Yannick Le Marec analyses how the European imagination prepared and legitimised colonial plunder.
- The animals captured in the colonies served as showcases of power, before dying for lack of appropriate care.
French painter Delacroix, for example, had many scenes with ferocious tigers, diffusing an exotic and wild world. The first thing the French did when they arrived in Indochina was to declare the tiger a “pest” and to hunt it. While he regulated the ungulates that were destroying the rice fields. This is one of those crazy contradictions of colonisation: the system that is put in place destroys ecosystems and balances.
- Sacred objects have sometimes been stolen at night by scientists during official expeditions.
- The search for provenance today enriches the knowledge of works rather than impoverishing it.
Let’s take two writers. Pierre Loti recounts in detail the violence with which France colonized Indochina. He also recounts the 1872 expedition to Easter Island, when a “hydrographic mission” of the French navy took the opportunity to bring back a statue, because the English already had one. Faced with his colossal size, men took hours to cut off his head, which now stands on the Quai-Branly.
Another author, Victor Segalen, sets out to meet the great Chinese statuary. He tells how peasants agree to hammer the neck of a Buddha statue for a few coins. Look at all these heads in museums that are now isolated on pedestals. They have suffered, they have been torn away.
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Erwan Le Bec writes more [in French] about colonial cultural belongings and ancestral remains and restitution issues, see e.g. Six objets pour remo0nter le fil dún passé complexe / Six objects to retrace the thread of a complex past.
