The Louvre Museum in Paris reopened its Galerie d'Apollon — the Gallery of Apollo — to the public on Wednesday, nine months after masked thieves stole crown jewels worth an estimated €88 million in one of the most audacious heists in French history. Visitors returning to the celebrated hall, however, will find it stripped of its jewellery displays entirely: the showcases are gone, and the gallery is reverting to its original role as a 17th-century royal reception room.

The theft took place in October 2024, when four men used a removable truck-mounted ladder to reach a balcony and climb directly into the gallery. In under eight minutes, they made off with nine pieces of crown jewellery, including the crown of Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III. That crown was later recovered — damaged — and is currently undergoing restoration. The remaining eight pieces, dating from the 19th century, have not been found. Four suspects — two men and two women — have been arrested, though prosecutors have yet to recover the stolen items.

The gallery itself is a monument to French royal ambition. Commissioned in 1661 by King Louis XIV, the Sun King, its vaulted ceilings are adorned with frescoes by painters including Charles Le Brun and Eugène Delacroix. It served as a model for the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, and takes its name from the Greek god Apollo, with whom Louis XIV famously identified. The gallery sits along the staircase that leads visitors toward the room housing the Mona Lisa, making it one of the museum's most-trafficked routes.

Louvre director Christophe Leribault, appointed in February after his predecessor Laurence des Cars resigned in the wake of the heist, confirmed that the crown jewels not taken in the robbery will be relocated to a purpose-built, windowless secure vault elsewhere in the museum. He acknowledged that significant construction work and funding remain outstanding before that space can open. Despite the setbacks, Leribault expressed cautious optimism about recovering the stolen pieces, pointing to the return of the Mona Lisa two years after its 1911 theft and the near-complete recovery of jewels stolen from the Dresden Green Vault museum in Germany five years after that 2019 robbery.

The heist has accelerated a broader reckoning with the Louvre's ageing infrastructure. Security has been overhauled with new cameras and intrusion-detection systems, and entry prices for non-European visitors have been raised by 45 percent. The robbery also lent urgency to the Louvre Nouvelle Renaissance plan, a decade-long, €800 million renovation announced by President Emmanuel Macron that includes a new entrance to relieve pressure on the iconic glass pyramid and a dedicated room for the Mona Lisa by 2031. The world's most visited museum, Louvre officials have noted, has not undergone a major renovation since the 1980s and 1990s.