The Institut du Monde Arabe sits on the Left Bank of the Seine, its southern facade fitted with 240 mechanical apertures that open and close like camera irises in response to light, a building designed to feel simultaneously Arab and French, ancient and modern. It was an appropriate setting.
On Monday, its newest exhibition opened with nearly 400 objects spanning 9,000 years, including an intact Bronze Age necropolis dated to around 1800 BC that had never before been shown to the public, believed to contain the tombs of kings Abi-Shemou and Yapi-Shemou-Abi, along with ancient ship anchors and funerary vessels, some of which still contain human remains.
Anne-Claire Legendre, the institute’s newly appointed first female president, described the logistics of assembling it as requiring “a great deal of determination, a great deal of courage and great trust between the teams, in a particularly complicated context.” The complicated context was the ongoing war. The objects were transported out of Beirut under bombing.
What Macron Said and Where He Said It
The opening on Monday brought together French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, Culture Minister Catherine Pégard, Lebanese Culture Minister Ghassan Salamé, and diplomats and cultural figures from across the Arab world and Europe.
Legendre’s appointment itself carries a separate story: her predecessor Jack Lang, who led the institute for over a decade, resigned last month amid a French police investigation into his alleged links to financier Jeffrey Epstein, which he has denied. Macron spoke alongside Salamé and made no attempt to keep the event within the boundaries of archaeology.
“At a time that certain people want to have us believe that security can only be achieved by invading a scary neighbour,” he said, “Lebanon reminds us of just one thing: the force of universalism.” He then added: “No occupation, no form of colonization, neither here, nor in the West Bank, nor anywhere else, can guarantee anyone’s safety.” The remark came as Israel’s offensive in Lebanon had killed more than 1,000 Lebanese according to Lebanese officials, and as Israeli ground troops maintained a presence in the south in what the Israeli military described as a limited incursion.
Byblos as Diplomatic Argument
Macron’s choice of setting was precise.
Byblos has been inhabited since around 6900 BC and is widely regarded as the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city, linking Egypt’s pharaohs, Mesopotamia, the Aegean civilisations, and later the Phoenicians and the Romans across more than seven millennia of trade, language, and early urban life. France’s relationship with Byblos is not only diplomatic: French archaeological missions helped shape the modern understanding of the site from the late nineteenth century onward, and the exhibition was developed jointly with Lebanon’s Ministry of Culture and its General Directorate of Antiquities.
Lebanese Culture Minister Salamé captured the register the exhibition was operating in: “Preserving such a rich heritage does not consist only in protecting stones. It is about keeping a spirit alive. What is threatened can still be saved.”That sentence functions simultaneously as a statement about archaeology, about Lebanese sovereignty, and about the purpose of holding a cultural event in a foreign capital while a war is underway at home.
France’s relationship with Lebanon runs deeper than any single exhibition. The two countries share a post-Ottoman history shaped by the French Mandate, the confessional political system France helped design, and a cultural and linguistic affinity that French governments have consistently used as diplomatic capital. That history is not uncomplicated: Lebanese intellectuals and politicians have long debated the difference between French partnership and French patronage, and cultural events organised in Paris around Lebanese identity can revive those tensions quickly.
What changes in wartime is the emotional weight of the gesture. When a country is being bombed, having its oldest city exhibited in a protected capital carries a different charge than it would in peacetime. It signals that someone in Europe is paying attention, and that the attention is being expressed in the language Lebanon has historically used to make itself legible to the world.
What Heritage Does in Wartime
The Kesrouan strike on Monday marked a new geographical extension of the conflict into the Christian districts north of Beirut, areas that had until then remained largely outside the direct combat zone. After Hazmieh and the outskirts of Beirut, the Kesrouan region entered the threat zone, intensifying anxiety around the Christian communities of Mount Lebanon and the wider spillover of the conflict into previously untouched areas.
Heritage diplomacy of the kind Macron staged on Monday works by making a country’s history legible to audiences who might otherwise engage with it only through casualty statistics and displacement figures. It frames Lebanon as ancient, coherent, and culturally indispensable at the precise moment when its physical continuity is under most pressure. Macron confirmed he would attend emergency heritage talks dedicated to protecting archaeological sites in Lebanon threatened by ongoing strikes, a commitment that transforms the exhibition from a cultural event into the opening move of a diplomatic intervention.
The stones are in Paris. The bombs are still falling on the country they camefrom.
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Read also:
Lebanon Deserves Headlines for Its Wonders, Not Wars
Baalbek Clans and the Return of the State
France: The End of Macron’s Middle Ground
