This lecture, cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was recorded in Berlin by Pr Bénédicte Savoy with the help of cameraman and editor Timur El Rafie.
The first measures to put an end to the culture of booty, intimately linked to the practice of war, are ratified by the main European powers at the International Peace Conference held in The Hague in 1899. These provisions, which notably prohibit the confiscation of all " communal property, establishments devoted to worship, charity and instruction, the arts and sciences, even those belonging to the State ", however, apply only to the signatory states of the treaty, and not to their colonies, where " events of colonial spoliation " were regularly carried out, in various configurations, by the British, French, Prussian or Belgian armies in the last third of the 19th and early 20th centuries .
They organized the systematic looting of precious objects which, to avoid being squandered among the soldiers, were often inventoried on the spot before being transferred to European museum collections, where they are sometimes still displayed as war trophies, when their bloody history has not been erased with the passing of time.
