10/23/2025
PARIS—There was just one surveillance camera in the area where thieves parked a truck-mounted lift to rob the Louvre Museum—and it was pointed in the wrong direction.
Security guards monitoring screens in the museum’s command center were therefore oblivious as the crew of burglars wearing yellow reflective vests placed cones around the truck and raised its mechanized ladder toward the exterior balcony of the Galerie d’Apollon, home of the nation’s crown jewels. The blind spot cost the Louvre precious minutes to stop a heist in which every second counted.
“We didn’t see the arrival of the thieves sufficiently in advance,” Laurence des Cars, director of the Louvre, said Wednesday in testimony before the French Senate. The entire perimeter of the sprawling Louvre Palace that houses the museum was monitored by only a few aging cameras, she said, adding: “The system is very insufficient.”
For years, authorities knew that lack of surveillance cameras outside the Louvre was one of many weak points in the museum’s security. They were preparing a major upgrade that, finally, aimed to cover the vast museum’s exterior with cameras, bringing state-of-the-art security to an institution that houses many of the world’s most priceless works of art.
Authorities are now facing the fact that years of delay allowed thieves to carry out one of the most devastating heists in French history. The thieves made off with eight pieces of jewelry from France’s royal and Napoleonic-era collections valued at €88 million, around $102 million, though French officials say that sum doesn’t begin to capture the jewels’ value to France.
“An immense wound has been inflicted on us,” des Cars said.
The four thieves who pulled off the heist were likely backed by others involved in planning the robbery, said Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau.
Sunday’s robbery has profoundly embarrassed the French establishment, spurring questions about how successive governments allowed security weaknesses to persist at the world-famous museum. Louvre officials have repeatedly warned over the past decade that the museum’s infrastructure was crumbling and its equipment out-of-date. They decided four years ago to pursue an upgrade, but bureaucratic hurdles meant the work has yet to begin.
Des Cars took over at the Louvre in 2021, after leading the Musée d’Orsay across the Seine River. Officials at the Louvre told her that she would be “shocked by the contrast with the obviously much more modern equipment at the Musée d’Orsay,” des Cars said.
In recent years, the antiestablishment yellow vest protests presented what authorities considered to be the most pressing security threat facing the Louvre. In December 2018, protesters tore down a fence in the Tuileries Garden next to the Louvre. One of des Cars’ first decisions was to upgrade fencing around the entire complex.
That left much of the dilapidated equipment and security weaknesses in place. Few surveillance cameras cover the outside of the museum, and the security command centers were woefully inadequate.
Inside the museum, 60% of its Sully wing and 75% of its Richelieu wing aren’t surveilled by video cameras, according to extracts of a report by France’s state auditor.
In 2021, the French government began preparing to fix some of these weaknesses. It was planning to spend €80 million to double the number of cameras outside the Louvre and build new command posts with modern surveillance technology. To monitor the 2.6 million square feet of floor space of the museum, once a palace of French kings, officials first needed to rewire the facility with 60 kilometers in cabling.
The outdated system, meanwhile, created an opening for Sunday’s heist. At 9:30 a.m. local time, the thieves parked the truck-mounted lift just under the Galerie d’Apollon on the eastern side of the palace.
“Unfortunately,” des Cars said, “the only camera there is pointed west and doesn’t cover the balcony
That left the thieves free to go about raising the cranelike lift to reach the palace’s exterior balcony without anyone noticing. Their yellow vests and road safety equipment made them look like workers to any cars driving by on the Quai François-Mitterrand, a busy thoroughfare along the Seine River.
Security guards rushed to the site, but they were unarmed in accordance with regulations, museum officials said. Instead of trying to stop the thieves, who were brandishing their grinders as weapons, the guards focused on evacuating visitors.
At 9:37 a.m., security ordered the museum to shut all of its exits in an attempt to trap the thieves, but the burglars simply fled back from where they came, riding the elevator crane back down to street level and escaping on motorcycles.
The crown jewels were gone.
Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said the thieves obtained the truck in a town north of Paris with a name—Louvres—that closely resembles the museum’s.
“The coincidence is troubling,” she said.
Four minutes later, the thieves began cutting into the balcony window with an angle grinder, triggering the alarm system. A security guard radioed to the museum’s command post at 9:35 a.m., which notified police 33 seconds later.
By then, the thieves were inside the gallery. They turned their angle grinders on the sparkling glass display cases, cutting holes large enough to pass their hands inside and extract necklaces and earrings with emeralds the size of lozenges, a sapphire-laden tiara and other diamond-encrusted jewels. The thieves didn’t take the 140-carat Regent Diamond in an adjacent case, though.
No comments:
Post a Comment