122 French Museum Collections: An Inalienable Patrimony By Yves-Bernard Debie A tweet in the beginning of March 2017 made public France’s refusal the previous December of a restitution demand by the Benin government made in the summer of 2016. The demand concerned objects from the ancient kingdom of Dahomey that were taken by the French army at the end of the nineteenth century. The French response was unequivocal: The objects to which you allude have been the public property of the French state for a long time— more than a century in some cases. In keeping with the laws as they stand, they cannot be seized and are subject to the principles of inalienability and imprescriptibility. As such, they cannot be restituted. The French Minister of Foreign Affairs also reminded his Beninese counterpart that France ratifi ed the 1970 UNESCO convention, which is not retroactive, and has applied it since 1997, while Benin only began to adhere to it on March 1, 2017. Legal experts can only welcome this decision. The reasoning behind it is clear and is based in law. Its principal merit is that it protects French museum collections and their universal vocation. Above and beyond the reference to the UNESCO convention and its non-retroactive nature, or to notions of imprescriptibility (what can and cannot be seized), the inalienable nature of the French national collections is itself a suffi cient cause to justify France’s refusal. The rigor of these principles has been clearly articulated in this column before: According to the fi rst paragraph of article L. 451-5 of the Code of the French Patrimony, “the ART + law
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