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PARIS: The robbery at the Louvre has done what no marketing campaign ever could: It has catapulted France’s dusty Crown Jewels – long admired at home, little known abroad – to global fame.
One week on, and the country is still wounded by the breach to its national heritage.
Yet the crime is also a paradox. Some say it will make celebrities of the very jewels it sought to erase – much as the Mona Lisa’s turn-of-the-20th-century theft transformed the then little-known Renaissance portrait into the world’s most famous artwork.
In 1911, a museum handyman lifted the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece off its hook. The loss went unnoticed for more than a day; newspapers turned it into a global mystery, and crowds came to stare at the empty space. When the painting resurfaced two years later, its fame eclipsed everything else in the museum, and that remains so today.
That’s the uneasy question shadowing Sunday’s robbery: whether a crime that cut deep will glorify what’s left behind.
“Because of the drama, the scandal, the heist, the Apollo Gallery itself and the jewels that remain will likely receive a new spotlight and become celebrities, just like the Mona Lisa after 1911,” said Anya Firestone, a Paris art historian and Culture Ministry licensed heritage expert. She toured the gallery the day before the robbery and did not think it looked sufficiently guarded.
Bringing celebrity through theft
The heist has electrified global media. Nightly newscasts from the US to Europe and across Latin America and Asia have beamed the Louvre, its Apollo Gallery and the missing jewels to hundreds of millions – a surge of attention some say rivals, or even surpasses, the frenzy after Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s 2018 “Apeshit” video filmed inside the museum. The Louvre is once again a global set.
For generations, the British monarchy’s regalia has captured the popular imagination through centuries of coronations and drawing millions every year to their display in the Tower of London. Meanwhile, France’s jewels lived in the shadow. This week’s heist tilts the balance.
One early emblem of that celebrity effect could be the survivor piece itself – Empress Eugénie’s emerald-set crown, dropped in the getaway and studded with more than 1,300 diamonds – which may now become the gallery’s most talked-about relic.
“I’d never even heard of Eugénie’s crown until this,” said Mateo Ruiz, a 27-year-old visitor from Seville. “Now it’s the first thing I want to see when the gallery reopens.”
Among the treasures that escaped the thieves’ grasp are storied gems still gleaming under glass – the Regent Diamond, the Sancy and the Hortensia. Authorities say one other stolen bejeweled piece, besides Empress Eugenie’s damaged crown, has since been quietly recovered, though they have declined to identify it.
The heist has not dented the Louvre’s pull. The palace-museum reopened to maximum crowds Wednesday, even as the jewels remain missing, and the robbers at large. Long before the robbery, the museum was straining under mass tourism – roughly 33,000 visitors a day – and staff warn it cannot easily absorb another surge, especially with the Apollo Gallery sealed and security resources stretched.
Jewels represent French history itself
For France, the loss is more than precious stones and metal totaling over $100 million; it is pages torn from the national record. The Apollo Gallery reads as a timeline in gold and light, carrying the country from Bourbon ceremony to Napoleon’s self-fashioned empire and into modern France.
Firestone puts it this way: The jewels are “the Louvre’s final word in the language of monarchy – a glittering echo of kings and queens as France crossed into a new era.” They are not ornaments, she argues, but chapters of French history, marking the end of the royal order and the beginning of the country France is today.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez called the theft an “immeasurable” heritage loss, and the museum says the pieces carry “inestimable” historic weight – a reminder that what vanished is not just monetary.
Many also see a stunning security lapse.
“It’s staggering that a handful of people couldn’t be stopped in broad daylight,” said Nadia Benyamina, 52, a Paris shopkeeper who visits the gallery monthly. “There were failures – avoidable ones. That’s the wound.”
Investigators say the thieves rode a basket lift up the building’s Seine-facing façade, forced open a window, smashed two display cases and fled on motorbikes – all in minutes. Alarms sounded, drawing security to the gallery and forcing the intruders to bolt, officials say. The haul spanned royal and imperial suites in sapphire, emerald and diamond – including pieces tied to Marie-Amélie, Hortense, Marie-Louise and Empress Eugénie.
In Senate testimony, Louvre director Laurence des Cars acknowledged “a terrible failure,” citing gaps in exterior camera coverage and proposing vehicle barriers and a police post inside the museum. She offered to resign; the culture minister refused. The heist followed months of warnings about chronic understaffing and crowd pressure points.
Drawing crowds to see what isn’t there
Outside the blocked doors, visitors now come to see what cannot be seen.
“I came to see where it happened,” said Tobias Klein, 24, an architecture student. “That barricade is chilling. People are looking with shock and curiosity.”
