Louvre crown jewels theft (2025)

On Sunday, October 19, 2025, shortly after opening time, a crew parks a truck fitted with a furniture lift against the Seine side of the Louvre, cuts through a window of the Apollo Gallery, smashes two display cases and leaves within minutes with eight pieces of the French crown jewels. The crown of Empress Eugénie, dropped during the escape, is found damaged near the museum. The Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, puts the loss at 88 million euros, excluding historical value. Suspects are arrested at the end of October. On the insurance side the account is short: national collections are not insured, the State being its own insurer, and nobody pays. What the underwriter keeps is the method. Fine art policies and site surveys mostly look inside, at cases, alarms, patrols; here the attack comes from outside, in daylight, with an ordinary moving lift parked on the public road, and it lasts less than the response time of many security services. The figure also raises a question of value. The 88 million measure a market value, while pieces taken apart or melted down would be worth only their stones and metal: the loss to the heritage far exceeds what those materials would bring the thieves. This entry sticks to the facts known in the fall of 2025 and says nothing of any recovery of the pieces or of the court proceedings. Not to be confused with the theft of Munch's Scream in 2004, another theft during opening hours but carried out at gunpoint inside the galleries, nor with a loss falling under the State exhibition indemnity, which covers borrowed works and not permanent collections.