Paris: France's government on Wednesday discussed a bill that would streamline the process of returning artworks and cultural artefacts looted from the country's former colonies over more than a century of imperial rule. Under current laws, the return of each item in France's extensive national collection must be voted on individually. 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.
According to France24.com, 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.
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. Since his election in 2017, Macron has gone further than his predecessors in admitting to past French abuses in Africa.
In a speech to students in Burkina Faso soon after taking office, he vowed to facilitate the return of African cultural heritage within five years. 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 artefacts 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.