Others feel a flicker of hope. “They’re ghosts now – but there’s still hope they’ll be found,” said Rose Nguyen, 33, an artist from Reims. “It’s the same strange magnetism the Mona Lisa had after 1911. The story becomes part of the object.”
Curators warn that recutting or melting the jewels would be a second violence. In museums, authenticity lives in the original: the mount, the design, the work of the goldsmith’s hand – and the unbroken story of who made, wore, treasured, exhibited and, yes, stole the object.
Whether loss now brings legend is the Louvre’s uneasy future.
“In the strange economy of fame, even bad news becomes attention – and attention makes icons,” Firestone said.

BANGKOK: Thailand’s Queen Mother Sirikit, who brought glamor and elegance to a postwar revival in the country’s monarchy and who, in later years, would occasionally wade into politics, has died aged 93, the Thai Royal Household Bureau said on Saturday.
Sirikit had been out of the public eye since a stroke in 2012.
The palace said she had been hospitalized since 2019 due to several illnesses and developed a bloodstream infection on October 17 before passing away late on Friday.
A mourning period of one year has been declared for members of the royal family and household.
The government said public offices would fly flags at half-mast for a month and asked government officials to observe mourning for one year. Entertainment venues were asked to suspend activities for a month.
Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul canceled trips to the ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur and the APEC summit in South Korea next week due to the Queen Mother’s death. He told reporters he would travel to Malaysia to sign a ceasefire agreement with Cambodia on Sunday but return to Thailand afterwards.
Style icon who charmed the world
Sirikit’s husband, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, was Thailand’s longest-reigning monarch, with 70 years on the throne since 1946. She was at his side for much of that, winning over hearts at home with their charity work.
When they traveled abroad, she also charmed the world’s media with her beauty and fashion sense.
During a 1960 visit to the United States that included a state dinner at the White House, Time magazine called her “svelte” and “archfeminist.” The French daily L’Aurore described her as “ravishing.”
Born in 1932, the year Thailand transitioned to a constitutional monarchy from an absolute monarchy, Sirikit Kitiyakara was the daughter of Thailand’s ambassador to France and led a life of wealth and privilege.
While studying music and language in Paris she met Bhumibol, who had spent parts of his childhood in Switzerland.
“It was hate at first sight,” she said in a BBC documentary, noting that he had arrived late to their first meeting. “Then it was love.”
The couple spent time together in Paris and were engaged in 1949. They married in Thailand a year later when she was 17.
Always stylish, Sirikit collaborated with French couturier Pierre Balmain on eye-catching outfits made from Thai silk. By supporting the preservation of traditional weaving practices, she is credited with helping revitalize Thailand’s silk industry.
Championed rural development
For more than four decades, she frequently traveled with the king to remote Thai villages, promoting development projects for the rural poor – their activities televised nightly on the country’s Royal Bulletin.
She was briefly regent in 1956, when her husband spent two weeks in a temple, studying to become a Buddhist monk in a rite of passage common in Thailand.
In 1976, her birthday, August 12, became Mother’s Day and a national holiday in Thailand.
Her only son, now King Maha Vajiralongkorn, also known as Rama X, succeeded Bhumibol after his death in 2016 and upon his coronation in 2019, Sirikit’s formal title became the Queen Mother.
Officially, the monarchy is above politics in Thailand, whose modern history has been dominated by coups and unstable governments. On occasion though, the royals including Sirikit have either intervened or taken actions seen as political.
In 1998, she used her birthday address to urge Thais to unite behind the then-prime minister, Chuan Leekpai, dealing a crippling blow to an opposition plan to hold a no-confidence debate in the hope of forcing a new election.
Later, she became associated with a political movement, the royalist People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), whose protests brought down governments led by or allied to Thaksin Shinawatra, a populist former telecoms tycoon.
In 2008, Sirikit attended a funeral of a PAD protester killed in clashes with police, implying royal backing for a campaign that had helped oust a pro-Thaksin government a year earlier.
For many Thais, she will be remembered for her charitable work and a symbol of maternal virtue. Her death will be treated with reverence in a country where any criticism is held at bay by strictly enforced lese-majeste laws, which prescribe potential prison sentences for insulting royals, even those who are dead.
On Saturday, mourners dressed in black gathered in front of Chulalongkorn Hospital where Sirikit had died.
“When I learned the news, my world stopped and I had flashes from the past of all the things that Her Majesty has done for us,” said 67-year-old Bangkok resident Maneenat Laowalert.
Sirikit is survived by her son, the king, as well as three daughters.