The curator of Belgian ethnographic collections at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren is alarmed by the lack of action taken to address a trend that has been growing for years. The spectacular burglary of the Louvre on October 19, 2025, revealed a reality many pretended to ignore: our museums, far from being inviolable, have become targets for criminals. The political class has been alarmed by the flaws in security systems.
Yet this theft is only the culmination of an epidemic of break-ins that has been developing amid almost general indifference for several years. The years 2010-2020 were rich for French and European museums, rich in a series of attacks of unprecedented gravity. We should be forgiven for listing them here, which has the air of a sad litany.
The main specialty of these new criminal professionals is precious metals and stones. In March 2017, the burglary at the Bode Museum in Berlin shocked all of Germany: a 100-kilogram gold coin nicknamed the Big Maple Leaf was stolen. In May 2017, a gold crown was stolen from the Fourvière Museum of Religious Art. In April 2018, the reliquary heart of Anne of Brittany and collections of gold coins were burglarized from the Dobrée Museum in Nantes by mere amateurs. In November 2019, imperial jewels disappeared from the Green Gold Museum in Dresden.
Flight acceleration
In May 2021, burglars stole several gold and silver objects at Arundel Castle in England, including Mary Stuart's rosary. In January 2023, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte's jewels were lost at the Musée Hébert in Grenoble. And in November of the same year, robbers entered the Musée du Hiéron in Paray-le-Monial and removed gold, ivory, and emerald elements from Joseph Chaumet's Via Vitae.
A year later, in November, another robbery took place at the Cognacq-Jay Museum. The robbers made off with seven precious boxes and snuffboxes. In January 2025, burglars used explosives to break into the Drents Museum in Assen (Netherlands) and stole several Romanian gold archaeological objects, including the famous Dacian helmet known as Cotofenesti. In September 2025, several nuggets of native gold disappeared from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, some of which had just been found in the personal belongings of a Chinese woman in Barcelona. And then, finally, in October, just before the Louvre, the Desert Museum in Mialet lost around a hundred gold Huguenot crosses.
Other thefts target objects from the Asian world. In March 2015, the National Museum of the Château de Fontainebleau lost around fifteen Chinese, Tibetan, and Siamese objects. In 2023, several Chinese porcelains were stolen from the Keramiekmuseum Princessehof in Leeuwarden (Netherlands) and the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in Cologne (Germany). In 2024, an important imperial Chinese jar was stolen from the Royal Museum of Mariemont in Belgium. And that same year, the Adrien-Dubouché National Porcelain Museum in Limoges was targeted.
Three works of Chinese porcelain, including two exceptional blue and white Jingdezhen plates dating from the 14th and 15th centuries, were stolen. It's worth noting that even the reserves of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) were affected. In November 2023, the BNF filed a complaint for the theft of rare Russian literature books, which had been stolen and then replaced with high-quality facsimiles. This audacity illustrates the growing porosity of our cultural sanctuaries.
This long list is not anecdotal. It outlines a significant trend that affects all of Europe. The presentation of these different cases, whether French, Belgian, English, Dutch, or German, allows us to establish that two categories of objects are particularly targeted. First, there is gold and precious stones. This interest of criminals in these two "materials" is easily explained. The value of gold increases year after year, and it is a metal that can be melted. As for precious stones, they are easily cut. It goes without saying that this philosophy of theft, which consists of targeting the materials of which an object of art is made rather than the piece itself, is the most detrimental to heritage.
Arsène Lupin, it's over
Asian, and primarily Chinese, objects fall into a second category. Here, unlike jewelry or goldwork that are to be dismembered, we are more likely to be dealing with thefts targeting the artifact itself. But in either case, the thefts are often highly organized. There are teams of professional thieves (as in Fontainebleau in 2015) or amateur thieves (as in Mariemont in 2024), often European, but perhaps in the service of Asian intermediaries possibly linked to the triads. In 2019, five Spaniards and one Chinese man were arrested during another attempted theft at the Fontainebleau Museum.
