Inside the dim, glass-walled galleries of the Musée du Quai Branly, the ghosts of the French empire are kept at a meticulous relative humidity of 50%. For decades, these objects, including carved ancestral figures from Gabon, royal sceptres from Dahomey, and reliquaries from Madagascar, existed in a state of ‘suspended animation’. They were protected by a legal doctrine as unyielding as the museum’s reinforced glass: inaliénabilité. Rooted in the 1566 Edict of Moulins, which sought to […]