Paris museum reopens the room everyone’s been talking about since last autumn, but with a very different look

Nine months on from a heist that completely stunned the art world, and doors have swung open once more on one of the most talked-about rooms in France. Crowds queued this week to walk through it again, though what greeted them now looked nothing like before.

A gallery reborn, minus its treasures

Paris’s Louvre welcomed the public back into its Apollo Gallery on Wednesday, July 22, the first time visitors could enter the space since October 2025. Empty glass cases and missing jewels are what greets guests, with the room stripped back to its bare architectural bones. Restorers have used the closure to bring attention back to painted ceilings, gilded carvings and centuries-old tapestries that once played second fiddle to the sparkle of crown jewels.

The daylight raid that shocked Paris

October 2025 saw four thieves use a lorry-mounted platform to break into the gallery in broad daylight, escaping with an estimated €88 million (£76m) worth of Napoleon-era jewellery in under eight minutes. Only one piece, Empress Eugenie’s diamond-and-emerald crown, was ever recovered, having been dropped during the getaway. Remaining items connected to the robbery have never resurfaced.

Where the missing jewels stand now

Louvre director Christophe Leribault has described the reopening as a fresh start rather than a lingering reminder of the theft. Jewellery that survived the raid won’t return to the Apollo Gallery at all, instead, a windowless strongroom is being built elsewhere in the museum to house what’s left of the collection.

Lessons learnt the hard way

Reopening comes eight months after it was revealed that the museum’s CCTV system had reportedly been protected by a password that was simply “Louvre”, a revelation that left cybersecurity experts and readers stunned. That single detail did more to explain how thieves slipped through undetected than almost anything else uncovered since.

What comes next for French museums

Officials have pledged tighter measures across France’s cultural institutions following the robbery, with the Louvre’s own president having departed in the aftermath of the scandal. Tourists can once again admire Charles Le Brun’s seventeenth-century ceiling and Eugene Delacroix’s Apollo Slaying the Serpent Python, even without its jewels, the room still has plenty worth seeing.