As France passes law on returning loot, should China pop the champagne?

In November 1861, during his self-imposed political exile, French writer Victor Hugo penned a blistering condemnation of his country. The author of Les Misérables described two “bandits” – France and Britain – who had attacked the Old Summer Palace, or Yuanmingyuan, in Beijing the previous year. “One plundered, the other burned.” “All the treasures of all our cathedrals put together could not equal this formidable and splendid museum of the Orient,” he said. “The French empire has pocketed half of this victory, and today with a kind of proprietorial naivety it displays the splendid bric-a-brac of the Summer Palace. “I hope that a day will come when France, delivered and cleansed, will return this booty to despoiled China.” Nearly 165 years later, on April 13, as parliamentarians gathered to vote on a landmark bill to streamline the return of looted cultural artefacts, National Assembly Deputy Jeremie Patrier-Leitus invoked Hugo’s words. When the vote was tallied – 170 in favour, zero against – he declared that the day Hugo hoped for had finally arrived. On May 9, French President Emmanuel Macron officially signed the bill into law. In China the news sparked a wave of hope online, with many imagining a mass exodus of treasures from the Louvre and Fontainebleau museums. According to analysts, this legislative pivot marked the dismantling of a centuries-old legal fortress that once declared looted art housed in public institutions “inalienable”. By replacing rigid parliamentary hurdles with a streamlined administrative process, France is trying to heal colonial wounds and reposition itself as a moral leader on the global stage. However, the journey home for artefacts has only just begun. Observers said that while the law offered a pathway for countries to reclaim their treasures, it also contained some legal loopholes and demanded high standards of evidence. For over two centuries, “inalienability” acted as a defence for French museums. This legal principle dictated that any object that entered a public collection became the permanent property of the state. It could not be sold, given away or returned, regardless of how it was acquired. To return even a single item, a specific act of the French Parliament was required. Under the new law, the government can now authorise returns via administrative decrees. The law applies to state-owned public institutions – such as the Louvre or the Guimet Museum – but does not affect private collections or galleries. Moreover, it only applies to artefacts acquired between 1815 and 1972, when France ratified the Unesco Convention on the illicit trade of cultural property. This law is an ‘extended hand’ to the Global South Wang Shuo, professor Thirteen countries, from Algeria to Mexico, have previously requested the return of items. These requests may be supported by the new law. The timing was a masterclass in “cultural diplomacy” as France’s influence in its former African colonies had waned significantly, Wang Shuo, an international relations professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, wrote in Chinese state newspaper, Guangming Daily. “This law is an ‘extended hand’ to the Global South,” Wang wrote. “By returning artefacts, Macron is attempting to reshape France’s image as a responsible, multilateral power that is willing to reflect on its colonial past.” For decades, the official French stance was that they had preserved the artefacts and thus had no obligation to return them. This has been replaced by a “decolonisation” framing since Macron’s 2017 speech in former French colony Burkina Faso, according to Huo Zhengxin, a professor of international law at the China University of Political Science and Law and a leading expert in cultural restitution. In his speech, Macron declared: “In the next five years, I want the conditions to be met for the temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage to Africa.” Later, the Elysee said “African heritage can no longer be the prisoner of European museums”. The French state has an estimated 90,000 sub-Saharan African artefacts, with around 70,000 of these housed at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. The speech jolted many into a new moral consensus – that colonial-era plunder, long shielded by museum walls, was no longer defensible – and triggered a wave of restitution across Europe and North America. This intellectual shift, fuelled by years of work by historians and museum professionals, fundamentally changed the “rules of the game”, Huo said. Since Macron’s pledge, France has returned 26 royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey to Benin in 2021 and the Djidji Ayokwe drum to Ivory Coast in 2025, though on a case-by-case basis. It is not known exactly how many Chinese relics are in France, but according to a tally by Chinese media, the Chinese Museum inside the Palace of Fontainebleau alone houses more than 1,000 Chinese artefacts from the 1860 campaign, including cloisonne, jade and furniture. However, artefacts housed in France will not be automatically returned just because a country has asked for them. The authority granted to the government by the law is strictly defined, as are new safeguards. Weng Huainan, director of the National Museum of China’s library department, pointed out several other barriers in the text. The law clearly states that artefacts seized by armed forces will not be returned if their nature, purpose or use has contributed to military activities. Artefacts that have not undergone proper archaeological excavation or scientific examination will not be eligible for return. If a Chinese imperial sword or suit of armour is classified as a “military asset” rather than “art”, France could legally refuse to return it, Weng told Xiakedao, a social media account operated by the Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily, in late April. Meanwhile, China bears the burden of proof and is required to provide “ironclad evidence” of illicit appropriation, which remains immensely difficult because of a lack of formal archival records. The law also sets up a rigorous double-lock system, where every claim must pass through two committees: a bilateral scientific committee staffed by French experts and scholars from the artefact’s country of origin; and France’s national restitution committee made up of representatives of the national museums, the government and parliament. But it still turns restitution from a virtual impossibility into a realistic possibility. “Details such as records of the item’s entry, photographs and provenance will be made public, and this will benefit China’s long-standing efforts to find concrete evidence of theft,” Weng said. A tally by China Cultural Relics Academy says over 10 million Chinese artefacts have been illicitly sent overseas, while Unesco puts the figure at 1.64 million which are held in over 200 museums across 47 countries. Since 2012, China has recovered more than 2,300 relics by a multipronged strategy of diplomatic negotiation, law enforcement cooperation, transnational litigation and donations. In 2013, for example, French billionaire François-Henri Pinault bought and donated the bronze rat and rabbit heads looted from the Old Summer Palace in 1860 to China. On May 7, the Chinese foreign ministry expressed strong support for France’s new law, describing it as a model of “responsibility and commitment”. Experts have advised China to analyse the new law’s provisions to lay the groundwork for future claims, start tracing the origins of lost artefacts now held by France, collect evidence, and prioritise claims based on difficulty and value. Germany has been the most proactive in Europe on the issue, returning more than 1,000 Benin Bronzes and restituting other colonial-era artefacts to Nigeria and Tanzania. The Netherlands returned 119 bronzes last year, and has implemented formal policies to return hundreds of artefacts to Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Britain, however, remains among the most restrictive due to legal obstacles. The governments of Spain and Portugal have also shown limited interest in restitution. For China, nowhere is the case more complex than in Japan, which has made almost no effort to return the estimated millions of items looted during its wartime invasion of China, and often denied or obscured artefacts’ origin, observers say.

As France passes law on returning loot, should China pop the champagne?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}While the law should make returning artefacts easier, it sets high standards of evidence which may be hard to meet

While the law should make returning artefacts easier, it sets high standards of evidence which may be hard to meet