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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is an academic, critic and broadcaster
The Louvre lost €88mn worth of jewellery in less than 10 minutes last week. Gen Z — those enfants terribles — responded to the robbery with memes. Gems of a different kind included posts titled, “Outfits I’d wear to rob the Louvre” and an interpretative dance inspired by the robbery set to a soundtrack of “Je ne regrette rien”.
The French invented Surrealism, so perhaps neither the robbery nor the country’s response to it should seem too absurd.
On Sunday morning, a team of four criminals disguised as workmen parked a carjacked, ladder-mounted truck against the south facade of the Louvre, clambered into the Galerie d’Apollon on the first floor and smashed two vitrines to grab their haul. On their hasty exit, they managed to drop and damage a 19th-century crown that had belonged to the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III. It was recovered outside the museum shortly after the robbery. Thoughts and prayers for the crown’s 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds.
While grim-faced officials from the museum and the French Ministry of Interior are left to tot up the losses, Parisians are on the hunt for high-vis jackets and a chipped tiara as the only à la mode costume option this Halloween.
What has made the altercation so mortifying is that the thieves made it look so simple.
Vincent Cassel needed an over-engineered capoeira routine and backflips across a cascade of laser-activated alarms to pocket a Fabergé Coronation Egg in Ocean’s Twelve. Yet it turns out that all you need for a real-life heist are balaclavas, angle grinders and scooters revved up for a speedy getaway. Someone should tell Tom Cruise to stand down from whichever ceiling he’s currently dangling off. The Louvre heist was not so much Mission Impossible as Mission Really Quite Feasible.
The determinedly lo-fi approach of the criminals is almost quaint in an age of rampant cyber crime. While few of us can claim to understand the wiring behind the boards of data theft, there’s no veil of mystery to a smash and grab.
There is, however, a naivety in thinking that a museum as old and as famous as the Louvre could be invulnerable. Its despondent director, Laurence des Cars, flagged a “worrying level of obsolescence” in its security back in January, but little appears to have been done to rectify the problem.
The refined Rue de la Paix, a 15-minute saunter from the Louvre, boasts both a Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, with sharply suited security guards and equally sharp security systems. Meanwhile, only around 75 per cent of the Louvre seems to be in range of CCTV surveillance. This shortfall makes little sense for a museum with one of the world’s most extensive collections of art, including the “Venus de Milo”and the coronation crown of Louis XV. As one Instagrammer deadpanned: “I can get a camera to watch my dog sleep . . . I don’t understand what their excuse is.”
But museum heists belong to a long and dishonourable tradition. In 1911, Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia smuggled the “Mona Lisa” out of the museum under his coat, gamely hiding it for two years before being collared.
More recently, Leonardo Notarbartolo pretended to be a diamond merchant, moved in next door to the Antwerp World Diamond Center and spent two years prepping how to bypass infrared heat detectors, a seismic sensor, Doppler radar, a magnetic field and a lock with 100mn possible combinations.
Notarbartolo was arrested when he returned to the scene of the crime days later. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail. Police searching for four suspects in the Louvre robbery will be hoping for a similar stroke of luck.
But while it is easy to crow, the French would probably tell us to mind our own oignons. The British Museum has started to host more public events. Is anyone keeping an eye on the Parthenon Marbles?
