The love of art and the art of flight.
Stéphane Breitwieser has combined the two, in a journey that has taken him from museum rooms to prison.
A connoisseur, passionate, then obsessed, this young Frenchman criss-crossed the museums of several European countries (France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, etc.) in the late 1990s to steal hundreds of works by art.
Equipped with a small knife to take down the paintings and a rucksack to load the objects, he acted in broad daylight, without burglary or violence.
Its activity was so intense that the amount of the loot is very difficult to quantify.
Arrested in 2001, in Switzerland, after stealing a horn from a museum in Lucerne, Stéphane Breitwieser, 30, then confessed.
And recognizes a series of thefts of paintings and objects of all kinds.
At home, in the small village of Eschentzwiller, near Mulhouse, where he lives with his mother and his partner, he has thus fitted out two rooms of the family pavilion into veritable private museum rooms... An incredible collection of stolen objects which will , largely disappear.
Stéphane Breitwiser's mother, angry with this son who is so passionate about these objects, decides to take action: she destroys several valuable paintings before putting them in the trash.
Then she will throw dozens of works of art into the Rhine-Rhône canal.
The gendarmes will manage to fish out a hundred objects in the mud for a value of ten million euros.
Read also"Stealing a painting is an intense happiness"
Stéphane Breitwieser is condemned by justice: a first time in Switzerland, a second time in France.
On his release from prison, he recounts himself in a book and gives interviews.
In one of them, in 2006, he admits, a few meters from the entrance to a museum: "I still avoid rubbing shoulders with this world because it hurts me to see works of art that I desire and, if I had the means, I would buy.
But I can't”.
But temptation eventually took over.
Because since then, Stéphane Breitwieser has plunged again: first for having stolen clothes in a shop, then a few years later for having again stolen from museums.
