France Sets Conditions for Colonial Restitution—but Not Without Control

African Hall, Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, photo Andreas Praefcke, Wikimedia Commons.

On 30 July 2025, French Minister of Culture Rachida Dati presented to the Council of Ministers a legislative proposal regarding the restitution of cultural property removed from former French colonies. A Senate report is expected September 11 and the legislation will be submitted for a vote of September 24, 2025.

The proposed new law is specific to objects removed under coercion from former French colonies between 1815 and 1972. However, the foundation for the new legislation derives from President Emmanuel Macron’s original 2017 declaration committing the French Republic to returning African cultural heritage held in national collections.

The principle of inalienability of public collections is a core doctrine in French heritage law. It has been the key limitation on restitutions of objects from France to other countries or claimants. Inalienability essentially means that objects held in public museum collections – particularly those classified as“national public collections” – cannot be sold, given away, or otherwise disposed of, regardless of their provenance or political context, unless exceptional legal procedures are followed.

Musee du quai Branly, gallery and mezzanine. 6 August 2014, author SiefkinDR. CCA-SA 3.0 unported license.

Under Article L2112-1 of France’s General Code of Public Property, properties classified as in the public domain are not subject to private ownership; they are inalienable, and not subject to prescription. Once any object registered in a public collection through formal acquisition or classification, it enters the public domain and is subject to this legal protection.

France’s Heritage Code, especially Book IV, Title V, affirms this principle. The Code du patrimoine effectively states that the property constituting the collections of the museums of France is part of the movable public domain of the public entity to which it belongs.

Museums cannot deaccession or transfer items unless a specific legal exception is created – typically by a law passed by the French Parliament. This is why every restitution to a foreign state of an object held in a national museum collection has required a specific legislative act.[i]

(An exception without a legislative act can be found in the notorious return of a collection of gold plaques and harness decorations to China, originally donated by Paris art dealer Christian Deydier and billionaire François Pinault to the Musee Guimet in Paris at the request of then President Jacques Chiraq. Fifteen years later, China claimed they had been taken from an illegal excavation. The donation was reversed and the collection was given to the government of China. Deydier vociferously objected, saying France had “dropped its trousers” to China, but the return went forward nonetheless.^[ii])

The New Proposed Legislation

Importantly, the proposed 2025 legislation reaffirms the legal principle of inalienability of France’s public collections. However, it introduces a narrowly tailored exception whereby items proven to have been acquired through theft, looting, forced sale, or transfer by unauthorized individuals during the colonial era may be deaccessioned and restituted to a requesting sovereign state.

Key conditions precedent for consideration under the law include:

• The submission of a formal restitution request by the competent authority of a foreign sovereign state;
• A demonstrable intention that the object be preserved and publicly exhibited in the requesting country;
• A determination, based on historical and legal evidence, that the transfer of the object was involuntary or unauthorized.

Stool for the King, Dahomey, Musée du Quai Branly, photo Miguel Hermoso Questa, Wikimedia Commons

Each claim shall be subject to review by a bilateral scientific commission composed of French and foreign experts. If the commission issues a favorable opinion, the matter shall be submitted for approval to the Conseil d’État, the supreme administrative jurisdiction of France, which shall have the authority to authorize restitution by way of exception to France’s inalienability rule.

With this proposed new law, France would have a formal legal mechanism for restitution.

However, the broader debate remains fraught with unresolved contradictions: tensions between heritage and diplomacy, competing ethical and legal principles, and an attempt to blend a political narrative of reparative justice with facts and history that often don’t coincide with that narrative. Most conspicuously absent from the public discourse on the return of objects to France’s former colonies is a candid reckoning with the persistent corruption, cultural sector neglect, and failure by many African states to secure public access to their heritage—a reality that undermines the stated goal of returning objects “for the benefit of the people.”

Temporal Limitations and Exclusions

The legislation defines its temporal jurisdiction as beginning in June 1815, the date of the Congress of Vienna, and concluding in April 1972, the date of France’s ratification of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Claims concerning objects removed after 1972 will fall outside the administrative restitution framework and must be adjudicated through civil proceedings.

