Once in, they threatened the guards, forced an evacuation and cut through the glass of two display cases holding centuries-old royal jewels. Moments later, they escaped on two scooters. When I saw the news that morning, it felt like a scene ripped straight out of an Ocean’s series of movies.

The stolen items were extraordinary: a sapphire tiara, sapphire necklace and earring worn by queens Marie-Amélie and Hortense, an emerald necklace and earrings worn by Marie-Louise (Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife), and a tiara and brooch belonging to Empress Eugénie, and the “reliquary brooch”.

In their rush to flee, the thieves dropped Eugénie’s crown, encrusted with more than 1,300 diamonds and 56 emeralds, which was recovered later, damaged. The rest remain missing. Curiously, the museum’s most famous diamond was not touched. The Regent Diamond, long rumoured to be ”cursed”, was left behind and many believe this was intentional.

Failed security

But the real mystery is the security failure. How could the Louvre, the most visited museum in the world, home to priceless art and artifacts from many centuries, allow a break-in this simple?

And in an age where even grocery stores use AI cameras to detect shoplifting and banks rely on biometric scans, the Louvre’s digital defences were allegedly protected by a password as basic as ‘Louvre’. Not only was the building vulnerable, so was its system.

That contrast is what makes this heist so unsettling to me. We live in an era of hyper-advanced security – facial recognition at airports, cars unlocking via fingerprints, homes monitored from thousands of miles away – yet inside the Louvre, a museum responsible for protecting some of humanity’s most valuable objects, the security felt closer to the 1980s.