Gérard Araud, France’s former Ambassador in Washington, and current president of the distinguished Société des Amis du Louvre, reassured its members (philanthropists, art collectors, socialites, auctioneers, mandarins, social climbers, the bored and the beautiful) that he understood “their sadness” — especially as four of the missing pieces “were acquired with the help of [our] Society”. But fear not. Le président (a Frenchman of his social class is always le président of something) also stands in “full support” of the institution “and its teams”, and does not “doubt for an instant” that “everything is being done” to “find the criminals and recover their loot”. Today, “more than ever, we stand with the Louvre”.

It’s worth quoting this sorry missive at length, because it exemplifies the polite, bone-deep self-satisfaction of the French elites. This explains, more than anything else, how the largest and arguably best-known museum in the world could be robbed in broad daylight, in the presence of visitors and guards, by four men (two of them in yellow hazmat vests) using an ordinary disk-cutter and a cherry-picker they’d stolen earlier from a construction site. It took the thieves seven minutes to break through a first-floor window, smash through three recently installed modern display cases that supposedly featured the latest in reinforced glass, grab the jewels, and flee on souped-up scooters.

We know these details not because of the Louvre’s security cameras — but because at least one visitor filmed the thieves smashing into the glass display cases on their phone. Laurence des Cars, the President-Director General of the Louvre, has spent the last few explaining that she had commissioned a “comprehensive security overhaul” shortly after being nominated for the job four years ago, and suggested that cameras would be part of it. Since then, a little over a hundred have been installed. But, on average, only a third of the museum’s rooms have been outfitted, mostly with a single machine.

In an appearance before French senators on Wednesday, a distressed-looking des Cars emphasized that no one is protected from such “brutal criminals”, not even an institution like the Louvre — and the security personnel are “really upset” about the robbery.

But equally, the “nothing to do with us, mate” is strong among representatives of the five major unions for the Louvre’s 2,000-strong staff. They have called over 20 strikes over the past two decades that either completely or partially closed the Louvre, as well as forcing numerous partial closures of entire galleries, including the Mona Lisa room’s, for alleged “understaffing” in the same period. The Communist CGT union in particular has been denouncing “chronic underfunding, building maintenance issues, and lack of personnel for surveillance” while praising “the guards’ professionalism during [last Sunday’s] incident”.

Laurence des Cars, 59, was named at the head of the Louvre four years ago, with the decisive support of Emmanuel Macron, making her the first woman to helm the Louvre in the museum’s 228 years’ history. (That she was the scion of a famous writing French dynasty played a part in the president’s choice.) Last year, she appointed another woman as the Louvre’s Head of Security: Dominique Buffin, 46, a former police officer specializing in art theft.

On paper, Ms Buffin, who has been accused of being a “diversity hire”, has the qualifications for the job. What she probably does lack, however, is the political, administrative, financial and social clout to (metaphorically, mostly) walk into meeting and bang on the table to make the point that the security situation at the museum is untenable.

Des Cars herself does have such clout. However, she chose to please her real boss, the President (the arts were always the prerogative of the King in France, and not much has changed since). She staged, at no small effort or expense, the kind of glittering events he likes best (haute couture shows, a chic new museum entrance and café, Olympic and sports-themed “animations”, fund-raising gala dinners and balls) while seeming to attach far less urgency in the boring upkeep of the actual galleries.

“As in so many cultural establishments in France, the money goes to highly visible glitz,” a board member of a couple of smaller Paris and provincial museums explains. “Redoing the electricity circuitry is always postponed. The lack of cameras in rooms full of priceless and largely uninsurable treasures [the stolen pieces of Imperial jewelry are reportedly not covered] is typical. Why should museums be different from schools, universities, train tracks, state buildings? It’s no secret that France’s vaunted infrastructure, our 20th-century pride, is near collapse.”

It is significant that even when the National Court of Audits recently leaked wide-ranging, highly critical excerpts of a forthcoming report on the Louvre’s operations from 2019 to 2024 — detailing delays, misspending, security black holes, conceptual flaws and general complacency —neither Buffin nor des Cars seized the occasion to make an unholy fuss. There were few incentives to do so and many reasons not to. France is a country of institutional and personal conformism. It hates tall poppies, whistleblowers, disruptors, lone riders, and dynamiters of the hallowed status quo. Not only would they lose their jobs; they wouldn’t find another, ever, as they would be viewed as “personnes à problèmes”, i.e. capable of independent organizational thought.

This, incidentally, applies doubly to Frenchwomen in positions of power. The country certainly has its share of image-savvy diversity candidates promoted far beyond their intellectual and technical capacities (Ségolène Royal, the former socialist presidential candidate, springs to mind, as does the former Minister for Education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem). Yet it also furnishes many instances of competent women isolated from networks of power often, but not always nurtured in male-dominated domains — from the higher reaches of the football world to the oldest-established Freemason manses, say. An understanding of unspoken ties, sometimes decades-old; powerful support networks created at post-graduate level in the better application courses following ENA or Ecole Polytechnique, for instance, is key to holding one’s own. The result is increased fragility, and higher risk to constantly weigh against possible rewards.

The publication of the Court of Audits report on the Louvre, which was slated to come out in January, has now been brought forward to the end of November. It may put an end to des Cars and Buffin’s careers — assuming they haven’t been tripped and fallen on their swords by then. (Macron flatly refused des Cars’s offer to resign on Wednesday.) All the same, in the ongoing French political crisis, the Louvre situation suddenly “fait désordre”.

But even the reappearance of Empress Eugénie’s and Queen Hortense’s tiaras in the Louvre’s gilded Galerie d’Apollon is unlikely to make much of a change to the downward spiral of French state competence. At best, it will ring-fence the theft as an anomaly, rather than what it is, an indicator of the general state of the country. The French will keep being drip-fed news of discrete scandals, one after the other, seemingly unrelated, and witness the breakdown of the world they once knew, wrought by elites who don’t want them to connect the dots.

