Representational file picture
The Louvre was not the only French museum to be pillaged on Sunday.
With the nation already in an uproar over the broad-daylight heist of French crown jewels that morning, a robbery unfolded that on any other day or week would have drawn far more notice, of some 2,000 gold and silver coins worth more than $100,000 from a small museum in Langres, a town in France’s northeast, authorities said.
Thieves late Sunday night smashed their way through the Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot - the Denis Diderot House of Enlightenment - a museum dedicated to Diderot, the 18th-century philosopher and editor of the Encyclopédie, a major Enlightenment-era encyclopedia.
The culprits broke down the main gate of the Hôtel du Breuil-de-Saint-Germain, which houses the museum, broke through the front door and bashed a display case containing coins, said Pierrick White, a senior local official.
Workers noticed the broken display case the following morning and alerted the police, White said. No arrests have been made and the hotel remains closed for an investigation. Investigators told local media outlets that the robbery appeared to be targeted and planned.
The museum houses sculptures, paintings and manuscripts, including a number of major items, among them the first editions of the Encyclopédie. Eighteenth-century inventions such as the Copernican orrery, which shows the movement of the planets, are also on display. The coins, minted between 1790 and 1840, were discovered in 2011 by a worker conducting renovations on the hotel.
The robbery comes at a moment of high interest in museum thefts in France: On Sunday morning, masked thieves used a mechanized furniture elevator to force their way through a window and into the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery and took jeweled artifacts from a display case worth more than $100 million, according to an official estimate.
On Wednesday, Louvre director Laurence des Cars told a committee of French lawmakers that the museum’s surveillance system was working inside the building but had a crucial blind spot in its exterior perimeter. "That was our weakness,” she said, speaking publicly for the first time since Sunday’s heist. "We didn’t spot the thieves sufficiently in time.”
According to des Cars, the museum has an external security camera system, but it didn’t capture enough of the facade. "On the side of the Apollo Gallery, the only camera is facing westward and therefore doesn’t cover the breached balcony,” she added, describing the surveillance system as aging and in need of renovation.
Des Cars told lawmakers that the Louvre had failed as a custodian of the jewels. She took personal responsibility. She said she had offered to tender her resignation but it was refused. She added that she believed it necessary to establish a police station within the museum.
In an interview Wednesday with Le Parisien, French Culture Minister Rachia Dati said she had refused des Cars’s offer of resignation. She said the museum’s internal security systems had worked as intended. "No system failed. Everything happened in the room in less than four minutes. However, was everything perfect? No,” she said. "The weakness is external to the gallery, not internal, at this stage,” Dati added. "The urgent need is to secure the area surrounding the Louvre.”
Experts believe the pieces, which contain thousands of diamonds and other jewels, have most likely been dismantled. Erin Thompson, an art crime professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the thieves would be under pressure to transform the pieces as quickly as possible to avoid detection. Metals, like gold, might be melted, while precious stones might be recut to obscure their origin.
On Tuesday, French prosecutors charged a woman who they said was a Chinese national, for the theft of gold nuggets from the Natural History Museum in Paris last month. The woman, whom they have not identified, was arrested in Barcelona and later handed over to France, authorities said.
