A break-in that shook France

The robbery at the Louvre left behind more than broken glass. It battered the pride of a nation that is increasingly glum about itself and its direction

With the glorious Louvre museum plundered by thieves in an eight-minute heist, a former president consigned this month to a prison cell, and a recent government that lasted just 836 minutes, an end-of-era air of rot has taken hold of President Emmanuel Macron’s France.

On the banks of the Seine, opposite the Académie Française, that august guardian of French civilisation, tourists and passersby rubberneck and gawk at the small balcony from which two burglars cut their way into the Louvre’s gilded Galerie d’Apollon on October 19 and made off with the jewels of two French queens and two empresses.

As thefts go, it was brazen to the point of mockery. A truck-mounted ladder
of the kind widely used in Paris to move furniture, a few glass-breaking machine tools and a heavy dose of audacity were all that was needed to make off in broad daylight with eight crown jewels valued at over $100 million, and leave that increasingly fragile thing, French pride, shaken.

The Louvre, a royal palace that became a labyrinthine museum spread over a half-mile of the right bank of the Seine, is much more than a repository of art. It is the embodiment of the tumultuous history of France, the physical expression of a nation’s restless quest for greatness, and a place widely regarded as near sacred, visited by almost 9 million people last year.

To violate it, and with such contemptuous ease, has been experienced as a form of ridicule at a time when five governments have succeeded one another in the space of two years.

“The burglary has felt like a profound violence, an expression of national disarray and of the degradation of the state,” Aurélie Filippetti, a former culture minister, said in an interview. “The chronic neglect that produced this, despite many warnings, in the largest and most visited museum in the world, is just not serious.”

Stewart Chau, a director of the Verian Group, which polls French sentiment, told the newspaper L’Opinion this past week that the most recent survey indicated that 53 per cent of French people felt ashamed of the country, up from 38 per cent in January, overtaking anger and despair as predominant emotions. Optimism, in general, is uncommon in France.

The fact that the Louvre was also the place chosen eight years ago by Macron to celebrate, with great pomp, his first electoral victory in the vast Napoléon Courtyard has added to a sense of shattered French hopes. The promise of that moment is now a distant memory and the president’s popularity at its lowest ebb ever.

For a couple of days after the theft, the broken window pane on the Louvre’s facade was covered with what looked like a piece of wood, suggestive of a do-it-yourself domestic repair job to keep out a draft. The sole exterior camera on that wing of the Louvre was pointing the wrong way — west, not east — as the embattled museum director, Laurence des Cars, revealed to angry senators at a hearing on Wednesday.

As for Rachida Dati, the conservative culture minister and a close friend of Nicolas Sarkozy, the now-imprisoned former president convicted in a campaign financing scandal, she has resorted to a whirlwind of flailing defiance.

Her story, and she’s sticking to it, has been that “there was no failure of security mechanisms,” as she put it to the National Assembly. She has insisted on this despite a leaked draft report from the country’s supreme audit institution that presented a devastating portrait of underinvestment, inadequate security cameras, and delays in essential modernisation of the Louvre.

Des Cars, the museum director, duly offered her resignation but, in a further circling of the wagons, Dati and Macron rejected it. “There is a dereliction of the State,” Sylvain Tesson, a prominent author, told France Inter radio.

On social media, some have portrayed the president since the burglary wearing the gold, diamond and emerald crown of the Empress Eugénie, which was dropped by the thieves in their hasty escape.

Perhaps in retrospect, the choice of the Louvre to start his presidency, in a courtyard bearing the name of an emperor, betrayed in Macron an air of grandiloquent loftiness and a near-regal, top-down approach to government that repelled many French people from the start, and many more over time.

Despite repeated pledges that he would become a humble listener, Macron has never shaken the “Jupiter” epithet, nor been able to contain his penchant for overlong speeches and elaborate strategic plans lacking essential groundwork.

Early in his presidency, Macron described his victory as a kind of “break-in,” a shattering of the system that undid in a moment decades of political dominance by parties of the centre right and centre left. It was indeed a “form of historical brutality,” as he put it then, that ushered a neophyte to power at the age of 39.

Now, another break-in has underscored his plight. It has been the cherry on the cake of his accumulated problems.

Eight years on, “Macronism” has birthed no credible alternative party of the centre, leaving the country deadlocked and largely paralysed between
the ascendant extreme right of Marine Le Pen, the far left, and several weakened centrist parties bereft of any clear message.

Under pressure to quit, which he has vowed never to do, Macron is term limited, with 18 months left to run in his presidency.

He has been repeatedly mocked by President Donald Trump as a publicity-seeking hound — a flippant affront to Macron’s commitment to the European Union and the rule of law. His popularity has plunged to 14 per cent, according to a recent poll by Elabe, published in the business daily Les Echos.

Gazing up at the scene of the crime at the Louvre, Lauric Czeryba, a student of industrial design, shook his head. “It’s chaos,” he said.

His girlfriend, Léane Lacroix, concurred. “Nobody can agree on anything,” she said, “so we don’t advance.” They are thinking of moving to Denmark.

This year, Macron, in an announcement that was widely viewed as part of his quest for a legacy, announced an almost $600 million “Louvre New Renaissance” project. It will move the Mona Lisa to a new exhibition space with its own ticket, shift the main entrance to the museum’s easternmost facade not far from where the thieves broke in, and devote about $93 million to improved security.

“It would be better to start with the plumbing and other basics,” said Filippetti, the former culture minister. “You don’t isolate a masterpiece like the Mona Lisa and put it to one side so that people can take selfies and leave after paying a premium.”

She called the grand plan a “bling-bling commercial operation.”

Of course, Macron presided last year over an extremely successful Paris Olympics. He steered the country through the Covid-19 crisis and has made France attractive to foreign investment. His insistence on turning Europe into a serious global power proved prescient.

But, with debt and the deficit spiralling, governments tumbling and pretenders to the presidency deserting him, a large majority of the French seem to have decided they have had enough.

If proof is needed that France is fickle, rebellious and can turn on its leaders, the Louvre provides it.

The nation created the museum after the 1789 revolution that sent the king and queen packing to the guillotine, only to raise Napoleon to the rank of Emperor 15 years later. It is the jewels of his new, post-revolutionary French royalty that have now gone missing.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)