Conférence - Prendre à l'Ennemi Rendre au Vainqueur

Conference moderated by Xavier Perrot, legal historian, Université de Limoges, and organized as part of the "Récits décoloniaux. Should museums be burned?

Cultural heritage has always been an object of covetousness, not so much commercial as symbolic, with all its imaginary and ideological implications, whether in the triumph of the victorious sensor, in the ideological battle waged by the missionary, in the scientific capture of the scholar, or in the appropriation of the collector and merchant. Since ancient times, several types of motivation have been behind the forced transfer of cultural heritage.
This talk will focus more specifically on the ways in which cultural goods were captured during periods of war and colonization, shedding light on the variety of the lexicon of appropriation in these contexts, from legal loot to prohibited plunder. But alongside the long-standing right to take the property of enemies and others, from the 19th century onwards, a right of restitution was gradually forged, and is now the focus of much attention in museums, in civil society and among claimant states. After the restitutions of 1815 following the French revolutionary and imperial captures, throughout Europe the right to booty, ius pradae, became an increasingly contested right, and the restitution of property on the sole basis of victory, a principle progressively legalized in the form of the right of restitution to the original owner. In two centuries, it was no longer "victory" that formed the basis for repossession, but law.
The two issues - taking and returning - go hand in hand, and cannot be analyzed without looking back over the long history of wartime practices and the place of certain precious objects in conflicts, and then in museums, which raises the disturbing question of whether we shouldn't burn them...

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