Abstract
The legal framework that accompanied Napoleon's twofold departure, set out in the Peace Treaty signed in Paris on May 30 1814 and in the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna, never specifically addressed the fate of the annexed artistic heritage, and gave rise to lively debate between opponents and supporters of restitutions.
The former, legalists, relied on legal arguments to claim that the Allied repossessions were unjust and illegal. By invoking the right of booty, which has historically sealed consent to the transfer of captured works, they are able to shift the question of the works' geographical origin to that of their legal origin : were they taken as part of military campaigns that gave rise to armistices or treaties ? Was their appropriation formalized by any legal title ? Did the people stripped by this appropriation agree to it, and did they sign and countersign it ?
On the contrary, the arguments of the moralists in favor of restitution are not based on the law of war, but on international law, on the law of men, and therefore on a moral level. They were interested not in the legal origin of the works, in the sense of how they were acquired, but in their title of ownership, which they linked to the question of the territories: in their view, it is only by considering these pieces according to their origin that a balance of justice can be re-established, on the one hand, and a calming of spirits in Europe, on the other, insofar as keeping the heritage of countries formerly subjugated by France in Paris would prevent any reconciliation between them.
The link between law and morality, as it was formulated in 1815, prefigures other approaches to the question of restitutions, developed in particular at the end of the 19th century by jurists of international law, who linked it to the idea of humanitarian progress.
