This Halloween, my suitemate dressed up as a Louvre robber — adorned with an orange traffic vest and a hot-glued Empress Eugénie crown. “TikTok gave me the idea,” she told me sheepishly.

Two weeks earlier, four men disguised as construction workers walked into the Louvre Museum’s Galerie d’Apollon and walked out with eight pieces of 19th century jewelry worth roughly $102 million. The heist quickly became an internet obsession: TikToks romanticized the getaway, and “Ocean’s Eleven” comparisons flooded X, formerly known as Twitter. In a time when outrage drives news and political cynicism has hardened into habit, it’s not difficult to see why this “dreamy little crime” — as The Atlantic writer Caity Weaver called it — has captured the American imagination. It’s relatively harmless, absurd, and strangely theatrical.

Yet, what interests me most isn’t the Louvre’s baffling lapse in security or the robbers’ finesse, but our fascination with it: why we subconsciously root for thieves and how loss itself can create legend.

Part of the reason for the former, I believe, is cultural conditioning. Films like “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Inside Man,” and even “Inception” have cemented heists as a part of American cinema, and transitively, American culture. We have long been taught that heists belong to fiction: the stuff of laser beams, glittering jewels, and Tom Cruise dangling from a ceiling. The sheer fact that anyone could pull off a crime of this scale today — and in the Louvre, of all places! — seems unthinkable. To many, that impossibility is precisely what makes it so irresistible. 

There’s also a strange decency in the act itself. In “Ocean’s Eleven,” gentleman thief Danny Ocean lays out three rules: Don’t hurt anyone, don’t steal from those who don’t deserve it, and play like you have nothing to lose. Say what you want about the Louvre robbers, but they did not burst into bedrooms or press a gun to anyone’s temple. The thieves, however loosely, followed a moral code.

Still, restraint doesn’t erase what was taken. I don’t mean to say that there is no historical loss or that the absence of violence absolves the act. The Eugénie jewels are centuries old, and it is unfortunate to imagine them melted down into something unrecognizable. But history has a strange way of canonizing theft. 

Not many know this, but the Mona Lisa, arguably the world’s most famous painting, was a relatively obscure Renaissance portrait until it was stolen in 1911. After it vanished, crowds swarmed the Louvre’s Salon Carré to stare at the empty frame — sound familiar? — and the image of the Mona Lisa spread far beyond France, a legacy that has outlasted both the thief and theft itself.

The same will be true for the Eugénie jewels, which are far more well-known now than if they’d sat on that same Galerie d’Apollon shelf for another 2,000 years. Their appraised worth, roughly $100 million, is little compared to the cultural value they have now acquired. I would even go as far as saying that Empress Eugénie herself — whose taste helped invent modern fashion as we know it — might have even thanked those thieves for reviving her memory, just as Leonardo da Vinci might have thanked Vincenzo Peruggia, who stole the Mona Lisa in 1911.

But beyond all the jewels and drama, there’s a much simpler answer for why we romanticize the Louvre heist. Every day, we scroll past news headlines about financial cuts, worsening wars, and classmates disappearing with little warning. Then, we move on with our day. It’s natural that a story that defies the cadence of bad news — about four men who outwitted the Louvre — feels like a quiet revolt against the order we’ve grown numb to. It’s less that we admire these anti-heroes and more that we recognize ourselves in their defiance. 

The Louvre heist will likely outlive its perpetrators, and us, in cultural memory. And maybe that’s pessimistic — that the world is in such disarray that this crime passes for good news — but there’s something oddly hopeful about it too. For all its absurdity, the heist has united millions across the world, if only for a brief moment. 

A theft with no human casualties and a headline without a massacre. Perhaps that’s the closest thing we have to optimism right now, and maybe that’s enough.