This summer saw a landmark law passed by the French Assembly stating that all Nazi-looted works of art acquired between 1933 and 1945 will be restored to their rightful owners. Seventy-eight years after the war’s end, the new law finally offers hope to families who did not claim missing works before they became state property. Far-reaching, the law will allow stolen art, books and other cultural property in France’s inalienable public domain to be returned to its rightful owners. Previously, unclaimed works became the property of state-owned museums and were therefore unsaleable under French law.
Commissioned by Emmanuel Macron and written by former Louvre director Jean-Luc Martinez, this new law concerns any assets in the French public collections that may have been the subject of spoliation by ‘Nazi Germany, by the authorities of the territories that it occupied, controlled or influenced and by the French State’ regardless of the place of the plunder.
Passed unanimously by the National Assembly on June 29 and officially adopted by Parliament on July 1, it is the first law to officially recognise the specific government-sponsored theft of Jewish cultural property by the French State under the Vichy regime.
‘It’s a sign of tremendous progress’ said Elizabeth Campbell, Director of the Centre for Art Collection Ethics at Denver University, describing the new bill as a move from ‘avoidance, avoidance, avoidance, justifications for holding on to Nazi-looted art, the inalienability of works in collections, to unanimous votes.’
During the war, an estimated 100,000 works of art were stolen from France alone. Some 60,000 were found in Germany and brought back to France after the war. The Artistic Recovery Commission returned nearly 45,000 to their owners by 1949. Approximately 2,200 remained unclaimed, however, and were labelled ‘Musée Nationaux Récupération’ (MNR) and therefore ‘inalienable’.
Restitution of these unclaimed items has been extremely complicated, mainly due to France’s Heritage Code which holds that collections in its public museums are shared public property and therefore ‘inalienable.’ This new framework law provides an exception, allowing for Nazi- or Vichy-looted artworks in the country’s public collections to be transferred to their rightful owner without the approval of parliament.
‘This is a law of action, ensuring that the duty of remembrance and vigilance translates into concrete legal action,’ said The Minister for Culture, Rima Abdul Malak. Authorities now need only the permission of a special committee – the Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation – to start the return process.
The law is one of three proposed amendments to French restitution laws expected this year. The latter two will focus on returning human remains and works of art acquired during the colonial era. In her January address, Malak said, ‘I hope 2023 will be a year of decisive progress for restitutions,’ adding that France’s approach to its own history is ‘neither one of denial nor repentance, but one of recognition.’
For decades France and its public museums have been criticised for their inaction or outright refusal to return artworks to Jewish families. During what academics refer to as the ‘trente silencieuses’ or ‘silent years,’ the thirty years following the 1950s, only 4 MNR artworks were returned.
Fabienne Colboc, the rapporteur charged with studying and amending the new restitution law, said: ‘Even if it’s difficult … even if we’re ashamed, we need to recognise what the French state did during the period.’
France’s evolving restitution efforts are reflected in the 2020 case of Claire Gimpel, a Jewish French woman from Paris who learnt in 2010 that her grandfather, René Gimpel, a French Jewish resistance fighter killed in Neuengamme concentration camp, had had a substantial art collection looted by the Gestapo.
Her discovery led to a decade of legal battles to determine whether the paintings were forcibly sold and how to prove this. Three years ago, the Gimpel heirs were finally reunited with their artworks. ‘Mentalities are evolving’ Gimpel said. ‘Sure, it’s 80 years [since the end of World War II]. But it’s better late than never.’
Picture via Memorial de la Shoah