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Breaking into the planet's most popular museum in broad daylight, grabbing eight items of invaluable Napoleonic jewellery and disappearing into the city traffic on humble scooters may seem like the boldest of crimes, carried out for international notoriety and ensuing movie adaptations.

Experts who study trends in global cultural theft, however, see Sunday morning’s robbery at the Louvre as a more practical matter: the most recent in a string of quick-hit thefts centered more on the material value of precious stones or metals than the historical importance, continuing a pattern that has appeared over the last decade in Germany, Britain and the US. The location, they propose, would have been of secondary concern to the criminals.

“You may ask why thieves who want to steal valuable jewellery are breaking into a globally renowned museum rather than a Cartier store,” stated an expert in art recovery. “The answer is simple: it’s because these days a Cartier store is more secure.”

A series of aggressive jewellery shop thefts mean that many outlets have strengthened their security in the past few years, with security personnel on their premises and merchandise no longer shown overnight. Museums, on the other hand, look more exposed, partly because of the in-built factor of being public-facing institutions in historic buildings, and also the current economic climate in many western countries.

“Since Covid, governments across the world have reduced spending on police and the arts funding,” said Marinello. “With criminals entering the Louvre, it demonstrates how at risk our institutions have become. This is a horrible time to be a museum.”

The robbery of the objects – including jewelry pieces made up of eight sapphires and hundreds of gems, the tiara of Empress Eugénie featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and a extremely expensive crown once possessed by Napoleon III’s wife that the robbers left by the roadside on their way out – has inevitably been compared with the historical theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, performed by the Italian handyman Vincenzo Peruggia.

Better comparisons may be the 2019 burglary of jewellery from a German institution worth over millions, the taking of a multi-million pound gold toilet from a UK landmark the that year, the 2017 robbery of a valuable item from Berlin’s Bode Museum or even a spate of thefts of sports memorabilia from American institutions.

“It's a clear trend here,” explained Marinello. “Smash, grab, and melt it down as quickly as possible.”

If the items were to remain intact, experts say, the criminals would find it hard to sell them. “There’s no way to trade something as immediately identifiable as the museum's gems on the licit market”, commented Lynda Albertson of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

“They would be immediately recognised, especially given the cultural authorities has released images of the pieces. Even a private collector or an sales venue would want to see documentation confirming proper ownership before touching such remarkable pieces.”

In the previous years, institutions were often hesitant to go public about the loss of famous art pieces and would remain quiet out of shame. Now, as art thefts are more reported on, the storage and sale of taken items is dangerous for any criminal.

“If you steal a famous painting, it has to stay complete or it becomes valueless, and you have to conceive of a scheme to conceal it, perhaps by moving it among difficult criminal actors,” noted Marinello. “And you’re constantly exposed to the danger of an accomplice informing authorities to cash in a ransom.”

For comparable factors, an investigator said it was highly improbable that the robbery had been commissioned. “Commissioned theft is something from Hollywood movies,” he said. “Nobody would touch this. It's global news and in all the media. If you acquire these, if you get caught, you end up in prison. You cannot show it to your acquaintances, you cannot leave it to your children.”

Altering taken items by dismantling or reshaping does lower the worth. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with considerable risk because contemporary cutting techniques give stones a bigger and brighter surface area, and antique-cut stones would either attract notice or barter the price down for a concealment.

Crucially, however, melting down or re-cutting eliminates the evidence of the theft. “I suspect that the robbers will try to bring the items to locations with diamond expertise like a country, India or even as nearby as a city, and locate an expert to remove the stones,” suggested Marinello.

The heist at the Louvre has already brought up concerns about protective steps at the institution, with a leaked official review expected to be published soon criticising “significant” and “ongoing” delays in updating equipment and observing that security cameras were missing in multiple areas. But security experts say showing precious items in older structures with a constant flow of visitors comes with risks that are not possible to eliminate completely.

“Older structures are more difficult to secure,” said an art crime professor. “They often have nice big street-facing windows that makes it easy for thieves to get away, and there may be preservation laws in place that mean you can’t fit them with secure windows.”

The best protective measures for structures should be designed “like a fortress”, noted a security advisor. “There should be several layers to repel intruders.”

Modern buildings are equipped with state-of-the-art external CCTV cameras or in-built seismic detectors that alert about a broken glass in immediately, but old museums may be reluctant to alter their appearance. Detection devices can be hard to fit to decorated surfaces. Sensors may also have to be disabled during the day as hordes of visitors walk through a museum.

The timing of the robbery, which occurred between morning hours in Paris, was typical of modern robberies, Stürmann said. “There’s a good reason why robberies tend to happen at either opening or closing times. It’s often when guards change their shifts and prior to the museum is crowded who actually act as additional security staff.”

Advances in technology may have thrown up new gadgets that can raise the alarm more rapidly and effectively, but it has also given thieves new methods with which to circumvent protections. In the city, the thieves accessed the museum’s upper level with a vehicle-mounted ladder and cut through a glass pane with a battery-powered disc cutter.

Elaine Sciolino said the conversation in France about the historic building had primarily focused on visitor management in recent years, and not as much on security.

The institution has an in-house team of about 50 full-time firefighters, but their mission is mainly to safeguard the artworks from blazes and water damage. “There is no rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “In the end, the safety of the Louvre all depends on political will and funding, and at present France simply has no resources.”