The Louvre is the most popular museum in the world, with nearly 9m visitors in 2024. A former royal palace in the historic centre of Paris, it is made up of more than 400 galleries displaying 35,000 works of art. The collection spans civilisations from Mesopotamia to Europe and links France's royal and imperial past with its republican present. Laurence des Cars became the museum's director in 2021.
The Louvre houses the French national collection of crown jewels in the Galerie d'Apollon, the museum's most sumptuous gallery. Items include an emerald-studded necklace and earrings given by Napoleon to Marie-Louise on their wedding in 1810, and a tiara of 212 pearls, 1,998 diamonds and 992 rose-cut diamonds belonging to the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III.
On October 19th 2025, two masked thieves slipped through a window of the Galerie d'Apollon and, using disc-cutters, pierced the security glass of two display cabinets. In seven minutes they made off with eight items of Napoleonic and royal jewellery worth €88m, escaping via a truck-mounted ladder and scooters with two accomplices. They dropped a ninth piece in their haste. President Emmanuel Macron called the heist an attack on "our history". Gérald Darmanin, the justice minister, said the raid had given France "a dreadful image". A leaked report from France's national auditor pointed to "persistent" delays in deploying modern security equipment at the museum. Rachida Dati, the culture minister, spoke of "40 years of neglect".
The Louvre's most famous previous theft was in 1911, when the "Mona Lisa" was stolen. Art-theft specialist Arthur Brand compared the 2025 heist to the 1990 robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, when 13 works of art were taken, including Vermeer's "The Concert" and Rembrandt's "Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee".
Some 1,700 works bear the designation "MNR" (Musées Nationaux Récupération, or National Museums Recovery) on their placards. These are "orphan" works, probably seized from Jews during the second world war, which remain in the Louvre's care but are not part of its permanent collection. For the purposes of the Louvre's holdings, history ended in 1848; later masterpieces are housed in France's other national museums.
Around four-fifths of visitors come mainly to see Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa", the most famous work of art in the world, bypassing other treasures. Many Louvre employees consider it overrated. The museum's 400 galleries span about 14.5km of walking distance; stopping to look at each artwork for 15 seconds would take roughly 145 hours.
Emmanuel Macron announced a renovation costing €700m-800m ($800m-900m), which would, among other things, give the "Mona Lisa" her own dedicated gallery.
Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.