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Breaking into the world’s most-visited museum in broad daylight, grabbing eight items of invaluable historical gems and vanishing into Paris traffic on simple scooters may seem like the most audacious of crimes, carried out for global fame and ensuing movie adaptations.

Experts who study patterns in global cultural theft, however, see the recent heist at the Louvre as something more prosaic: the most recent in a string of quick-hit thefts focused more on the monetary worth of valuable gems or materials than the historical importance, continuing a trend that has appeared over the last ten years in Germany, Britain and the US. The venue, they propose, would have been of lesser importance to the thieves.

“You may ask why criminals who want to steal valuable jewellery are breaking into a globally renowned museum rather than a Cartier store,” said an expert in art recovery. “It's straightforward: it’s because nowadays a Cartier store is better protected.”

A series of violent retail store thefts indicate that many outlets have beefed up their protection in recent years, with security personnel on their premises and wares no longer shown overnight. Museums, meanwhile, look vulnerable, partly because of the in-built reason of being public-facing institutions in historic buildings, and partly the financial situation in many developed nations.

“After the pandemic, authorities across the globe have reduced spending on law enforcement and the culture sector,” noted Marinello. “If thieves can get into the Louvre, it demonstrates how at risk our institutions have become. This is a horrible time to be a museum.”

The robbery of the items – including jewelry pieces made up of eight sapphires and 631 diamonds, the crown of Empress Eugénie featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and a extremely expensive diadem once possessed by Napoleon III’s wife that the thieves left by the roadside on their way out – has inevitably been compared with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, performed by the Italian handyman the thief.

Better points of reference may be the 2019 theft of valuables from Dresden’s Green Vault Museum worth over millions, the taking of a multi-million pound gold toilet from a UK landmark the same year, the recent heist of a valuable item from Berlin’s Bode Museum or even a spate of robberies of collector items from American institutions.

“There’s a simple pattern here,” said Marinello. “Break in, take items, and dismantle them as quickly as possible.”

If the items were to remain intact, specialists say, the criminals would find it hard to sell them. “There’s no way to trade something as immediately identifiable as the Louvre’s jewels on the legal marketplace”, commented an art crime researcher of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

“They are too well-known, particularly given the cultural authorities has published photos of the pieces. Even a private collector or an auction house would want to see paperwork confirming proper ownership before touching such remarkable pieces.”

In the past, institutions were often reluctant to go public about the disappearance of famous works of art and would stay silent out of shame. Now, as cultural robberies are more widely publicised, the keeping and sale of taken items is dangerous for any lawbreaker.

“Taking a famous painting, it has to remain intact or it becomes valueless, and you have to conceive of a plan to keep it in hiding, perhaps by moving it among difficult criminal actors,” said Marinello. “There's ongoing risk to the danger of an partner informing authorities to cash in a ransom.”

For comparable factors, an art detective said it was vanishingly unlikely that the theft had been commissioned. “Commissioned theft is something from Hollywood movies,” he said. “No one would handle these items. It's global news and in all the media. If you buy this, if you are apprehended, you go to jail. You cannot show it to your friends, you cannot bequeath it to your children.”

Modifying taken items by melting down or reshaping does reduce the worth. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with considerable risk because contemporary methods give stones a bigger and brighter surface area, and antique-cut stones would either draw unwanted attention or reduce value for a concealment.

Crucially, however, dismantling or reshaping removes the evidence of the crime. “I suspect that the Louvre thieves will try to take the items to places with gem knowledge like Israel, another nation or even as close as Antwerp, and locate an expert to cut out the stones,” suggested Marinello.

The robbery at the Louvre has already brought up concerns about security measures at the museum, with a unauthorized state auditor report expected to be released next month criticising “considerable” and “persistent” delays in updating systems and noting that security cameras were missing in multiple areas. But specialists say showing valuable objects in historic buildings with a steady stream of visitors comes with risks that are impossible to remove entirely.

“Older structures are much harder to secure,” said an art crime professor. “Many of them have large accessible windows that makes it easy for criminals to get away, and there may be building protection statutes in place that mean you can’t fit them with proper bulletproof glass.”

The most solid protective measures for structures should be designed “like a fortress”, said a security advisor. “There should be several layers to deter attackers.”

Modern buildings are fitted with advanced surveillance systems or integrated vibration sensors that raise alarm about a broken glass in immediately, but old museums may be reluctant to uglify their exteriors. Detection devices can be hard to fit to decorated surfaces. Motion and sound detectors may also have to be turned off during the day as hordes of visitors stomp through a museum.

The schedule of the robbery, which took place between 9.30am and 9.40am in Paris, was typical of recent thefts, Stürmann said. “It's logical why thefts tend to happen at either start or end of day. Frequently when security change their shifts and prior to the museum is full of visitors who actually act as extra protection.”

Technological progress may have thrown up new gadgets that can raise the alarm more quickly and efficiently, but it has also given thieves new methods with which to circumvent security measures. In Paris, the robbers accessed the museum’s first-floor window with a vehicle-mounted ladder and cut through a window with a battery-powered disc cutter.

Elaine Sciolino said the conversation in the country about the historic structure had mostly centered on crowd control in recent years, and not as much on security.

The institution has an on-site team of about fifty full-time emergency personnel, but their purpose is mainly to safeguard the artworks from blazes and flooding. “There isn't a rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “Ultimately, the safety of the Louvre all comes down to government support and funding, and currently France simply has no money.”