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Entering the world’s most-visited museum in broad daylight, taking eight items of invaluable Napoleonic jewellery and vanishing into Paris traffic on humble scooters may seem like the boldest of crimes, executed for international notoriety and ensuing movie adaptations.

Specialists who observe patterns in global cultural theft, however, see Sunday morning’s robbery at the Louvre as something more prosaic: the most recent in a string of smash-and-grab thefts focused more on the monetary worth of valuable gems or metals than the historical importance, continuing a pattern that has emerged over the last decade in Germany, Britain and the US. The location, they suggest, would have been of secondary concern to the criminals.

“One might wonder why thieves who want to steal 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 high-end boutique is more secure.”

A series of aggressive jewellery shop thefts indicate that many stores have beefed up their protection in the past few years, with armed guards on their locations and merchandise no longer kept on display overnight. Museums, on the other hand, look vulnerable, partly because of the inherent factor of being accessible institutions in older structures, and also the financial situation in many developed nations.

“Since Covid, governments across the world have cut back on law enforcement and the arts funding,” said Marinello. “If thieves can get into the Louvre, it demonstrates how at risk our museums have become. This is a difficult time to be a museum.”

The theft of the objects – including jewelry pieces made up of eight sapphires and hundreds of gems, the tiara of Empress Eugénie featuring thousands of diamonds and a extremely expensive diadem once possessed by a royal that the thieves dropped by the roadside on their way out – has naturally been compared with the historical theft of the famous painting from the Louvre, carried out by the Italian handyman Vincenzo Peruggia.

Better comparisons may be the 2019 burglary of jewellery from a German institution worth over millions, the taking of a £4.75m valuable object from a UK landmark the that year, the recent robbery of a valuable item from Berlin’s Bode Museum or even a spate of thefts of collector items from US mining museums.

“It's a clear trend here,” explained Marinello. “Break in, take items, and dismantle them as rapidly as possible.”

If the artefacts were to remain intact, experts say, the thieves would find it hard to find a buyer. “There’s no way to trade something as recognizable as the museum's gems on the legal marketplace”, commented an art crime researcher of the a relevant organization.

“They would be immediately recognised, particularly given the cultural authorities has published photos of the items. Even a private collector or an auction house would want to see paperwork establishing proper ownership before touching such striking pieces.”

In the past, museums were often hesitant to announce publicly about the disappearance of well-known works of art and would remain quiet out of shame. Now, as art thefts are more widely publicised, the storage and sale of taken items is risky business for any criminal.

“Taking a famous painting, it has to stay complete or it becomes valueless, and you have to devise a scheme to conceal it, maybe by moving it among difficult criminal actors,” said Marinello. “And you’re constantly exposed to the danger of an partner informing authorities to collect a ransom.”

For comparable factors, an art detective said it was highly improbable that the theft had been ordered. “Commissioned theft is something from films,” he said. “Nobody would touch this. It's global news and in all the media. If you acquire these, if you get caught, you end up in prison. You can't display it to your acquaintances, you cannot bequeath it to your family.”

Modifying stolen works by melting down or reshaping does lower the value. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with significant danger because contemporary cutting techniques give stones a bigger and brighter surface area, and antique-cut stones would either attract notice or barter the price down for a coverup.

Importantly, however, dismantling or re-cutting eliminates the proof of the crime. “I suspect that the robbers will try to take the items to places with gem knowledge like Israel, India or even as close as a city, and locate an expert to remove the stones,” suggested Marinello.

The robbery at the Louvre has already raised questions about protective steps at the museum, with a unauthorized official review expected to be released next month pointing out “considerable” and “persistent” delays in updating equipment and observing that surveillance were missing in multiple areas. But security experts say displaying valuable objects in historic buildings with a constant flow of visitors comes with risks that are impossible to eliminate completely.

“Historic buildings are much harder to protect,” said an art crime professor. “They often have nice big street-facing windows that makes it easy for criminals to escape, and there may be preservation laws in place that mean you can’t fit them with proper bulletproof glass.”

The most solid security systems for buildings should be conceptualised “like a fortress”, said Peter Stürmann. “There should be multiple levels to repel attackers.”

Modern buildings are equipped with state-of-the-art external CCTV cameras or in-built seismic detectors that raise alarm about a smashed window in real time, but historic institutions may be reluctant to uglify their exteriors. Detection devices can be hard to fit to stuccoed ceilings. Motion and sound detectors may also have to be disabled during the day as crowds walk through a museum.

The schedule of the Louvre raid, which took place between morning hours in Paris, was common of recent thefts, Stürmann said. “It's logical why robberies tend to happen at either opening or closing times. It’s often when guards change their shifts and prior to the museum is crowded who effectively act as additional security staff.”

Advances in technology may have introduced new gadgets that can raise the alarm more rapidly and efficiently, but it has also provided robbers new methods with which to circumvent security measures. In Paris, the robbers reached the museum’s first-floor window with a vehicle-mounted ladder and breached a glass pane with a battery-powered disc cutter.

An author said the conversation in the country about the 232-year-old structure had primarily focused on visitor management in the past decade, and not as much on security.

The institution has an on-site brigade of about 50 permanent emergency personnel, but their purpose is mainly to safeguard the collection from fires and flooding. “There isn't a rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “In the end, the security of the Louvre all comes down to government support and money, and at present France lacks sufficient money.”