We are therefore far from the aesthete thief, and far from dealing with modern-day Arsène Lupins. These robberies are becoming increasingly violent and planned. Thus, there were real robberies like those of the Musée du Hiéron and Cognacq-Jay. Other cases reveal teams capable of sophisticated plans, intrusions, neutralizing cameras and alarms. Some of these professionals are very possibly acting on behalf of powerful sponsors linked to organized crime. These hypotheses will, of course, require serious investigations to confirm or deny them. But there must still be the political will to clearly identify the nature of the threat and respond effectively.
While the dramatic increase in thefts is very worrying, the lack of measures taken to prevent them is just as worrying.
While the dramatic increase in thefts is very worrying, the lack of measures taken to prevent them is equally so. There were various initiatives that could have been considered. Surveillance could have been increased in the rooms devoted to gold, jewelry, and previously identified rare Asian coins, perhaps placing them in a safe at night or displaying them only a few days a month under close surveillance. Such procedures were also implemented in some exhibition venues when, in the 2010s, a wave of rhino horn thefts hit European museums. Several of them temporarily removed the horns on display or replaced them with resin examples.
Should we recall that the priceless pieces stolen from the Louvre would perhaps still be in the museum if, in 2019, it had not been decided to abandon, for aesthetic reasons in particular, an "old" case made of armoured glass placed on jacks which, in the event of an alert, would disappear into a safe?
Ministers look elsewhere
French museums have many weaknesses: reduced staffing levels, aging security systems, and poorly equipped and poorly trained guards in protecting their works, which is only one aspect of their many missions, which they carry out as best they can. But there should have been closer collaboration between the Ministries of Culture, Justice, and the Interior to consider the possibility of arming and training certain guard corps whose sole mission would be to protect the works. It would also have been possible to consider reserving the surveillance of certain museum rooms for specialized police units. Moreover, such an armed presence could play a preventive role at a time when the terrorist threat is still current.
Above all, we could have strengthened the judicial response to heritage thefts. The sentences imposed today are extremely lenient in France, as in other European countries. For example, in Germany, the perpetrators of the catastrophic heist at the Grünes Gewölbe were sentenced to between four and six years in prison. In France, the heaviest sentence handed down to one of the defendants in the Dobrée Museum affair was four years in prison. It is clear that it is difficult to imagine a better risk-benefit ratio for seasoned criminals.
Finally, if we stick to the French case, the political response has remained nonexistent. Culture ministers have often remained silent on these issues. Neither Roselyne Bachelot after the theft of the Anne of Brittany reliquary, nor Rima Abdul-Malak after that of the Hébert Museum, nor even Rachida Dati after the 2025 burglaries in Paris and Mialet had a public word. The day Paris learned of the Cognacq-Jay theft in 2024, the minister commented on X… the death of Bernadette Després, author of Tom-Tom and Nana. Rachida Dati was still more reactive than her predecessors by minimally condemning on X the thefts in Limoges and the older one in Paray-le-Monial. These simple tweets make her the most proactive minister on these issues during Emmanuel Macron's five-year terms.
Political inertia
This is why the theft at the Louvre seems like a bolt from the blue. But where was this outrage when other, less famous museums were being robbed? Which MPs or senators have asked questions or introduced bills on museum security and the protection of museum heritage over the past fifteen years? Our museums are presented as sanctuaries of the nation, but they are protected as mere municipal repositories. Throughout Emmanuel Macron's two presidencies, there have been numerous debates on restitution and consideration given to how to suspend the inalienability of French collections enshrined in law. Questionable projects like the loan of the Bayeux Tapestry have also been supported. However, nothing has been done to address the real and growing threat of museum theft. Will the current outcry, following the Louvre heist, change anything about this state of affairs? Let us be allowed to doubt it. Just one day after this robbery, it was the turn of a small museum in Langres to have a collection of coins stolen.
(An article that can be found in Le Figaro)
