Oct. 19 2025, The Louvre was robbed in broad daylight for the first time since 1998, quickly becoming one of the most infamous heists to date. The public was astonished that amateur criminals managed to break in and steal around $102 million worth of precious jewels in under ten minutes, leaving unidentified and unscathed. This crime left the internet inspired.
The crime quickly went viral, and people began to deem the event as “chic”, anxiously anticipating a movie recounting the robbery. Just days after the heist, some users even began to base their Halloween costumes off of it, donning ski masks and diamonds. Many people compared it to the plot of an Ocean’s movie, unable to fathom that this was real.
Senior Caroline Wheatley was surprised to hear about the robbery.
“I think that people didn’t take it seriously because it’s so crazy, ” Wheatley said, “I thought it was funny at first. How does a museum like that get robbed in the middle of the day?”
In recent years, materialistic robberies have been turned into an internet spectacle instead of drawing concern for the property lost, or in this case, the history. The notorious Bling-Ring celebrity robberies were treated the same way in 2009, with the crimes being encouraged and people aspiring to have the same success as the thieves did.
So why is it popular to praise crimes like these? The answer isn’t simple. Maybe because these crimes are considered victimless, and the people at disadvantage are wealthy enough to be scorned upon. With this specific heist, the stolen jewels in question were originally from a collection of jewelry acquired during the French Revolution.
Junior Yllana Lao has many opinions about the heist.
“I think it’s funny online, but I don’t think it’s funny to steal art,” Lao said.
Eight items were reportedly stolen: 19th century necklaces, earrings, and brooches belonging to Empress Eugénie, Queen Marie-Amelie and Queen Hortense. While the thieves are in custody, the valuables remain unrecovered. For Parisians and French officials, this has been a very difficult situation to grapple with, and brings attention to the faulty security that initially led to the heist. However, many people feel justified in making this mockery of the crime as most of these pristine jewels were originally stolen by European colonizers from South Africa and India.
There’s nothing people love more online than to use a large scale event for views. While this brazen heist could be a great plotline for a movie in the future, it reveals a more complicated reality: people glamorize what they don’t have to face. To the general public, this robbery is a joke or a costume, but to historians, it is a great loss of an important piece of culture and history.
Written by senior Jamie Johnson. Edited by staff writers for Oswego East’s online news magazine The Howl.