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  • More glittering royal jewels displayed while Paris is still uneasy over the Louvre robbery

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    PARIS (AP) — A glittering exhibition of royal jewels is opening Wednesday in Paris even as the city still reels from the brazen crown-jewel heist at the nearby Louvre Museum.

    The four-minute operation in October emptied cases in the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery, forced its closure and rattled public confidence in France’s cultural security.

    With the plundered gallery still sealed off, another museum nearby is showcasing diamonds and tiaras that endured revolutions, exile and empire: treasures that have managed to escape the type of plunder now afflicting the Louvre’s own jewels.

    A loaded location

    The “Dynastic Jewels” exhibition at the Hôtel de la Marine — itself the site of an infamous 1792 crown-jewel theft — opens at a moment of national sensitivity.

    Spread across four galleries, the exhibit unfurls more than a hundred pieces that dazzle in both sparkle and scale. Its objects are drawn from the Al Thani Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and major lenders including King Charles III, the Duke of Fife, Cartier, Chaumet and France’s own national collections.

    Some of the most striking loans include the giant 57-carat Star of Golconda diamond; a sapphire coronet and emerald tiara designed by Prince Albert for Queen Victoria, reunited here for the first time in more than 150 years; and Catherine the Great’s diamond-encrusted dress ornaments. A Cartier necklace created for an Indian ruler blends European platinum-age design with centuries-old gems.

    Security front and center

    Curators didn’t comment on details of operational security. But the Hôtel de la Marine stresses that it was rebuilt with modern, high-grade security when it reopened in 2021, and that its galleries were conceived with robust protections in mind. The museum did not say whether any measures had been strengthened in response to the Louvre heist.

    Still, the latest exhibition unfolds at a moment when Paris is urgently tightening museum protections.

    Last month, Louvre director Laurence des Cars announced that roughly 100 new surveillance cameras and upgraded anti-intrusion systems will be installed, with the first measures rolled out in weeks and the full network expected by the end of next year. The Louvre investigation remains active; meanwhile, none of the stolen pieces have been recovered.

    Arthur Brand, an Amsterdam-based art detective, said the Louvre heist will have sharpened vigilance at institutions like the Hotel de la Marine.

    “Authorities have learned from the Louvre’s lacking security,” he said. “The thieves know that the security people here aren’t going to be sloppy. They will have learned their lesson. It’s a good thing this exhibit is going on. Life goes on. You should not give in to thieves. Show these precious items!”

    With the Apollo Gallery closed, the Hôtel de la Marine is suddenly poised to become a prime stop for jewel-lovers — an unfortunate coincidence, or unexpected advantage — a place where visitors shut out of the Louvre’s Crown Jewels displays may naturally gravitate.

    Power, prestige and unease

    “We show how great gemstones, tiaras and objects of virtuosity reflected identity in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries,” said Amin Jaffer, director of the Al Thani Collection and one of the exhibition’s curators. “They were expressions of power, reflections of prestige and markers of passion.”

    That display of privilege and power lands differently today. Just this weekend in Britain, protesters at the Tower of London splattered custard and apple crumble on the display case of a royal crown at an anti-inequality demonstration.

    The Louvre robbery has sharpened scrutiny of where such jewels came from. Museums are increasingly pressured to confront provenance more honestly and address the exploitative networks that made the treasures possible.

    For some in Paris, the celebration of jewels so soon after the Louvre heist doesn’t feel right.

    “Honestly, the timing feels off,” said Alexandre Benhamou, 42, a Paris gift shop manager. “People are still upset about what happened at the Louvre, and now there’s another jewel exhibition opening just down the street. It’s too soon; we haven’t even processed the first shock.”

    A building with a memory

    Before the Revolution, what was then known as the Hôtel du Garde-Meuble housed the Crown Jewels and royal collections — a history the exhibition directly invokes. That the building’s 18th-century jewels were stolen in 1792 only deepens the irony: this stretch of Paris has witnessed such crimes before.

    Despite the charged backdrop, curators say they want visitors to marvel, to dream and to explore the layers of “affection, love, relationships, gift-giving” embedded in the objects.

    “Every object here tells a story,” Jaffer told AP. “They’ve changed hands ever since they were made, and they continue to survive.”

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  • Louvre heist leaves a cultural wound — and may turn French crown jewels into legend

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    PARIS (AP) — The robbery at the Louvre has done what no marketing campaign ever could: It has catapulted France’s dusty crown jewels — long admired at home, little known abroad — to global fame.

    One week on, the country is still wounded by the breach to its national heritage even as authorities Sunday announced arrests tied to the haul.

    Yet the crime is also a paradox. Some say it will make celebrities of the very jewels it sought to erase — much as the Mona Lisa’s turn-of-the-20th-century theft transformed the then little-known Renaissance portrait into the world’s most famous artwork.

