The Louvre Heist: The Grave and The Absurd

On October 19^th, the news of the Louvre Heist hit. Eight crown jewels were stolen from the room that has housed what is left of the French crown jewels since 1887. These jewels are symbols of the French state and the history of the country, described as priceless and irreplaceable. It was, like much of the news these days, upsetting to read about, until some of the details came out and then, it became a story juxtaposing the grave with the absurd.

The first hint of this came in the details of how the heist was committed; the four thieves used a ladder, escaped on scooters after spending less than eight minutes robbing the Louvre. Let's face it, it looks like a few friends wanting to avoid the holiday rush and deciding to rob the national museum of France that is, by the way, the most visited museum in the world. The ladders and scooters are hardly the stuff of a carefully planned high tech heist one would expect. Add to this the comment by Lynda Albertson, chief of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA), an organisation that examines and tracks trends in museum security including theft and vandalism, saying the Louvre’s architecture was not built “to address modern security needs, rigorous conservation controls, or the massive crowds it now attracts.”

The problem with that statement is the there were no crowds and ladders are hardly modern security threats.

Then, while about 100 detectives investigated the jewelry robbery, the news focused on this man and the internet initially identified as one of the investigators, "This is, by all accounts, genuinely the detective tasked with cracking the Louvre heist. God I love the French," writer David Patrikarakos said. 

It was only later that it was clarified that this gentleman was not a fabulously dressed detective but, rather, a passerby who was at the right place, at the right time and dressed just like a detective from a novel.

Then, Cosmopolitan put out an article discussing the suspects, replete with photos,"It is so French of them to both be this hot," activist and actor Jameela Jamil said in response to the two mugshots, with someone else commenting: "Why do they look like Calvin Klein models?"

However, the article corrected the panting hordes by stating, "Hot as they may be, however, the Louvre heist mugshot men don't actually have anything to do with the jewel heist – as we've discovered..."

I won't post their photos because the poor guys have done nothing wrong.

After the modern heist that didn't use modern tools, a detective who only looks like a detective but is not one and suspects who are just two random hot guys who didn't rob the Louvre, surely we should be done with the hilarious part of this sad story.

Yet, we are not.

We still have a password that should never be a password, "one of the museum’s key passwords was simply “LOUVRE.” To add the absurd onto the ridiculous, the French Culture Minister Rachida Dati, made the understatement of the year, “Security failures did indeed occur.”

There is so little news to chuckle about this story kept the world amused, despite the gravity of the theft.