French government prepares a new law to assist the restitution of looted artworks

France’s government discussed, on Wednesday, July 30, a bill designed to speed up the restitution 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 Sénat is due to discuss it in September.

Streamlining the restitution process

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.

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.

Several recent high-profile restitutions

In 2019, France’s then-prime minister Édouard Philippe handed over a sword to the Senegalese president that was believed to have belonged to the 19^th-century West African Islamic scholar and leader, Omar Tall.

France returned 26 formerly royal artefacts, 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 Côte d’Ivoire earlier this year.

Other European states, including Germany and the Netherlands, have also handed back a limited number of artefacts in recent years

Britain faces multiple high-profile claims but has refused to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece and the Koh-i-noor diamond to India, two of the best-known examples.