The Musée d’Orsay now has a room it has never had before. Thirteen paintings and sculptures hang on its walls, each recovered from Germany or Austria after 1945, each still waiting for an heir to come forward. The gallery opened on 6 May.
Its title, painted across the entrance, asks a question French institutions have spent decades avoiding: À qui appartiennent ces œuvres? To whom do these works belong?
A Law that Changes the Pace
The colonial side of this reckoning moved just as fast.
France’s parliament passed legislation this week to simplify the return of artefacts looted during the colonial era, with the lower house approving the bill on 6 May and the Senate following on 7 May. The law removes the old requirement that each object from the national collection be returned through its own specific statute. That procedural change is more significant than it sounds.
France had long acknowledged the principle of restitution whilst making the process so slow and bespoke that every return looked exceptional. The new law targets objects acquired between 1815 and 1972 and allows the government to act by decree rather than fight piecemeal parliamentary battles each time. Speaking at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi on Monday, President Macron described what France had built as “irreversible and unstoppable.” That is ambitious language. It also carries an admission: if the process needed to be made irreversible, that is because for years it was too easy to stall.
France still holds tens of thousands of artefacts taken from its colonial empire, according to Africanews. Restitution requests have already arrived from Algeria, Mali, and Benin, with more expected now that the legal bottleneck has loosened. A recent illustration shows how far the old system fell short: parliament approved the return of a talking drum, taken from the Ebrie people of Ivory Coast by colonial troops in 1916, only in 2025, and the object was returned this March. That single object required its own law.
The new framework is designed to stop France needing to repeat that performance every time.
Moral Theatre, Then and Now
The old structure had a perverse elegance.
France could celebrate each restitution as a historic gesture precisely because the machinery made normal returns so difficult. Every object became a ceremony; every ceremony let the state look generous. Meanwhile, the underlying imbalance stayed intact. Macron made his original pledge to African audiences during a speech in Ouagadougou in 2017, promising to return cultural heritage within five years. Nine years passed before the law followed.
There is still no reason to be uncritical of the new framework. The law requires restitution requests to come from states, not communities directly, and bilateral scientific committees will assess each case before a decree can be issued. Government discretion remains a political filter. Easier returns do not guarantee generous decisions. But one old excuse has been removed: France can no longer claim that its national collections were structurally too rigid for routine restitution.
2,200 Works Still Waiting
The Orsay gallery tells a different but related story.
The 2,200 MNR works in France, known as Musées Nationaux Récupération or National Museums Recovery, were retrieved from Germany and Austria after 1945 and placed inside French national museums in the early 1950s, pending identification of their rightful owners. France does not own them. It holds them in trust. The Musée d’Orsay alone holds 225 such pieces.
Between 1954 and 1993, France returned exactly four works from the entire MNR collection. Four, across four decades, and the delay was not a question of information but of will. The Orsay has returned 15 since 1994, the most recent being works by Alfred Sisley and Auguste Renoir returned to the heirs of Grégoire Schusterman in 2024. The new gallery, funded by a one-million-euro donation from the American Friends of the Musée d’Orsay, is meant to change that tempo. Six Franco-German researchers led by Inès Rotermund-Reynard, the Orsay’s head of provenance research, are now working through the files. Thirty cases are currently believed likely to result in restitutions.
Inside the gallery, the histories are not abstract. A Degas ballroom scene belonged to Fernand Ochsé, a Jewish collector deported to Auschwitz and killed. A Renoir portrait was sold to a Cologne museum in November 1941; no record names the seller. Curator François Blanchetière put it plainly: “There is no statute of limitations on these crimes.”
One Republic, Two Histories of Delay
France has not merged these two histories. Colonial theft and Nazi plunder belong to different legal architectures, different moral registers, different sets of claimants. The new colonial restitution law builds on framework legislation adopted in 2023, which covered goods looted from Jewish families during the occupation and the repatriation of human remains from public collections. The Orsay gallery fits that same expanding architecture.
What has changed is not the distinction between the two histories but the cost of maintaining the delay. African states kept pressing. Historians kept tracing. Families kept searching. The diplomatic and moral price of hanging on grew obvious enough that France moved. That is the honest account of how this week’s law came to exist, and it matters for judging what comes next.
Both histories also force the same institutional question. Nazi plunder left behind archives, labels, and transport records. Colonial appropriation left behind imperial collection habits and deliberate silence. Either way, museums are now required to become investigators of their own legitimacy. The Orsay is doing that visibly, hanging the canvas backs on the wall so visitors can read the stamps and transit codes. The colonial restitution law asks for something similar: a formal admission that the acquisition history of French collections is not settled, and that the state is not the final authority on what it owns.
Late, but Structural
France is not only returning Africa’s art.
It is also being pushed to rethink the museum logic through which ownership was once stabilised, whether the objects came from empire or came back from Germany after the war. That is a larger shift than any single restitution, and it is overdue.
This week’s law should be read with some scepticism as well as approval. It is a real advance, and it is also late. France has accepted that restitution cannot remain an occasional exception dressed as magnanimity. The harder test is how far that acceptance holds once the easiest applause has passed and the requests become harder to grant.
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