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Louvre heist: A break-in that shook France
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The Louvre is the embodiment of the history of France, and the expression of its quest for greatness. To violate it with such ease has been experienced as a form of ridicule.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Roger Cohen
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PARIS – With the glorious Louvre museum plundered by thieves in an eight-minute heist, a former French president consigned in October 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 Academie Francaise, that august guardian of French civilisation, 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 Oct 19 and made off with the jewels of two French queens and two empresses.
