Until then, to circumvent the inalienability of public collections, it had taken a specific law, in April 2022, to allow the restitution to their heirs of fifteen works of art looted during the Nazi period. The law, which was put to the vote on the evening of Tuesday, June 20, opens a new era, as it is a framework law on the same subject.
More generally, it is part of three laws which completely reconsider the framework of restitutions during the period 1933-1945 but also during the colonial period. Le Point questioned the rapporteur for the bill, Fabienne Colboc, on the scope and consequences of such a law.
Le Point: How does this framework law mark a turning point?
Fabienne Colboc: It will no longer be necessary, from now on, to vote specific laws each time we want to return such cultural property from public collections. The imprescriptible and inalienable nature of public property having, in the Heritage Code, a legislative value, a law could be made to circumvent it. Here, this time, is a framework law which, as its name suggests, perpetuates the possibility of this circumvention and therefore makes it automatic and accelerates it whenever the case arises.
It concerns the collections of French museums, local authorities and private museums with the Museums of France label that have acquired donations or bequests from private collectors. The scope of the law has therefore also been broadened. For supposedly looted private works, we will continue to go through the legal process to request their restitution. You can also go through the Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation (CIVS) set up in 1999, which can carry out mediation.
The founding speech of Jacques Chirac’s Vél’ d’Hiv in 1995 recognized the responsibility of the Vichy regime in terms of the persecution and deportation of Jews from France, but also in terms of spoliation. In particular, it led to the establishment of the Matteoli commission. But cultural property, in particular paintings, was not necessarily yet the priority aspect of restitutions.
The Gurlitt affair, which broke out at the end of 2013, sent shock waves around the world. The following year, Aurélie Filippetti, then Minister of Culture, decided to create a unit to carry out research on a certain number of works of art from the MNRs (National Reserved Monuments), a collection of works which had no not found their owners after the war. But these did not belong to public collections.
Another important step was the speech of Édouard Philippe, in 2018, who noted that we could do better and more so that the State searches for the provenance of spoliated works. The consequence of this speech was the establishment, in 2019, within the Ministry of Culture, of a research and restitution mission for spoliated cultural property, led today by David Zivie. In particular, it carries out work to collect information on works purchased by provincial museums between 1933 and 1945.
We are witnessing a global awareness of the subject, within the State, museums, but also art market players when selling this or that work whose origin is not entirely certain. It is a question of returning as quickly as possible whereas the having right are more and more numerous and distant from the legitimate owner.
This is a request that I made to all the actors auditioned within the framework of this law. The Louvre already has a research unit that still needs to be developed. The Musée d’Orsay has just hired a curator to carry out this research on its collections, the National Institute of Art History (Inha) has just done the same for the book collections.
This is a point on which I insisted a great deal. For the time being, the University of Nanterre has just launched a university degree on the research of provenance of works of art, the École du Louvre offers one of its six masters 2 on this subject (sensitive goods and international provenance ). The question is: should this research be a separate profession or should all curators systematically receive training in this sense? I lean towards the second solution if we want to go further.
This framework law is announced as the first of a long series of laws on the origin of collections. Does this mean that we must expect others which will not concern the period 1933-1945, but the period of colonization?
In effect. Senator Catherine Morin-Desailly’s bill on the restitution of human remains was adopted Tuesday, June 13 in the Senate, it will soon arrive for consideration at the National Assembly. A reworking of an old text proposed under the ministry of Roselyne Bachelot which had not been placed on the agenda of the National Assembly. At the end of the year, we should also have a framework law, in the spirit of the framework law on spoliated cultural property, concerning the search for the provenance of foreign property acquired in a colonial context. Either the establishment of a decisive triptych.