Last Sunday’s theft of eight major pieces of Napoleonic jewellery from the Louvre Museum has prompted many fatuous comments. However, for its exquisitely calibrated nothingness, the statement by Gérard Araud, France’s former ambassador in Washington, and current president of the distinguished Société des Amis du Louvre, might just take le canapé.
Araud reassures the Société’s members (philanthropists, art collectors, socialites, auctioneers, mandarins, social climbers, the bored and the beautiful) that he understands “their sadness”, especially as four of the missing pieces “were acquired with the help of [our] Society”. But fear not. Le président (a Frenchman of his social class is always le président of something) also stands in “full support” of the institution “and its teams”, and does not “doubt for an instant” that “everything is being done” to “find the criminals and recover their loot”. Today, “more than ever, we stand with the Louvre”.
It’s worth quoting this sorry missive at length, because it exemplifies the polite, bone-deep self-satisfaction of the French elites. This explains, more than anything else, how the largest and arguably best-known museum in the world could be robbed in seven minutes, in broad daylight, in the presence of visitors and guards, by four men (two of them in yellow hazmat vests) using a disc-cutter and a cherry-picker they’d stolen that very morning from a construction site. For this was the means by which the thieves broke through a first-floor window of the Galerie d’Apollon and stole the jewels before escaping on scooters.
We know these details not because of the Louvre’s security cameras — but because at least one visitor filmed the thieves smashing into the glass display cases on their phone. Laurence des Cars, the President-Director of the Louvre, explained in the days following the incident that she had commissioned a “comprehensive security overhaul” shortly after she was nominated for the job and suggested that cameras would be part of it. However, only 138 have been installed since 2019. A third of the rooms in the Galerie d’Apollon, and 75% of rooms in the Richelieu wing, the museum’s largest, have no CCTV whatsoever.
“A third of the rooms in the Galerie d’Apollon, and 75% of rooms in the Richelieu wing, have no CCTV whatsoever.”
In an appearance before French senators on Wednesday, a distressed-looking des Cars emphasised that no one is protected from such “brutal criminals”, not even an institution like the Louvre — and the security personnel are “really upset” about the robbery.
The spirit of “nothing to do with us, mate” has been strong, too, among the five major unions who represent the Louvre’s 2,000-strong staff, which have called over 20 strikes that have either completely or partially closed the Louvre over the last two decades, as well as repeatedly forcing the closure of the room that contains the Mona Lisa due to understaffing. The Communist CGT union in particular has been denouncing “chronic underfunding, building maintenance issues, and lack of personnel for surveillance” while praising “the guards’ professionalism during [last Sunday’s] incident”.
Much of the blame has naturally fallen on des Cars, 59, who was appointed to the role of President-Director in 2021 after four years as director of the Musée d’Orsay. A 19th-century art specialist who grew up in a famous French writing dynasty, she became the first woman to helm the Louvre in its 228-year history. Last year, she appointed another woman as the Louvre’s Head of Security: Dominique Buffin, 46, a former police officer specialising in art theft.
Buffin has been accused of being a “diversity hire” — though she clearly has the qualifications for the job. What she probably does lack, however, is the political, administrative, financial and social clout to bang on the table and make the point that the security situation at the museum is untenable. Des Cars herself does have such clout — she is a favourite of Emmanuel Macron. However, she has chosen to please the President with glittering events (haute couture shows, a chic new museum entrance and café, Olympic and sports-themed “animations”, fund-raising gala dinners and balls) and is seemingly far less interested in the boring upkeep of the actual galleries.
“As in so many cultural establishments in France, the money goes to highly visible glitz,” a board member of a couple of smaller Paris and provincial museums explains. “Redoing the electricity circuitry is always postponed. Only one third of the Louvre’s galleries are outfitted with security cameras, usually a single one in most rooms. Why should museums be different from schools, universities, train tracks, state buildings? It’s no secret that France’s vaunted infrastructure, our 20th-century pride, is near collapse.”
The view is echoed across France’s industries. In so poor a state is French infrastructure that SNCF, which operates most of France’s railways, has been forced to slow down its regular train schedules as a safety precaution. “It takes almost half an hour more to get from Paris to Cherbourg as it did in the Nineties,” complains a Parisian banker.
There have been warnings. In France’s Court of Auditors leaked wide-ranging, highly critical excerpts of a forthcoming report on the Louvre’s operations from 2019 to 2024 — detailing delays, misspending, security black holes, conceptual flaws and general complacency. However, neither Buffin nor des Cars seized the occasion to make an unholy fuss. There were few incentives to do so and many reasons not to. France is a country of institutional and personal conformism. It hates tall poppies, whistleblowers, disruptors, lone riders, and dynamiters of the hallowed status quo. Not only would they lose their jobs; they wouldn’t find another, ever, as they would be viewed as “personnes à problèmes”, i.e. capable of independent organisational thought.
This applies doubly to Frenchwomen in positions of power. The country certainly has its share of image-savvy diversity candidates promoted far beyond their intellectual and technical capacities (Ségolène Royal, the former socialist presidential candidate, springs to mind, as does the former Minister for Education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem). However, it also has many instances of competent women isolated from networks of power within male-dominated domains. Here, an understanding of unspoken ties, sometimes decades-old, is the key to holding one’s own. Any authority a woman might hold is fragile, with higher risks to weigh against possible rewards.
The publication of the Court of Auditors report on the Louvre, which was slated to come out in January, has now been brought forward to the end of November. It may put an end to des Cars’ and Buffin’s careers — assuming they haven’t already fallen on their swords by then. However, it is unlikely that it will make much of a change to the downward spiral of French state competence, especially considering the country’s political crisis and crushing national debt.
It is even unlikelier that the theft will be considered as an indicator of the general state of the country. The French will keep being drip-fed news of discrete scandals, one after the other, seemingly unrelated, and witness the breakdown of the world they once knew.