Jewel robbers strike days after the Louvre heist

Two weeks after the high-profile jewel robbery at Paris's Louvre Museum, thieves have struck again in the French capital after a break-in at a Swarovski shop in the city's stylish Left Bank district saw watches and jewels worth around 200,000 euros ($230,000) taken.

The break-in happened in the early hours of Friday morning but was not discovered until workers arrived to open the shop and found a door and display cases broken. It has been confirmed that there is no usable security camera footage of the incident.

This is the latest embarrassing lapse at what should be high-security locations across France. In September, gold nuggets worth around 1.5 million euros were taken from the Natural History Museum in Paris, around the same time that a break-in at the National Porcelain Museum in the central city of Limoges saw the theft of two Chinese dishes and a vase estimated to be worth more than 6.5 million euros.

The day after the Louvre robbery, another museum, in Langres, in the northeast of the country, reported the theft of 90,000 euros' worth of 18th-century gold and silver coins, and last week there was a break-in at a precious metals refinery in Lyon, although the stolen goods were soon recovered and six suspects were arrested.

So far, four suspects, described as local petty thieves, rather than members of a sophisticated criminal gang, have been charged over the Louvre break-in on Oct 19, which saw jewels worth an estimated 88 million euros stolen.

The audacity of the raid at the world's most visited art museum, and its comparatively basic nature, made international headlines, and when suspects began to be arrested, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau confirmed that it appeared to be a low-level criminal enterprise.

"This is not quite everyday delinquency ... but it is a type of delinquency that we do not generally associate with the upper echelons of organized crime," she said, revealing that the first four people arrested were "clearly local people" from the impoverished Seine-Saint-Denis region to the north of the city.

Louvre director Laurence des Cars called the theft from the museum an "immense wound" for France, but she has come in for personal criticism after reports that workers had previously expressed concern about levels of security at the museum, which holds priceless works of art by many of the most highly-regarded artists in world history, including Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

The Louvre theft has also taken on huge symbolism in a country that has been bogged down in political deadlock and instability for more than a year, with Stewart Chau from public opinion consultancy Verian telling L'Opinion newspaper that it fed "a form of shame … it fuels the idea that the nation has become vulnerable and incapable of protecting its treasures".