Things are tough for French museums right now. A dawn raid on Tuesday at the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer resulted in the theft of two paintings by Renoir worth £7.7m (another two were stolen but swiftly abandoned). On long term loan from the Musée d’Orsay, the paintings were seized when thieves sliced through the museum’s garden fence with an electric saw. Following a spate of thefts from French museums in July, France’s patrimoine is undeniably under threat.
While British museums (The Horniman, Pitt Rivers, Ashmolean, Fitzwilliam and occasionally British Museum) busy themselves with the return of their artefacts, the French, it would seem, struggle to keep hold of theirs. One wag online couldn’t help himself: ‘At least they know where the Bayeux Tapestry is.’
All of this comes back to 9.35am on 19th October, 2025, when jewels of nation-defining importance worth £76m were stolen from the Louvre in a heist of breath-taking audacity. The world was stunned by the news that the seemingly impregnable Louvre, the world’s largest and most-visited museum, had been breached with no more than high-vis jackets and angle-grinders. No siege towers; all that was needed to hop into the Galerie d’Apollon was a Böcker cherry-picker.
The Louvre heist was speedy, precise and liquefied heritage into cold, hard cash. The thieves, in-and-out of the gallery within four minutes, brandished angle grinders at guards and were unchallenged. More worryingly, the raid was inspirational. If France’s crown jewels had only one external camera positioned away from the thieves’ entry point, how many other treasure troves would be similarly unguarded? Every criminal worth his salt did a quick inventory of the tools in his arsenal and googled ‘local museums’.
Last month, in response to the raid on the Louvre, Interpol published a ‘spotlight’ report on ‘The Evolving Nature of Museum Heists’ noting the rise of ‘the emerging agressor’ vs. ‘the traditional trafficker’. The latter might spend months on an elaborate but less profitable crime such as stealing rare books and replacing the originals with counterfeits, while the former is recruited by organised crime groups on an ad-hoc basis and is ready to deploy violence unlike his more gentlemanly opposite number.
As it turns out, Mr Emerging Agressor has been busy. Since the Louvre raid, jewellery from a museum in Burgundy and from the Lalique Museum in Strasbourg has been stolen. The Jacques Chirac Museum in Sarran has also been targeted on three occasions. Further thefts of valuable pieces from museums in Sicily, Parma and Vienna highlight the worrying trend for cash-hungry heists executed in a manner not far removed from the high-street smash-and-grab. On each occasion, the thieves were met with little to no resistance and security systems so ineffective as to be ignored.
Speaking about these heists, Dutch art-crime expert Arthur Brand told the BBC ‘These are all copycats, they have seen the Louvre, they have seen these other thefts, and they think, let’s go for it.’ David Desclos, a former bank robber turned comedian who said that he warned the Louvre about the security blind spots in the Galerie d’Apollon before the heist, has also pointed out in the Times that criminals are turning to museums because banks have become harder to target: ‘They see museums as much easier because their security systems are weaker.’
So where does that leave the Musée Renoir? The good news is that paintings are far harder to fence than jewels, where the gems can be taken out of their settings, repolished, recut or reset to launder their provenance. The stolen Renoirs, Jeune femme au puits and Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano, while not among Renoir’s most famous works, will now acquire a degree of notoriety as they are added to Interpol’s Stolen Works of Art Database and that of the Art Loss Register. Every reputable dealer and auction house runs their catalogues and listings through these bodies, removing the international art market as an option for the thieves.
The outcome of a heist in March at the Fondazione Magnani Rocca, near Parma, provides hope. Three paintings by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse worth around £8m were stolen in the raid and later recovered by the Carabinieri’s Art Squad at the house of a suspect, a member of a Moldovan organised crime group. The theft of the paintings bore all Mr Emerging Agressor’s hallmarks: speed and force deployed in pursuit of cash. However, when the group realised that the paintings were hot potatoes, they were hidden and placed in a cardboard box once used for a flat-screen TV.
Whatever becomes of the stolen Renoirs, the memo for French museums is unmistakable: update your security systems or have a reckoning with an angle grinder at dawn.
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