After Permanence: Restitution and the Legal Conditions of Museum Authority
A new French restitution law does not threaten to empty museums. It reveals how deeply institutional authority depends on legal immobility—and what changes when permanence becomes conditional.
When the French Senate unanimously adopted a draft bill on January 29 to simplify the restitution of colonial-era artefacts, the reaction was familiar. Headlines warned of emptied museums, hollowed collections, and a cultural self-erasure disguised as moral repair. The anxiety was less about objects than about precedent: once permanence breaks, what remains of institutional authority?
But the bill does not do what its critics suggest. It does not mandate mass returns. It does not dismantle national collections. Instead, it exposes something more fragile than any museum inventory—the legal fiction that has long underwritten museum confidence.
A Procedural Shift, Not a Cultural Purge
Under current French law, national collections are considered inalienable. Every restitution requires a specific act of parliament, turning the return of a single object into a symbolic drama staged on the legislative floor. The new bill removes that bottleneck. If passed by the National Assembly, restitution requests will be assessed through a standardized procedure grounded in historical research and bilateral dialogue.
The scope is narrow by design. The law applies only to objects whose illicit appropriation can be historically established, that originate from the current territory of the requesting state, and that entered French collections between 1815 and 1972. This is not an invitation to empty museums; it is a framework for deciding when legal permanence should yield to demonstrable fact.
As Senator Catherine Morin-Desailly, who has worked on restitution legislation for nearly two decades, put it: the aim is “not to empty French museums, but to achieve authenticity in France’s response.”
Why the “Empty Museums” Argument Persists
If the law is so limited, why does the fear remain so loud?
Because museums are not destabilized by loss alone; they are destabilized by contingency. The encyclopedic museum depends on the assumption that its holdings are settled—legally, temporally, and morally. Inalienability has functioned less as a protection against depletion than as a guarantee against doubt. Once objects can be questioned without parliamentary spectacle, the institution loses a key buffer between historical evidence and public consequence.
The phrase “museums would empty” operates rhetorically, not empirically. It converts procedural reform into existential threat, framing accountability as erosion. What is being defended is not the number of objects on display, but the idea that the museum’s authority derives from immobility.
What Changes Inside the Museum
Institutions most associated with colonial collections, including the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac and the Louvre Museum, already live with restitution in practice. Royal treasures from Abomey have been returned to Benin. A “talking drum” taken from Ivory Coast in 1916 was approved for restitution in 2025. Human remains have been repatriated under a separate 2023 framework law.
What the new bill changes is not the direction of travel but the internal logic. Restitution becomes administrative rather than exceptional, embedded within curatorial and research workflows instead of staged as a national exception. Provenance research is no longer merely scholarly—it becomes operative.
This is the quiet institutional shift at the heart of the law: museums are asked to substitute confidence based on permanence with authority based on traceability.
Macron, Continuity, and the Limits of Symbolism
President Emmanuel Macron has framed restitution as part of a “new relationship” with Africa since his 2017 Ouagadougou speech. The Senate bill fits squarely within that continuity. It follows earlier legislation addressing Nazi-looted Jewish property and the repatriation of human remains, extending an existing legal logic rather than inaugurating a radical break.
Yet the bill also reveals the limits of symbolic politics. Returning objects does not rebalance the global museum economy, nor does it undo centuries of extraction. What it does is narrower and more disruptive: it interrupts the automatic alignment between possession and legitimacy.
The Real Risk: Not Loss, but Exposure
The fear animating opposition to restitution reform is not that museums will be emptied, but that they will be seen—seen as historical actors rather than neutral containers. Once restitution is governed by procedure instead of exception, the museum’s past is no longer sealed behind vitrines and wall texts. It becomes actionable.
This exposure is what makes the law unsettling. It asks museums to operate without the comfort of legal immobility, to accept that some objects remain provisional guests rather than permanent residents. For institutions built on the promise of timeless stewardship, that is a profound recalibration.
After Permanence
France’s restitution bill does not resolve the moral contradictions of the universal museum. It does not offer a new model of shared custody or global circulation. What it does is simpler and more consequential: it weakens the legal shield that allowed institutions to avoid deciding.
Museums will not empty. But they may have to speak more precisely—about how objects arrived, why they remain, and under what conditions they might leave. In that sense, the law does not threaten museums with absence. It threatens them with responsibility.
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