"In October, thieves broke into the Louvre and purloined a priceless collection of jewelry—including a pearl tiara, set with thousands of diamonds, that had belonged to Empress Eugénie. The incident was memed around the world, even by the German company that manufactured the burglars' ladder; in France, a country where cultural heritage is practically a state religion, it was treated like a terrorist attack."
"The museum's founding director, Dominique-Vivant Denon, travelled across Europe with Napoleon's armies, confiscating Raphaels and Veroneses in the name of 'freedom.' More than a century of plunder followed. Empress Eugénie herself got in on the action. In 1860, when a Franco-British army sacked the Qing emperor's Summer Palace—a wound so fresh in China that Jackie Chan starred in a 2009 film about it—she accepted a share of the booty."
Bénédicte Savoy leads European efforts to repatriate looted cultural heritage, translating scholarship into concrete restitution policies. A high-profile October theft at the Louvre—where thieves stole a pearl tiara of Empress Eugénie—sparked comparisons between French outrage and the histories of objects taken from other societies. The Louvre's founding director Dominique-Vivant Denon and nineteenth-century figures including Empress Eugénie participated in widespread seizure of artworks and artifacts across Europe and beyond. Savoy's new book Who Owns Beauty? chronicles nine such displacements and traces the movement toward restitution, including the 2018 Sarr-Savoy report that influenced returns of Dahomey sculptures to Africa.
Read at The New Yorker
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