Live

The secret life of Europe’s stolen art

Four Minutes at the Louvre

It was just another morning like any other on October 19, 2025, for the great Louvre Museum, which welcomed its first visitors as it did every other day. The ordinariness of everyday life disappeared when, at 9:30 a.m., four men dressed in yellow vests arrived with a forklift truck on the banks of the Seine. In just four minutes, they used mechanical tools to cut through the window of the famous Galerie d Apollon, break two display cases, and steal eight pieces of jewelry of inestimable value—crowns, diadems, and necklaces that once belonged to queens and empresses of France, from Marie-Amélie to Empress Eugénie. They made their escape on two scooters, racing against time and the authorities along the river, leaving behind a destroyed crown and traces of fuel — scenes more reminiscent of a movie heist than reality.

The thieves used an angle grinder and a blowtorch, while gloves, walkie-talkies, and gasoline were found outside the museum, abandoned next to the truck that lifted them up to the balcony of the hall. The police found Eugenia’s tiara, with 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds, fallen and damaged. For investigators, the method and determination of the perpetrators are reminiscent of the Green Vault robbery in Dresden (2019), when members of the Remmo family stole jewelry worth €113 million, confirming that this is a European crime pattern with an organized basis. The robbery highlighted security issues such as the poor code for the camera access system and the weaknesses of the facilities, with one of the three rooms in the wing having no cameras when the local alarm system itself was out of order. On that day, despite the activation of the general security system, which provided time for evacuation, it became clear that this was an attack on the soft underbelly of civilization and democracy.

On a political level, President Emmanuel Macron described the incident as “an attack on our history,” while Marine Le Pen spoke of “a wound to the soul of France.” Culture Minister Rachida Dati described the perpetrators as “experienced, calm, and with an escape plan,” while Interior Minister Laurent Nounies admitted that the state had “failed” in terms of prevention.

French authorities have examined potential links to Eastern European networks known for trafficking stolen artworks—whether for private collectors or as currency in illicit trade—but the investigation has since broadened. Officials are now exploring additional scenarios beyond the trafficking-gang hypothesis, including the possibility of a commissioned theft or local criminal involvement. Interpol has added the stolen jewellery to its database, and the case remains active, with five people arrested and two suspects still at large. Authorities admit that the robbery revealed years of underestimating the risks, with Culture Minister Rachida Dati pledging to strengthen security measures by the end of the year, while museum director Laurence des Cars admitted that the only camera in the room was pointing away from the entrance window. At the same time, critics accuse the Louvre of investing too much in the “New Renaissance” program (a renovation project costing up to €800 million) while neglecting basic security. Today, several of the museum’s priceless treasures have been transferred to the Bank of France, symbolically marking an interesting shift from works of art to managed capital.

While the 1970s certainly intensified the financialisation of art, artworks had already been treated as capitalised assets much earlier, with organised art markets, speculative booms and auction-house trading developing from the 18th and 19th centuries onward, and notable market ‘booms’ in the 1960s.In the years that followed, museums emerged as repositories of national identity, while the archetype of the “noble art thief” emerged, as portrayed in films such as The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) and Topkapi (1964). However, this fantasy linked art with greed, making it both a symbol of prestige and an object of exploitation.

Today, Europol now lists the illegal trafficking of cultural goods as one of the European Union’s priorities in the fight against organized crime. As the Agency explains, the phenomenon is based on three main pillars: theft, looting, and forgery, all of which are acts that “generate huge profits and are often linked to money laundering.” From ancient artefacts illegally removed from excavations to fake antiques traded online, the “black market in cultural heritage” operates using the same mechanisms as the trafficking of drugs or weapons. The Pandora operations, coordinated annually by Europol, reflect the scale of the problem: 37,700 items were seized in 2025, while in 2024, another 6,400 works were recovered in Europe-wide raids. However, Europol itself acknowledges that these are only “the tip of the iceberg,” as the vast majority of crimes are never recorded because criminal structures are now cross-border, with sales taking place online, often through fake collectors and social media marketplaces, where controls are virtually non-existent.

Commercialization is based on the consistency of the market that the West itself has built: a market where artworks function as capital reserves, investment portfolios, or means of prestige. From museum collections to NFTs and crypto-collectible tokens, the contemporary culture of ownership has transformed aesthetics into assets. Art is becoming more visible, with societies treating artworks as investment objects, thereby undermining their ethical value. The result is a Europe that keeps its masterpieces behind bulletproof glass, while at the same time leaving the roots of its cultural memory exposed to the very market forces that once elevated it.

