'Tell the honest and complete story...'

France mourns its stolen crown jewels as their uncomfortable colonial past returns to view, reports Thomas Adamson of Associated Press

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AS FRENCH police race to track where the Louvre's stolen crown jewels have gone, a growing chorus wants a brighter light on where they came from.

The artefacts were French, but the gems were not. Their exotic routes to Paris run through the shadows of empire an uncomfortable history that France, like other Western nations with treasure-filled museums, has only begun to confront.

The attention sparked by the heist is an opportunity, experts say, to pressure the Louvre and Europe's great museums to explain their collections' origins more honestly, and it could trigger a broader reckoning over restitutions.

Within hours of the theft, researchers sketched a likely colonial-era map for the materials: sapphires from Ceylon (Sri Lanka), diamonds from India and Brazil, pearls from the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean and emeralds from Colombia.

That doesn't make the Louvre robbery less criminal. It does complicate the public's understanding of what was lost. "There is obviously no excuse for theft," said Emiline C.H. Smith, a criminologist at the University of Glasgow who studies heritage crime. "But many of these objects are entangled with violent, exploitative, colonial histories."

While there's no credible evidence these specific gems were stolen - experts say that doesn't end the argument: What was legal in the imperial age could still mean plunder in today's lights. In other words, the paperwork of empire doesn't settle the ethics. Meanwhile, the heist investigation grinds on. Police have charged suspects, but investigators fear the jewels could be broken up or melted down. They are too symbolic to fence, but easy to monetise for metal and stones.

The Louvre provides scant information about how the gems in the French crown jewels showcased in the Apollo Gallery until the theft were originally extracted.