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Louvre heist: A break-in that shook France
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If proof is needed that France is fickle, rebellious and can turn on its leaders, the Louvre provides it.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Roger Cohen
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PARIS – 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 Academie Francaise, 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 Oct 19 and made off with the jewels of two French queens and two empresses.
