Hubert Pellegrini: The millionaire who stole his own necklace and let his chauffeur pay for it

In the last episode of the second part of Lupin (Netflix, 2021), “Chapter 10”, Assane Diop corners Hubert Pellegrini in a private box at the Théâtre du Châtelet, on a concert night, and puts a knife to his throat. He never uses it. He only needs him to talk. And Pellegrini, a Parisian magnate used to answering to no one, admits almost boastfully what he did twenty-five years earlier: he staged the theft of the Queen’s necklace, the jewel that had belonged to Marie Antoinette, to collect the insurance; he pinned it on his chauffeur, the Senegalese immigrant Babakar Diop; and once Babakar was in prison, he had him murdered and his death passed off as suicide. Assane has recorded the confession and plays it at the end of the concert over a photograph of himself with his father, while the police lead Pellegrini and Commissioner Dumont away. The scene closes a case that began as one man’s word against another’s, and the series, created by George Kay and François Uzan and starring Omar Sy, spends ten episodes asking why the millionaire’s word counted for more. Conflict theory has an answer: crime is defined by those with the power to define it.

// The theoryWho defines crime

Conflict theory in criminology has two roots. One is Marxist: Willem Bonger argued in 1916 that capitalism fosters selfishness and that the penal system pursues above all the crimes of the poor. The other is Richard Quinney’s sociology of conflict, which in The Social Reality of Crime (1970) explained that crime is a definition created by those with the power to make and enforce the laws. Jeffrey Reiman summed it up in a title: The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (1979). His thesis is that the penal system treats the harms of the poor harshly and those of the rich leniently.

// The subjectA man who was never told no

Pellegrini is elegant, polite and ruthless. He moves in a world of charity dinners, ministers and friendly journalists, and treats people as resources. He shows no remorse over Babakar: for him it was collateral damage, a problem to be solved. What irritates him most about Assane is not that he threatens him but that he dares to challenge him. The series plays with that arrogance: Assane wins because Pellegrini never imagines that the son of immigrants could be smarter than he is.

Nor does the series show a merely gullible police force. In “Chapter 3”, Assane kidnaps Commissioner Dumont, the officer who handled his father’s case, and the story fills in over the first part. Dumont had once gathered evidence of insurance fraud against Pellegrini, but the millionaire threatened his wife, and the commissioner ended up tricking Anne Pellegrini into getting Babakar to sign a false confession. Dumont, for good measure, took bribes to top up his salary. The system did not pick the wrong suspect through carelessness: someone powerful enough pushed it into the mistake. Quinney and Reiman wrote about structural bias; Lupin adds direct pressure, the threat that turns evidence into waste paper. And impunity holds out almost to the end. Arrested in “Chapter 8”, Pellegrini walks free in the next episode thanks to a favor from the interior minister. It takes a recorded confession and a packed theatre for his word to stop counting for more than everyone else’s.

// The crackThe series has its own thief too

Conflict theory has been criticized for presenting the penal system as a tool in the service of the rich, when in practice most of the crimes it pursues, such as assaults or robberies, have poor people as their victims. Defending criminal law is not always defending the powerful.

Lupin, moreover, solves the problem with a hero who steals and deceives, and who places himself above the law to do justice. It is an individual solution to a structural problem, and the series knows it: Assane manages to avenge his father, but the system that convicted him is still standing.