A law designed to protect,
called upon to transmit.

The French regime of the public domain for movable property follows a logic of conservation. The cultural objects within it are, by construction, inalienable, imprescriptible and immune from seizure. In consolidating this regime within the Code of public property in 1995 and 2004, the legislator meant to give the community a robust instrument of protection. That instrument proved its defensive worth.

It had not been conceived for what was asked of it from 2020 onward. The course opened that year, which saw France transfer to receiving States several significant works, among them the twenty-six pieces of the Béhanzin Treasure to the Republic of Benin and the sabre known as El Hadj Omar Tall’s to the Republic of Senegal, called for the opposite movement: to remove an object from the public domain in order to transfer it to another State. The ordinary law, as it applied to the collections of the museums of France, offered no general route to that end.

The legislator therefore proceeded case by case. A special statute in December 2020, another in December 2023 for human remains. A third in July 2023 for property spoliated during the Occupation. To each operation, its text. To each text, its debates, its parliamentary calendar, its political arbitrations.

What this method produced

From the standpoint of the French State, the method was tenable. It secured parliamentary control over each operation, preserved legislative sovereignty and left the executive in command of the calendar. Three valuable qualities on a politically sensitive subject.

From the standpoint of the receiving States and partner institutions, it produced something else. A structural unpredictability. No restitution was secured until its text had been passed. Negotiations begun upstream could, at any moment, be suspended by a parliamentary postponement or a change of majority. The curatorial and logistical work, which takes several years, was conducted under a constant resolutory condition.

The imbalance was not merely awkward. It was counterproductive. Part of the political value of a restitution lies in the reliability of the process. Yet the diplomatic commitment precedes the actual transfer by years. The distance between promise and execution, measured at times in presidential terms, eroded the force of the gesture. It is to this fragility that the Law of 9 May 2026 set out to respond.

From the special statute to the general regime.

The Law of 9 May 2026 replaced this succession of texts with a single route. It writes into the Code of cultural heritage a new section devoted to cultural property that has been the object of unlawful appropriation (articles L. 115-10 to L. 115-16). What once required, for each operation, an ad hoc parliamentary decision now falls under a permanent regime. Restitution ceases to be a negotiated exception and becomes a settled procedure.

The means chosen is a derogation, not a rupture. The principle of inalienability of the public domain remains; the law derogates from it for a precise category of objects, those meeting the criteria it sets, and for that purpose alone (article L. 115-10, by reference to article L. 3111-1 of the Code of public property). The legislator measured what it was doing. The ordinary rules on removal from the public domain (déclassement), as they applied to the collections of the museums of France, presupposed that an object had lost its public interest before it could leave the collections. Restitution asks the reverse: it bears on eminent pieces, whose value is not in question. To let them go without denying their importance, a footing was needed that existing law could not supply.

What the law transfers

The mechanism rests in a single act. The exit from the public domain is pronounced by decree of the Conseil d’État (article L. 115-14), following an examination entrusted to a scientific committee formed jointly with the requesting State, whose report is made public, and then submitted to the public and reasoned opinion of a national commission for restitution attached to the High Council of the Museums of France (articles L. 115-13 and L. 430-1-1). But the decree does not merely declassify. It carries the transfer: whoever the initial owner may have been, ownership of the object passes to the requesting State (article L. 115-10). In one and the same movement, and in domestic law, the law settles both the exit from French public property and the passage of ownership.

This deserves to be kept in mind, for it shifts the question. Once the law is applied, the object has left France and belongs to the State that asked for it. Domestic law has done all it could do alone.

What the law bounds

The regime is precise, and therefore circumscribed. A restitution may bear only on an object coming from the present-day territory of the requesting State, whose unlawful appropriation is established or presumed by serious, precise and concurring indications, and which occurred between 20 November 1815 and 23 April 1972 (article L. 115-11). Outside that window, the regime does not apply. Objects from archaeological excavation-sharing, and certain spoils of war, are expressly set aside (article L. 115-11).

The request, finally, is reserved to a State. The law recognises that a State may act on behalf of a human group that remains present on its territory (article L. 115-10): the dimension of peoples is not ignored. But it passes through the mediation of a State. A group that has none, or that its own does not represent, is left without a route of its own.

There remains what the law names without organising. It charges the Government with favouring the development of a strengthened cultural, scientific and museographic cooperation between France and the requesting States (article 1, IV). The intention is set down. The instruments are not. The text knows how to remove an object and to transfer it; it says nothing of what is woven, around that transfer, between the two States and over time.

