What a Museum Heist Teaches About Property, Trust, and Patience

Two men, we are told, broke into the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer on a Tuesday morning, in that house where the painter once lived and laboured. An alarm sounded at 05:48, the police arrived within minutes, and in their hurried flight the thieves dropped two of the four canvases in the garden, leaving two still missing. The papers speak of millions in value and recall a brazen heist at the Louvre the year before. Such tales are apt to be treated as curiosities, fit to be placed beside celebrity gossip and cooking fashions. Yet beneath this episode lie first principles of property, law, and political trust that admit of no levity at all.

When I wrote in my Second Treatise that every man has a property in his own person, and in the labour of his hands, I meant to mark a truth that reaches even to these painted canvases. The earth in common yields linen, oil, and colour; but the artist, by mixing his labour with these materials, joins to them something that is his own, and so makes them his property. When, later, a museum is founded, curators labour to preserve, arrange, and present these works to the public; by their industry and by lawful exchange, the institution acquires a title to them, held not only for itself but, in some degree, for all who may come and look. On any such account, those paintings are not wares lying ownerless, but settled possessions under the protection of law and right.

In the state of nature, as I described it, there is a law of nature to govern it, and reason teaches that, being equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his possessions. Theft is therefore, in its very idea, a violation of that law. It takes what another has rightfully joined to himself, without consent and without just cause. These thieves did not paint Renoir’s works; they did not maintain the house that shelters them; they did not, by any compact, obtain a title. They simply broke in and carried away what pleased them. They made themselves judges in their own case, and executioners too, which is the very mischief for which men leave the state of nature and enter civil society.

The end for which men put themselves under government, and give up the equality of pure nature, is that their lives, liberties, and estates may be safeguarded by known laws and impartial judges, and by a power able to execute those sentences. Political power, as I argued then, is but the right to make laws with penalties, all for the public good; anything further is usurpation. Here, the museum had an alarm, the alarm called the public force, and the officers of that force were presently at the scene. So far as these sparse reports show, the magistrate did not sleep, nor connive, nor bend the law to favour the strong against the weak. He answered the trust in this particular instance as well as human frailty commonly permits.

Yet some may ask, if there was this Louvre heist almost a year before, and now another theft at a museum that draws visitors from many lands, whether we see emerging a pattern of impunity. They will say that pictures worth such sums ought not to be twice exposed, that the state’s duty is not only to chase thieves but to deter them. I grant the concern, for where a long train of abuses and failures in protecting property appears, all running the same way and showing the same bent of design, the people may reasonably conclude that the trust is broken, and that their rulers either cannot or will not secure what they were empowered to defend. But it is one thing to note the possibility in reason, and quite another to affirm its actuality upon a single page of newsprint.

For my part, I see here not yet the dissolution of government, but the ordinary occasion for it to justify itself anew. That the alarm sounded, that the police came within five minutes, that two canvases were recovered, all show an attempt—whether sufficient is another question—to maintain the common security. In such a case, private men ought not to fly at once to thoughts of resistance, or to set up, each for himself, a new standard of justice. The appeal must be made first to the established laws, to an impartial judge, and to the officers charged with enforcing his sentence. To answer a theft by private violence, or by new arbitrary rules born of indignation, would be to pay for one disorder with another of at least equal mischief.

There is a further temptation I must resist, and invite others to resist with me. It is to treat works of great price, when stolen, as of more moral concern than humbler goods. Yet the widow’s small savings, wrongly seized, are a violation of natural law no less than the museum’s Renoir. God, who made men all of one workmanship and sent them into the world about His business, did not set a higher hedge about the possessions of the celebrated than around those of the obscure. If we keep this in mind, then even a famous heist will serve as a reminder, not that art is fragile, though it is, but that the whole fabric of civil society hangs upon a simple rule: that no one may, without consent, make another man’s property his own.

If, in time, it appears that such crimes multiply, that security is a jest, that magistrates excuse their negligence, or that public force serves private interest rather than the common good, the people will have cause to reconsider the trust they have placed. Until then, the right course is plainer and more modest. Let the thieves be pursued under known laws, judged by an impartial tribunal, and punished proportionably, not as enemies of beauty only, but as violators of that law of nature that forbids one man to prey upon the estate of another. Civil order does not rest on eloquent praise of art, but on steady, even-handed justice.