    In 1911, a museum handyman lifted the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece off its hook. The loss went unnoticed for more than a day; newspapers turned it into a global mystery, and crowds came to stare at the empty space. When the painting resurfaced two years later, its fame eclipsed everything else in the museum, and that remains so today.

    That’s the uneasy question shadowing Sunday’s robbery: whether a crime that cut deep will glorify what’s left behind.

    “Because of the drama, the scandal, the heist, the Apollo Gallery itself and the jewels that remain will likely receive a new spotlight and become celebrities, just like the Mona Lisa after 1911,” said Anya Firestone, a Paris art historian and Culture Ministry licensed heritage expert. She toured the gallery the day before the robbery and did not think it looked sufficiently guarded.

    Bringing celebrity through theft

    The heist has electrified global media. Nightly newscasts from the U.S. to Europe and across Latin America and Asia have beamed the Louvre, its Apollo Gallery and the missing jewels to hundreds of millions — a surge of attention some say rivals, or even surpasses, the frenzy after Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s 2018 “Apeshit” video filmed inside the museum. The Louvre is once again a global set.

    For generations, the British monarchy’s regalia has captured the popular imagination through centuries of coronations and drawing millions every year to their display in the Tower of London. Meanwhile, France’s jewels lived in the shadow. This week’s heist tilts the balance.

    One early emblem of that celebrity effect could be the survivor piece itself — Empress Eugénie’s emerald-set crown, dropped in the getaway and studded with more than 1,300 diamonds — which may now become the gallery’s most talked-about relic.

    “I’d never even heard of Eugénie’s crown until this,” said Mateo Ruiz, a 27-year-old visitor from Seville. “Now it’s the first thing I want to see when the gallery reopens.”

    Among the treasures that escaped the thieves’ grasp are storied gems still gleaming under glass — the Regent Diamond, the Sancy and the Hortensia. Authorities say one other stolen bejeweled piece, besides Empress Eugénie’s damaged crown, has since been quietly recovered, though they have declined to identify it.

    The heist has not dented the Louvre’s pull. The palace-museum reopened to maximum crowds Wednesday, even as the jewels remain missing. Long before the robbery, the museum was straining under mass tourism — roughly 33,000 visitors a day — and staff warn it cannot easily absorb another surge, especially with the Apollo Gallery sealed and security resources stretched.

    Jewels represent French history itself

    For France, the loss is more than precious stones and metal totaling over $100 million; it is pages torn from the national record. The Apollo Gallery reads as a timeline in gold and light, carrying the country from Bourbon ceremony to Napoleon’s self-fashioned empire and into modern France.

    Firestone puts it this way: The jewels are “the Louvre’s final word in the language of monarchy — a glittering echo of kings and queens as France crossed into a new era.” They are not ornaments, she argues, but chapters of French history, marking the end of the royal order and the beginning of the country France is today.

    Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez called the theft an “immeasurable” heritage loss, and the museum says the pieces carry “inestimable” historic weight — a reminder that what vanished is not just monetary.

    Many also see a stunning security lapse.

    “It’s staggering that a handful of people couldn’t be stopped in broad daylight,” said Nadia Benyamina, 52, a Paris shopkeeper who visits the gallery monthly. “There were failures — avoidable ones. That’s the wound.”

    Investigators say the thieves rode a basket lift up the building’s Seine-facing façade, forced open a window, smashed two display cases and fled on motorbikes — all in minutes. Alarms sounded, drawing security to the gallery and forcing the intruders to bolt, officials say. The haul spanned royal and imperial suites in sapphire, emerald and diamond — including pieces tied to Marie-Amélie, Hortense, Marie-Louise and Empress Eugénie.

    In Senate testimony, Louvre director Laurence des Cars acknowledged “a terrible failure,” citing gaps in exterior camera coverage and proposing vehicle barriers and a police post inside the museum. She offered to resign; the culture minister refused. The heist followed months of warnings about chronic understaffing and crowd pressure points.

    Drawing crowds to see what isn’t there

    Outside the blocked doors, visitors now come to see what cannot be seen.

    “I came to see where it happened,” said Tobias Klein, 24, an architecture student. “That barricade is chilling. People are looking with shock and curiosity.”

    Others feel a flicker of hope. “They’re ghosts now — but there’s still hope they’ll be found,” said Rose Nguyen, 33, an artist from Reims. “It’s the same strange magnetism the Mona Lisa had after 1911. The story becomes part of the object.”

    Curators warn that recutting or melting the jewels would be a second violence. In museums, authenticity lives in the original: the mount, the design, the work of the goldsmith’s hand — and the unbroken story of who made, wore, treasured, exhibited and, yes, stole the object.

    Whether loss now brings legend is the Louvre’s uneasy future.

    “In the strange economy of fame, even bad news becomes attention — and attention makes icons,” Firestone said.

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