The theft at the Louvre in Paris on Sunday joins a historic list of robberies, where valuable museum treasures are often taken without a trace.
It was just after dawn in Paris when the sirens began to wail through the narrow streets surrounding the Louvre. Soldiers with rifles guarded the courtyard, tourists were turned away, and the great glass pyramid stood silent under a gray sky.
Inside, the world’s most visited museum had been stripped of eight priceless jewels once belonging to Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie. The thieves were gone, and the crime had already become legend.
Police say it was fast and flawless — less than seven minutes from entry to escape.
Security footage shows figures dressed in black, moving with precision on the morning of Sunday, Oct. 19. These people knew what they wanted and how to take it. When the alarms rang, it was already too late. The jewels, pieces of France’s royal past, vanished into the dark.
Experts say the thieves may be caught, but the jewels may not return. Once the gold is melted and the diamonds cut, there is no trail left to follow.
“Once they’re gone, they’re gone,” said Christopher Marinello of Art Recovery International.
For investigators, time is the enemy. For the thieves, time is the perfect disguise.
Across the Atlantic, Washington, D.C. knows this story too well.
The nation’s capital, home to some of the most treasured pieces of American history, has long battled its own quiet plague of thefts. From the Smithsonian Institution to small neighborhood galleries, beauty has been stolen in plain sight.
In 1979, a gold snuff box encrusted with diamonds was taken from the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History. Two years later, thieves struck again, this time breaking into a Smithsonian storage facility and escaping with more than a dozen artifacts, including George Washington’s correspondence, antique coins, and a colonial sword.
In 1981, what would come to be known as the “Smithsonian Heist” saw burglars bypass guards and alarms, walking out with relics of the early republic — priceless symbols of the nation’s birth.
Even decades later, the city has remained a quiet battleground between art and opportunism. In 2023, D.C. artist AnaYelsi Velasco Sanchez was celebrating her first solo exhibition in Adams Morgan when a man slipped two of her paintings off the wall, tucked them into a bag, and disappeared.
The theft took less than three minutes. She had surveillance footage but refused to turn it over to police.
“I’m not scared to call them,” she told WTOP News. “I’m not willing to call them. For me, the harm that comes out of engaging with police is much more violent than anything that has occurred.”
Instances of Treasure Theft Around the World
From national treasures to community creations, D.C. has seen its share of stolen history. Some pieces are melted down; others hang on the walls of private collectors who will never speak of how they came to possess them. Like Paris, Washington has learned that even the symbols of freedom are not immune to theft.
And so, the Louvre is not the first to fall.
In 1990, two men dressed as police officers walked into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. They overpowered the guards and stripped 13 paintings from the walls. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, Manet — all gone without a trace. The museum’s founder had written that nothing inside could ever be moved, so the empty frames remain, haunting the gallery like ghosts. More than 30 years later, the paintings have never returned.
In 1911, the Mona Lisa disappeared from the same Paris museum that now mourns its jewels. She was not yet famous then. When she vanished, the world learned her name. Two years later, police found her in Florence, hidden by an Italian handyman who claimed he wanted to bring her home. When she was returned to the Louvre, she was no longer just a painting; she was a legend.
In 1972, three masked men descended through a skylight into the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. They tied up the guards and escaped with 18 paintings and dozens of jewels, including a Rembrandt worth a million dollars. No one was ever caught. None of the art has been found. Some say the Montreal mafia helped hide the works in private collections. Others believe they were destroyed.
In 2010, Paris faced another betrayal from within. A man known as “Spider-Man” climbed the walls of the Musée d’Art Moderne and slipped inside. He took works by Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani, choosing his prizes with an artist’s eye. When he was arrested, the paintings were gone. While he said he stole them for beauty, some believe he destroyed them rather than let them be recovered.
Now the Louvre stands scarred once more, its name added to a list of crimes that spans centuries and continents. From Paris to Washington, from Scranton to Montreal, investigators search, artists mourn, and history waits in silence. The jewels of Napoleon’s court may already be gone, scattered into fragments, melted into history.
“This is not just an affront to law and order,” International Intrigue wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Oct. 20, “but also French history and culture, amid a febrile atmosphere of political-economic instability, all while a populist opposition circles.”
Source: Washington Informer
