PARIS – As French police race to track where the Louvre's stolen crown jewels have gone, a growing chorus wants a brighter light on where they came from.

The artifacts were French, but the gems were not. Their exotic routes to Paris run through the shadows of empire — an uncomfortable history that France, like other Western nations with treasure-filled museums, has only begun to confront.

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The attention sparked by the heist is an opportunity, experts say, to pressure the Louvre and Europe’s great museums to explain their collections' origins more honestly, and it could trigger a broader reckoning over restitutions.

Within hours of the theft, researchers sketched a likely colonial-era map for the materials: sapphires from Ceylon (Sri Lanka), diamonds from India an

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