Jewelry Heist at French Decorative Arts Museum Is Latest in Spate of Thefts

Jewelry worth an estimated €4 million ($4.57 million) was stolen from a decorative arts museum in northeastern France’s Alsace region early on Sunday morning, less than a week after another heist at an archaeological museum on the other side of the country.

According to French reports, soon after 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, masked thieves smashed through a door to the Lalique Museum in Wingen-sur-Moder, which is dedicated to Art Deco and Art Nouveau designer René Lalique. Next, they broke through six glass display cases and snatched about 20 pieces of jewelry, which were mostly made of crystal, a source told Le Parisien. Though alarms went off, for reasons that are still unclear, a security monitoring company did not immediately alert police. Eventually, when a maintenance worker arrived at the museum to start her shift, she discovered the crime scene and was the first person to call police.

“All the alarms went off, just as they were supposed to. But then, apparently, there was a major lapse in the security monitoring company: they didn’t respond immediately, and they didn’t notify the police,” said the mayor of the French town, Christian Dorschner.

The museum was also considered a “sensitive” site. It had been the subject of a security system review that led to some additional protective measures that, after Sunday’s robbery, proved insufficient, according to a source speaking to AFP. A message on the museum website states it will remain closed for several days following a burglary, and asks for the public’s understanding.   

This latest heist recalls the brazen, daytime Louvre theft of France’s Crown Jewels in October, which, despite putting the country’s museums on relatively higher alert, does not appear to be staving off a spate of recent thefts. The Sunday jewelry robbery comes after thieves nabbed a clay vessel containing about 40 Gallo-Roman-era gold and silver coins, worth an estimated €120,000 (about $134,000), from the Centre archéologique du Montans in southwest France, in the early hours of July 1.

The heist at the start of the month was reportedly pulled off “without great difficulty,” and the archaeological museum has no video-surveillance system, despite plans to install one. “Should we have done so early? After the fact, it’s easy to say that yes, we should have,” admitted local mayor Jonathan Vidal.

In September alone, porcelain treasures were robbed from France’s Adrien Dubouche National Museum in Limoges, and the same month, gold worth about $700,000 was snatched from Paris’ Natural History Museum.