How the elites stole France The theft is the pinnacle of their complacency

Of the many fatuous public comments made among the Parisian great and good since the Louvre theft, one definitely takes the petit four in the “mistakes were made” stakes.

 Gérard Araud, France’s former Ambassador in Washington, and current president of the distinguished Société des Amis du Louvre, reassured its members (philanthropists, art collectors, socialites, auctioneers, mandarins, social climbers, the bored and the beautiful) that he understood “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 broad daylight, in the presence of visitors and guards, by four men (two of them in yellow hazmat vests) using an ordinary disk-cutter and a cherry-picker they’d stolen earlier from a construction site. It took the thieves seven minutes to break through a first-floor window, smash through three recently installed modern display cases that supposedly featured the latest in reinforced glass, grab the jewels, and flee on souped-up 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 General of the Louvre, has spent the last few explaining that she had commissioned a “comprehensive security overhaul” shortly after being nominated for the job four years ago, and suggested that cameras would be part of it. Since then, a little over a hundred have been installed. But, on average, only a third of the museum’s rooms have been outfitted, mostly with a single machine.

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.

But equally, the “nothing to do with us, mate” is strong among representatives of the five major unions for the Louvre’s 2,000-strong staff. They have called over 20 strikes over the past two decades that either completely or partially closed the Louvre, as well as forcing numerous partial closures of entire galleries, including the Mona Lisa room’s, for alleged “understaffing” in the same period. 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”.

Laurence des Cars, 59, was named at the head of the Louvre four years ago, with the decisive support of Emmanuel Macron, making her the first woman to helm the Louvre in the museum’s 228 years’ history. (That she was the scion of a famous writing French dynasty played a part in the president’s choice.) Last year, she appointed another woman as the Louvre’s Head of Security: Dominique Buffin, 46, a former police officer specialising in art theft.

On paper, Ms Buffin, who has been accused of being a “diversity hire”, has the qualifications for the job. What she probably does lack, however, is the political, administrative, financial and social clout to (metaphorically, mostly) walk into meeting and bang on the table to make the point that the security situation at the museum is untenable.

Des Cars herself does have such clout. However, she chose to please her real boss, the President (the arts were always the prerogative of the King in France, and not much has changed since). She staged, at no small effort or expense, the kind of glittering events he likes best (haute couture shows, a chic new museum entrance and café, Olympic and sports-themed “animations”, fund-raising gala dinners and balls) while seeming to attach far less urgency 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. The lack of cameras in rooms full of priceless and largely uninsurable treasures [the stolen pieces of Imperial jewellery are reportedly not covered] is typical. 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.”

It is significant that even when the National Court of Audits recently 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 —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, incidentally, 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). Yet it also furnishes many instances of competent women isolated from networks of power often, but not always nurtured in male-dominated domains — from the higher reaches of the football world to the oldest-established Freemason manses. An understanding of unspoken ties, sometimes decades-old; powerful support networks created at post-graduate level in the better application courses following ENA or Ecole Polytechnique, for instance, is key to holding one’s own. The result is increased fragility, and higher risk to constantly weigh against possible rewards.

The publication of the Court of Audits 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 been tripped and fallen on their swords by then. (Macron flatly refused des Cars’s offer to resign on Wednesday.) All the same, in the ongoing French political crisis, the Louvre situation suddenly “fait désordre”.

But even the reappearance of Empress Eugénie’s and Queen Hortense’s tiaras in the Louvre’s gilded Galerie d’Apollon is unlikely to make much of a change to the downward spiral of French state competence. At best, it will ring-fence the theft as an anomaly, rather than what it is, 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, wrought by elites who don’t want them to connect the dots.

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