France mourns stolen crown jewels as uncomfortable colonial past returns to view

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. 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 and Brazil, pearls from the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean and emeralds from Colombia. That doesn’t make the Louvre robbery less criminal. It does complicate the public’s understanding of what was lost. “There is obviously no excuse for theft,” said Emiline C.H. Smith, a criminologist at the University of Glasgow who studi

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