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Breaking into the planet's most popular museum in the middle of the day, grabbing eight items of invaluable Napoleonic jewellery and vanishing into Paris traffic on humble scooters may seem like the boldest of crimes, executed for global fame and subsequent movie adaptations.

Experts who study patterns in international art crime, however, see Sunday morning’s robbery at the Louvre as something more prosaic: the most recent in a string of smash-and-grab thefts centered more on the material value of precious stones or metals than the artifacts’ significance, perpetuating a trend that has appeared over the last ten years in Germany, Britain and the US. The location, they propose, would have been of lesser importance to the thieves.

“One might wonder why criminals who want to take expensive jewellery are breaking into a globally renowned museum rather than a luxury jewelry store,” said Christopher A Marinello. “The answer is simple: it’s because nowadays a Cartier store is more secure.”

A series of violent jewellery shop thefts mean that many stores have strengthened their security in the past few years, with armed guards on their premises and merchandise no longer shown overnight. Museums, on the other hand, look vulnerable, in part because of the in-built reason of being public-facing institutions in older structures, and partly the financial situation in many western countries.

“Since Covid, governments across the world have cut back on law enforcement and the arts funding,” noted Marinello. “With criminals entering the Louvre, it shows how vulnerable our museums have become. This is a difficult time to be a museum.”

The robbery of the items – featuring necklaces made up of eight sapphires and hundreds of gems, the tiara of Empress Eugénie containing nearly 2,000 diamonds and a extremely expensive crown once possessed by Napoleon III’s wife that the thieves left by the roadside on their way out – has inevitably drawn comparisons with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, performed by the worker Vincenzo Peruggia.

Better points of reference may be the 2019 burglary of valuables from a German institution worth over millions, the theft of a £4.75m gold toilet from Blenheim Palace the same year, the 2017 robbery of a valuable item from a European museum or even a series of thefts of sports memorabilia from US mining museums.

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

If the artefacts were to stay whole, experts say, the criminals would find it hard to sell them. “There’s no way to trade something as recognizable as the museum's gems on the legal marketplace”, commented Lynda Albertson of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

“They are too well-known, particularly given the cultural authorities has published photos of the items. Even a individual buyer or an auction house would want to see documentation confirming proper ownership before handling such remarkable 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. Now, as art thefts are more widely publicised, the storage and selling of taken items is risky business for any criminal.

“Taking a famous painting, it has to remain intact or it becomes valueless, and you have to devise a scheme to conceal it, maybe by passing it around difficult criminal actors,” noted Marinello. “There's ongoing risk to the danger of an accomplice telling the police to collect a ransom.”

For similar reasons, an investigator said it was highly improbable that the theft had been commissioned. “Stolen to order is something from films,” he said. “Nobody would touch this. It’s all around the world and in all the media. If you buy this, if you get caught, you end up in prison. You cannot show it to your acquaintances, you cannot leave it to your family.”

Modifying taken items by melting down or reshaping does reduce the worth. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with significant danger because modern cutting techniques give gems a larger and brighter surface area, and older-style stones would either draw unwanted attention or reduce value for a concealment.

Importantly, however, melting down or reshaping removes the proof of the theft. “My guess is that the robbers will try to bring the items to places with diamond expertise like a country, India or even as close as Antwerp, and locate an expert to remove the stones,” suggested Marinello.

The heist at the Louvre has already raised questions about protective steps at the museum, with a unauthorized official review expected to be published next month criticising “considerable” and “persistent” slow progress in modernizing equipment and observing that security cameras were missing in many rooms. But specialists say showing precious items in historic buildings with a steady stream of guests comes with risks that are not possible to remove entirely.

“Older structures are much harder to protect,” explained an art crime professor. “They often have large accessible windows that allows for criminals to get away, and there may be preservation laws in place that mean you are unable to install them with proper bulletproof glass.”

The best security systems for buildings should be designed “as a stronghold”, noted a security advisor. “It should include multiple levels to deter attackers.”

Modern buildings are fitted with state-of-the-art external CCTV cameras or integrated seismic detectors that alert about a broken glass in real time, but old museums may be reluctant to alter their exteriors. Laser scanners can be difficult to fit to stuccoed ceilings. Sensors may also have to be disabled during the daytime as hordes of visitors walk through a museum.

The timing of the robbery, which took place between morning hours local time, was common of recent thefts, Stürmann said. “It's logical why robberies tend to happen at either opening or closing times. Frequently when guards change their shifts and before the museum is crowded who actually 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 robbers new tools with which to bypass security measures. In Paris, the robbers reached the museum’s first-floor window with a vehicle-mounted ladder and cut through a window with a battery-powered disc cutter.

An author said the discussion in the country about the 232-year-old structure had primarily focused on crowd control in recent years, and less on protection.

The institution has an on-site brigade of about 50 permanent firefighters, but their mission is mostly to protect the collection from blazes and flooding. “There isn't a quick reaction team,” Sciolino said. “Ultimately, the security of the Louvre all depends on political will and money, and at present France simply has no money.”