A Break-In That Shook France

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 civilization, tourists and passers-by rubberneck and gawk at the small balcony from which two burglars cut their way into the Louvre’s gilded Galerie d’Apollon on Sunday 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 nine 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.”