Madam Chair,
Madam Chair of the Commission, dear Isabelle Rauch,
Rapporteur, dear Fabienne Colboc,
Ladies and gentlemen of the Assembly,
I am particularly moved to be before you today.
I am moved to present to you this bill, which is the first bill since the Liberation that recognizes the specific dispossession suffered by the Jews, in France and everywhere, by Nazi Germany and the various authorities associated with it.
I am moved, as so many subjects are fracturing us right now, that we can find ourselves around this text of recognition, justice and values.
This text was voted unanimously in the Senate, which both adopted and enriched it.
I hope that in your turn you will grant him all your trust, that is, that of the Nation.
We live in a country whose history, heritage and culture are often mentioned in this assembly. We cannot do this without remembering, always, that our solidarity, our ideals and a part of our collective humanity were broken during the period of Nazism and collaboration.
Some of the people of France, the Jews, whether they were born here or elsewhere, have been persecuted in our country. Their possessions have been looted, their lives taken or their lives forced into hiding or exile.
We cannot forget it.
In 1995, President Jacques Chirac recognized for the first time France’s complicity in the deportation of Jews from France during the occupation of the country by Nazi Germany. He acknowledged that we were still indebted to them. That is, eternal.
This discourse resonates strongly in our minds today: “France, as he said, the homeland of the Enlightenment and of Human Rights, the land of welcome and asylum, France, that day, accomplished the irreparable.”
Thanks to the work of researchers and historians, to our archives and to the investigations conducted by the families themselves, our knowledge of this period is increasingly important and precise.
The Nazis took everything of value, paintings, everyday objects – books, dishes, photographs. So many memories that we could never trace, without losing the memory.
But we also know that the French State, that is to say the one that has governed since Vichy, with all its willingness to collaborate with the Nazi regime but also on its own initiative, proceeded to the «aryanisation» of thousands of small businesses, leases, or various properties, forfeited, sold, taken from their holders.
We know, since the Mattéoli mission in 1997, that works and objects of art have been specifically and massively robbed of Jewish families, both by the Germans and by the French state.
It is estimated that at least 5 million books were taken from these families and 100,000 were stolen from Jews in France alone.
All the research carried out also reminded us how much spoliation contributed to the horror of genocide, since it proceeded from the same will of annihilation by making disappear the beings, their possessions, their creations, their memory.
To “Aryanise”, to plunder and plunder the cultural goods of the Jews, was to try to erase not only the beings that are broken but also their heritage that is stolen, their history, their individuality, their posterity. Reduce them to a number without voice, without baggage, without rights.
History cannot be rewritten. Nothing can undo the tragedy of the Shoah.
But we can do everything in our power to ensure that these cultural goods can be returned to the rights holders of those who have been deprived of them.
That means changing the law. We owe it to the victims of yesterday and their heirs of today: to give them back a fragment of family history.
The bill I have before you today, we have been building for many months
During those months, I learned the names of women and men whose paintings have disappeared for decades. Paintings that they cherished and were stolen from them. Paintings that they had sold, desperate, trying to escape.
Tables that were often the last possible link with their rights holders and yet we could not, in the current state of law, restore them.
We owe it to them to dive into this.
As I said, today we estimate that more than 100,000 works and works of art have been stolen in France, mostly in the context of anti-Semitic persecution.
In the aftermath of World War II, the Allies tried to recover these stolen works before they were dispersed in the murky context of the end of the conflict.
Many of these works have been identified thanks to a heroine of the resistance, who risked her life to do what is right, without expecting anything in return: Rose Valland, a volunteer conservation attaché at the Musée du Jeu de Paume.
Art historian Emmanuelle Polack, whom I would like to thank in this assembly for her colossal work on the subject of art dispossession by the Nazi regime, has helped to make her history better known.
In the fall of 1940, a Nazi party cultural organization led by the Reich ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, whose mission is to systematically confiscate private collections belonging to the Jews, moved to the Musée du Jeu de paume. During the entire period of the Occupation, Rose Valland managed to keep herself at her post and managed to remove from the Rosenberg service the most valuable information on the location of works taken to Germany. She records everything in her notebooks. Titles, artists, owners, origins and destinations. Risking her life. At the armistice, she joined the staff of the first army of General de Lattre de Tassigny, went to Germany and conducted investigations to identify and bring back cultural property recognized as belonging to the French artistic heritage. His work as a liaison in the Artistic Recovery Commission, combined with that of the Allies, will allow the return of about 60,000 works out of the 100,000 that had been transferred to Germany and Austria. We owe so much to Rose Valland, to her courage, to her sense of justice.
Of these 60,000 cultural properties that have returned from Germany, more than 2,200 have been entrusted to the custody of national museums without entering their collections. These are the works known as MNR, «Musées Nationaux Récupération», which can be restored without going through the law, because they do not belong to the national collections. The State is only the provisional holder.
