Our National Treasure Are Important

We need to treat them better

The Louvre jewellery heist was some sensational stuff. You might have thought that France was heartbroken, grieving the loss of some of the most precious artefacts of its great history. Perhaps that should have been the case.

The fact is, people in France have never really cared all that much about the jewels. It’s not really like the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom, or of other European countries. In 1887, France organised a huge sale of all the jewels — they were pawned off for pennies, spread across the world in different private collections, or melted down into oblivion, and most were never seen again. Some of the more important ones were kept — displayed in grand cases near large windows, with a sprawling view onto the road below and no security in sight — but no one really cared much about them.

Then there was the heist, and mass hysteria online as everyone realised that stealing the jewels of kings, queens, and empresses was as easy as driving up a furniture lift to the Louvre during working hours and walking in. The loss of the jewels is a great one; they were some of my favourite things held at the Louvre. It’s a crying shame for history that they have been, in all likelihood, melted down and the stones recut. To me, this represents the loss of objects which contributed to making France itself; a tie to the monarchs we consistently overthrew, to what we were.

Yet I do think that there are lessons to be learned from this loss; lessons for France, but also for the rest of the world.

All we hear today is bad news — heists, killings, Trump doing yet another thing. The little tune which plays in the background is such: that it’s all falling apart. When was the last time that a British person felt like they belonged to a nation? Perhaps the death of the Queen, but even then, that may have lasted two weeks at most. When was the last time Americans felt like a nation? Or Germans? Or truly any country with free press and social media?

Nowadays, only bad news sells, which, wave by wave, event after event, promotes the idea that “it’s not like it used to be,” and that existing divisions have succeeded in destroying the whole. There is a lot of money being made in convincing everybody that nothing binds us together anymore.

But it’s also our fault. We don’t care about what binds us together anymore. We may not go see our crown jewels, but we also don’t really go visit different parts of our countries. We rarely grieve or celebrate together as we used to, we just focus on the immediate sources of contention — Trump and Farage know well how potent this is — and simply accept that it has changed, that we aren’t really bound together by much anymore other than a passport or the odd sports championship.

The greatest irony in all of this is that we just aren’t trying. Instead of crying over stolen jewels, which the overwhelming majority of people never heard of or cared about, it might be worth caring about the things that are still around. We still have our histories, our dead, our buildings and cities, our languages and hopes, our collective tears and joys — let’s dwell on those. Let’s realise that, in the end, what divides us right now is temporary. Elections, current events, the British carceral system having an awfully hard time not releasing people by accident, are all things which have come but will go. There will be more news tomorrow, more bad things happening, more divisions possible. The difficult part is simply understanding that there is a future, that there is a past, and that all water eventually flows under the bridge. What counts is keeping that bridge around.

Illustration by Abigail Svaasand