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The brazen robbery on Sunday has put a spotlight on security protocols in the sprawling museum, which have been tested over the years by break-ins and thefts.
Elaine Sciolino, a former Paris bureau chief for The Times, recently published a book on the Louvre. She reported from Paris.
Oct. 22, 2025, 12:00 a.m. ET
How do you solve a problem like the Louvre? Perhaps you can’t.
The world’s most famous and most-visited museum started as a medieval military fortress, then became a palace. It took a revolution to turn it into a museum. Royals and rulers renovated it more than 20 times, satisfying their vanity but leaving behind an incoherent structure that sits on 25 different levels and stretches for half a mile. It exhibits over 30,000 of its 500,000 artworks in more than 400 rooms.
And it is this convoluted history and identity that make the Louvre a structure that is so difficult to monitor, oversee and protect.
“The Louvre is a palace that doesn’t have the logic of a museum,” said Gérard Araud, the president of the Society of Friends of the Louvre. “It is a universe unto itself.”
The brazen and seemingly effortless robbery Sunday morning of eight pieces from the collection of crown jewels at the museum has wounded its leadership and put a spotlight on the Louvre’s security protocols, which have been tested over the years by break-ins and thefts.
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Not since Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian who had worked as a glazier at the Louvre, stole the Mona Lisa in 1911 has the reputation of the museum been so damaged by a security blunder. Since Sunday, charges of lax protection at the Louvre have been so relentless that the French Senate has called Laurence des Cars, the museum’s director, to explain herself in a hearing on Wednesday.
A confidential draft report by the Cour des Comptes, France’s highest-level auditing institution, faults the Louvre for an inadequate video surveillance system in all three of its wings, huge reductions and delays in spending for security in recent years and a flawed sense of overall priorities. The document indicates that spending on security in 2024 was far lower it was 20 years ago.
In the Richelieu wing, which holds paintings by Poussin, Dürer and Vermeer, as well as the ancient Persian and Mesopotamian collections, only 25 percent of 182 rooms are covered by surveillance cameras, according to the report.
There have been “considerable delays in the raising of the museum’s technical facilities to modern standards,” the report said, according to a partial copy seen by The New York Times.
The report blames the museum’s leadership for focusing on new projects rather than “indispensable work” needed at the museum. The Louvre “has abundant resources of its own that it should use as a priority for urgent work,” the report says.
The jewels under the Louvre’s care reflect the ups-and-downs of French history through the centuries that the building has endured. From François I to Marie Antoinette, Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Eugénie, French royals amassed a mountain of gems. They wore them in crowns, rings, brooches, bracelets, earrings and necklaces, placed them atop scepters and on thrones, or closeted them away. Through wars and royal rivalries and revolutions, tens of thousands of these jewels remained with the French state.
They have long been a target of thieves.
The most spectacular theft came in 1792, amid the chaos and violence of the unfolding French Revolution. For several nights, drunken brigands settled into the royal storehouse, near the palace that is the Louvre today, to drink, sing and carry off more than 10,000 precious stones and pearls.
While most of the jewels were recovered, one that never came back was the French Blue, a flawless, rare steel-blue 69-carat diamond mined in India and sold to Louis XIV. It was recut to a smaller size — 45.5 carats — and resold more than once before the jeweler Harry Winston bought it and then donated it to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. It is displayed there today as the Hope Diamond, one of the largest blue diamonds in the world.
France is unlikely to ever get it back.
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As for thefts inside the Louvre, a break-in that was in some ways similar to the one last Sunday happened in December 1976 when three masked burglars broke into the museum at dawn. They climbed a cleaning crew’s scaffolding, smashed unbarred windows, clubbed two guards, broke a glass showcase, and grabbed a diamond-studded sword that had belonged to King Charles X, who ruled in the early 19th century, during a period when the monarchy was restored.
The sword has never been recovered. It is listed on the Louvre website as “not on display.”
In 1998, a thief removed “The Path of Sèvres,” a small landscape painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, from its frame in broad daylight. It hung in a room without a surveillance camera. The thief escaped; the painting, valued at an estimated $1.3 million, was never recovered.
As scores of investigators continue to search for the perpetrators of last Sunday’s heist, they are also struggling to understand what went wrong with the Louvre’s security.
The Louvre is protected by a double layer of human security: a staff of guards (almost 1,200 in 2024, according to the Louvre) and a permanent 52-member force of firefighters, who are part of the French military.
The security guards have long complained about their working conditions, and even senior Louvre officials admit the workers’ status and training could be improved.
“Civil servants aren’t very well paid in France,” said Denis Fousse in an interview in 2022, before he retired as the Louvre’s director of visitor services and security. “You take the exam and then we train you. We are not a profession where there is a security guard school.”
The firefighters, on the other hand, are well-drilled and are the first line of defense against fire and floods, and the ones designated to remove artworks in an emergency.
The firefighter-soldiers run a round-the-clock operation. Some stay overnight in simple dormitories furnished with bunk beds, tables and chairs.
Some of their tasks border on the frivolous. When pigeons zoom in through open windows, the firefighters must shoo them out. Other tasks are dead serious: The brigade is the first point of contact and care in all health emergencies. But they are not responsible for crimes like thefts.
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Among the unanswered questions were how the thieves broke the glass cases that displayed the crown jewels. The Louvre has sealed the Mona Lisa in a custom-made climate controlled, bulletproof glass box, and the painting’s wooden reverse side is studded with sensors to detect even the tiniest change in shape.
But the glass in the display cases for the crown jewels was different. It had to be strong enough to resist criminals but flexible enough to be broken by the firefighters if the museum caught fire and the jewels had to be saved, said a former senior member of the unit, who was not authorized to speak publicly as a retired member of the French military.
The firefighters’ handbook shows how tools like axes and battery-powered angle grinders are used to break glass display cases.
“To secure the jewels, you also have to be able to extract them in an emergency,” the former firefighter said. “We have tools that can open the cases. It takes time and training to do so.”
The theft on Sunday has depleted what was already a diminished collection of crown jewels. In the years after the founding of the Third Republic, the parliamentary government created in 1870 from the ashes of Napoleon III’s empire, an anti-monarchical republican fervor swept France. In 1887, France held a grand 11-day public auction of most of its crown jewels.
Gems were torn from their settings; jeweled ornaments were broken up. Diamond merchants, importers and jewelers from around the world descended on Paris for the auction, and more than 77,000 stones were sold. Charles Lewis Tiffany, the founder of Tiffany & Company, was the largest buyer, scooping up just over a third of the inventory.
For several decades, the Louvre has struggled to buy back, piece by piece, jewels from the collection when they came up for sale.
The irony of the current theft is that some of the crown jewels stolen had been sold in the auction and later bought back for the Louvre. Now they are gone again.
