The culture minister Catherine Pégard, praised its “universal character”, aiming to “promote a dialogue between the peoples”. She also reaffirmed the sacrosanct principle of “inalienability” of French public collections and insisted that the procedures for restitutions will be “strictly supervised” under the new law.
Under its provisions, the request for a restitution must be introduced by a state, which would commit to protecting the relevant items and displaying them to the public.
It would then be examined by a bilateral scientific committee, opening the way to a decree for their restitution, if it is proved that they had been stolen, looted, sold under duress or given by someone who did not have the authority to do so.
Military items, public archives as well as the shares of archaeological digs are excluded.
Furthermore, the legislation applies only to the period between the Vienna Congress of June 1815, in the wake of Napoleon’s fall, and April 1972, when Unesco’s convention for the protection of cultural heritage came into force.
All cases relating to objects allegedly stolen after 1972 must be submitted to a civil court. Even if the government was at first reluctant, the senate has imposed the creation of a national scientific commission, which will publish an annual report.
Currently, a French-Mexican scientific commission has been working on the subject since 2024 and has suggested digitisation of the illustrated manuscripts.
- Requests for restitutions are also pending from:
Algeria (personal effects of the rebel leader Abdel Kader), - Benin (most notably a statue of the Vodun god Gou),
- Ivory Coast (around 150 objects), Madagascar,
- Mali (objects taken by the 1931 Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic expedition). Mali is also requesting, along with Senegal, the return of the “hoard of Ségou”: gold and jewels from the Toucouleur kingdom which were unearthed by French troops in 1890.
- Ethiopia and Chad forwarded a general request in 2019 with no list attached.
Private international law specialist Zhen Chen adds:
A clip of one speech in the Parliament went viral on Chinese social media, because it referenced the pillage of countless cultural objects from the Summer Palace (圆明园, Yuanmingyuan) by the Anglo‑French forces in 1860 during the Second Opium War (鸦片战争). At the time, a British officer sought Victor Hugo’s endorsement of the sack. Victor Hugo replied:
- “One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned. Before history, one of the two bandits will be called France; the other will be called England. Governments are sometimes bandits, peoples never.”
Hugo added:
- “The French empire has pocketed half of this victory, and today with a kind of proprietorial naivety it displays the splendid bric‑a‑brac of the Summer Palace. I hope that a day will come when France, delivered and cleansed, will return this booty to despoiled China.”
