“Professional” Thieves Steal Priceless Jewelry From Louvre

By Rob Bates | October 20, 2025

A gang of thieves stole eight historic jewels from the Louvre on Sunday in a brazen theft that some are calling the biggest heist in the Paris museum’s history.

According to press reports, at 9:30 a.m., a half hour after the museum opened, four thieves—who were wearing yellow vests, to look like construction workers—used a truck with an extendable ladder to access a second-floor balcony near the museum’s Apollo gallery, which houses the French crown jewels. From there, they broke a window—triggering an alarm—and climbed inside.

The thieves threatened museum guards and used an angle girder and blowtorch to penetrate two glass display cases and remove nine pieces, reports said.

They exited out the window and drove away on scooters. The robbers had tried to set fire to their truck, but a guard prevented it, according to a statement from the French ministry of culture.

The entire theft took less than seven minutes. No injuries were reported. The thieves left behind some of their equipment as well as a diamond- and emerald-encrusted crown as they fled.

Eight pieces from the Louvre’s collection are missing, including a tiara, adorned with some 1,000 diamonds, that had belonged to Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III; an emerald necklace and a pair of emerald earrings, from Marie Louise, Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife; and a diadem, a sapphire necklace, and a sapphire earring, all owned by Queen Hortense of Holland and her daughter Marie-Amélie, the final queen of France.

The crown (also once the property of Empress Eugénie) has been recovered, and its condition is “under review,” the culture ministry said.

Jewelers’ Security Alliance executive vice president Scott Guginsky tells JCK the theft should be a warning to any business that displays jewelry.

“If Napoleon’s jewelry can be stolen, it can happen anywhere,” he says. “The lesson for our industry is that if you put jewelry in a museum, if you put it out in a lobby, and it’s not fortified, you are at risk.”

The Louvre theft appears to have been carefully planned, says Guginsky.

“These are professional thieves that thought things through,” he says. “This was weeks and weeks of planning. They probably cased it for a while. They did their due diligence. The gang is probably out of the country already and things are being shipped to another location.”

It’s likely that the historic pieces will be destroyed and broken down for parts, Guginsky says.

“It’s like stealing a Picasso—you can hang it in your house, but you can’t put it out on the open market. Whoever has that jewelry will probably sit on it for a while, and then it will probably be broken apart. If that one piece has 1,000 diamonds, chances are they aren’t melee.”

He advises jewelers in the United States to be on the lookout “if someone’s selling a large amount of diamonds without grading reports.”

French president Emmanuel Macron wrote on X that “The theft committed at the Louvre is an attack on a heritage that we cherish because it is our history.

“We will recover the works, and the perpetrators will be brought to justice. Everything is being done, everywhere, to achieve this, under the leadership of the Paris prosecutor’s office,” Macron posted.

The Louvre closed for the day following the robbery and stayed closed today, according to the museum’s Facebook page.