This is not the first high-profile heist at the Louvre. Here’s a history of past thefts

The Louvre Museum in Paris has been closed after masked thieves stole valuable jewelry in what officials have described as a seven-minute heist in broad daylight.

Shortly after the museum opened on Sunday morning, two bandits used a truck lift to break into the Galerie d’Apollon, home to the French Crown Jewels and other treasures, through a second-floor window. This is what the Paris public prosecutor’s office says, which is looking for four male suspects.

The thieves destroyed display cases and stole what a Louvre spokesperson described eight articles of ‘invaluable cultural and historical value’. They then fled on high-powered scooters to a nearby highway. Two pieces of jewelry – including the crown of Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III – were subsequently found near the museum.

The robbery causes a huge blow to one of the most popular museums in the world, where valuable works such as those of Leonardo da Vinci are on display. Mona Lisa and signed about 9 million visitors in recent years.

But it is not a first. Thieves have robbed the Louvre several times in recent decades and managed to steal it once Mona Lisa itself straight from the wall.

A robbery made the Mona Lisa known

The Louvre was built in the 12th century as a military fortress and was used as a royal residence and art collection center in the 14th century.

The revolutionary government opened the Louvre as a public museumthe Central Art Museum, in 1793. It displayed art previously in the royal collection and embodied the ideals of the Enlightenment that had fueled the French Revolution four years earlier.

The Louvre now has some 35,000 works permanently on display. And despite its rich history, it has fallen victim to several high-profile security breaches, including the theft of the Mona Lisa.

On a Monday morning in August, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had worked briefly at the Louvre, put on his old uniform, walked into the museum and, when the coast was clear, immediately took the painting down from the wall. He removed it from its frame in a nearby stairwell and carried it out of the building under his keel.

At the moment the Mona Lisa was not generally known outside the art world. And because the museum had the habit of briefly removing paintings from the walls to photograph them, the Mona LisaThe man’s disappearance went unnoticed for no less than 28 hours, after which it quickly became international news.

A reconstruction shows how Vincenzo Peruggia de Mona Lisa from the walls of the Louvre in 1911.

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Roger Violett/Getty Images

“The Mona Lisa becomes this incredibly famous painting literally overnight,” writer and historian James Zug told NPR in 2011, a century later.

In fact, the robbery received so much attention that Peruggia decided not to sell it and instead store it in the false bottom of a trunk.

More than two years later he tried to sell it anyway, approaching an art dealer in Florence, who immediately became suspicious and alerted the authorities. Peruggia eventually pleaded guilty to stealing the painting – he wanted to return it to his native Italy – and was sentenced to eight months in prison.

The robberies didn’t stop there

The Louvre and its works survived the occupation of France by Nazi Germany during World War II, thanks to Jacques Jaujard, the director of France’s national museums.

On the eve of war, Jaujard, with the help of staff and volunteers, secretly arranged the Mona Lisa and thousands of other masterpieces that must be evacuated to the French countryside to protect them from looting.

But Nazi forces systematically plundered tens of thousands of works from Jewish families and wealthy collectors during the war. Many of them were returned to France through post-war government efforts, but have not been recovered. The Louvre began exhibiting them in 2018, as part of a renewed effort to reunite them with the heirs of their original owners.

The post-war period saw a series of daring daytime art thefts National Geographic reports.

In May 1966, thieves stole five antique gold and ruby ​​jewelry from the airline’s cargo terminal at JFK Airport in New York City. The pieces were on their way back to the Louvre after being displayed on loan at a museum in Virginia.

The New York Times reported that two months later, detectives found the jewelry in a shopping bag as it was being passed “from one man to two others in exchange for an envelope containing $2,900.” All three were arrested.

Scaffolding at the Louvre in Paris, France, which three masked men used to gain access to the building and steal King Charles X’s sword in December 1976.

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A decade later, in December 1976three masked men broke into the Louvre and stole what the New York Times described as “the priceless diamond-studded sword of King Charles X.” That theft shows striking similarities with Sunday’s events.

A museum spokesperson told the newspaper at the time that the trio “climbed a metal scaffolding set up by workers cleaning the facade of the former palace and smashed unsecured windows on the second floor,” then smashed a display case to grab the sword. They knocked down two guards and ran into Apollo Hall – the same gallery targeted this weekend – but fled the way they came after setting off an automatic alarm.

The sword was never found. The times notes that this wasn’t the only item stolen from the Louvre in 1976: in January, it says, “burglars made off with a painting by the Flemish school.”

Two pieces of 16th century Italian armor were taken from the Louvre one evening in May 1983. breastplate and helmet up at an estate auction in Bordeaux, France in early 2021. The pieces were reinstalled in the museum that year, but details about their disappearance remain scarce.

In July 1990, thieves tore up a small painting: that of Pierre Auguste Renoir Portrait of a sitting woman – out of its frame and stole it from a third-floor gallery in broad daylight, according to news reports from that time. That caused a inventory, which showed that some time before, a dozen pieces of ancient Roman jewelry had also been taken.

And in May 1998, a thief made off with a 19th-century landscape by the French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. According to news itemsAfter a security guard discovered the museum was missing, officials closed the museum for hours and police executed hundreds of visitors as they left the store. The painting was never found.

Why do these breaches continue to occur?

French police officers stand next to a furniture elevator that robbers used to enter the Louvre on Sunday.

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In the aftermath of the 1990 thefts, then Louvre director Michel Laclotte declared a ‘crisis'”the Washingtonpost reported at the time.

Laclotte said the crisis would be used to increase security measures for museums, including increasing the security budget by about $1.8 million and hiring a “super specialist” to recommend policy changes.

But things like overpopulation, decay and… climate change have continued to plague the Louvre.

Tensions reached a boiling point in January, when Laurence des Cars, the Louvre’s chief executive, sent a letter to the French culture minister outlining areas of concern – which was leaked to the press.

These included “increasing breakdowns in seriously affected areas”, “outdated technical equipment” and “alarming temperature fluctuations that endanger the conservation of works of art”, the French newspaper said. The Parisian.

Later that month, French President Emmanuel Macron presented extensive renovation plans for the museum, which are expected to cost as much as $834 million and take nearly a decade to complete.

Among other changes, the project would create a dedicated space for the Mona Lisacreate a new “grand entrance” to reduce traffic congestion and upgrade of the building’s security system.

Louvre staff – including gallery visitors, ticket agents and security staff – say these upgrades can’t come soon enough.

In June, the museum was closed for part of a day after staff went on a spontaneous strike to protest “unmanageable crowds, chronic understaffing and what one union called ‘untenable’ working conditions.” This is reported by the Associated Press.

These vulnerabilities are top of mind in the wake of Sunday’s heist, as other cultural institutions tighten security and French officials take the blame.

“What is certain is that we failed because people were able to park a furniture elevator in the middle of Paris and get people into it within minutes to get precious jewelry,” Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin told France Inter Radio on Monday.