The recent theft at Louvre Museum in Paris has caused a lot of discussion, especially regarding safety 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 artefacts like this recognisable 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 was declared by the Dutch detective Arthur Brand at the BBCjewelry is likely to be dismantled – gold and silver will come melted and each of the precious stones will come sold individually. Let’s take Empress Eugenie’s tiara as an example: only that 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 stonesso as to make them unrecognizable and difficult to connect to the theft of the Louvre.
The jewelery historian Carol Woolton instead, he confirmed that the thieves, in all likelihood, chose the jewels to steal with extreme care, taking them the most precious of the entire collection. For the same reason he hypothesizes that the crown of Empress Eugenie was voluntarily abandoned before the 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 the possibility that the coup was done cannot be ruled out commissioned to some criminal organization from a rich financierwilling to do anything to have the jewels of the Louvre in his private collection. In this case the artefacts would not be dismantled but hidden and carefully preserved as illegal relics.
