The senators are currently considering a bill concerning the works looted by the Nazis during the Second World War. Its aim: to make it possible to derogate from the principle of inalienability of cultural property kept in the public domain.
The Senate is examining on Tuesday a painful page in history, with the examination of a consensual text intended to facilitate the restitution by public collections of cultural property whose Jews were looted by Nazi Germany.
The objective of this bill is to establish a framework for removing goods from museums in order to return them to their legitimate owners or assigns, without having to resort to legislative texts on a case-by-case basis. After the Senate, it will be debated in the National Assembly.
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100,000 works looted during the War
“Identifying and finding these cultural assets and returning them to the beneficiaries of the victims today means doing a work of justice, but also a work of memory, to allow the descendants of looted Jewish families to rediscover their history.“, estimated the Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak.
The goods concerned (art objects, paintings, books, etc.) were stolen by the Nazis between the accession to power of Adolf Hitler on January 30, 1933 and the German capitulation on May 8, 1945. One hundred thousand works of art would have been seized in France during the Second World War, according to the Ministry of Culture. 60,000 goods were found in Germany at the Liberation and returned to France. Among them, 45,000 were quickly returned to their owners.
About 2,200 were selected and entrusted to the custody of national museums, so-called MNR works (National Museums Recovery). The rest (about 13,000 objects) were sold by the Estates administration in the early 1950s. Many of these works of art thus returned to the market.
Derogating from the principle of inalienability
In 2019, the Ministry of Culture created the Mission for the research and restitution of cultural property whose owners were spoliated between 1933 and 1945. Preserved by the Musée d’Orsay, the painting Rosebushes under the trees by Gustav Klimt, was thus returned to the heirs of its owners. It was one of the 15 works concerned by a law of February 21, 2022 allowing them to be removed from public collections.
Contrary to MNR works, the State can so far only initiate the restitution of works that have entered public collections by adopting a specific law making it possible to derogate from the principle of inalienability of these works. collections.
The framework law now submitted to parliamentarians creates in the heritage code a derogation from this principle of inalienability of works and cultural property kept in the public domain. The decision to leave the national collections can only be made after consulting a specialized commission.
Already refunds
The victims will be able, if they wish, to negotiate an amicable agreement on the terms of reparation other than restitution. The bill also authorizes the owners of private museums that have received the designation “french museum“to return, after consulting the commission, the property in their collections which was the result of spoliation by the Nazis.
The last restitution of property looted by the Nazis took place on April 18. The Minister of Culture presented two paintings to the beneficiaries of Agathe and Ernst Saulmann, as well as a sculpture to the beneficiaries of Harry Fuld junior. The three works were part of the so-called MNR assets. A total of 184 MNR and similar works and objects have been returned since 1950.