French word of the day: La Casse

Published: October 23, 2025

It has been a cold blustery month in Paris, and the weather here is not great either. You may have heard, there was an embarrassingly big museum heist (la casse) here in the capital of France this past Sunday.

That world-famous museum, the Louvre in the center of Paris, was the stage for a ridiculously easy burglary in broad daylight. So that would be several pieces of priceless royal jewellery stolen, along with a part of the country’s heritage.

I’ve heard rumbling comparisons to Ocean’s 11, but the break-ins in the movie actually looked complex. This is sounding more like a Pink Panther sketch, with the hapless Inspector Clouseau running around trying to stop a bunch of jewel thieves.

(If you are too young to have heard of the 1963 Pink Panther movie, I feel for you, you are missing out. It is currently on Apple+ and Amazon Prime.)

To summarize all the various points of this real-life Parisian whodunit:

• The burglars used a large crane furniture lift to get to the 1st floor (2nd floor for Americans).
• The furniture lift was stolen 9 days earlier from the French town of Louvres about 22 miles away. Burglars with a sense of humor?
• They went through a wooden window whose alarm had been reported broken a month earlier. An inside job, perhaps?
• No word why such precious jewellery was so easily accessible on the 1st floor outer Denon wing of the Louvre (circled in red below), next to a very helpful balcony and open space, rather than in one of the inner rooms underground.

• They used a battery-powered saw to break into the display cases holding the jewellery. The glass didn’t shatter, but it did let the burglars cut a hole in it to fit through an arm.
• The display cases had been changed in 2019. With the old cases, the jewellery descended into a built-in safe if the alarm sounded, while the newer ones did not have this feature.
• The reason for the change, according to the museum is that the descent wasn’t working very well and they were worried that the vibrations of the descent into the safe could damage the treasures.
• Visitors were already inside the Louvre museum and the Apollon gallery where the treasures were kept.
• In video recordings, it is not clear if the alarms went off.
• Guards are not armed, and so waited for police to confront the thieves.
• The thieves were in there for 7 minutes and have escaped, dropping one royal crown along the way.
• The jewellery is not insured, and the monetary loss is estimated at €88m.
• The Cour des Comptes (Court of Accounting, a high-ranking French government agency) was already in the process of issueing a report on the various security holes at the Louvre, including the lack of working video cameras in several hotspots.
• A few days after the fact, the Director of the Louvre offered her resignation to President Macron, which was turned down.
• In 1976, the sword of King Charles X was stolen from the same Apollon gallery and has never been recovered.
• Earlier, on Sept 16th, the Museum of Natural history in 5th arrondissement of Paris was broken into and gold pieces worth €600k were stolen.
• On October 20, the day after the Louvre break-in, another museum in the Haute Marne area, the Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot suffered a break-in where several pieces of gold and silver were stolen.
• The Minister of Culture Rachida Dati thanked the Louvre team for keeping an orderly exit of the premises. She has also announced an “administrative investigation“.
• Addendum: It is possible that those Apollon gallery display cases were made by the same company that made the new display cases for the Saint King Louis’s Crown of Thornes and other holy artefacts kept in the Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral since its reopening.

Yeah so all this is not looking great. But apparently dozens of police personnel have been deployed to the case and we’re all keeping our fingers crossed.

In other news:

• There was a deadly tornado in the Paris suburbs this past Monday, where 1 person was killed and several others badly injured. (Interestingly, no tornado alert was issued. I only saw it on the news a few hours later, even though we are within 25 miles of the area.)
• As I predicted in my last newsletter, the new Prime Minister Lecornu was in, and then he was out again in 24 hours. And then he was back again a week later (Yes, I still had to look up his name’s spelling.) So is this is the 4th or is that 5th PM in a year…?
• Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has started a 5-year prison sentence for conspiracy to finance his 2007 campaign with foreign funds from Gaddafi in Libya.

And in the blog:

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