New day, new robbery: another French museum hit after Louvre

ISLAMABAD: Just a day after the high-profile jewel heist at Musée du Louvre in Paris, another French cultural institution was robbed. On Monday morning, officials at the Maison des Lumières – House of Enlightenment in Langres (Haute-Marne) discovered that part of the museum’s coins treasure had vanished, Franceinfo reported.

The museum staff entering the institution in the morning found the entrance door open and a display case housing gold and silver coins shattered. 

“The sliding entrance door had been forced open, and a display case containing gold and silver coins had been broken,” the municipal statement said. 

According to local officials, the thieves selected only a limited number of items from the collection, leaving the rest untouched, authorities consider this a sign of a targeted and prepared robbery.

The stolen pieces came from a trove of nearly 2,000 coins, 1,633 silver and 319 gold, previously valued at around €90,000. 

The museum said the missing items were part of “the ‘museum treasure’, a collection of silver and gold coins discovered during renovation.”

The timing could not be more alarm-raising. The Louvre robbery, which made global headlines with its daylight raid on priceless royal jewels valued at €88 million, triggered national alarms about museum security. The Langres incident arrived like a copy-cat in the making, raising concerns that once-targeted-vulnerable institutions are now under renewed threat.

Police are investigating the Langres heist as “targeted and planned,” with the city already contracting a private security firm to guard the site overnight while the museum upgrades its surveillance. 

In a public statement the City of Langres vowed to “strongly condemn this act of vandalism and theft, which damages the community’s heritage.”

For now, Langres remains closed to visitors until further notice. The coins are gone, the display case lies broken, and French heritage watchers wonder: How many more?