In Paris, the musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac is exhibiting from Tuesday, October 26, 26 works from its collections which will be returned next month in Benin. It is the first group of objects to leave a French museum for Africa since Emmanuel Macron announced in 2017 that restitutions were to take place within five years. This return announces others, even if it is not simple.
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These 26 works, we know perfectly well their origin and the history of their arrival in France. They come from the ancient kingdom of Abomey, today an integral part of Benin. They were seized there in 1892, in the midst of the colonial war, by the troops of a French general. Among these 26 pieces, there are in particular three royal statues half-man, half-animal, three thrones and four carved wooden doors from the royal palace. They entered French collections in 1893. And because of their history, they are of immense value to the Beninese. Bertin Calixte Biah is the curator of the Ouidah History Museum in Benin. “A whole population awaits the arrival of these works, he assures. It’s our culture, it’s our heritage. These objects which have stayed outside our territories for decades and which are coming back are a strong emotion. ”
“When you find yourself in front of certain rooms, you get goosebumps, the feeling that drives you is indescribable.”
Bertin Calixte Biah, the curator of the Ouidah history museum in Beninto franceinfo
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These 26 works should return to Benin on November 9. They will first be exhibited at the Ouidah history museum because for the moment the museum which is supposed to host them in Abomey on the site of the former royal palace has not been built.
To date, seven African countries are calling for the return of works from French museums. Besides Benin, there are Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Chad, Mali and Madagascar.
But the requests are not always precise as explained by lawyer Emmanuel Pierrat, specialist in intellectual property and collector of African art. “There are those who have worked who say ‘these are the looted objects that we need and that we are ready to show’, this is the case of Côte d’Ivoire, it is the case of a certain number. There are other countries which take a very political approach which consists in completely avoiding listing, which do not even know what they are asking for and which say ‘meet us’ just because the relations diplomatic relations at the moment are not good with France. These requests are not to be examined for the moment, they are not requests that can be made in a general way “, he explains.
How many objects and works of art could be affected? What we know from a study which has just been published and which is continuing is that there are in French public collections, approximately 150,000 objects from Africa, at least 219 museums are concerned. . But all these extremely varied objects will not return to Africa. Especially since most of the time, we have little information on their origin, we do not know the conditions under which they arrived in France.
This is the case, for example, in Angoulême where the Musée des Beaux-Arts holds more than 3,200 African works from a bequest made in 1934 by a city doctor. Émilie Salaberry directs the municipal museums of Angoulême. “My big difficulty is that we have no archive on how to acquire objects. It is customary to say that he supplied himself from Bordeaux and La Rochelle, that he regularly went to Paris for his business and that he bought, a priori, a certain number of pieces in the great colonial fairs. Arrived in France”, she laments.
Press conference in the Senate.
With @L_Lafon the president of the #ComCultSenate, @C_MorinDesailly and @OuzouliasP I present 15 proposals to install a scientific approach which approaches the restitution of cultural goods methodically to avoid the “act of the Prince”. pic.twitter.com/vvXQ3es5bQ
– Max BRISSON (@max_brisson) December 16, 2020
Faced with this lack of information and the increase in the number of restitution requests, three senators have just tabled a bill to create a scientific council, which would be responsible for giving an opinion on restitution requests. Among them, Senator Les Républicains, Max Brisson: “The advice I want is a way to enlighten politics. We need to have a policy, it cannot be piecemeal. I think we have to counter this ‘fact of the prince’ by establishing transparency. democratic, an expert opinion available to public opinion “, he explains.
Senators like many curators or museum directors in France are in favor on a case-by-case basis: yes to restitutions but not without prior study and certainly not general. According to the Heritage Code, French public collections are inalienable, we cannot dispose of works, downgrade them for donation, except to have a specific law passed, this is what has been done for the 26 works of Abomey. . Emmanuel Macron will also admire them on Wednesday October 27 afternoon at the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac museum, on the occasion of a ceremony.