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Breaking into the world’s most-visited museum in broad daylight, taking eight items of invaluable Napoleonic jewellery and vanishing into Paris traffic on humble scooters may seem like the most audacious of crimes, carried out for international notoriety and subsequent Hollywood film treatments.

Specialists who study patterns in global cultural theft, however, see Sunday morning’s robbery at the Louvre as a more practical matter: the most recent in a series of quick-hit thefts centered more on the material value of precious stones or materials than the artifacts’ significance, continuing a pattern that has emerged over the last decade in Germany, Britain and the US. The location, they propose, would have been of secondary concern to the criminals.

“One might wonder why thieves who want to take expensive jewellery are breaking into a globally renowned museum rather than a luxury jewelry store,” said Christopher A Marinello. “It's straightforward: it’s because these days a high-end boutique is better protected.”

A spate of violent retail store thefts indicate that many stores have strengthened their protection in recent years, with armed guards on their locations and merchandise no longer shown overnight. Cultural institutions, meanwhile, look vulnerable, partly because of the in-built reason of being accessible institutions in historic buildings, and partly the current economic climate in many western countries.

“After the pandemic, authorities across the globe have cut back on police and the arts funding,” noted Marinello. “If thieves can get into the Louvre, it demonstrates how vulnerable our museums have become. This is a difficult time to be a museum.”

The robbery of the objects – featuring jewelry pieces made up of eight sapphires and hundreds of gems, the crown of a historical figure featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and a hugely valuable crown once possessed by a royal that the thieves left by the street on their way out – has naturally been compared with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the same museum, carried out by the Italian handyman the thief.

More relevant points of reference may be the recent theft of valuables from Dresden’s Green Vault Museum worth over €113m, the theft of a £4.75m gold toilet from a UK landmark the same year, the recent heist of a valuable item from Berlin’s Bode Museum or even a series of robberies of sports memorabilia from US mining museums.

“There’s a simple pattern here,” said Marinello. “Smash, grab, and melt it down as rapidly as possible.”

If the artefacts were to remain intact, experts say, the criminals would struggle to find a buyer. “There’s no way to trade something as recognizable as the museum's gems on the licit market”, said Lynda Albertson of the a relevant organization.

“They are too well-known, especially given the Ministry of Culture has released images of the items. Even a individual buyer or an sales venue would want to see paperwork establishing proper ownership before handling such striking pieces.”

In the previous years, institutions were often reluctant to go public about the disappearance of well-known art pieces and would stay silent out of embarrassment. These days, as art thefts are more reported on, the keeping and sale of taken items is dangerous for any criminal.

“If you steal a Picasso, it has to remain intact or it becomes valueless, and you have to devise a plan to conceal it, maybe by passing it around difficult criminal actors,” noted Marinello. “And you’re constantly exposed to the risk of an partner informing authorities to cash in a ransom.”

For comparable factors, an investigator said it was highly improbable that the theft had been commissioned. “Commissioned theft is something from Hollywood movies,” he said. “Nobody would touch this. It’s all around the world and in all the newspapers. If you buy this, if you are apprehended, you end up in prison. You cannot show it to your friends, you cannot leave it to your children.”

Altering stolen works by dismantling or re-cutting does lower the worth. When it comes to gems, it also comes with significant danger because contemporary cutting techniques give stones a bigger and brighter appearance, and older-style stones would either draw unwanted attention or barter the price down for a coverup.

Crucially, however, dismantling or reshaping eliminates the evidence of the crime. “I suspect that the robbers will try to take the items to locations with gem knowledge like a country, India or even as nearby as Antwerp, and find someone to cut out the gems,” said Marinello.

The heist at the Louvre has already raised questions about security measures at the museum, with a leaked official review expected to be released next month pointing out “significant” and “ongoing” slow progress in updating systems and observing that security cameras were missing in many rooms. But specialists say showing valuable objects in historic buildings with a constant flow of visitors comes with risks that are impossible to remove entirely.

“Historic buildings are much harder to secure,” said an art crime professor. “They often have nice big street-facing windows that makes it easy for thieves to get away, and there may be building protection statutes in place that mean you can’t fit them with secure windows.”

The best security systems for structures should be designed “as a stronghold”, noted a security advisor. “It should include several layers to repel intruders.”

Contemporary structures are fitted with advanced surveillance systems or integrated vibration sensors that raise alarm about a smashed window in real time, but historic institutions may be reluctant to uglify their appearance. Laser scanners can be difficult to fit to decorated surfaces. Motion and sound detectors may also have to be turned off during the daytime as crowds walk through a museum.

The schedule of the Louvre raid, which took place between morning hours in Paris, was common of modern robberies, Stürmann said. “There’s a good reason why thefts tend to happen at either start or end of day. Frequently when guards change their shifts and before the museum is full of visitors who effectively act as additional security staff.”

Technological progress may have thrown up new devices that can raise the alarm more rapidly and effectively, but it has also provided thieves new methods with which to circumvent protections. In Paris, the thieves accessed the museum’s upper level with a vehicle-mounted ladder and breached a window with a battery-powered disc cutter.

Elaine Sciolino said the discussion in France about the 232-year-old building had mostly centered on visitor management in recent years, and not as much on security.

The museum has an in-house brigade of about fifty permanent firefighters, but their purpose is mainly to safeguard the collection from blazes and flooding. “There is no quick reaction team,” Sciolino said. “Ultimately, the security of the Louvre all depends on government support and money, and at present France lacks sufficient money.”