The draft bill explicitly excludes from its scope:

• Military and state archives;
• Cultural property acquired through archaeological partage agreements;
• Property donated by private individuals, including missionaries, military officers, colonial administrators, or their heirs, which is currently protected under legacy and donation statutes.

Procedural and Political Considerations

Historically, because of the inalienability of collections in state museums, French restitution of cultural heritage has required the passage of ad hoc legislation for each object or group of objects. This process takes time due to many procedural delays. Notably, only thirty objects have been restituted since 2017 under President Macron’s initiative. The current bill aims to streamline the process while preserving rigorous oversight.

Eket Mask, Nigeria, 20th C, wood, author Shonagon, public domain, Musee du quai Branly, Paris.

Nonetheless, the proposed legislation faces legal and political challenges. Senator Pierre Ouzoulias, a member of the Senate’s cultural commission, has said he opposes any attempt to rush a complex legal reform. He advocates instead for setting up a permanent scientific council composed of jurists, scholars, and public officials, whose deliberations would be subject to public disclosure. Senator Ouzoulias and other critics have cautioned against permitting diplomatic considerations to outweigh legal and scholarly judgment in restitution determinations.

Senator Ouzoulias has also noted that many requests from African states lack detailed provenance information, and that recipient institutions are often poorly funded or politically manipulated, raising concerns about actual public benefit.

Current Restitution Claims

The French government has received numerous pending restitution requests from former colonies, including:

• Algeria: Personal effects of Emir Abdelkader[iii];
• Benin: Additional statues and sacred objects, including a representation of the Vodun deity Gou held at the Louvre;
• Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast): 148 objects, one of which, the famous Djidji Ayôkwé drum housed at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, seized by French forces in 1916, was transferred to Côte d’Ivoire in 2024 via a “deposit agreement”—a long-term loan, not a full return[iv];
• Madagascar and Mali: Ethnographic material collected during the 1931 Dakar-Djibouti expedition[v];
• Mali and Senegal: The so-called “hoard of Ségou,” comprising gold and jewels seized during French military operations in 1890;
• Ethiopia and Chad: General restitution requests issued in 2019, not accompanied by specific inventories.

Sculpture “Fon” attributed to Akati Ekplékendo. Collection Musee du Quai Branly, currently at the Louvre, France.

Additionally, the Ministry of Culture has acknowledged the complexity of cases involving religious and temple objects, such as two Nepali statues acquired by the Guimet Museum and seven Italian objects held by the Louvre, subject to claims from the government of Italy.

The French legislature has demonstrated willingness to enact narrowly tailored restitution laws such as the 2023 unanimous approval of measures to return Nazi-looted art and human remains. However, the current proposal concerning colonial-era cultural property touches on far more politically and legally sensitive terrain. The government must now articulate just what constitutes an “imperative cause for exemption” from the inalienability principle, while simultaneously navigating rising political resistance, particularly from far-right parties who see returns as retrospective condemnation of the French colonial enterprise.

How France Got Here: Restitution Movement in France 2017-2025

Reliquary ensemble. Sango. Gabon. author Shonagon, public domain, Musee du quai Branly, Paris.

On November 28, 2017, President Emmanuel Macron stunned the cultural world in a speech at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso by declaring that “African heritage cannot be only in European private collections and museums.” He promised to return colonial-era African heritage within five years.

Not only a stark departure from France’s legal doctrine of inaliénabilité, Macron’s statement also reflected a political narrative of reparation, asserting moral responsibility without addressing the practical capacity—or willingness—of many African governments to manage returned artifacts responsibly or publicly.

2018 – Sarr-Savoy Report and Institutional Pushback

The Ouagadougou announcement heralded a proposed major restructuring of France’s cultural policy. Macron commissioned a report from academics Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr, which recommended sweeping returns of sub-Saharan artifacts. It proposed an entirely new pro-restitution framework in which – to simplify their elaborate arguments – items acquired through a disproportionate power relationship should be returned.

While celebrated as a turning point in postcolonial cultural justice, the report was critiqued for its ahistorical treatment of provenance, lack of legal realism, and assumptions about the receiving states’ readiness to safeguard public access and ensure conservation. The report held as entirely irrelevant the reality that many African regimes have deprioritized heritage, diverted cultural funding, or restricted access for political purposes.