The shadow market

Behind Napoleon’s precious crowns and stones, lies a global network of illegal trafficking in cultural goods, with routes stretching from Paris and Berlin to the ports of Antwerp and the markets of Istanbul. The ongoing investigation is examining a possible connection between the case and Eastern European circles that supply works of art on behalf of wealthy collectors or use them as currency. Tim Carpenter, former head of the FBI Art Crime Division, explains that “traditional works of art” are difficult to liquidate because of their recognizability, while precious metals and stones have “high liquidity” and can be dissolved or melted without a trace. Europol confirms the above, stating that the most profitable thefts now involve coins, jewelry, rare metal objects, and small-volume antiquities because they can be easily transported and resold without certificates of origin, while the so-called “commodification of heritage” has turned museums into high-liquidity targets, beyond places of culture, and into warehouses for investment resources.

Tackling these crimes remains problematic. Naomi Oosterman, Assistant Professor of Cultural Heritage at the Department of Arts and Culture Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam with a specialization in the illicit trade of arts and antiquities, emphasizes that, despite European cooperation structures, monitoring systems are incomplete and unreliable.

The so-called “dark figure,” that obscure percentage of crimes that are never reported, reveals the inability of institutions to record the invisible. At the same time, criminal groups operate with speed and knowledge of the subject, while police authorities often lack expertise. At the same time, Professor Oosterman points out that databases (such as those of Interpol or the Art Loss Register) can be used in reverse, i.e. as mechanisms of legalisation: if an object is not recorded as stolen, then it can be sold “in good faith”.

“The use of databases and intelligence-led policing makes sense (also for other crime areas), but databases should be treated with caution. Databases of national and international policing organisations, but also those of private organisations are often incomplete. So just because a work of art is listed on a database, does not mean it is stolen. In criminology we refer to this as a dark figure: crimes that take place but that are not reported to authorities or registered.”

— Naomi Oosterman, Assistant Professor of Cultural Heritage at Erasmus University Rotterdam

 

This attitude of “self-regulation” — or rather controlled opacity — keeps art one of the most profitable and untraceable areas of illegal trade. The Louvre case is not an isolated incident. It was preceded by break-ins at three other French museums within a month, while in 2019, the Green Vault in Dresden was a milestone in the way organised crime families, such as the German Remmo clan, introduced the profession of “art thief” on an industrial scale. The phenomenon no longer concerns the romantic nonconformist of the 1960s, but a global economic system that links cultural heritage to the black market of wealth.

The paradox of inheritance

The news from the Louvre struck at the heart of Europe, with many newspaper headlines referring to a “wound to the French soul,” “national humiliation,” or even an attack on our history. Guardian columnist Jonathan Jones criticizes the rhetoric of “priceless national treasure,” saying that in the end, the thieves did not take any works of art, no Mona Lisa or Chardin, but “a series of charmless royal regalia.” The French Minister of the Interior may have elevated them to symbols of national grandeur, but in reality, the perpetrators were only interested in their material weight—the emeralds, diamonds, and gold. “It was not a robbery for art, but for material goods,” writes Jones. And here we see an interesting shift: the state, in its need to transform an institutional failure into a national narrative, reinvented the material as spiritual, baptizing market value as national heritage through the institutional seal, a rhetorical shift that functions more as consolation than self-criticism.

Her remark serves as a reminder that cultural identity is not self-evident—it is a construct shaped by losses, silences, and selective memories. When European societies mourn a crown, but not the colonial journey of the precious stones that compose it, then “heritage” seems more like a self-portrait of privilege than a common ground of memory. As Emiline Smith Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Glasgow notes has pointed out, the diamonds and emeralds in the Louvre “probably come from Asia, South America, or Africa” — and yet, this origin is completely absent from the public narrative of the loss.

“The stolen jewels are more than iconic objects of immense socio-cultural, historic, and economic value. They are also products of a long history of colonial extraction. The sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, pearls, and other gemstones they contained were mined across Asia, Africa, and South America. These regions were systematically exploited for their cultural and natural resources to enrich European courts and empires. For example, Empress Eugénie’s diadem is set with 3,007 diamonds and 212 pearls. Now largely depleted through centuries of overharvesting, these natural pearls would have come from the Persian Gulf or Indian Ocean. Fueled by slavery, French colonial outposts and broader European networks funnelled such valuable resources to royal courts and elite collectors, where they were transformed into symbols of wealth and power. Though still celebrated as emblems of national prestige today, these objects carry with them a history of exploitation, colonization, and violence.”

— Emiline Smith, Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Glasgow

In France, public mourning for the “cosmic crowns” serves as a ritual of identification not only with aesthetic heritage, but also with an idea of state continuity that the country is struggling to maintain in times of political decay. Perhaps, in the end, we are talking about a double crime, the first being theft and the second being its consequence—the way it reveals the hierarchy of memory, which symbols we consider priceless and which we allow to be lost. And perhaps this is the key to understanding why, if the Louvre crowns are never returned, the debt is not only to the lost objects, but also to those intangible qualities, history, origin, memory, that wealth can buy but never restore.

Written by

Shape the conversation

Do you have anything to add to this story? Any ideas for interviews or angles we should explore? Let us know if you’d like to write a follow-up, a counterpoint, or share a similar story.

Write a counterargument article Write a related article