In May 1887, in a small auction hall on the Quai Malaquais across the river from the Louvre, the Third Republic of France sold off its crown jewels. Seventeen days of auctions. About 77,000 individual stones. The great diamond necklaces of Empress Eugenie, the pearls of Marie Antoinette, the emerald-set tiaras of the Bourbon queens, the Napoleonic stars, the riviere necklaces, the diadems. Everything went. It went to New York jewelers, London dealers, Indian princes, an Ottoman pasha, a Russian grand duke. By the end of the month most of the object that had crowned French monarchs for four hundred years had been broken up, re-set, and scattered across three continents.
The Louvre museum jewels you can see today are what that auction left behind. A dozen or so pieces. The ones the republic couldn’t bring itself to sell. The ones a curator with a good argument managed to rescue at the last minute. And three great historic diamonds, set aside by name in the auction law itself, which a nervous parliament decided were too famous to let go.
That is why the Galerie d’Apollon is small. The collection used to fill a vault. Now it fits in a single long room, and the room tells you the story of what a republic does with the symbols of the thing it overthrew.
Why France sold its own crown
The Third Republic was founded in 1870 after the collapse of Napoleon III’s empire at the Battle of Sedan. It was the fourth attempt at a French republic in eighty years — the first three had all ended with a new emperor or a restored king — and the new government was genuinely worried that a fourth would too. There were still three royal pretenders in exile, each with a faction inside France, each waiting for the moment.
The crown jewels were dangerous. Not as wealth. As symbols. A tiara that had been worn at a coronation was a piece of continuity evidence: look, France has always had kings, here are the stones they wore. If the royalists ever came back, they would need those stones. A pretender cannot crown himself with imitation paste.
The answer the republic arrived at, after fifteen years of argument, was to break the continuity on purpose. Sell the jewels, scatter them abroad, let collectors re-cut and re-set them, and there would be no coronation set to restore. A lawyer named Benjamin Raspail drafted the legislation in 1882. It passed in 1886. The auction followed in 1887. A Reuters correspondent watching the sale wrote that the last diadem went under the hammer to an American dealer for less than the value of a small Paris apartment.
Three diamonds were exempt from the sale because parliament, at the last vote, added their names to the bill. The Regent, the Sancy, and the Hortensia. Each had a history so entangled with France that the exemption passed on a voice vote. Those three stones are still in the Louvre.
The Regent, the Sancy, and the Hortensia
The Regent is the first thing you see when you walk into the Galerie d’Apollon. One hundred and forty carats, a cushion-cut diamond the size of a walnut, perfect water. It was mined in India around 1698 by a slave who — according to the story French jewelers tell, which may be true — cut open his own thigh and hid it in the wound to smuggle it out of the mine. He was killed in a tavern by a ship’s captain who took the stone for himself. The captain sold it in Madras for a thousand pounds. The buyer, Thomas Pitt, the British governor of Madras and grandfather of a future prime minister, cut it down over two years in London and sold it on to the Regent of France, Philippe of Orleans, for the equivalent of about three million dollars today. That is how it got its name.
It was worn by Louis XV at his coronation. By Louis XVI at his. By Marie Antoinette, once, set into a black velvet hat. By Napoleon, at his coronation, where he had it set into the hilt of his sword, not a crown, because a sword is what conquerors wear. After his fall it was used as collateral on a loan from a Berlin banker. France bought it back. It was stolen during the Revolution and recovered six months later in a hole dug behind a building in the Marais. It survived the 1887 auction because by then even the republicans agreed that the Regent was a national object and not a private asset.
The Sancy is behind it in the same case. Fifty-five carats, pear-shaped, cut so old that nobody can date its original shaping — certainly fifteenth century, possibly earlier, possibly Indian. It belonged to Charles the Bold of Burgundy, who lost it on a battlefield in 1477. A Swiss mercenary found it and sold it to a priest for a florin. From there it passed through the hands of a Portuguese king, a French diplomat named Nicolas de Sancy (hence the name), Queen Elizabeth I of England, Louis XIV, and three successive British crown jewelers, before a Russian industrial family bought it in 1865 and France bought it back from their descendants in 1978. It spent most of the twentieth century in a vault in New York. The Louvre put it on display in 1992.
The Hortensia is the smaller one. Twenty carats, peach-pink, named after Hortense de Beauharnais — Napoleon’s stepdaughter and, through her son Louis-Napoleon, the future mother of Napoleon III. It was mined in India, bought by Louis XIV in 1678, worn in the shoulder knot of Louis XV’s coat, stolen in the same revolutionary theft as the Regent, recovered from the same hole in the Marais, re-set into Napoleon’s imperial crown in 1804, and re-set again by the Bourbons after his fall. A pink diamond the size of a grape that spent forty years being pried out of one crown and jammed into another every time the government changed.
