The Apollo Gallery of the Louvre Museum, where the French Crown Jewels that were stolen last October were exhibited, reopened this Wednesday, nine months after its closure, but without the jewels, which are still missing. The room, one of the most visited in the art gallery, will continue to attract visitors after the incredible assault on October 19, when four men accessed it in broad daylight via a staircase to the balcony that gives access to it and, armed with angle grinders, broke the display cases and took eight of the jewels from the collection.
The room has opened empty, without the display cases and without the rest of the pieces that were exhibited and that the thieves did not take. These will be exhibited later in a “secure room, a kind of vault, without windows, in another part of the museum,” explained the new president of the art gallery, Christophe Leribault, in an interview with the newspaper Le Parisien. “It is a large-scale project, but we must find the ideal place, and the funding for it.”
Of the loot, with an estimated value of 88 million euros, but with an incalculable heritage value, only the crown that belonged to Empress Eugenie de Montijo has been recovered, which the thieves dropped during their escape. The piece suffered significant damage although, according to the Louvre Museum, it will be fully restorable.
The robbery revealed significant security flaws in the world’s most visited and largest museum. It was the beginning of a crisis that, months later, led to the resignation of the then-president, Laurence des Cars. Several audits, some conducted before the assault and others afterwards, had revealed insufficient surveillance and degradation in many of the building’s rooms. The Court of Auditors, in another report, criticized that in recent years the museum prioritized the acquisition of works over investment in the maintenance and renovation of its facilities.
After the robbery, the center entered a spiral of misfortunes and the Campana Gallery, which houses part of the Greek ceramics, had to be closed due to the risk of beam collapse. In addition, a water leak in the museum’s Egyptian antiquities library damaged between 300 and 400 historical documents. To all this was added in December a strike by the art gallery’s workers in protest of the degradation of their conditions and the lack of staff, which forced the museum to close for several days.
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France’s Minister of Culture, Catherine Pégard, attended the reopening of the Apollo Gallery on Wednesday, along with the museum’s president. The room was closed after the assault, and the broken display cases remained there for months. The pieces that were saved were moved to a security vault at the Bank of France.
Since 1889, the French Crown Jewels had been exhibited in this room. Christophe Leribault explained to Le Parisien that the idea is for this gallery to regain its original function in the 17th century, that of a ceremonial hall, so that visitors can stroll and admire the architecture and ceiling frescoes, as is the case with the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles.
The group of assailants was arrested a week after the robbery and is in pre-trial detention, accused of organized gang robbery. They declared having acted on commission. Nine months later, there is no trace of the eight stolen pieces, and the worst-case scenario is gaining traction: that the set of 8,700 precious stones that adorned the eight jewels have been dismantled to be cut and sold separately.
