A quick heist took place at the iconic Louvre Museum in the French capital on Sunday, with eight priceless pieces of Napoleonic-era jewelry spirited away from the second floor.
Items stolen included a tiara associated with Queen Marie Amélie and Queen Hortense’s jewelry set, an emerald necklace worn by Empress Marie Louise, a large brooch belonging to Empress Eugenie, and other similar items.
The international press reported on the theft with predictably dramatic twists. CNN, for example, ran a headline that read, “France’s historic jewels stolen in ‘national disaster’.” The article went on to say that, according to the Louvre, one of the looted crowns “features 24 Ceylon sapphires and 1,083 diamonds and can be removed and worn as a brooch.”
This sensational hand-wringing was almost reminiscent of another modern-day “national disaster” in Paris. Namely, the April 2019 Notre Dame Cathedral fire that broke the hearts of politicians around the world, even though they were clearly unfazed by the objectively more tragic events of Israel’s repeated massacres of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
And now that we have just witnessed two years of all-out carnage in Gaza courtesy of the US-backed Israeli military, it seems that the loss of all those sapphires and diamonds may not actually be so “disastrous” after all, at least in terms of the general state of humanity and the future of the planet.
In fact, many of us may even find ourselves rooting for the thieves, even to some extent, if only as a symbolic middle finger to a world premised on despicable inequalities and misplaced priorities.
Indeed, the Louvre and like-minded elite art institutions are themselves symbols of historical injustice, serving as repositories for treasures amassed by royalty who made their fortunes on the patronage of the working class, not to mention cultural and stolen artifacts from former colonial holdings and other imperial imprints.
Talk about “looting”.
Curator and scholar Simrit Lee writes in his book Decolonizing Museums that “even the term ‘loot’, derived from the Hindi word ‘root’, meaning ‘stolen property’, was appropriated into English as a result of British rule in India.” Lee notes that the British Museum in London has traditionally “displayed sculptures looted from India and bronzes from Benin, a West African kingdom in what is now Nigeria that was invaded by Britain in 1897 and then annexed to the British Empire,” and that “France’s Louvre established a gallery in the early 1800s to display many objects specifically plundered by Benin.” Napoleon and his Egyptian entourage. ”
Today, Lee writes, it is impossible to find a Western museum that does not house some amount of African, Asian, Oceanic, and Native American cultural material. It is a legacy of violent and extractive colonialism, the effects of which continue to impact the lives of indigenous peoples and black people around the world. Nevertheless, “museums with white walls and white lighting aid historical amnesia and trick visitors into thinking this violence existed only in the past.”
Introducing Sunday’s Jewel Thief. They might even take on the role of a half-Robin Hood-type hero, set against such a backdrop of white walls and white lighting. Unfortunately, this kind of romanticization falls short, as would-be Robin Hoods likely performed their spectacular stunts to make bank by selling off their looted treasures to other wealthy people who specialized in the art of exploitative economics, rather than as a political-cultural statement against historical amnesia.
In a recent article about the heist, Emmeline Smith, a lecturer in criminology at Scotland’s University of Glasgow, highlighted that the stolen jewels were “the product of a long history of colonial mining” and came from regions such as Asia, Africa and South America, which were “systematically exploited for their cultural and natural resources to enrich European courts and empires.”
As Smith puts it, France’s “colonial outposts and extensive network in Europe funneled such valuable resources to royal courts and elite collectors” — all with the help of good old-fashioned slavery. Among the funnel-shaped items is a 19th-century sculpture by Akati Ekprekendo, an enslaved court artist of the Kingdom of Dahomey (formerly a French colony) in what is now the Republic of Benin (not to be confused with the British-conquered Kingdom of Benin), which Smith notes is “still on display in the Louvre’s Pavillon des, despite repeated requests by Benin.” session”.
Again, it is not difficult to see why those of us concerned with world justice would tend to view the material loss inflicted on the Louvre on Sunday favorably in theory.
But in the end, this robbery is not worth glorifying. But it also does not deserve to be classified as a “national disaster” or even an international disaster. And the fact that there are people casting it that way is almost a disaster in itself.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
