The museum of the French jeweller and glassmaker Lalique, located in the eastern French region of Alsace, was raided on Sunday 5 July by a gang who escaped with €4.5m worth of jewellery. Three masked men broke into the Lalique Museum at around 5.30am and went to the exhibition hall where they smashed six showcases with hammers and sledge-hammers and stole 27 crystal pieces, according to the local prosecutor, François Antona. Filmed on CCTV, the heist took 11 minutes, he added.
The break-in was discovered an hour later by the cleaner, according to Christian Dorschner, the vice-chairman of the museum and the mayor of Wingen-sur-Moder, where the museum is located. He told the local newspaper Les dernières nouvelles d’Alsace that “alarms went off” and that he was “outraged” because “the security company failed to intervene at once and did not alert the gendarmes”. No explanation has been given to this incident by the prosecutor who just mentioned the opening of a criminal investigation with the help of the French Office against art trafficking (OCBC). The museum has announced on its website that it will be closed “for several days”.
The Lalique company was founded by René Lalique (1860-1940), a leading figure of the Art Nouveau movement. He designed jewels, perfume bottles and art objects with curved lines inspired by flora, fauna and feminine figures, using original materials like horn, coloured glass or semi-precious stones. The museum opened in 2011 close to the site of Lalique's workshop in Wingen-sur-Moder. Lalique has been owned by Lalique Group SA (formerly known as Art & Fragrance SA), a Swiss luxury goods company, since 2008.
The Lalique burglary comes just eight months after the spectacular theft of the Crown Jewels from the Louvre and in the wake of a series of similar violent crimes targeting jewels and gold in French museums. A parliamentary report underlined the serious failures in security across the 2,000 French museums, pressing the culture ministry to adopt emergency measures.