Nine years after President Emmanuel Macron of France announced that his government would return some historic pieces of African art held in French museums to the continent, his government has passed a law making it easier to do just that.
Experts say that the new law, if slow in coming, is a game changer for France’s former colonies looking to regain their cultural property, and that it reflects a seismic shift in how France thinks about its colonial history.
“It’s a big advancement,” said Franck Ogou, the director of the School of African Heritage in Porto Novo, Benin, a university that specializes in cultural heritage management. “It offers a possible path for restitution.”
For decades, items held in French museums were removed only when a French president presented them as diplomatic gifts, a practice that was not always legal but was rarely challenged. When leaders of other countries demanded restitution, they were rebuffed by a French law that deems everything in the public collection “inalienable,” meaning that it cannot leave.
The new law, passed unanimously by both houses of Parliament this week and expected to be formally enacted this month, creates an exception to that rule for cultural property unlawfully appropriated by “theft, pillage or gift obtained by coercion or violence” between 1815 and 1972.
Just months after being elected in 2017, Macron traveled to Burkina Faso and told hundreds of students at the University of Ouagadougou that “African heritage cannot be solely in private collections and European museums.” To applause, he vowed to make returning African heritage to the continent one of his priorities.
Macron commissioned a report by two academics, the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy and the Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr, that laid bare the issue: Some 90 to 95 percent of Africa’s cultural heritage was held in major museums outside Africa. France alone had at least 90,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa in its national collections.
The report called for a kind of “rebalancing” achieved through the restitution of objects taken by force or amid “inequitable conditions” created by the army, scientific explorers or administrators during the French colonial period in Africa.
While Macron seemed keen to move forward, the reaction in France’s cultural world was a furious no. The former culture minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon called the report “radical,” adding that its recommendations would mean “emptying the African collections of French museums.”
The Museums Special Section
Stéphane Martin, the former president of the Quai Branly museum in Paris, which houses most of France’s colonial treasures, called it a “cry of hatred against the very concept of the museum.”
Macron’s announcement in Burkina Faso prompted what Savoy called the “Olympic Games of restitution,” with museums in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland returning cultural artifacts to Africa.
But France, because of its strict legal code, has made relatively few restitutions. They include 26 cultural artifacts to Benin that French troops plundered from the royal palace more than 130 years ago; a sword to Senegal that was once owned by Omar Saidou Tall, a 19th-century spiritual leader and military commander; and a talking drum to the Ivory Coast that colonial troops looted in 1916.
In those cases, Parliament passed special laws allowing the state to remove items from the public collections — a painstaking process that each time essentially reopened the debate over restitution.
By contrast, the new law offers a streamlined procedure with clear rules underpinned by scientific rigor. Only a government can make an official request for cultural objects that it can prove were taken from its territory illicitly. The objects cannot already be subject to an international agreement, nor can they be warfare objects seized during war by armed forces.
Under the law, if more than one state requests an object, those states need to sort out the issue before any other action is taken. And if the object was a gift to a public museum, the government must get the consent of the donor.
Requests will first be examined by a freshly formed scientific committee of experts from both France and the requesting country. Then they will go before a permanent national commission made up of politicians, state officials and experts. France’s highest administrative court will make the final decision.
“It’s no longer just the president who decides what object can be sent back, for diplomatic reasons,” said Malick Ndiaye, the director of the Théodore Monod African Art Museum in Dakar, Senegal, who called the new law a “good step.”
The new law follows two related ones, helping to set a broader process for restitution from France’s public collections, first for goods looted from Jewish families in the lead up to and during World War II, and then for human remains from other countries.
The law on restitution of stolen cultural goods was considered the most sensitive, because it touches the wound of France’s colonial past, which remains largely taboo in the country. The law relates to items collected between Nov. 20, 1815, when the Second Treaty of Paris ended the Napoleonic wars and what is considered France’s second colonial empire began, and April 24, 1972, when the UNESCO convention on the illicit import and ownership of cultural property came into effect.
Senator Catherine Morin-Desailly, who led the research and writing of the law over years, called it “a recognition of our shared history and a redress.”
She said she hoped the new law would “radically” change the relationship between France and its former colonies. According to Morin-Desailly, since Macron began the debate on restitution in 2017, France has received dozens of demands from places including Kazakhstan, Madagascar, Mali and Poland.
“Beyond restitutions,” she added, “there is also the desire to have shared exhibitions and artists coming here for residencies.”
Savoy, the French art historian, said even more than the law, what struck her most was the considerable change in mentality since she and Sarr issued their report in 2018. Legislators in the lower house of Parliament passed the law unanimously. Although the law’s language avoids the word “colonialism,” the term was uttered more than 60 times during the debate, she noted.
“In a country that was as far behind on these issues as France was only 10 years ago, that moved me deeply,” said Savoy, a professor at the Technical University of Berlin and the author of the book “Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: Story of a Postcolonial Defeat.”
She said in an interview that she considered the new law “one of Macron’s great successes.”
“Not geopolitically,” she said, “but for humanity, it is a truly great step.”
