Abstract
While the restitutions episode came to an end in 1815-1816, some pieces were not returned to their rightful owners, and can still be seen today on the walls of several French museums.
To understand the stakes involved in France's retention of these objects, it is of the utmost interest to measure the importance attached to them by Dominique Vivant-Denon. This importance is due first and foremost to their rarity. This was particularly true of the pieces by so-called "primitive" painters, which he had gone to Italy to seek out with great energy, and which the Italian emissaries agreed to give up because they did not yet perceive their value. Similarly, while the exchange of Veronese's Marriage at Cana for Lebrun's Madeleine was officially negotiated with the Austrian curators on the grounds of the work's extreme fragility, which would have made it untransportable in its current state, the very high symbolic and economic value of the painting, estimated at over million francs, is no doubt a factor in the Paris museum director's desire not to part with it.
On another level, the Chaptal decree of 1802, which marked the creation in fifteen provincial towns of museums whose collections were sourced from what Dominique Vivant-Denon has called the " imperial superfluous ", also played a role in keeping certain works in France. Indeed, when the Allies entered Paris in 1814-1815, they did not examine the provincial collections and, for their restitution, submitted to the relative goodwill of the museum administration.
After a few years of silence, this question was taken up by historians, art historians and librarians in the years 1820 to 1840, not in France, where the subject was of little interest, but in the countries that had suffered losses, where efforts were made to determine what had not been returned. In the absence of reliable sources, legends about the number of works that remained in France began to swell all over Europe. These legends were not disproved by the publications of French museum catalogs, and were revived with each new conflict. During the two world wars, German administrations, libraries and museums launched a number of initiatives to locate and recover works taken before 1815 and not returned.
The notion of national heritage on which these claims were based gave way, however, in the post-war construction of Europe, to the idea of a common cultural heritage that erased all discussion of the restitution of works of art in Europe, and also constituted a powerful argument against the claims of former colonized countries in this respect.
