Olivier Gabet, director of decorative arts at the Louvre Museum since 2022, is pushing back against suggestions to display valuable jewels in less accessible spaces like the museum’s basement, or to present copies to the public while the real objects are stored in a secure vault.
“To think that we could replace the original works with copies is almost to deny their very nature,” Gabet told Le Monde in an interview.
Gabet’s comments come in the aftermath of thieves breaking into the Louvre on the morning of Sunday, October 19, and stealing nine objects form the gilded Apollo Gallery, where a wide array of the French crown jewels are regularly on view.
The thieves—two of whom were arrested on October 24—dropped one of the items, Empress Eugénie’s crown, while fleeing the museum. In a hearing the with French senate last week, Louvre director Laurence de Cars mentioned that the crown had sustained damage while being removed from its case, but experts thought it was possible for the artifact to be restored.
In the interview, Gabet shared more details about the fate of the crown: “Contrary to what has been reported, the thieves did not smash the glass cases, but rather created slits through which they extracted the object.” Empress Eugénie’s crown is “particularly light and malleable,” Gabet explained, causing it to become “deformed and flattened during its removal.”
Gabet additionally shared that the crown was held by forensic police immediately after the robbery and returned to the Louvre the next day. Though a few small diamonds and one of the gold eagles are missing from the recovered crown, all of the large diamonds and emeralds remain intact.
“It is therefore entirely restorable,” according to Gabet. The museum plans to work with a team of jewelers and goldsmiths in the coming weeks. “It will never be exactly as it was originally, but it will be very close and will, of course, retain its full symbolic value.”
