The adoption of a law on 18 December 2023 aims at facilitating their restitutions.
Up to now each restitution had to be approved by a special law. Requests must be made by a foreign state and will be accepted only to fulfil funerary customs of a living community, therefore prohibiting any exhibitions.
The legislation does not cover the cases of people from French territories around the world, including indigenous people exhibited in Paris’s “human zoos“.
Parliament has given the culture minister one year to report on the restitutions of these remains. The law comes after a dozen years of wrestling between Parliament and the government and a Senate report, which found French policy on the issue ‘unsatisfactory’: France consented to only a few repatriations of human remains, even though there are ‘hundreds of collections’ in museums, universities or archaeology departments.
The Musée de l’Homme in Paris has 23,665, but only 900 could be identified. Most are from France and Europe. A small minority came from former colonies, 7% from Africa and 5% from other overseas territories.
A bill on looted art has already been passed in July but the most complicated one, on colonial goods, has yet to be drafted.
[ in French ] RAPPORT FAIT au nom de la commission de la culture, de l’éducation et de la communication sur la proposition de loi relative à la restitution des restes humains appartenant aux collections publiques, Par Mme Catherine Morin-Desilly
