It is difficult to believe that the French courts and government authorities can expose themselves to more ridicule than they managed with the October 19, 2025 heist from the Louvre Museum at 09.30 am. But they did – and the events are relevant for the U.S.
Recall, back in October, four thieves arrived with a stolen vehicle-mounted mechanical lift to gain access to the museum from a balcony close to the River Seine. Breaking the windows, they got into the Galerie d'Apollon. By 09.38, the four escaped on two scooters with about U.S. 100 million worth of jewelry – yet to be recovered (except one item that the thieves dropped). Both the outside of the building and the rooms had few videos and CCTV (closed-circuit TV) cameras.
Then, Friday, March 13, as part of what the Prison Administration in France calls a “cultural outing re-education program” at the Nanterre-Hauts-de-Seine penitentiary, inmates were taken to the – not kidding – the Louvre. While on their way, one of the inmates escaped on public transport at 14.30.
According to the Prison Administration, drawing on its regulations, there were six prison staff supervising the three (!) inmates. Among the six, there were three surveillance personnel, including a senior officer, and two “probation and reintegration officers” – jargon for “social workers.” The announcement did not say what role the sixth person had. Whatever it was, one of the 3 inmates escaped at a train stop, and quickly disappeared in the metro.
The outing was then interrupted, and the two remaining inmates were taken back to the penitentiary. The director general of the prison administration issued firm instructions to suspend such collective re-education events until – quote - they “work on a framework to guarantee their safe return from such educational outings.” The Prison Administration also made it clear that they objected to this outing. However, a judge overruled both this objection and that of the Department of Justice against such events. The only option the Prison Administration was left with was to add more prison personnel for executing such “re-education” program, and hope to have the inmates back in their cells.
With debates in the U.S. about roles of the police, of academic theories and jargons rationalizing going easy on criminals, of big city mayors – Zohran Mamdani among them - advocating replacing police personnel with social workers – perhaps these events would give some pause before pursuing such policies. Even good screenwriters for a Pink Panther sequel would have been unlikely to come up with better comic sequence of events than the above, involving politicians, judges and museum’s management, the latter failing to install sufficient security devices.
Turns out the museum management has been incompetent for quite some time. February 12 disclosures had Louvre in the news again. The French police detained nine people - including two staff of the Louvre - over a suspected ticket fraud scheme. The investigators alleged that the perpetrators were bringing in up to 20 groups of visitors per day – for a decade - with reused tickets, having bribed Louvre’s employees over the years. Authorities said they have seized more than $1 million in cash, more than $500,000 from bank accounts, three vehicles and several bank safe deposit boxes, and suspect that they can trace money to real estate in France and Dubai.
Apparently, this was the last straw for tolerating Louvre’s present top management. February 25, President Emanuel Macron accepted the Louvre’s director, Laurence des Cars’ resignation, and announced that the museum needed to “carry out major projects involving security and modernization” under Christophe Leribault, transferred from his director role at Palace of Versailles.
Perhaps President Macron could also replace some judges making decisions to prevent subsidizing inmates’ “educational outings” where they have a good chance to inspect newer installations at museums (criminals have often found ways to misuse them before management and police discover the mischiefs); require properly trained police personal rather than social workers to deal with criminals, and enforce far more accountability within the states’ institutions to prevent fraud. Meanwhile, with fraud, court decisions and better policing much in the headlines in the U.S. too, its politicians, especially those without any non-taxpayers' paid based work-experience, can perhaps learn from all these French mistakes and avoid them.
These episodes are also reminders of fractals - a tool Benoit Mandelbrot introduced in applied mathematics, using it for modeling a variety of phenomena from physical objects to the behavior of the stock market. In this case it shows for how - fraud, crime and stupidities – happen at smaller scales at the Louvre, and in extravagant scales in the U.S., as events in Minnesota, California and New York show. It also turns out that fractals apply to media and academia too - in this case not across countries, but time.
In the Introduction to a August 1916 published book, titled God in the Battle, H. G. Wells, known as a father of science fiction, but who wrote about a wide range of topics too, had this to say:
"In England, if we disregard two sturdy weeklies, Justice and The Clarion, we have the most grotesque "socialist" and labour press it is possible to conceive; it is a press little read at home, but seriously quoted abroad … The curious inquirer into this obscure literature, will find that it is written almost entirely by people absolutely remote from any experience of labour and innocent of any intelligent knowledge of socialist thought… [Among them] Mr. Bertrand Russell, hitherto known to the intelligenzia as an awe-inspiring mathematical philosopher, who objected to Euclid upon grounds no one could possibly understand in books no one could possibly read, and who has just intensified his claims to speak for British socialists by producing a volume in praise of tepid voluntaryism ..." "Assisting [Mr. Russell], there are a few people of the local secretary type, full of the peculiar venom against the employer, that detestation of any form of success … Week after week the Labour Leader and the Herald of appear, full of distraught hostility to the war from such pens as these … A contemplation of this combination of the genteel independent and the resentful untaught, a consideration of the common failure of these two types to rise to the conception of a collective aim, to the idea of individual sacrifice in a fight against overwhelming evil …"
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
