The doors of the world’s grandest museum had been opened to the public for just 30 minutes when two burglars were lifted up onto a stony second-floor balcony on the building’s south side.
Their faces concealed, they rode a monte-meubles, a truck-mounted electric ladder that is a common sight on the streets of Paris, where it is used to ferry bulky furniture through the windows of apartments.
Once there, they used grinders to break a window, setting off the security alarms, and burst inside the gilded Galerie d’Apollon of the Louvre Museum, where a prized collection of royal jewels and crown diamonds is held in a succession of cases.
There they smashed two cases, sounding more alarms, and snatched eight precious objects, including a royal sapphire necklace and earring, a royal emerald necklace, and earrings and a diadem worn by Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, the 19th-century ruler.
The burglars went back down the ladder to a road shouldering the Seine and made their getaway with two waiting members of their team on motor scooters.
In all, it took no more than seven minutes.
It was the most brazen — and possibly the most costly — theft ever staged at the Louvre, which houses the country’s most prized art collections. French politicians publicly mourned the loss and railed against those they deemed responsible, loudly demanding to know how such a thing could happen at the world’s most famous museum at 9:30 on a Sunday morning.
“It seems like a scenario out of a film or a television series,” said Ariel Weil, the mayor of central Paris, where the Louvre is located.
Not only did it take place in broad daylight, while the museum was open, Mr. Weil pointed out, but the thieves walked off with some of the nation’s crown jewels.
“Those are the most valuable thing — not just from a material point of view, but from a symbolic one,” he said in an interview.
President Emmanuel Macron said in a message on social media that the theft was “an attack on a heritage that we cherish because it is our History.”
Then he made a vow: “We will recover the works, and the perpetrators will be brought to justice. Everything is being done, everywhere, to achieve this.”
The Paris prosecutor’s office said it had opened an investigation.
The authorities said that investigators were poring through evidence that included objects abandoned by the thieves and security camera footage. “It’s a major robbery,” Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said on France Inter radio Sunday morning.
Up until last week, Mr. Nuñez was the head of the Paris police, and he said the robbery bore the hallmarks of a team of veteran criminals, given its precision and speed.
At the moment of the break-in, the museum was already full of visitors. Five museum staff members were either in or near the gilded Apollo Gallery. Following the Louvre’s security protocol, they contacted the police, “prioritizing the protection of people,” according to statement by the French ministry of culture.
No one was hurt, the ministry said, though the Paris prosecutor’s office said the staff had been threatened by the robbers.
In their haste to leave, the robbers dropped a crown made for Empress Eugénie to wear during the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855. It holds 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds, according to the Louvre. The Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement that a second jeweled item was also “lost or abandoned during the perpetrators’ escape,” but did not say what it was.
Before fleeing the scene the robbers tried to burn the basket of the monte-meubles that had carried them aloft, authorities said.
Elsewhere in the cavernous building, museum staff members were directing visitors to leave.
Joseph Sanchez, a tourist from Puerto Rico, was in the crowd pressing to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa when security guards began to shout for them to evacuate. Many panicked, believing that the museum was on fire or that it had been attacked by terrorists, said Mr. Sanchez.
A travel vlogger, he filmed himself racing through the museum halls and down the marble stairs with his family members. They were kept in the lobby for more than an hour before the crowd, now calm, was allowed to exit the building, Mr. Sanchez said in an interview.
Afterward, the museum remained closed for the day as “a security measure and to preserve traces and clues for the investigation,” according to a statement from the Louvre.
It is hard to overstate the importance of the Louvre to France.
A former royal palace. it was transformed into a museum after the French Revolution. Its dizzying number of wings and courtyards hold more than 33,000 works of art, including sculptures from ancient Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia, paintings by European masters like Jacques-Louis David and Rembrandt, and antique furniture, including the pieces that furnished the luxurious apartments of Napoleon III.
Up to 30,000 people visit the museum each day, making it the most visited museum in the world. Its most popular painting, the Mona Lisa, draws such crowds that earlier this year, Mr. Macron announced that the building would be renovated to create a room and special entrance for it.
Mr. Macron said on Sunday that the renovation would include improved security. “It will be the guarantor of the preservation and protection of what constitutes our memory and our culture,” he said.
Political opponents denounced the government throughout the day, accusing it of not sufficiently securing the museum’s precious collection.
“The government, in an ultimate symbol of its collapse, has allowed the Crown Jewels to be stolen!” one right-wing lawmaker, Éric Ciotti, declared on social media. “When the State no longer ensures the security of its treasures, the entire nation is threatened.”
Ian Brossat, a Communist senator and longtime Paris councilor, noted that the museum had closed for several hours last summer because of a wildcat strike by employees who were warning about untenable conditions in the overcrowded museum. “Why were their warnings not heard by the minister?” he asked.
The Louvre is the latest in a line of French museums to have been hit by recent robberies.
Last week, four men were arrested a few hours after the President Jacques Chirac Museum in the town of Corrèze was robbed by individuals wearing balaclavas and armed with a shotgun and bladed weapons. Less than 48 hours later, the museum was burglarized, according to the French press.
In September, thieves stole nuggets of raw gold worth about $700,000, using a blow torch and grinder, from the National Museum of Natural History, a few subway stops from the Louvre. That same month, two porcelain dishes and a vase worth about €9.5 million — $11 million — were stolen from the Adrien Dubouché museum in Limoges.
Arthur Brand, 56, a Dutch art crime expert, said in a telephone interview that he was unsurprised by the Louvre theft, given the recent pattern. But entering France’s most important museum and stealing jewels, he said, “is the ultimate art heist”
While perhaps destined to become its most notorious, Sunday’s theft was not the Louvre’s first. The museum has been targeted by a number of high-profile thefts.
In 1976, three burglars broke into the Louvre at dawn, climbing up a metal scaffolding and smashing windows on the second floor and stealing a 19th-century diamond-studded sword that once belonged to King Charles X . And in 1990, a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, “Portrait of a Seated Woman,” was cut from its frame and stolen from a third-floor gallery.
But the best-known theft — and the one that made the Mona Lisa famous — occurred during the summer of 1911 when the painting was stolen by a museum employee, Vincenzo Peruggia. Two years later, after breathless news coverage of the case, Peruggia was arrested while trying to sell the painting in Italy.
Museums in other countries across Europe have also been hit by robberies in recent years.
In 2019, thieves broke into the Green Vault rooms of the Royal Palace museum in Dresden, Germany, and stole more than 100 million euros’ worth of jewels (about $116 million). Most of the loot was later recovered as part of a plea deal. In 2022, thieves stole a cache of 483 ancient gold coins from a museum in Germany, worth an estimated $1.7 million.
Mr. Nuñez, the interior minister, said on Sunday that security at the Louvre had increased in recent years.
“But we can’t prevent everything,” he told France Inter.
Jenny Gross and Alex Marshall contributed reporting from London, and Ségolène Le Stradic from Paris.
Catherine Porter is an international reporter for The Times, covering France. She is based in Paris.
Aurelien Breeden is a reporter for The Times in Paris, covering news from France.
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