[See: Savoy-Sarr Report on African Art Restitution: A Summary, Cultural Property News, January 30, 2019.]

Dahomey royal sculptures in the Musee du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac. 2019-03-08, photo Kate Fitz Gibbon.

Four years later, one of the Sarr-Savoy Report authors, Bénédicte Savoy, remained adamant, denouncing “a France that has clutched onto the inalienability of the collections for so long” and an “administration that multiplied strategies to choke public debate.”[vi] French institutions, including the Musée du Quai Branly, pushed back, emphasizing the logistical, conservation, and legal challenges involved, as well as the need to protect collections from politically motivated deaccessioning.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the selective restitutions that have taken place in the last decade, while often publicly celebrated, served diplomatic ends and largely bypassed broader policy discussion. Critics warned they fed a myth of moral redemption without mechanisms for ensuring that artefacts would be preserved, made accessible, or protected from resale or internal misappropriation.

December 2020: First Major Legislative Restitution Attempt

On December 17, 2020, France’s Parliament passed a bill to return 26 artefacts looted in 1892 from the city of Abomey (in the country of Benin, not the city of Benin in Nigeria) and a sword to Senegal. The Senate initially blocked the bill over disagreements on wording and oversight structures but was overridden by the National Assembly.

Scroll, detail. Angel. Ethiopia. author Shonagon, public domain, Musee du quai Branly, Paris.

Senators pushed for a National Restitution Council and for the term “restitution” to be replaced with “return,” reflecting concern that legal exceptionalism would replace legal consistency, and that symbolic politics was overtaking institutional integrity.

In November 2021, 26 objects from Benin, including some of the most famous sculptures in the Musee du Quai Branly were returned to Dahomey and others to Senegal. Crucially, no evaluation of the actual conditions in Benin or Senegal for the long-term care and display of these artefacts was undertaken. After a temporary exhibition of the returned objects ended in 2022 – and the international circulation of a prizewinning documentary film, Dahomey, on the return – construction has stalled on the promised museum exhibiting them, and the objects were placed in storage, inaccessible to the public. French Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop told the NY Times in 2024, ““We must be critical and have high expectations toward the African leaders repatriating these artifacts… We’re not here to say, ‘He’s getting them back, he’s a hero.’”[vii]

Throughout, President Patrice Talon of Benin has stated dissatisfaction with France’s incomplete restitution – a stance some saw as posturing for domestic political gain rather than public cultural benefit.

 2021–2024: Political Gridlock, Institutional Resistance, and Legal Progress on Human Remains and Nazi-Looted Art

In October 2021, Macron adopted a more cautious tone, stating it would be “madness” to dismantle collections simply to “renationalize” cultural heritage. He stressed that objects creating “psychologically intolerable” absences should meet the standard for restitution.[viii]

Mask. Pendé. Congo. Wood, 19-20th C. author Shonagon, public domain, Musee du quai Branly, Paris.

In January 2022, the French Senate proposed a permanent expert commission to vet all future non-European restitutions of cultural property. The Ministry of Culture opposed this, reinforcing executive control and preferring case-by-case discretion. Jean-Luc Martinez, former Louvre director, was appointed to build a legislative framework. His initiative collapsed in the face of bureaucratic inertia and his later indictment (2023) in an antiquities trafficking investigation.

Then in June 2023, there were two unanimous parliamentary votes – one created legal procedures for the restitution of Nazi-looted art and the other enabled restitution of human remains in museum collections. These were welcomed, but they strategically avoided the politically sensitive issue of colonial plunder. France’s lower house, the National Assembly, failed to consider broader deaccessioning laws, and efforts to legislate on colonial artifacts stalled.

Although praised, efforts like the return of the Djidji Ayôkwé drum in 2024 also made clear that the mechanisms of return could avoid ownership transfer, reinforcing criticism that France continues to use legal gymnastics to delay comprehensive action, while simultaneously allowing African governments to posture as successful claimants without demonstrating long-term stewardship.

