The New Yorker:

Bénédicte Savoy is Europe’s leading advocate for the repatriation of cultural heritage. Now, in the wake of a shocking heist, she’s bringing her ideas to the Louvre.

By Julian Lucas

In October, thieves broke into the Louvre and purloined a priceless collection of jewelry—including a pearl tiara, set with thousands of diamonds, that had belonged to Empress Eugénie. The incident was memed around the world, even by the German company that manufactured the burglars’ ladder; in France, a country where cultural heritage is practically a state religion, it was treated like a terrorist attack. Not a few observers also saw a teachable moment: Didn’t the Louvre hold thousands of treasures stolen from other peoples, who must have felt much as the French do now? The museum’s founding director, Dominique-Vivant Denon, travelled across Europe with Napoleon’s armies, confiscating Raphaels and Veroneses in the name of “freedom.” More than a century of plunder followed. Empress Eugénie herself got in on the action. In 1860, when a Franco-British army sacked the Qing emperor’s Summer Palace—a wound so fresh in China that Jackie Chan starred in a 2009 film about it—she accepted a share of the booty.

Nine such displacements are chronicled in a bracing new book written by the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy, in collaboration with Jeanne Pham Tran, and newly translated into English by Andrew Brown: “Who Owns Beauty?” Savoy would know. For years, she’s been not only asking but concretely answering that question, first as a scholar of museums, and then as an architect of the ongoing global shift toward restitution. In 2018, Emmanuel Macron asked Savoy and Felwine Sarr, a Senegalese intellectual, to advise on France’s repatriation of art works to its former colonies in Africa. The resulting Sarr-Savoy report led not only to the homecoming of sculptures from the Dahomey kingdom—immortalized in a fantastical documentary by Mati Diop—but to a wave of returns from other European countries, particularly of the Benin Bronzes, whose saga will soon anchor a romantic thriller by Ava DuVernay.

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