Louvre Heist: Empress Eugénie’s Reliquary Brooch Lost

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Among the treasures stolen from the Louvre in the early hours of 19 October 2025, few names strike with such resonance as the reliquary brooch of Empress Eugénie.

This brooch was a living fragment of France’s royal past — a gleaming thread linking Louis XIV’s court to the reign of the Second Empire. Now vanished, the brooch leaves behind an echo of brilliance, its 94 diamonds once blazing beneath the vaulted ceilings of the Apollo Gallery.

The Emperor’s gift

The story of this masterpiece begins in 1855, when Napoleon III commissioned the Parisian jeweller Paul-Alfred Bapst to create a jewel worthy of his Empress for the Exposition Universelle. The result was a spectacular “historicist” brooch, its gilt-silver mounting chiselled with leaves and scrolls, recalling 18th-century models from the Bapst archives. Measuring 17.5 centimetres high, it embodied the Second Empire’s fascination with royal grandeur revived through modern craftsmanship.

The heart of the Crown Jewels

At the brooch’s core lay a rosette formed by seven diamonds surrounding a solitaire one, a constellation of stones that carried within them the lineage of the French monarchy. The two central, heart-shaped diamonds — known as the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Mazarins — had once adorned Louis XIV’s justaucorps as buttons, part of the Mazarin Diamonds bequeathed by Cardinal Mazarin in 1661. Listed in the royal inventory of 1666, these ancient stones had witnessed the splendour of Versailles and survived the fires of the Revolution.

Around them clustered four smaller pear-shaped diamonds, while below descended an intricate arrangement of brilliants and pendants: a triangular, elongated brilliant with two pendants leading to a large ovoid diamond, ending in a hexagonal pendant of antique cut. From these elements hung nine trembling briolettes, whose origins may trace back to Revolutionary seizures, perhaps even to the jewels of the Kings of Sardinia.

From Versailles to the Tuileries

These same stones had adorned history’s most storied women. Two almond-shaped diamonds, once worn by Marie-Antoinette as earrings — listed in her 1791 inventory — later formed part of Joséphine’s coronation belt in 1804 and Marie-Louise’s jewels in 1810. By 1812, they glittered upon Napoleon’s ceremonial baldric, embodying the Empire’s continuity through shifting dynasties. By the time Eugénie de Montijo received them, they had become symbols of both France’s heritage and her personal piety.

The mystery of the “Reliquary”

Despite its sacred title, no relic has ever been found inside the brooch. The Louvre’s curators note that while the term reliquaire was used as early as 1855 — and even engraved on its fixing pin — the jewel contains no cavity to hold a relic.

Yet on the back of its original case, a small logette, or compartment, suggests that Eugénie, known for her devout nature, may have intended to insert a holy fragment later on. The ambiguity endures, giving the piece an aura of spiritual mystery — a relic of devotion in name, if not in function.

A national treasure, lost again

Unlike Eugénie’s crown, returned to her in exile, or her Bapst diadem repurchased in 1875, the reliquary brooch entered the Louvre’s collection in 1887, following the auction of the French Crown Jewels. For nearly a century and a half, it shone among the museum’s most exceptional displays, a silent witness to France’s turbulent journey from monarchy to republic. Its presence in the Apollo Gallery, amid the gems of kings and queens, testified to the endurance of beauty beyond power.

Its disappearance today reopens a wound once thought healed — the loss of jewels not merely of gold and diamond, but of memory itself. The reliquary brooch has once more become what its name foretold: a vessel of absence, holding only the sacred memory of what it once was.