Restitution, a composite act under the new framework.

With the framework in place, the nature of the operation deserves to be taken up again, for it governs what follows. Restitution fits properly into none of the categories the law knows. It is not an expropriation: there is no expropriating party, the decision proceeds from the State itself. It is not a diplomatic donation: it rests not on courtesy between States but on a reasoning about the legitimacy of possession. It is not a sale: the object leaves without consideration, economic value not being the point. It remains sui generis, yet it is no longer an act without a framework: the Law of 9 May has inscribed it in a regime of its own (articles L. 115-10 to L. 115-16).

This act unfolds in three moments, and it is this unfolding, more than any qualification, that shows what remains to be done.

The first moment is political. The French State recognises that the holding of an object, until then lawful, must end. This recognition is almost always reached between two States, by which the principle and the contours of the transfer are agreed. The law has not altered it: it remains the initial spring, and it remains bilateral.

The second moment is legal. It is the one by which the object leaves the French public domain. Yesterday it was built each time as though it were unprecedented, by a statute of the moment whose course had to be run anew for each operation. This was the fragile point of the arrangement. The Law of 9 May directed its effort precisely there: the exit now rests on a decree of the Conseil d’État, at the end of a stable procedure, and the transfer of ownership follows from it under article L. 115-10. What had been the weak link has become the settled one.

The third moment is material and relational. The object out of the public domain and become the property of the requesting State, its handover must be arranged, its entry into a patrimony, its conservation, its life. It is the most visible moment, and now the least equipped. For it no longer depends on France alone: it engages two States, over time, on what the object becomes and on what its restitution opens between them. Domestic law has no hold on this part. The law senses it, inviting the Government to favour a strengthened cooperation (article 1, IV); but it stops at the invitation.

The centre of gravity has thus shifted. As long as the framework was missing, all attention bore on the exit from the public domain. The framework once in place, the difficulty slides downstream, towards what is at stake once the object has gone. That is where the real questions now lie, and where French law, having done its part, gives way to other instruments.

What the law leaves to the States.

The law settled what fell to French law. It did not settle, because it could not alone, what falls to the agreement between two States. A transfer of ownership states a result; it says nothing of the conditions in which it is accomplished, nor of what it commits. Those conditions are settled elsewhere, in the convention that France and the requesting State conclude around the restitution.

The agreements reached to date were each drafted in their own context, with their own solutions. In each instance, their balance derives from the very terms of the negotiation. It is also a source of uncertainty for the partner State, which enters negotiations without knowing towards what balance they will lead. A reference convention, of non-binding force, would lift that uncertainty. It would not impose itself: it would offer a negotiable starting point, which is, in diplomatic matters, a considerable accelerator.

What such an instrument is meant to carry comes down to a few objects, all absent from the law: the precise terms of the transfer and the handover, the conservation commitments undertaken by the receiving State, the treatment of scientific and documentary questions, the conditions under which the object may or may not later circulate. So many questions that the decree of exit from the public domain does not settle, and that no provision settles in its place.

This instrument requires no new law. It belongs to the conventional practice of States, immediately available. It touches none of the bodies the law created: the scientific committee examines, the national commission gives its opinion, the Conseil d’État rules; the convention is woven downstream, outside the field in which those bodies intervene within the restitution procedure. It is the natural extension of an objective the law set down without equipping, when it charges the Government with favouring a strengthened cooperation (article 1, IV) without saying by what means.

Keeping alive what restitution opens.

There remains the last moment, the longest. A restitution is not a final settlement. The day the object changes owner closes nothing: it opens a relationship between the State that has transmitted and the one that receives. That relationship has its forms, already practised: training of curators, long-term loans, joint exhibitions, shared restorations, common research. It is conducted today case by case, without a framework to give it continuity.

A protocol of cooperation, annexed to the convention of transfer, would give it that continuity. It would fix, for a renewable duration, the mutual commitments of the two States on what the object becomes and on what they undertake together around it. Like the convention, it belongs to the practice of States and can be put in place without a new law: it extends, over time, what the strengthened cooperation called for by the text (article 1, IV) leaves to be invented.

It is there that the true reach of a restitution is measured. The transfer is an instant; the law has made it secure. But its political value does not lie in the instant. It lies in what it inaugurates, and in the faithfulness with which the two States keep it alive thereafter. An object returned without a relationship to carry it is a gesture that exhausts itself on the day it is made.