hall" — the same gallery that was targeted this weekend — but fled the way they came after triggering an automated alarm.
The sword has never been recovered. The Times notes that it wasn't the only item stolen from the Louvre in 1976: That January, it says, "burglars made off with a painting of the Flemish school."
Two pieces of 16th-century Italian armor were taken from the Louvre one evening in May 1983, a mystery that persisted for decades until the breastplate and helmet turned up at an estate auction in Bordeaux, France in early 2021. The pieces were reinstalled in the museum that year, but details about their disappearance remain scarce.
In July 1990, thieves cut a small painting — Pierre Auguste Renoir's Portrait of a Seated Woman — from its frame and stole it in broad daylight from a third-floor gallery, according to news reports at the time. That triggered an inventory, which revealed that a dozen pieces of ancient Roman jewelry had also been taken sometime before then.
And in May 1998, a thief made off with a 19th-century landscape by the French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. According to news reports, after a guard discovered it missing, officials shut down the museum for hours and police conducted body searches on hundreds of visitors as they exited. The painting has never been found.
Why do these breaches keep happening?
In the wake of the 1990 thefts, then-Louvre director Michel Laclotte declared a "crisis," the Washington Post reported at the time.
Laclotte said the crisis would be used to increase museum security measures, including upping its security budget by about $1.8 million and hiring a "super-specialist" to recommend policy changes.
But issues like overcrowding, disrepair and climate change have continued to plague the Louvre.
Tensions reached a boiling point this January, when Laurence des Cars, the Louvre's president-director, sent a letter to France's culture minister outlining issues of concern — which was leaked to the press.
They included "increasing malfunctions in severely degraded spaces," "outdated technical equipment," and "alarming temperature fluctuations endangering the conservation of artworks," according to the French newspaper Le Parisien.
Later that month, French President Emmanuel Macron presented extensive renovation plans for the museum, which are expected to cost as much as $834 million and take nearly a decade to complete.
Among other changes, the project would establish a dedicated room for the Mona Lisa, create a new "grand entrance" to relieve congestion and upgrade the building's security system.
Louvre staff — including gallery attendants, ticket agents and security personnel — say those upgrades can't come soon enough.
In June, the museum shut down for part of a day after staff spontaneously went on strike to protest "unmanageable crowds, chronic understaffing and what one union called 'untenable' working conditions," the Associated Press reported.
Those vulnerabilities are top of mind in the wake of Sunday's heist, as other cultural institutions tighten security and French officials take the blame.
"What is certain is that we have failed, since people were able to park a furniture hoist in the middle of Paris, get people up it in several minutes to grab priceless jewels," Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin told France Inter radio on Monday.
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