Télérama – The Disquieting Fate of a Vanished National Treasure, by Sophie Cachon
Jewellery historian Capucine Juncker rejects the theory of a heist commissioned by a billionaire collector. She fears that this national treasure of eight jewels will be broken up and sold off piece by piece.
By Sophie Cachon
Published 22 October 2025
The world now knows that it took barely seven minutes for thieves to wrench from the world’s greatest museum eight jewels from its collections—imperial masterpieces of the nineteenth century, some set with older stones of royal provenance. These unique creations, immortalised in their time by court painters, form part of the very DNA of French history. Now vanished—and perhaps already spirited out of the country—the question is what fate awaits these treasures, valued at €88 million according to the Paris prosecutor. Universally recognised, more so than ever today, they are in practice almost impossible to resell intact.
Set with a staggering number of precious stones—7,811 in all, including remarkable sapphires and emeralds, and an overwhelming majority of small, old-cut diamonds—the great fear now is their dismantling and dispersal, scattered like a puzzle. Capucine Juncker, art and jewellery historian, gemmologist, and author of the first book devoted to the fabled Golconda diamonds of India (Diamonds of Golconda, Skira Paris, 2024), offers her considered view on the troubling future that may await a national treasure that has simply vanished.
A discreet billionaire collector? A diamond dealer ready to break them up? Where could the stolen jewels go?
Two outcomes dominate: either a partial reappearance, negotiated by intermediaries after police or judicial pressure; or dispersal. In the latter scenario, stones are removed from their settings, the gold is melted down, and the components are sold off individually to obscure the trail. The tempo of the heist—extremely rapid—together with the equipment used, suggests an operation geared towards dismantling, though the other scenario cannot be ruled out. Smuggling the jewels abroad is difficult but entirely feasible. Illicit markets have existed since time immemorial; few commodities are more negotiable or more stable than a diamond.
As for the romantic notion of a heist commissioned by a fabulously wealthy collector, I remain sceptical. Investigations consistently show that thefts are almost never “commissioned”. The economics of resale prevail.
If the jewels are dismantled, will the gold be melted down? Must the diamonds be recut to pass unnoticed?
If dismantling occurs, the gold will indeed be melted, refined, anonymised, and reintroduced to the market bearing a maker’s mark and an assay mark indicating its purity.
The diamonds do not necessarily need to be recut to circulate. Most often, simple removal is enough: opening the setting and extracting the stone turns it back into an unmounted “loose” diamond—immediately negotiable and with no loss of weight. Recutting is undertaken only to obscure the identity of a celebrated stone. The emblematic case remains Louis XIV’s blue diamond, stolen in 1792 from the Crown Jewels kept at the Garde-Meuble royal, rediscovered in London in 1812 in another form. Recut, it became the “Hope Diamond”, now at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
While the pedigree of an exceptional gem can sometimes be reconstructed, one never recovers a pavé of small diamonds; they dissolve into the flow of the market. Once removed and recut, these stones become anonymous gems.
Are old-cut diamonds like those stolen from the Louvre actually sellable?
Rose cuts—flat-backed stones with a faceted dome—are readily traded on the antique market. They were produced between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, with twelve, eighteen, or more facets depending on the variant. Recutting them makes little sense: the risk of breakage is high and the yield poor.
To recognise the largest stones, one would essentially compare certain elements with any existing pre-theft photographs: carat weight, facet pattern, overall outline (round, oval, flattened pear), the height of the dome, and recurring idiosyncrasies—nicks, oblique scratches, flattened corners. Individually, these markers prove nothing; taken together, they may provide leads.
Some diamonds stolen from the Garde-Meuble in 1792 were later recovered. How are such stones authenticated?
At the time, the Crown jewellers cross-checked inventories, names, weights, measurements, and cutting peculiarities—building a converging set of clues.
Today, curators and scientific teams in gemmological laboratories prepare in advance a dossier for each stone, invaluable in case of reappearance: frontal, profile, and back photographs; ideally a 3D scan; a diagram of inclusions; and the faint polishing marks as distinctive as wood grain. Non-destructive optical tests read impurities and defects, producing a luminous signature and internal imagery that reveals the crystal’s stable identifying markers.
We often hear that their value is “inestimable”, chiefly historical. But are these stones really so rare and valuable?
It is a significant—and unsettling—question. On the market, some of these stones, especially the small ones, are worth very little because of their imperfections. The pearls in Empress Eugénie’s tiara (1853), however, are exceptional.
We must stop fantasising about “astronomical sums”. Once removed from their settings and recut, the stones become anonymous gems, generally sold at a steep discount. From an economic standpoint, if the thieves had wanted to make a substantial profit, they would have smashed the display cases of a major Place Vendôme jeweller and taken new, standardised pieces that are easily resold.
Here, the so-called “heist of the century” is an economic fallacy as well as a heritage disaster. The principal value of these jewels is historical: their mounts survive intact, their prestigious provenance is known. This is the real tragedy of the theft: we lose not only a part of our heritage, but also the expertise and irreplaceable craftsmanship of the jewellers who created them.