Two weeks ago on Sunday, October 19th something rather extraordinary happened at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. During broad daylight, thirty minutes after the museum opened for the day, and as hundreds of visitors streamed inside, 8 pieces of France’s crown jewel collection valued at an estimated 102 million dollars (but actually priceless when considering historical value) were stolen in less than 8 minutes. I don’t often cover current events on this show, I’m usually covering events centuries after they happened, but this one deals with history and it deals with history that I now find myself unable to stop thinking about. My mind races back to the Mona Lisa episode and the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, how that was possible. How this was possible. It fixates on the pieces themselves, these extravagant ostentatious manifestations of the wealth of the elite. Who were these women who sported such opulence? What gave them that right? And it gets stuck, my mind, it gets stuck on another question that not enough people seem to be asking. Where did these gems come from originally? I promise you they didn’t come from France. So where did they come from and at whose expense? And, possibly the question that haunts me the most, can you really steal something that was already stolen? Let’s fix that.
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Sources:
- Artnet "The Glittering Royal History Behind the Louvre's Stolen Jewels"
- BBC "Everything we know about the Louvre jewelry heist"
- CBS News "How thieves pulled off a brazen crown jewel heist at the Louvre"
- ThoughtCo "The Rulers of France: From 840 to Present"
- Wikipedia "Colonial India"
- Wikipedia "French Crown Jewels"
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