A French man pleaded guilty Thursday to attempting to sell four valuable paintings that were stolen last year from a French art museum in a brazen robbery by masked, armed thieves.

Bernard Jean Ternus, 56, admitted that he conspired to sell the paintings for about $4.7 million to buyers who turned out to be undercover FBI agents and French police officers. Four of their meetings were videotaped and dozens of conversations recorded, an assistant U.S. attorney, Christopher Hunter, said.

“Why are you pleading guilty?” the U.S. District judge, Patricia Seitz, asked.

“Because I am guilty,” Ternus said, speaking in French that was translated into English.

The paintings stolen in August 2007 from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nice, France, include two well-known Impressionist works: “Cliffs Near Dieppe” by Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley’s “The Lane of Poplars at Moret.” The other two were both painted by 17th-century Flemish master Jan Brueghel the Elder: “Allegory of Earth” and “Allegory of Water.”

Ternus, a French citizen who had been living in the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., suburb of Cooper City, faces a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison and up to $250,000 in fines. He has agreed to cooperate in the investigation of the robbery and could receive a much lighter sentence, prosecutors said.