FRENCH MUSEUMS ARE LOSING THE WAR WITH THIEVES

Minimal security and the high price of gold have fueled nine heists over the past year

- Noemie Bisserbe, Stacy Meichtry & Bertrand Benoit

A police car parked in the courtyard of the Louvre in Paris, one week after the robbery, on 26 October.

(Benoit Tessier/Reuters via Zuma Press)

Barely 24 hours had passed since thieves had broken into the Louvre Museum and stolen France’s crown jewels when the mayor of Langres, a walled medieval town in Eastern France, received a troubling phone call.

The director of the town's museum was on the line to report that it too had been robbed. Thieves had penetrated the Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot overnight and gone straight for a display case housing its collection of historic gold and silver coins.

"It's as if the city's jewels have been stolen," said Pierrick White, the mayor's chief of staff.

The brazen robbery of the Louvre on Oct. 19 grabbed the world’s attention, because it targeted an iconic institution and a nation’s crown jewels. But the Louvre robbery was just one of nine different heists that have taken place in France over the past year.

Five French museums have been hit since the beginning of September alone—one of them twice—including at the stately Museum of Natural History in central Paris and the Musée du Désert, located in a remote hamlet in southern France. Few of the stolen works—including precious porcelain and gold crosses and statues—have been recovered.

As the robberies pile up, French officials are waking up to an unsettling reality: France is awash in cultural treasures but has minimal resources to protect them from thieves. Successive governments have collapsed over efforts to rein in the country’s budget deficit, leaving the state too cash-strapped to invest in meaningful security upgrades for the more than 1,200 sites classified by the government as museums.

President Emmanuel Macron’s administration is currently scrambling to take a census of the country’s most valuable artworks to determine which cultural sites will get reinforced first.