Abstract
To whom should be returned? This question was very much on everyone's mind around 1800, as many of the pieces seized in European countries had not been taken from museums. When a piece is seized from a public museum, the issue is fairly straightforward. The works must be returned to the museum whose collections have been annexed. On the other hand, the problem is far more complex when books or paintings have been taken from castles or religious establishments that have been destroyed or secularized by France. What should be done with these objects ? Should they be placed in university libraries, which do not yet exist and which will have to be created ? Should they be entrusted to the care of other nations who already have other means of preserving them ?
The question " to whom to return ? " thus has as its corollary the interrogation " where to return ? " Intertemporality, a concept that designates events that have occurred in the intervening period, is of vital importance to all these questions of art object displacement, insofar as the period of absence of works from their place of origin often sees the emergence of new frontiers, new relations of state power or new heritage landscapes.
In 1815, for example, works seized from museums were taken in hand by new states that had not always owned them, and had to decide, in conjunction with their respective publics and after deliberations that sometimes lasted several years, whether they should be recontextualized in their place of origin or musealized, and if so, whether it would be better to bring them together in a single museum space or to distribute them across several centers throughout the country.