Those are the three diamonds the republic decided it could not sell. The rest of what you see is the remainder.
What’s left of the set
The Louvre museum famous statues and sculptures tend to overshadow the Galerie d’Apollon, which is small and tucked off the Denon wing stairs, and most visitors walk through it without slowing down. That is a mistake. Slow down. Here is what to look at.
The Crown of Empress Eugenie. Gold, diamonds, emeralds, made in 1855 for Napoleon III’s wife. It is the one imperial crown the republic did not break up, partly because it was so expensively made that the Louvre’s director in 1887 argued in a letter to the ministry of finance that the labor alone was worth more than the stones. The letter worked. The crown stayed.
The tiara of Empress Marie-Louise, Napoleon’s second wife. It had originally been set with emeralds, but the emeralds were all pried out in 1953 and sold to the jeweler Van Cleef and Arpels by an Austrian heir. The Louvre bought back the empty setting in 1992 and re-set it with Persian turquoise, which was the best the curators could do with the photographs. If you know what you are looking at, you can see the difference in color between the stones in the front of the tiara and the ones at the back — the front ones were matched to the old emeralds, the back ones are a looser fit.
A diadem and a necklace made for the Duchesse d’Angouleme, the daughter of Marie Antoinette, who outlived her mother and her father and her uncle and her husband and every monarchical system France had before dying in exile in a Slovenian castle in 1851. The set was rescued from the 1887 auction at the last minute by the curator of the Apollo Gallery, Germain Bapst, who went personally to the finance minister and made the argument that the Duchesse’s jewels were the most historically charged pieces in the collection. He won. They are still there.
The sword of Charles X, the last Bourbon king, with a hilt set with hundreds of small diamonds. He abdicated during the July Revolution of 1830 and went into exile in Scotland. The sword stayed behind, went into storage, survived the Second Empire, survived the Commune, survived the auction, and is now in a case on the left-hand wall of the gallery. Nobody is usually looking at it.
And a handful of the late nineteenth-century pieces made for Eugenie’s court that were bought back from private collectors in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Louvre quietly decided that selling everything had been a mistake and began buying the republic’s mistakes back at collectors’ prices.
The louvre museum famous sculpture upstairs gets the crowd
Most visitors come to the Denon wing for the Venus de Milo or the Winged Victory — the louvre museum famous sculpture that sits on postcards — and never detour through the jewels. If you do, budget twenty minutes. The Galerie d’Apollon is the ceiling and the floor as much as the cases. The ceiling was painted by Charles Le Brun starting in 1661, left unfinished when Louis XIV decided to build Versailles, and finally completed in 1851 with a central panel by Delacroix of Apollo killing the serpent Python — Apollo standing in for the Sun King, the serpent standing for whatever the room’s patron most wanted defeated. The parquet floor is inlaid with six different tropical woods. The scale of the decoration was supposed to match a vault full of royal jewels. The republic emptied the vault. The room got left with its ceiling.
The fun facts version
People Google louvre museum facts and come back with the same twelve bullet points: the building used to be a fortress, the Pyramid was controversial, the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911, it’s the most visited museum in the world. The fact that France auctioned off its own crown jewels in 1887 to prevent a royalist restoration almost never makes the list. It is the most politically loaded piece of art history the museum contains, and it is hiding in plain sight in a room most visitors walk past on the way to the Mona Lisa.
When the curator of the Galerie d’Apollon, Germain Bapst, wrote his memoir at the end of his life, he called the auction “the saddest month of my career, and the month I understood what a republic is.” He had spent fifteen years trying to stop it. He succeeded, partially, in saving perhaps a twentieth of what went up for sale. Everything you see in the cases today is what Bapst and two or three like him managed to pull off the block.
What to look for
Walk in from the Denon wing. Turn left at the top of the Daru staircase. The Galerie d’Apollon is the long room with the painted ceiling. Start at the far end with the Regent. Work your way back toward the door. Read the small labels under each piece and look for the dates on the acquisitions — the ones that say “purchased 1976” or “purchased 1992” are the buy-backs, pieces the republic sold and then, a century later, bought again. The labels will not tell you which collector sold the piece back, or for how much. Chiaro will.
Every piece still in the cases is a decision the republic made about its own past. The auction was the easier decision. The rescues were the argument.