Napoleons

You have hardly been able to escape to the news of the weekend. It happened when the morning of Paris had not yet acquired the pulse of tourism. Then, a four-man gang climbed the facade of the Louvre as if the very principle of deterrence did not exist. Everything was surprising: there was no night, no disguise of technological ingenuity, no escape into an interior labyrinth. Thus, in the seven minutes it took us humans to have a coffee, the group removed from the heart of the museum the most sensitive remains of the French imperial lineage. The most guarded museum in the world could be crossed like if it were a decoration. The material blow. He told in a detailed report this morning Le Monde that the command arrived on the side of the Seine taking advantage a context of works and the functional anonymity of an urban furniture-mountain. They forced a porte-fenêtre towards the Galerie d’Apollon (the room that condenses the mythology of state sovereignty: joyaux de la CouronneNapoleonic inheritances, diadems and colliers that condense continuity of power) and broke two high security display cases in seconds, collecting eight pieces of heritage value not translatable to the market. The operation lasted around seven minutes. The withdrawal was done along the same vertical axis with the support of two large displacement scooters. In the rush of escape, the criminals dropped the Eugenie’s crownlater recovered damaged. What they took and what they didn’t. The theft affected pieces of the corpus Marie-Amélie/Hortense (including sapphire colliers, earrings and tiaras) and jewelry linked to Marie-Louise. They were unable to extract the diamant-régent (one of the three canonical diamonds of the French canon) nor, as we said, preserve Eugénie’s crown in the flight. What is stolen is, strictly speaking, unmarketable as an entire heritage object, but its dismantling (gold, diamonds, sapphires separately) suppresses cultural and biographical traceability, which is where the irreparable lies. Structural failure. They count national media that the gap was not the cunning of others but the internal predictability: five agents for a room thermodynamically saturated with risk, a relay that reduces to four personnel in the exact strip in which the coup is carried out, a security architecture whose modernization was postponed, and a prioritization curve that armored the Joconde but it decompensated the surrounding heritage periphery. In fact, the runion and staff action (boos to management, demand for an independent audit, denunciation of years of unattended alerts) indicates that the failure was not only big, it was known and was never corrected. Political responses. The assault detonated a immediate response of Macron, of the Interior and of the judiciary, with the affirmation that the authors were going to be captured and the pieces recovered. For its part, the opposition transferred the episode to a frame of state decay: If the Louvre (symbol of the nation’s continuous narrative) is permeable during opening hours, the crack is more than museum-like. In other words, from that prism, public humiliation then operates in two planes: exterior (Country-image) and interior (delegitimization of the chain of command over heritage). The crown of Empress Eugenia de Montijo Criminal logic. We said it at the beginning. The pieces, en bloc, do not circulate. Its economic power lies rather in its deconstruction. The likely incentive is not conventional private collecting (impossible to display) but the supply on demand (unknown contractor, including state or quasi-state) or the cannibalized high margin industrial bulk. According to Le Mondehe recent pattern (Cognacq-Jay, Museum of Nature History, Limoges) shows a vector of criminal professionalization with a logistical window close to civil works, rapid emergence, cold extraction, brief departure and, sometimes, exogenous assignment. The discarding of an item in the flight suggests, perhaps, operational friction, but not global improvisation. Precedents. There is no doubt, France knows famous robberies (1911 the Joconde1976 sword of Charles, 1998 the Corot) but the qualitative leap lies in the practical deactivation of the Louvre taboo during visiting hours. The museum was closed to preserve vestiges and the criminal investigation is open with focus on escape routeabandoned equipment, construction perimeters and cameras. In fact, the hypothesis of a foreign commission is not ruled out, nor is the performance of a cell trained in high-density urban theater patterns. Hunting status. From what is known, the investigation focuses in four authorsscooters and routes already mapped, with cameras analyzed and forensic material in progress. One damaged piece was recovered, but eight remain missing. Plus: the probability of intact recovery decreases with time because the thief’s rational incentive is, a priori, to disassemble, volatilize and recombine. The cultural loss is absolute if the components are assembled in another vector or if the metal is melted and sold through other channels. What the robbery reveals. The reputational implosion now forces us to accelerate what years of internal warnings They did not move: comprehensive shielding, redistribution of personnel due to real risk and not due to tradition, closing of logistical windows associated with civil works, and a redefinition of the security perimeter by layers, not only by a single idol (the Joconde-Gioconda). The only “advantage” of an open-hour robbery with global symbolic production is that it makes it politically unaffordable to return to the previous status quo. If you also want, the episode, rather than pointing out an unusual criminal genius, points to the country itself. The escape in seven minutes did not measure the capacity of the thieves, but rather the exact time in which the State left open the possibility that the largest museum in the world could be treated like the entrance to a bathroom in full public service. Image | Tore Sætre, Alexandre-Gabriel Lemonnier In Xataka | Everyone wants to see the Mona Lisa, a problem that the Louvre is going to solve drastically: by hiding it In Xataka | A Saudi prince paid $450 million for a Da Vinci painting. The problem is that it may not be by Da Vinci