To the world, the news was astonishing, bordering on incomprehensible: Four Parisians were up and about early on a Sunday morning (well, 9:30). And not only that—they had robbed the Louvre.
The people of France, upon learning that two tiaras, two brooches, two necklaces, and 1.5 pairs of earrings had been stolen, reacted with humiliation and apoplexy. The director of the Louvre called the theft a “terrible failure.” The French president labeled it an “attack.” The crime, the minister of justice said, had given the country an “image terrible”—this last remark raising uncomfortable questions: How exactly do French people imagine the rest of the world conceives of their hexagonal nation? As a futuristic police state where the rule of law is rigorously enforced? Surely, to everyone outside the republic, a pair of cat burglars cleverly robbing a museum in broad daylight and escaping—Beep! Beep!—on mopeds is very nearly the Frenchest thing that could have happened.
The Louvre, it turns out—at least certain nooks of the ancient former palace—is something like an anopticon: a place where no one is observed. The world now knows what the four thieves (two burglars and two accomplices) realized as recently as last week: The museum’s Apollo Gallery, which housed the stolen items, was monitored by a single outdoor camera angled away from its only exterior point of entry, a balcony. In other words, a free-roaming Roomba could have provided the world’s most famous museum with more information about the interior of this space. There is no surveillance footage of the break-in.
The Paris prosecutor’s office has suggested that the operation was likely conducted by members of an organized-crime syndicate, though the evidence for this is thin at present. The assumption seems to be that none but a highly experienced criminal architect could have come up with a plan to access an unmonitored second-floor balcony via a ladder. If the thieves are professionals, organized surely refers more to the nature of their fellowship than the style of their work; Le Parisien reported that the group, as they fled the scene, left behind the angle grinders they used to cut holes in the jewelry display cases, a yellow high-visibility vest that one of them wore to pose as a construction worker, gloves, a blanket, a blowtorch, gasoline, a talkie-walkie—the humiliating French term for a walkie-talkie—and, obviously, quite a bit of DNA evidence. Apparently, they had intended to use the blowtorch and gasoline to set fire to their ladder truck, but abandoned the plan after a museum security guard confronted them on the ground in the middle of their getaway. They also dropped a crown bearing 1,354 diamonds—the sort of item most people would really kick themselves for dropping.
Initially, France’s minister of the interior gave the value of the eight pieces the thieves spirited away as “priceless.” How disappointing, then, when Louvre officials later updated the jewels’ combined value to about $102 million. One hundred two million dollars is not nothing, of course; it’s slightly less than half of what the Oakley-sunglasses baron sold his home for last year—and that was a super nice house, and it was in Malibu—but still. Priceless sounds more like, you know, $900 trillion. And this was not that.
It is true that the heart of a small French boy might never again threaten to plummet through his chest cavity, weighed down with pride, as he gazes through glass at a second-empire decorative bow once owned by the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew. But that garçon’s loss is our gain. This theft is a gift for the entire world.
How thrilling, upon hearing the news, to put oneself in the shoes of the thieves, and imagine making off with the diamonds scot-free. How inspiring to be reminded of what fun and potential profit there is to be had when one ditches one’s phone for a morning, and embarks on an outing with friends. How democratic the possibility that, if the pieces are disassembled (as they almost certainly will be)—their gold melted down like margarine, their gems sliced into new facets—any of us might, one day, through the actions of an unscrupulous jeweler, come to own a piece of French history. How nice to read about a heist rather than a massacre.
The irony, of course, is that these trinkets have garnered far more attention now than they would have had they remained on view at the Louvre for 5,000 years. The world’s major news outlets are cranking out reams of text just to have an excuse to publish a sumptuously detailed photograph of a tiara studded with milky pearls the size of apricot pits, or a necklace (from—can you believe it?—a larger set of items made for Napoleon’s second wedding) festooned with globs of mint-jelly emeralds. Interpol blared in a press release that it had added the items to its database of stolen artwork. “Who,” the BBC asked in a headline from its live blog of theft coverage, “Was Empress Eugenie—The Wife of Napoleon III?” (Here is the BBC contact page for anyone with information.)
This was to be expected. Stealing artworks tends to make them more famous. The Mona Lisa, for instance, was little known outside the art world until it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911. (It took more than a day for anyone to notice it was missing.)
Here was a dreamy little crime: No one was hurt. No beloved painting was damaged. Some out-of-the-box thinkers have perhaps earned a handsome paycheck for their ingenuity. And jewelry, really, is meant to be worn, not stored in sterile boxes. One hopes that the thieves take a moment to at least try on the rather subdued sapphire necklace of Queen Hortense (yes—the famous Queen Hortense) before taking pliers to it.
Would that all thefts were such blithe occurrences. Compare this chain of events with the robbery of Kim Kardashian in Paris in 2016. Assailants dressed as police burst into her hotel room and held a gun on her while rummaging through her belongings. They bound her wrists and ankles with zip ties. They wrapped duct tape around her head. Earlier this year, Kardashian testified in a French court that she was “absolutely” certain she was going to be killed. She prayed for her sister, whom she feared would be the person to discover her dead body lying in her hotel-room bed. The value of the jewelry that Kardashian’s captors took from her was less than one-tenth that of the Louvre thieves’ haul. But no sane person could believe that the museum crime was worse.
The gravest offense of this week’s incident, one could argue, was committed not by the thieves but by the museum officials, who closed the entire Louvre to visitors for two days after the incident, effectively cutting a perfect circle into thousands of travelers’ vacation plans and coldly excising the crown jewel of their itineraries. To add chaos to injury, the director of the Louvre has now called for a police station to be installed inside the museum, though it defies logic to suppose such a feature would have helped in this case—police arrived just three minutes after being called, by which point the robbers had already fled.
One hopes that, after the embarrassment dies down, museum officials will adopt the mindset of François Chatillon, the Louvre’s chief architect. “We’re not going to put armored doors and windows everywhere because there was this burglary,” Chatillon told Le Monde.
Thank God. (Maybe stick one camera inside the gallery?)
The post In Praise of Jewel Thieves appeared first on The Atlantic.
