How thieves took 7 minutes to steal crown jewels

PARIS — The heist crossed hushed corridors with a speed and ease that humiliated a nation. The authorities are now racing against their own time.

In the space of just seven minutes, in the bright daylight of Sunday morning, four suspects stole nine pieces of France’s crown jewels from the Louvre. They stole not only the most visited museum in the world, but also the French themselves, the government said on Monday.

Authorities are now working to reassure the public that key cultural sites are safe and find jewelry stolen from the museum before they can be broken and melted down.

The thieves used a furniture lift – a truck equipped with a lifting basket, commonly used to hoist furniture into inaccessible buildings in Paris.

They parked it outside the sprawling Renaissance palace, went to the balcony of the Apollo Gallery and sliced ​​the window with cutting tools, officials said.

Their daring heist also pierced the image of the nation.

Threatening museum staff with their angle grinders, otherwise unarmed people The thieves then destroyed two display cases, taking necklaces, tiaras and brooches from the royal families now dispatched to France, officials said.

This all happened just after the museum opened, with passersby able to film a suspect wearing a high-visibility vest standing in front of one of the glass cases housing historical treasures.

Investigators say they are baffled as to why the culprits left behind the colossal 140-carat Regent Diamond, valued at $60 million. Had they wandered down this opulent corridor, they would have reached the Mona Lisa, itself infamously stolen over a century ago.

In fact, they fled on two scooters, but not before dropping two items, including the crown of Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s empress in the 19th century, which was found broken near the scene, authorities said.

This object alone “is worth several tens of millions of euros,” Alexandre Giquello, president of Drouot’s first French auction house, told the Reuters news agency. “And it is not, in my opinion, the most important object” taken by the burglars.

Some experts have said that because the items are unique, they cannot be sold and so thieves will likely try to melt their metals and break their emeralds, sapphires, diamonds and pearls. That means investigators could have less than a week before the jewelry is lost forever.

The incident saw the Louvre closed on Sunday and Monday morning, with disconcerted crowds evacuated from the area immediately after the attackers’ attack.

For a nation whose character is defined by proud displays of history and culture, the incident is seen in some quarters as a national humiliation.

French President Emmanuel Macron called it “an attack on a heritage that we cherish because it is our history.” He pledged to “recover the works and the authors will be brought to justice”, adding that “everything is being done, everywhere, to achieve this”.

The culture and interior ministries held an emergency meeting on Monday and agreed to ask senior officials across France to “immediately assess existing security measures already in place around cultural institutions, and strengthen them if necessary,” the interior ministry said, according to Reuters.

Justice Minister Gérard Darmanin declared that this robbery gave a “negative” and “deplorable” image of France. “What is certain is that we have failed,” he told France Inter radio. “The French all have the feeling of having been robbed.”

One of Macron’s main political opponents, Jordan Bardella, the far-right leader favored to replace him in the next presidential election in 2027, presented the crime as a new example of “the disintegration of the state” under Macron and “an unbearable humiliation for our country.”

This is not the first time that the Louvre has been the target of thieves.

In 1911, a museum decorator named Vincenzo Peruggia stole the Mona Lisa. And more recently, French museums have been hit by a wave of thefts, including raw gold stolen from the National Museum of Natural History and porcelain works worth about $11 million stolen from the Adrien Dubouche Museum in Limoges last month.

After the theft at the Louvre, the SUD Culture union blamed “the destruction of jobs dedicated to security” and the lack of funding for security equipment.

This hints at the broader concern seeping into France.

Macron saw several governments collapse as he tried to stem the rise of Bardella’s National Rally. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest against cuts in public spending.

Today, the authorities are facing a new crisis.

Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said on BFM TV that if the heist was sponsored by a collector, then there was a chance of recovering the objects in their original condition.

Otherwise, leading Dutch art detective Arthur Brand told Sky News that police “have a week” before the jewels are gone forever.

“These crown jewels are so famous you just can’t sell them,” he said. “The only thing they can do is melt the silver and gold, take the diamonds apart, try to cut them. That’s how they’ll probably disappear forever.”

“It’s a race against time.”

Molly Hunter and Mo Abbas reported from Paris and Alexander Smith from London.