[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-1238606812.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tLast night, France\u2019s lower house of parliament\u00a0unanimously voted\u00a0in favor of a long-anticipated bill to facilitate the restitution of artworks looted during the colonial era, making good on a nearly 10-year-old\u00a0pledge\u00a0by French President\u00a0Emmanuel Macron to return African heritage to the continent. The vote, which came following a lively debate that went late into the night, comes after the Senate\u2019s adoption of the bill in January, and sets it on a smooth path to be enacted as law, likely before the summer.<\/p>\n
\n\tMembers of parliament agreed the bill was a step forward in a decades-long, painful effort to confront France\u2019s colonial past and return cultural goods that were unfairly and violently seized in the 19th\u00a0and 20th centuries. But representatives on both sides of the political spectrum called the bill \u201cimperfect,\u201d engaging in heated debates that underscored the degree to which the issue remains politically charged.<\/p>\n
\n\tA central issue is that the bill\u2019s text, which is about returning stolen colonial-era artworks, doesn\u2019t mention the word \u201ccolonialism.\u201d Instead, it states that artworks looted between 1815 and 1972 are eligible for a more streamlined restitution process to countries that make formal demands. This omission has been characterized as a means of appeasing the far-right, which, as MP Florence Joubert said yesterday, staunchly opposes any \u201cnotion of repentance,\u201d or \u201cideological discourse of guilt,\u201d over France\u2019s role during that period. Joubert also aligned with other critics who argued the bill opens a \u201cPandora\u2019s box\u201d of demands for artworks, risking a rush of restitutions, allegedly depriving the French public of some prized holdings.<\/p>\n
\n\tAmid boos, MP Frederic-Pierre Vos asked: \u201cWhy not the Eiffel Tower, since I remind you Algeria claims it was made with Algerian iron?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tLeftist MP Rodrigo Arenas responded, \u201cThere is no demand from anyone to reclaim the Eiffel Tower, just as France is not asking for the return of the Statue of Liberty from the New York harbor.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIndeed, the bill stops short of making any kind of apology for wrongs committed by France, but it hopes to \u201crepair\u201d them and, in so doing, to send an olive branch to former French colonies that continue to eye France with distrust and suspicion.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe restitution of an artwork \u201ccan bring people closer together, in a spirit of appeasement and cooperation,\u201d French Minister of Culture Catherine P\u00e9gard said in her introduction of the legislation.<\/p>\n
\n\tHowever, left-leaning representative Sophie Taill\u00e9-Polian repeatedly warned that omitting the word \u201ccolonialism\u201d from the legislative text weakened it, and instead strengthened the same racist logic that had underpinned colonial rule itself. Rather than stirring feelings of \u201cguilt,\u201d Taill\u00e9-Polian argued that directly naming colonialism in the text was a matter of historic rigor, not repentance. \u201cTo refuse to [do so] is to sugarcoat, and to sugarcoat is itself already a refusal to understand,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\n\tStill, the unanimous vote marks \u201ca profound change in mentality, and in that sense, it is a true historic monument,\u201d art historian B\u00e9n\u00e9dicte Savoy told ARTnews<\/em>. With Felwine Sarr, she co-authored a landmark 2018 report on African cultural objects in French museums that was commissioned by Macron. That report estimated that 90 to 95 percent of African artistic heritage is located outside the continent, and it was regularly referenced during last night\u2019s debate as supporting evidence backing the legislation.<\/p>\n \n\tThe Savoy-Sarr report has helped accelerate efforts to return some looted works, notably ones given back to Benin, Senegal, and C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire. But in each case, those returns had to be made via separate laws. The cumbersome process inspired what is known as a trio of \u201cframework\u201d laws to facilitate restitutions. The first two framework laws, pertaining to Nazi-looted artworks and human remains, passed in 2023 without difficulty, but this third, far more contentious one, was delayed as debates raged about the implications of explicitly admitting, via the legislation, the harm caused by France\u2019s colonial reign.<\/p>\n \n\tYet even on the political left, leaders said the law was better off without delving into the colonial context. Instead, they advised sticking to the technicalities of whether an object was stolen and needed returning.<\/p>\n \n\tPer the proposed legislation, two committees will be given that forensic task, and based on their conclusions, decide whether to return an artwork formally requested by another country, pending government approval. The committees would include one with scientific experts plus representatives from the country making the request, and another including museum, government, and legislative personnel.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI\u2019m opposed to the mention of \u2018colonialism\u2019 in the law, because as a historian, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s up to parliament to write history and define what the official thinking should be on colonialism,\u201d said left-leaning Senator Pierre Ouzoulias, who has been involved in drafting the law. Plus, he said, such a mention would restrict its scope.<\/p>\n \n\tSavoy agreed on that last point. \u201cAnything that prevents the freedom of expression is a problem, but we saw in the debates that [the word \u2018colonialism\u2019] is used in reference to this law, so we can easily understand what it\u2019s about,\u201d she said. \u201cI think the idea was not to shut out countries that were not formally colonized, but to open up to them.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThis law doesn\u2019t solve everything, and it is far from perfect, but it opens up a stable framework, which will allow for real progress going forward,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/france-national-assembly-vote-bill-looted-artifacts-1234781166\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-1238606812.jpg?w=1024″] Last night, France\u2019s lower house of parliament\u00a0unanimously voted\u00a0in favor of a long-anticipated bill to facilitate the restitution of artworks looted during the colonial era, making good on a nearly 10-year-old\u00a0pledge\u00a0by French President\u00a0Emmanuel Macron to return African heritage to the continent. The vote, which came following a lively debate that went late into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1883129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1883129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1883129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1883129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1883129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}