‘Not Particularly Great Photo’ of Well-Dressed Man Outside Louvre Heist Goes Viral
An Associated Press photographer who snapped a viral image of a well-dressed young man near the Louvre heist in Paris has spoken about the photo he calls “not particularly great.”
Thibault Camus sparked the internet’s imagination as he was covering the audacious Louvre heist on October 19. His photo of a man in a three-piece suit, angled fedora hat, and tartan umbrella making his way through a police checkpoint seemed innocuous to Camus.
“Maybe he’s a tourist, maybe he’s just a Parisian who planned to go to the Louvre. I really don’t know who he is. He’s kind of a dandy,” Camus tells AP in a video.
Camus only decided to take the photo because of the man’s striking garb. “[He was] dressed like an old-fashioned guy,” says Camus. “And I decided to take this photo because he sticks to the idea of the museum — which has a lot of old things — and he’s dressed like an end of 19th century guy.”
But Camus didn’t even rate the photo because someone’s shoulder partially obscures the foreground. Nevertheless, the photo was sent out on the AP wire service with the simple caption: “Police officers block access to the Louvre museum after a robbery Sunday, Oct. 19, 2025, in Paris.”
Life of Its Own
Camus’s photo was picked up on X where, fueled by misinformation, it went extremely viral. In a post that got 5.8 million views, Melissa Chen wrote, “actual shot of a French detective working the case of the French Crown Jewels that were stolen from the Louvre in a brazen daylight robbery.”
The man in the fedora, who looks like he came out of a detective film noir from the 1940s is an actual French police detective who’s investigating the theft of the Crown Jewels at the Louvre. Pure aesthetic. pic.twitter.com/XgpgscYGDz
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) October 22, 2025
These posts were assigned Community Notes explaining that the man was not a detective, but it didn’t stop people comparing the man to Inspector Jacques Clouseau from The Pink Panther.
Even the Paris prosecutor’s office got in on the joke, “We’d rather keep the mystery alive ;)” wrote the investigator’s office with a wink in response to an AP question about the well-heeled gentleman.
French police have so far arrested seven people in connection with the heist, but the eight extremely valuable jewels that once belonged to French royalty or imperial rulers remain missing.
