French Govt Prepares New Law to Return Colonial-era Art

Asharq Al-Awsat

01-08-2025

France's government on Wednesday discussed a bill designed to speed up the return of artworks looted during the colonial era to their countries of origin, officials said.
If approved, the law would make it easier for the country to return cultural goods in France's national collection "originating from states that, due to illicit appropriation, were deprived of them" between 1815 and 1972, said the culture ministry.
It will cover works obtained through "theft, looting, transfer or donation obtained through coercion or violence, or from a person who was not entitled to dispose of them", the ministry added.
The bill was presented during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, a government spokeswoman told reporters. The Senate is due to discuss it September.
Former colonial powers in Europe have been slowly moving to send back some artworks obtained during their imperial conquests, but France is hindered by its current legislation.
The return of every item in the national collection must be voted on individually. Wednesday's draft law is designed to simplify and streamline the process.
France returned 26 formerly royal artifacts including a throne to Benin in 2021.
They were part of the collection of the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac museum in Paris, which holds the majority of the 90,000 African works estimated to be in French museums, according to an expert report commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2018.
A "talking drum" that French colonial troops seized from the Ebrie tribe in 1916 was sent back to Ivory Coast earlier this year.
In 2019, France's then prime minister Edouard Philippe handed over a sword to the Senegalese president that was believed to have belonged to the 19th-century West African Islamic scholar and leader, Omar Tall.
Other European states, including Germany and the Netherlands, have handed back a limited number of artifacts in recent years
Britain faces multiple high-profile claims but has refused to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece and the Kohinoor diamond to India, two of the best-known examples.
The French draft law is the third and final part of legislative efforts to speed up the removal and return of artworks held in France's national collection.
Two other laws -- one to return property looted by the Nazis, and a second to return human remains -- were approved in 2023.