Visitors queue to enter the Louvre museum three days after historic jewels were stolen in a daring daylight heist, Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2025 in Paris. (AP Photo)

The robbery at the Louvre has done what no marketing campaign ever could: It has catapulted France’s dusty Crown Jewels — long admired at home, little known abroad — to global fame.

One week on, and the country is still wounded by the breach to its national heritage. Yet the crime is also a paradox. Some say it will make celebrities of the very jewels it sought to erase — much as the Mona Lisa’s turn-of-the-20th-century theft transformed the then little-known Renaissance portrait into the world’s most famous artwork.

In 1911, a museum handyman lifted the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece off its hook. The loss went unnoticed for mor

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