The Cultured Resident: 'The Heist' - Synthesised

Illustrations by Grace McKenna

Hi, I’m Maeve, your new Society and Culture columnist. Or, in other words, your one-stop-shop to being a cultured member of society here in Edinburgh. Whether it's current affair titbits or student-life specifics, I’ll ensure you are up to date with the city and the world’s happenings.

I am lucky enough to live here in Edinburgh, where Scottish culture runs through the veins of every cobbled street and alleyway. Fear not, though, we will be talking internationally as well as locally, with something for everyone, divulging the topics on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

This week I will be taking you through everything you need to know about the recent Louvre heist in Paris. This delightfully juicy and just as meme-able event is certainly a conversation starter and should make you think the next time you are wandering the halls of an art gallery or museum.

The questions on everyone’s lips, as I’ve heard, as follows:

1. What did they take?

2. Why did they take them? (Besides the obvious money and potential kleptomaniac intrigue)

3. Who is doing the taking? (Do we even know yet?)

4. And who is the illusive detective employed on the case, and is he wearing a Sherlock-style trench coat and beret to maximise his ‘Frenchdetective’ - esque style? I know I would be…

Let’s start with the basics. On the 19th of October, four thieves posing as renovation workers gained entry through a window of the Louvre Museum, using disc-cutters to extract four jewellery items worth a total of 88 million euros. So far two men have been detained on suspicion of the theft, one of them reportedly about to flee the country to Algeria. Sounds like the obvious move if you ask me.

What exactly was the significance of what was stolen?

Reports from the French ministry of culture suggest that the stolen items were a tiara and brooch belonging to Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon the 3rd, an emerald necklace belonging to Empress Marie Louise, a sapphire tiara necklace and earring set from Queen Marie-Amelie and Queen Hortense, and a "reliquary brooch".

The consensus is that the thieves will not be keeping these pieces intact, meaning the survival of these cultural emblems is under threat, as they will likely be easier to sell for individual jewellery pieces, especially without being tracked down. One can imagine a jewellery buyer raising a few questions: ‘hey, is that not the reliquary brooch you’re trying to flog there?’

There’s nothing like a multi-million-euro jewel heist to expose some holes in your security system, with the President of the Senate Culture Committee suggesting that it is "it is not what you would expect from a museum", though I think it's a bit late now!

Perhaps we already know too much, as the Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau is angered by the amount of information that has been leaked about the case, claiming too much public knowledge will only “hinder the investigative efforts” of those on the job. I’m sorry Laure, it's just too interesting, we can't help it!

Why is the internet blowing up about the case?

Well, apart from the fact that a jewellery heist happening in real life sounds like something straight out of Hollywood, or a David Walliams novel (Gangsta Granny anyone?). Exciting details about the case are making for humorous discourse online. Might I equally suggest that you can drop these into conversation to stand out as particularly up to date. 

The first is that the thieves had quite the Cinderella blunder on the way out of the crime scene, dropping the emerald and diamond encrusted crown of Empress Eugénie in their desperate attempt to get away on motorbikes.

Following an escalating online discussion about AI photography and “innate French-ness”, AP photographer Thibault Camus clarified details about a viral image. He explained that the stereotypically dressed man in a fedora and trench coat, seen standing with policemen and retweeted by Melissa Chen, was simply an unknown passer-by, NOT the detective working on the case. Boo. Or maybe he is and we just don't know it yet! We also cannot discern much about the other two robbers, meaning faith is dwindling on finding and recovering the jewels, and ultimately redisplaying them (hopefully in slightly more robust cases this time).

Although juicy, this case is not a joke, and perhaps the most sophisticated conversation you could follow this up with is the cultural value of the pieces that have gone missing. If you think large-scale about the Louvre, how many priceless artefacts of historical significance are held inside? How is it that some can separate the physical worth of the precious jewels and metals from the irreplaceable heritage interwoven with them?

All this behind, thoughts about the heist’s motives and mechanics inevitably spring to mind. While we may have thought that the real-world difficulty of pulling off such a thing has confined jewel heists and grand-museum-thefts to the movies, what does it say about how we look after our artefacts? Could this spark an uptake in similar operations in other museums?

There is also the worry that what we might have deemed as ‘safe’ is, in the age of technological advancement, not quite safe enough! Does this mean that greater security will be introduced in museums worldwide, making them more expensive or harder to access for the general public?

I ask these hypotheticals not to add to the unanswered mass of frenzy, but to make you think about what kind of critical conversations this event can probe within our peer groups, one of the key purposes of this column. So, with that my friends, I leave you this week hopefully a little more cultured, and I am over and out. Out of the window. On a motorbike. With not a single ‘fedora-topped’ detective to stop me.