African Heritage: French government to present bill to facilitate restitution

New window of opportunity to accelerate restitution: after a series of missed opportunities, the French government is expected to put back on the agenda at the end of July a highly anticipated bill facilitating the return to their country of origin of cultural property looted during colonization.

Despite President Emmanuel Macron's promises in 2017, restitutions are still being carried out in dribs and drabs in France, each requiring the passage of a specific law to remove an item from public collections. Currently, only 27 objects have been returned, including 26 to Benin in 2021, while requests for several thousand objects have been submitted by ten states, mainly in Africa (Algeria, Madagascar, Ivory Coast, etc.), according to a count dating back to 2023.

"Thousands of pieces have been returned to Africa from around the world, and France is really lagging behind," said researcher Saskia Cousin, interviewed by Agence France-Presse (AFP). In 2022, Germany and Nigeria agreed to return around 1,100 works.

To shift into high gear, the French government plans to present a text to the Council of Ministers on July 30 that will allow property to be declassified by decree in the Council of State in order to return it without going through the legislative process, the Prime Minister's office recently reported to AFP. This framework bill concentrates "the bulk of expectations," recently agreed the Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, who has experienced disappointments on the subject. In the spring of 2024, she was forced to withdraw from the parliamentary agenda a first text deemed insufficiently motivated by the Council of State and attacked by senators from all sides, who denounced a "forced march examination."

"It's a delicate, expected subject, and we therefore need to produce good legislation," Senator (Seine-Maritime, Centrist Union) Catherine Morin-Desailly, a specialist on the subject and designated rapporteur for the future text during its examination in the Senate at the start of the school year, explained to AFP.

What restitution criteria will be used? And what compelling reason will be put forward to justify the infringement of the inalienability of public collections? In its 2024 opinion, the Council of State considered that the "conduct of international relations" alone was not sufficient. The Senate also expects the future text to establish a rigorous method for examining restitution requests in order to avoid any missteps.

A precedent remains in the minds of several senators. In 2020, France returned 24 skulls to Algiers, claiming they belonged to Algerian anti-colonial fighters. However, two years later, a New York Times investigation established that only six of these skulls undoubtedly belonged to combatants and that the origin of the other bones was highly uncertain. Doubts also surround the saber returned by France to Senegal at the end of 2019. At the time of its return, Africanist historian Francis Simonis assured that this weapon had "never belonged" to the warlord El Hadj Oumar Tall, contrary to what the French authorities claimed.

"Before Parliament relinquishes its power, we want to ensure that there is a whole methodical and scientific work to be sure of the authenticity of the gesture," says Catherine Morin-Desailly. Also very familiar with the matter, her colleague (Hauts-de-Seine, Communist Republican Citizen and Ecologist Group - Kanaky) Pierre Ouzoulias believes that a "political consensus" has been forged thanks to the restitution of the talking drum to Côte d'Ivoire , voted in July by Parliament, despite disagreements on the colonial period. "It is not up to Parliament to write history," the senator maintains to AFP: "On the other hand, it is our role to repair faults and bring justice, as was done for anti-Semitic spoliations or human remains," which were both the subject of framework laws in 2023.