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.
