The recent theft at the Louvre Museum in Paris has caused a lot of discussion, especially regarding security procedures in one of the most famous tourist sites in the world. Eight jewels that belonged to Napoleon they were stolen from the Gallery of Apollo, where the French Crown Jewels are kept. The thieves, using a common hoist and a simple grinder, took possession of stolen goods with a value defined as “priceless” by the French Ministry of Culture. But in these hours many people are asking themselves a question: what will happen to the stolen jewels? In fact, these are artifacts so recognizable and so precious that it would most likely be impossible to sell them as they are even on the black market. To try to provide some clarity, let’s analyze the main hypotheses formulated by experts.
According to what Dutch detective Arthur Brand told the BBC, it is likely that the jewels will be dismantled: the gold and silver will be melted down and each of the precious stones will be sold individually. Let’s take Empress Eugenie’s tiara as an example: that alone is made up of over 2000 diamonds!
Obviously each of the stones, to an expert eye, is recognizable even if removed from the original jewel, and therefore a new cut to the stones cannot be ruled out, so as to make them unrecognizable and difficult to connect to the theft of the Louvre.
Jewelery historian Carol Woolton confirmed that the thieves, in all likelihood, chose the jewels to steal with extreme care, taking the most precious ones from the entire collection. For the same reason, he hypothesizes that Empress Eugenie’s crown was voluntarily abandoned before her escape: the stones present here would have been too small to be worked easily, making that theft an unnecessary risk.
In reality there is also another hypothesis. For now we have taken it for granted that the jewels will be sold, but we do not exclude the possibility that the heist was commissioned to some criminal organization by a rich financier, willing to do anything to have the Louvre jewels in his private collection. In this case the artefacts would not be dismantled but hidden and carefully preserved as illegal relics.
