French museums are facing a wave of brazen thefts that has exposed just how vulnerable their treasures really are. When thieves scaled a balcony at the Louvre on October 19 and escaped with crown jewels worth tens of millions of dollars, it seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime heist. But within hours, the mayor of the small town of Langres got a call: their own museum, the Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot, had been robbed overnight, its display of historic gold and silver coins smashed open and emptied, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Brazen robberies expose weak security
The Louvre raid was only one of nine museum heists in France over the past year, with five museums hit since the beginning of September alone, some more than once. Targets range from the grand Museum of Natural History in central Paris to the remote Musée du Désert in the Cévennes, where a lone thief walked in through a side door at night and took around 100 gold Huguenot crosses in minutes. In many cases, the alarms worked but the response was slow, guards were unarmed, and display cases offered little resistance.
France is rich in cultural heritage but short on money to protect it. More than 1,200 sites are officially classified as museums, many housed in centuries-old palaces and mansions that were never designed with modern security in mind. Successive governments have struggled with budget deficits, leaving museums with ageing camera systems, patchy alarm coverage and constant delays for basic upgrades that have to be cleared by heritage authorities.
How ‘melt value’ made museums a target
The surge in gold and other metal prices has made museums especially tempting. Thieves no longer need to find a buyer willing to take a famous painting or a recognisable jewel; they just need the “melt value”. In Berlin in 2017, a gang stole a 220-pound pure gold coin, the “Big Maple Leaf”, from the Bode Museum and cut it up. Later, the same crime family helped orchestrate a spectacular raid on Dresden’s Green Vault, where jewel sets with thousands of diamonds were grabbed in minutes. That playbook has now spread across Europe.
In Paris last year, a thief used power tools to cut into the Museum of Natural History and torch open a case holding 13 pounds of gold nuggets from around the world. At the Musée du Président Jacques Chirac, robbers struck on back-to-back nights, first storming in with a shotgun and knives, then returning to steal watches and jewellery worth more than a million dollars.
France scrambles to protect its treasures
Until recently, a small national unit of about 30 police officers handled museum thefts across the country, stretched thin as the cases mounted. Only after the Louvre robbery did the government order prefects to identify the nation’s most valuable works and prioritise security upgrades. The Louvre itself has long-planned projects to double its camera network and rewire kilometres of cabling, but much of that work is still to come.
For smaller museums like the Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot, the gap between risk and resources is even starker. The museum depends on the town and private donors; ticket sales do not cover its costs, and even simple measures like metal shutters were delayed for financial reasons. On the night of the Louvre heist, thieves broke through its main door and headed straight for the coins discovered during renovations in 2011, a local “treasure with an incredible history.” An alarm did sound, but the staff member who checked used a side entrance and missed the damage. By the time workers arrived the next morning, the coins were gone.
The twin robberies that night, one at the world’s most famous museum and the other at a small town’s pride, underline the same uncomfortable truth: in a country overflowing with art and artefacts but slow to invest in security, thieves have found their moment.
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