It’s a heist so brazen it seems to have been pulled straight out of the Arsène Lupin universe. In just seven minutes, some of the greatest treasures of French history were stolen from the Louvre on Sunday. Inevitably, the blame game has already started. And in typical French fashion, the culprit is always insufficient public spending and headcount rather than a proper introspection on what went wrong.

This is not the first high-profile jewellery-related scandal in French history. The so-called Affaire du collier de la reine of 1785 saw a conwoman, Jeanne de la Motte, swindle a gullible cardinal into buying a diamond necklace worth two million livres, supposedly on behalf of Queen Marie Antoinette. While the Queen never saw the jewels, the scandal did more than any pamphlet to tarnish her image and prepare France for revolution. In France, scandals involving the nation’s treasures are often read as symbols of the wider social and political climate.

It would be tempting to view this robbery as a sign of decaying law and order. But while France’s robbery rate is above the EU average, burglaries in France have gone down by 17% since 2017.

Aside from an admission of failure from Gérald Darmanin, the Interior Minister, few in positions of authority have taken responsibility. And when the usual blame game begins, it rarely targets flawed procedures or poor prioritisation. Instead, the French tend to point fingers at an alleged shortage of public funding and staff.

Unions, for instance, have long criticised the Louvre’s understaffing, pointing to a decline of around 200 employees over the past 10 to 15 years. And yet the museum’s annual report last year boasts 2242 employees, up from 2100 in 2010. Perhaps the unions were referring specifically to security personnel, even though the Louvre currently employs 1,200 security agents — exactly the same number it reported in 2010 and 2015. Meanwhile, its budget has grown sharply, from €199 million in 2015 to €323 million in 2025, far outpacing inflation. Unsurprisingly, the unions’ claims have been widely echoed in the French media without much fact-checking.

When it comes to the heist itself, the security guards did not flee out of cowardice. They are trained to protect the public, not to confront armed thieves. Adding 200 more agents would not have altered the outcome.

A yet to be released report from the prestigious Cour des Comptes found that a third of rooms in the Louvre do not have CCTV, a number that climbs to 75% in some wings of the museum. In the last five years, only 138 security cameras were set up to cover 73,000 square metres. The Cour des Comptes also criticised the Louvre’s slow pace of transformation. Indeed, some initiatives, such as for fire prevention, have been ongoing for two decades. What’s more, the press reports that the previous security system had been replaced by a modern design in 2019. The former, however, could back up into safes at the slightest alarm. It remains to be seen why the Louvre elected to change systems.

Six years after Notre-Dame nearly collapsed in the great fire, the Louvre heist is another blow to the Parisian psyche. The Romans would have seen a bad omen: 90% of the French population believes that the country is in decline. Finding that the crowns of France are now in the gutter is not going to help.

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François Valentin is a political analyst and co-host of the Uncommon Decency podcast.

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