Luckily, The Wedding at Cana by Veronese could be rolled around a cylinder. So could Jacques-Louis David’s The Coronation of Napoleon. But Delacroix’s Crusaders, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and all the Rubenses were too fragile and had to be hauled away on a special open truck made to transport the set designs and murals of France’s state theatre company, the Comédie Française. The Raft of the Medusa, weighing nearly one and a half tons, stood in the open-air truck covered only by a giant blanket.

Masterpieces were categorised in order of importance: a yellow circle for very valuable ones, a green circle for major artworks and a red circle for world treasures. The white case containing the Mona Lisa was marked with three red circles. In a letter to the curator who was in charge of travelling with the painting also known in France as La Joconde — and who did not yet know the full burden of his responsibility — Jaujard broke the news by telling him: “Old friend, your convoy will be made of eight trucks. I have to tell you that the Chenu truck which will be departing from 5 rue de la Terrasse, with the plate number 2162RM2, contains a case with the letters MN written in black. It is the Mona Lisa.” Leonardo da Vinci’s finest work was travelling in an ambulance specially fitted with elastic-rubber-sprung suspension.

A convoy of 203 vehicles transporting 1,862 wooden cases set out one morning in late August to eleven castles in France — where they would wait, anonymous and secure, for what would come. Grand châteaux on the Loire, such as Chambord and Cheverny, were used, but Jaujard also requisitioned more inconspicuous and privately-owned estates conveniently ‘lost’ in the French countryside, far from any strategic locations. Every convoy had a curator and staff attached to it. Their mission: to look after the art collections in their new homes for as long as was necessary. Whole families were displaced and relocated. For those dedicated museum employees, it was an adventure that would last more than five years.

More from this author

Covid-19 is hardening our borders

By Agnes Poirier

Did they ever ask themselves what the world treasures they were guarding with their lives were worth? The most expensive painting ever sold at auction, Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, was bought for $450 million in 2017. What would the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, be worth if France sold it? A rhetorical question? Not for French tech entrepreneur Stéphane Distinguin who estimates its value at €50 billion (£44.7 billion) and thinks the French State should sell it to fund post-Covid recovery. His thinking is as simplistic as his maths:

“As an entrepreneur and a taxpayer, I know that all the billions spent in the covid crisis are real and will necessarily cost us. An obvious idea is to sell off a valuable asset at the highest price possible, but one that is the least critical as possible to our future.”

Mr Distinguin is wrong on two counts. Even if sold for €50 billion, the Mona Lisa would offer only a brief financial respite from France’s huge post-Covid public debt. It would certainly not cover all the losses. Besides, to say that the Mona Lisa serves little purpose in our future is to be blind to the ageless, universal and immaterial quality of art.

This doesn’t mean of course that artists or cultural institutions can’t support war or pandemic efforts. After Albert Uderzo, co-creator of Asterix, died in March, his widow announced she would auction five original drawings estimated at €100,000 (£90,000) each to support health caregivers and French hospitals. The sale will be held in Paris on 26 May.

Suggested reading

What does it mean to be French?

By John Lichfield

Likewise, the Mobilier National, the office responsible for furnishing official buildings in France, which owns 130,000 precious rugs, ceramics, desks, chairs, chandeliers, said it would hold an auction on 20 and 21 September. For sale will be 100 art objects dating back to the 19th century — and of little heritage and historical value. All the proceeds will contribute to the national effort to support hospitals.

Those initiatives should be encouraged. However, to suggest that France should do away with its most precious and totemic possessions, simply because they are worth billions and could stopper a financial hole, is a step too far.

The Mona Lisa tells stories that keep people warm in moments of crisis or during national catastrophes. Its sheer existence — the fact it has survived hundreds of years of wars and tumult — helps us live through tough or strange times. It is not just a work of great beauty and a masterpiece from history’s most celebrated artist, it is also an inspiration. In fact, in the national imagination, certain inanimate objects such as the Mona Lisa take a life of their own. They are family.

The French take pride in knowing that it was a French King, François I — an artistic visionary and an intrepid young sovereign — who saw genius in Leonardo da Vinci. At the time, the Pope had abandoned the artist, and everybody in Florence was looking down on Da Vinci. France, a great patron of the arts, gave the old Leonardo a grandiose shelter to freely create in the 1510s, until his death in 1519.

Suggested reading

When Asterix took on Covid-19

By John Lewis-Stempel

When I started writing my book Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950, I knew I had to start with the Mona Lisa, and how she escaped from the hands of the Nazis thanks to the brave and visionary Louvre director.

The Louvre finally reopened to the public on 10 July 1945. Its first post-war exhibition was called, simply, ‘Great Masterpieces’. Its collections repatriated from their hiding places, the French public realised that not one piece had been damaged, thanks to their saviour-in-chief, Jacques Jaujard, and the thousand anonymous keepers defended them. This was an emotional reunion.

So, too, had been the return of a well-wrapped-up acquaintance three weeks earlier. The photographer Pierre Jahan had been allowed to take pictures of a moment that would immediately travel the world and make headlines: the opening of a white poplar case marked with three red dots. Waterproof layers of protection were carefully removed, one by one, until the last one, a thin sheet of fire-retardant fabric woven from asbestos fibres, appeared. It was then torn open, revealing the face of the Mona Lisa. She had come home, finally.

When the Louvre, the most visited museum in the world, reopens after Covid-19 is tamed at last — hopefully not in six years time as during the Second World War — many French visitors will no doubt feel emotional too. Those emotions are part of a nation’s history. They are priceless.