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The robbery at the Louvre has catapulted France’s dusty Crown Jewels — long admired at home, little known abroad — to global fame.
One week on, and the country is still wounded by the breach to its national heritage. Yet the crime is also a paradox.
Some say the heist 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.
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