Journalism of Courage
The director of the Louvre Museum in France on Wednesday acknowledged a ‘terrible failure’ after a stunning daylight heist on Sunday. Louvre director Laurence des Cars testified before the French Senate on Wednesday, where she said the heist has shocked the security agents of the Louvre and everyone who loves the museum.
“We cannot replace these items, and these collections that have been stolen are national collections,” she said.
“I don’t want to take a position of denial,” she said, adding: “We failed to protect these jewels”.
Cars told a Senate committee that she submitted her resignation but that the culture minister refused to accept it.
She also told the Senate committee that the museum had a damaging shortage of security cameras outside the monument and other weaknesses exposed by Sunday’s theft.
Cars also claimed that she had spoken about the issue of the museum’s security repeatedly in the past.
“I am wounded as chair and director that the warnings I was raising – as a whistle-blower, in a sense – have come to pass last Sunday,” she said.
Following the shocking theft on Sunday, Cars said the security camera didn’t cover the area where jewel thieves broke in.
“We did not spot the arrival of the thieves early enough… the weakness of our perimeter protection is known.”
Cars added that the museum infrastructure is “aging” and that modern equipment cannot be simply added.
The director appeared before the Senate on the same day the Louvre reopened to the public, three days after one of the highest-profile museum thefts of the century stunned the world with its audacity and scale.
Even though the Louvre reopened on Wednesday, the scene of the crime — the Apollo Gallery housing the Crown Diamonds — stayed sealed, a folding screen obscuring the doorway at the gallery’s rotunda entrance.
The thieves slipped in and out, making off with eight pieces from France’s Crown Jewels including a sapphire diadem, necklace and single earring from a set linked to 19th-century queens Marie-Amélie and Hortense at the world’s most-visited museum.
They also made off with an emerald necklace and earrings tied to Empress Marie-Louise, Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife, as well as a reliquary brooch. Empress Eugénie’s diamond diadem and her large corsage-bow brooch — an imperial ensemble of rare craftsmanship — were also part of the loot.
One piece — Eugénie’s emerald-set imperial crown, with more than 1,300 diamonds — was later found outside the museum, damaged but recoverable.
Authorities say the thieves spent less than four minutes inside the Louvre on Sunday morning: a freight lift was wheeled to the Seine-facing façade, a window was forced open and two vitrines were smashed. Then came the getaway on motorbikes through central Paris.