Conclusion: A Conflicted Legacy, A Fragile Framework

As noted above, on July 30, 2025 France put forward its first comprehensive law allowing for restitution of colonial-era objects – but under tightly controlled conditions that uphold inalienability but allow exemptions for cultural property taken between 1815 and 1972 by force or duress. If finally approved the law as it stands will require:

• Formal request from a sovereign state.
• Bilateral scientific committee review.
• Conseil d’État approval.
• Restituted objects must be publicly exhibited, proven to have been stolen, looted, or inappropriately transferred.
• Military objects, archives, and archaeological shares are excluded.
• Post-1972 cases must go through civil court.

The proposed law is receiving criticism for its restrictive scope and discretionary process, particularly since  a permanent, independent scientific council is not included in the review structure.

Exterior, Musee du Quai Branly, author Andreas Praefcke, 2008-03-21, CCA 3.0 license.

In France and in other collecting nations, the narrative of restitution continues to be focused on colonial victimhood, with little acknowledgment of internal African culpability in cultural heritage degradation, including wartime looting, destruction of shrines, and state neglect of conservation.

Critics remain concerned that the government’s preference for “symbolic diplomacy over structural equity” will result in loss of public and scholarly access and threats to preservation. France continues to overlook the governance challenges of recipient states -including lack of museum infrastructure, corruption in cultural ministries, and political instrumentalization of restitution. As has occurred in the Nigerian government’s decree that all Benin artifacts returned to Nigeria are under the absolute ownership and control of the unelected traditional ruler of Benin, not the government of Nigeria or its Ministry of Culture, there are few accountability mechanisms ensuring that returned objects are not reappropriated by elites or left in insecure storage.

If restitution is to benefit the public rather than reinforce state power or elite collections, recipient countries must build credible museums, invest in preservation, and commit to public cultural access. Without reciprocal obligations, restitution risks becoming a moral spectacle detached from the long-term public good.

France’s restitution policy has entered a new phase, but the real work—ensuring that cultural justice includes institutional capacity, not just ownership transfer—has only just begun.

Note: French legal citations:

• Code général de la propriété des personnes publiques, Articles L2112-1, L3111-1
• Code du patrimoine, Article L451-5
• Loi n° 2020-1673 du 24 décembre 2020
• Loi n° 2023-99 du 7 février 2023
• Ministère de la Culture, “Projet de loi relatif à la restitution des biens culturels spoliés,” July 2025 Cabinet Presentation

[i] For example, the Loi 2020-1673 du 24 décembre 2020 allowing restitution of 27 objects to Benin and Senegal and the Loi 2023-99 du 7 février 2023 permitting return of the sword of El Hadj Omar Tall to Senegal.

^[ii] Kate Fitz Gibbon, French Government Reverses Donation to Guimet of Chinese Gold Ornaments, Cultural Property News, July 27, 2015. https://culturalpropertynews.org/french-government-reverses-donation-to-guimet-of-chinese-gold-ornaments/

[iii] Frédéric Bobin, The headache of returning Emir Abdelkader’s sabers to Algeria from France, Le Monde, 10 May 2024, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/le-monde-africa/article/2024/05/10/the-headache-of-returning-emir-abdelkader-s-sabers-to-algeria-from-france_6671048_124.html

[iv] Gareth Harris, Seven years on from Emmanuel Macron’s pledge to return African heritage, frustration grows about the lack of progress, The Art Newspaper, 27 November 2024, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/11/27/seven-years-on-from-emmanuel-macron-pledge-to-return-africas-heritage-frustration-is-growing-about-the-lack-of-progress

[v] Gaëlle Beaujean et al, Dakar-Djibouti [1931-1933]: Counter Investigations, Exhibition 15 Apr 2025-14 Sep 2025, Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, https://www.quaibranly.fr/en/exhibitions-and-events/at-the-museum/exhibitions/event-details/e/mission-dakar-djibouti-1931-1933-contre-enquetes

[vi] Vincent Noce, Why Macron’s radical promise to return African Treasures has stalled, The Art Newspaper, 3 February, 2022, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/02/03/why-macrons-radical-promise-to-return-african-treasures-has-stalled?

[vii] Elian Peltier, ‘Dahomey’ Celebrated Looted Art’s Return. What Happened Next?, NYT, 15 November 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/arts/design/dahomey-benin-museum.html.

[viii] Vincent Noce, supra note vi.