France mourns its stolen crown jewels as their uncomfortable colonial past returns to view

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PARIS (AP) — As French police race to track where the Louvre's stolen crown jewels have gone, a growing chorus wants a brighter light on where they came from.

The artifacts were French, but the gems were not. Their exotic routes to Paris run through the shadows of empire — an uncomfortable history that France, like other Western nations with treasure-filled museums, has only begun to confront.

The attention sparked by the heist is an opportunity, experts say, to pressure the Louvre and Europe’s great museums to explain their collections' origins more honestly, and it could trigger a broader reckoning over restitutions.

Within hours of the theft, researchers sketched a likely colonial-era map for the materials: sapphires from Ceylon (Sri Lanka), diamonds from India and Brazil, pearls from the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean and emeralds from Colombia.

That doesn’t make the Louvre robbery less criminal. It does complicate the public's understanding of what was lost.

“There is obviously no excuse for theft,” said Emiline C.H. Smith, a criminologist at the University of Glasgow who studies heritage crime. “But many of these objects are entangled with violent, exploitative, colonial histories.”

While there’s no credible evidence these specific gems were stolen — experts say that doesn’t end the argument: What was legal in the imperial age could still mean plunder in today’s lights. In other words, the paperwork of empire doesn’t settle the ethics.

Meanwhile, the heist investigation grinds on. Police have charged suspects, but investigators fear the jewels could be broken up or melted down. They are too symbolic to fence, but easy to monetize for metal and stones.

The Louvre provides scant information about how the gems in the French crown jewels – showcased in the Apollo Gallery until the theft — were originally extracted.

For example, the Louvre’s own catalog describes the stolen diadem of Queen Marie-Amélie as set with “Ceylon sapphires” in their natural, unheated state, bordered with diamonds in gold. It says nothing about who mined them, how they moved, or under what terms they were taken.

Provenance isn’t always a neutral ledger in Western museums. They sometimes “avoid spotlighting uncomfortable acquisition histories,” Smith said, adding that the lack of clarity about the gems’ origins is likely no accident.

The museum did not respond to requests for comment.

The stolen tiaras, necklaces and brooches were crafted in Paris by elite ateliers, and once belonged to 19th-century figures such as Marie-Amélie, Queen Hortense, and the wives of two Napoleons, Empress Marie-Louise of Austria and Empress Eugénie. Their raw materials, however, moved through imperial networks that converted global labor, resources — and even slavery — into European prestige, experts say.

Pascal Blanchard, a historian of France’s colonial past, draws a line between craftsmanship and supply. The jewels “were made in France by French artisans,” he said, but many stones came via colonial circuits and were “products of colonial production.” They were traded “under the legal conditions … of the time,” ones shaped by empires that siphoned wealth from Africa, Asia and South America.

Some French critics press the point further. They argue that national outcry over loss should sit beside the history of how imperial France acquired the stones that court jewelers later set in gold.

India is waging the best-known battle over a single colonial-era treasure — the Koh-i-Noor diamond.

India has repeatedly pressed the U.K. to return the mythologized 106-carat jewel, now set in the Queen Mother’s crown at the Tower of London. It likely originated in India's Golconda diamond belt — much like the Louvre's dazzling Regent diamond, one that was also legally acquired in imperial times and spared by the Oct. 19 robbers.

The Koh-i-Noor passed from court to court before landing in British hands, where it is hailed in London as a “lawful” imperial gift and denounced in India as a prize taken under the shadow of conquest. A 2017 petition to India’s Supreme Court seeking its return was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, but the political and moral dispute endures.

France is not Britain, and the Koh-i-Noor is not the Louvre's story. But it frames the questions increasingly applied to 19th-century acquisitions: not only “was it bought?” but “who had the power to sell?” On that measure, experts say, even jewels made in France can be considered products of colonial extraction.

The Louvre case lands in a world already primed by other fights. Greece presses Britain to reunite the Parthenon Marbles. Egypt campaigns for the Rosetta Stone in London and the Nefertiti bust in Berlin.

France has moved — narrowly. President Emmanuel Macron’s pledge to return parts of Africa’s heritage produced a law enabling the return of 26 royal treasures to Benin and items to Senegal. Madagascar recovered the crown of Queen Ranavalona III through a specific process.

Critics say restitution is structurally blocked: French law forbids removing state-held objects unless Parliament makes a special exception, and risk-averse museums keep the rest behind glass.

They also say that under former Louvre chief Jean-Luc Martinez, the museum's narrow definition of what counts as “looted” — and its demand for near-legal levels of proof — created a chilling effect on restitution claims, even as the museum publicly praised transparency. (The Louvre says it follows the law and academic standards.)

Asking museum visitors to marvel at artifacts like the French crown jewels without understanding their social history is dishonest, says Erin L. Thompson, an art-crime scholar in New York. A decolonized approach, she and others argue, would name where such stones came from, how the trade worked, who profited and who paid — and share authorship with origin communities.

Egyptian archaeologist Monica Hanna calls the contradiction glaring.

“Yes, the irony is profound,” she said of the outcry over last month's Louvre theft, “and it’s central to the conversation about restitution.” She expects the heist will trigger action on restitutions across Western museums and fuel debate about transparency.

At a minimum, Hanna and other experts say, what's needed from museums are stronger words: plain-spoken labels and wall texts that acknowledge where objects came from, how they moved, and at whose expense. It would mean publishing what is known, admitting what isn’t, and inviting contested histories into the gallery — even when they cloud the shine.

Some offer a practical path.

“Tell the honest and complete story,” said Dutch restitution specialist Jos van Beurden. “Open the windows, not for thieves, but for fresh air.”

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Associated Press writer Danica Kirka in London contributed to this report