In the midst of political crisis, France suffers humiliation of jewel theft at the Louvre

This weekend’s jewel theft at the Louvre captured the world’s attention.  Partly, no doubt, because of the Pink Panther-style audacity with which it seems to have been carried out.  But no doubt also because of what seems to have been a Clouseau-esque attitude to security at the museum.  The fact that the crime was carried out in broad daylight while the museum was open to visitors, and was actually filmed by passers-by, is simply acutely awkward for the French authorities.  As Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin noted, this gives France a “terrible image”.  The opposition describe it simply as a “national humiliation”.

Of course this can happen anywhere.   It’s hardly the first prominent art theft from a major museum in the last few years.  Equally embarrassing in its way was the disappearance of thousands of artifacts from the British Museum, for reasons that remain murky to this day.  That scandal cost the museum’s German director his job.  Let us see whether this costs Laurence des Cars, director of the Louvre, hers.

But sometimes symbolism and timing matter.  And this weekend’s heist comes after a year of political crisis unprecedented in France’s recent history, a period which has essentially nullified President Macron’s ability to govern and has brought the Fifth Republic itself into question.  A few years back, Macron and his Brussels friends were showing plenty of Schadenfreude about Britain’s descent into the constitutional maelstrom of Brexit.  Yet our crisis in Britain could be, and in the end was, resolved by a decisive general election.  Macron doesn’t even seem to have that option: Another election seems likely to deliver something like the same result.  Then he’d have even fewer options.

The truth is that the President can’t govern.  Nor can the Prime Minister.  And the main Opposition leader, Marine Le Pen, has just been banned from standing.  The whole thing is a mess.  The only way the show can go on is for Macron to throw out one policy commitment after another, most recently his attempt to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 (in Britain, by the way, just for reference, it is 67).  Just as Napoleon could only get back across the Niemen in 1812 by abandoning his Grande Armée and all its kit, so his 21st-century imitator can only hope to reach the 2027 elections by throwing out everything he stood for. One of Macron’s problems is that one of the things he stood for was demonstrating the ability of liberal globalist centrists to govern.  I suspect it will be a long time before the French put that experiment to another test.

Now it is easy to have a degree of Schadenfreude here in Britain too as we look on, particularly given that the French seem to go out of their way to continue to make life unnecessarily difficult for us after Brexit.  Not just in the way they take our money and run, half a billion euros in the current three year programme, rather than make any serious effort to control small boat crossings of the Channel.  There’s also their determination, near-uniquely in Europe, to make the EU’s new third-country entry clearance rules as difficult and time-consuming as possible, in as many places as possible, knowing that outside airports it’s mainly Brits who are coming.  Reluctantly or otherwise, we’ve got used to this since Macron closed Channel crossings to France entirely at Christmas 2020.  You have to live with the neighbours you have and make the best of it.

Despite all this, even now, British people are not especially hostile to France.  A poll last year showed that 70 per cent of Brits saw France as “friendly”, though admittedly I suppose some might say that figure ought to be higher among NATO allies.  It’s more true the higher you go up the social scale, but there is still a respect for French civilisation, an admiration for French high culture, an interest in French history and French politics, that is true of few other countries.  Some of that is almost certainly an interest in the “great opposite”: A country like us in so many ways yet which does things so differently.  Most people in Britain don’t want France to fail. We just wish they would stop needling us and focus on governing themselves.

And that is something they need to do.  When I worked in the British Embassy in Paris twenty years ago, we used to ask ourselves, “How come France appears to be so successful when they do the opposite of everything they are supposed to?”  High taxation and spending, high regulation, strong state direction, many state-run industries: Everything that went against the Zeitgeist.  Yet France was still a pleasant, civilised, and wealthy place to live.

My answer to this paradox is that France really ought to be much more successful than it is.  What it fondly imagines to be the reasons for its success are actually its problems.  France has tremendous natural and cultivated advantages that really ought to make it the stand-out player in Europe. It is a big country with plenty of room for industries and for building.  It doesn’t have the same hang-up as we Brits about building, so it has 9 million more registered dwellings than we do.  It has lots of good roads, railways, airports – and nuclear power stations.  It has lots of advanced industry and among the highest levels of productivity in Europe. It has a great climate, wonderful food and drink, great natural beauty, and mixes as best as possible the cultural attitudes of northern and southern Europe.   This is why so many people love it so much.

It takes really bad governance to bring a country like that down to the European average, but unfortunately that is the kind of governance France has got.  State regulation, taxation, and spending are not the reason for French success; they are what is holding it back.  It’s just that all its natural advantages mean that it’s hard to see that – or, at least, has been until recent years, when the chickens are finally coming home to roost.  Fifth Republic autocracy may have worked when the task was economic catch-up after the war, but now it’s just generating an entitled political class that is out of touch with public concerns, most obviously on migration and culture.  The obsession with unifying Europe has led France to the disaster zone of the euro, and the mistake will be repeated every time France focuses more on building European institutions, for example on defence, than on their own actual policy needs.  Maybe one day they will learn.

One of Macron’s few unarguable successes has been the rebuilding of Notre Dame Cathedral after the fire.  The insistence on remaking it as it was, with no fashionable add-ons, has paid off in spades.  The brutal Pompidou Centre has been up 50 years and is already closed for five years’ renovation.  Notre Dame has been up over 800 years and is the unarguable cultural and historic centre of Paris once again. Maybe the French establishment need to learn from this.  Look back to the civilisational roots and stop thinking they know best all the time.  It worked for France before.  Why not once again?

The Rt Hon Lord Frost of Allenton CMG was Britain’s chief negotiator for exiting the European Union