The New French Law on Restitution
France now stands at the edge of an unfamiliar, but long-awaited, horizon. In July 2025, Culture Minister Rachida Dati introduced a draft law that would, if passed, make it far easier for looted or misappropriated cultural artifacts to be returned to their countries of origin. For the first time, restitution would not require the exhausting ritual of special parliamentary legislation for each object. Instead, a decree approved by the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, would suffice. This is more than a legal innovation; it is a slow awakening of conscience, a soft acknowledgment that objects wrenched from communities in the age of empire were not just commodities but fragments of soul.
To picture this, imagine a carved wooden mask lying under glass in a Parisian museum, its features frozen, its story muffled in a foreign language. In the law’s passage, there is the possibility of this mask leaving the sterile silence of its display case and once again meeting the rhythms of dance, drum, and ritual. Restitution is not about filling empty halls with guilt, but about filling living communities with memory.
How the Law Will Work
The proposed law, as it stands, covers cultural property acquired between 1815 and 1972. It creates a pathway for countries to request restitution directly, provided they can demonstrate that the objects were looted, transferred under conditions of inequality, or acquired in contexts of colonial domination. Requests would be submitted to a bilateral scientific commission, composed of experts from France and the claimant state. If the commission finds the claim valid, the French government can issue a decree authorising the return, subject to approval by the Conseil d’État.
Not everything is eligible. Archaeological finds from official excavations, scientific exchanges, or military objects fall outside its scope. Public records are also excluded. Importantly, only recognised states, not communities or ethnic groups, can make claims. This means that while Nigeria may demand the return of a looted mask from Ife, the descendants of the artisans who crafted it cannot petition directly. Critics see this as a narrowing of restitution’s spirit, reducing a moral act to a transaction between states. Still, the law simplifies a notoriously clunky process and signals a deeper willingness to move from symbolic returns to systemic ones.
The Critiques and the Hopes
Scepticism abounds. It may still be argued that the law keeps France in the driver’s seat, deciding which objects qualify and which claims are “worthy.” In setting temporal boundaries, it also risks ignoring injustices that fall outside its neat historical frame. Yet even with these restrictions, the significance is undeniable. The movement is not static. Already, iconic pieces such as Djidji Ayôkwé, a revered Ivorian ritual drum, have been returned. If passed, the law could accelerate similar journeys for thousands of objects, each carrying with it the weight of erased histories.
There is a particular kind of poetry in this. Even though stolen/looted objects do not speak, yet they testify to their displacement. A bronze head from the ancient city of Ife does not cry out, but in its silence is the memory of rituals broken by colonial plunder and the greed of its excavators. A richly painted Buddhist scroll from Tibet does not breathe, but when returned, it becomes a bridge between past and present. To return such objects is to acknowledge that colonial violence did not just fracture borders, but also severed rituals, memories, and continuities of identity.
A Vision for India: Reclaiming Heritage, Rekindling Stories
For India, France’s step carries both inspiration and urgency. India has, for decades, sought the repatriation of its cultural treasures including medieval Jain statues auctioned in London, Pala-era sculptures held in private European collections, and sacred manuscripts scattered across libraries abroad. But the process has been piecemeal, often opaque or lost in diplomatic quagmires. France’s approach offers a model: a legal architecture that balances state sovereignty with moral redress, enabling restitution without endless parliamentary interventions.
However, as the claimant state, India can only do so much to facilitate the identification of stolen/looted artifacts from its different parts and relay them to the United Kingdom, which, as the chief colonial power and plunderer holds most looted artifacts of Indian origin. The hope with the French law, if passed, is that it would gradually nudge other former colonising countries, to also facilitate a similar process. A similar law would have, for instance, made it much easier for the statue of Lord Shiva to come back to India, a process that was ultimately completed after an extremely spirited legal dispute in English courts.
Imagine, for instance, the famed Koh-i-Noor diamond leaving the Tower of London and returning to Indian soil—not as an emblem of possession, but as an acknowledgment of history. Or a Kashmiri terracotta panel, carved with scenes of Buddhist lore, returning from a European museum to a valley still alive with those ancient echoes. Such moments would not just repatriate objects but revive faith, identity, and local pride. Both India and the United Kingdom could draw from France’s model to craft its own restitution pathways, both for its own treasures and for those held within India but claimed by other communities of South Asia.
More Than Policy
In the end, the French restitution law is more than a piece of legislation. It is an act of humility, an acceptance that history’s wounds cannot be healed by silence. It reminds us that heritage is not merely about preservation in glass cases, but about continuity across generations. A mask in a museum is an artifact. A mask returned to its community is a story, a rhythm.
And perhaps that is the lesson for all of us. Restitution is not simply about the ownership of objects, but about ownership of stories. Who gets to tell them? Who gets to inherit them? France’s law does not answer all these questions, but it dares to ask them in public. That, in itself, is a beginning. And beginnings, however tentative, are where history finally starts to heal.