But these works, called «MNR» are not the only ones to have been the object of spoliations. Some have gone from hand to hand, from plunderers to unscrupulous buyers, then from one collection to another, from one merchant to another, until they sometimes find themselves in public collections.
Unraveling the tortuous course of these works, often made of concealment and manipulation, is extremely complex. This is a long-term investigation, which requires a great deal of determination, but also extremely specialized expertise.
What the legislator will allow today if your assembly votes this text, is the historian who built it.
In recent decades, numerous studies conducted in Europe, and especially in France and Germany, have revealed, digitized and shared sources of archives that make it possible to fight against forgetting. No one can now ignore these resources.
On the occasion of the commemoration of the Vel d'Hiv round-up in 2018, the Prime Minister pledged to “do better” in research and restitution of art stolen from Jewish families.
To this end, in 2019 we created the Mission of Research and Restitution of Cultural Property Plundered between 1933 and 1945 within the Ministry of Culture, in order to pilot and animate this public policy of research, repair and memory. I would like to personally thank David Zivie and his team, whose expertise and commitment, put at the service of museums, contribute to “doing better” every day.
For a long time, these researches focused on MNR works that, despite many efforts, could not be returned to unknown owners. But since the creation of our Mission for the Search and Restitution of Plundered Cultural Property, the research has been extended to other types of works, legally entered into the collections, sometimes many years or even decades after the war.
In two out of three cases today, two out of three, it is at the initiative of the Ministry of Culture, that the stolen works are identified and returned to the descendants.
This work, these investigations, these refunds have forged a link between the researchers and experts of yesterday and today. For now a new generation of historians is resolutely engaged in research of provenance, examining, step by step, all the public collections to detect, among the works acquired since 1933, doubtful origins.
This project, art professionals are more than ever ready to lead it and the Ministry of Culture continues to encourage it. These concerns are now reflected in the initial training of heritage curators, library curators and auctioneers at the Ecole du Louvre, the National Heritage Institute, and since 2022 in a degree from the University of Paris Nanterre dedicated to the «Provenance Research»; and next fall, at the Ecole du Louvre in a new master’s degree dedicated to provenance research. These training efforts are truly essential and we will continue to build on them.
Museums are now fully mobilized, sometimes by creating positions specifically dedicated to studies of origin such as at the Louvre or Orsay, or by commissioning researchers to evaluate their collections, as did the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen.
The methodological tools exist, the trainings produce new generations of experts, this citizen concern has become general: no museum can now stay away from this quest.
It is in this perspective that I am also engaging my department in supporting territorial museums that are under the jurisdiction of communities, so that assistance can be allocated to the research they wish to conduct.
However, when these long and difficult researches succeed, when a stolen work is identified as such in the public collections, when the owners have been identified, when all parties agree on the principle of restitution, it remains impossible to restore it without passing a law to derogate from the principle of inalienability of public collections.
However, this legislation can only take place after a certain amount of time, after a necessarily long legislative process.
And rather than multiplying these specific laws and taking years and years, this framework law on property stolen in the context of anti-Semitic persecution is the first of three framework laws on which I work assiduously with all parliamentarians.
The second is supported by a bill by Senator Catherine Morin-Desailly to regulate and facilitate the return of human remains – her long-standing commitment to this subject is exceptional. This PPL has just been adopted in the Senate and will soon be examined in the Assembly.
The third framework law, carried out by the government, will concern cultural property not acquired abroad, and in particular in Africa. We will take the time necessary to prepare it in conjunction with parliamentarians, building on the proposals submitted by Jean-Luc Martinez in his recent report and the various consultations we are conducting.
These three framework laws concern very different, very specific contexts. It was important for me to distinguish clearly between the three debates, but they are all part of a common movement of recognition, appeasement and justice.
By amending the Heritage Code, this bill on the restitution of cultural property that was the object of dispossession in the context of the anti-Semitic persecutions perpetrated between 1933 and 1945, will open a new chapter in our relationship with our history, in the sense of justice and historical truth.
On the basis of rigorous work carried out by experts and subject to the opinion of the CIVS (the Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Dispossession, created in 1999), each cultural property entered into the public collections, which will be identified as having been dispossessed, may be returned to the rights holders of its owner, without further delay. For the State, a simple decree of the Prime Minister will suffice. For the communities, a decision of the deliberative body.
We extend the scope of the CIVS so that it can deal with cases of anti-Semitic dispossession that took place between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945, regardless of the place of dispossession, and not only in France during the Occupation, because even stolen abroad, spoofed works can be found today in a French public collection.
This is now the scope of this new ambition, which commits and obliges us.
We also want to give ourselves the means.
As recommended by the Senate following the review of the Act, the Government has committed to report to Parliament every two years. It will give a regular account not only of the refunds made, but also of the budget allocated by each national museum to research from, and of the technical and/or financial assistance that my department has provided to other museums that have expressed a need.
Here, I would like to sincerely thank the parliamentarians involved in the construction and enrichment of this bill.
First in the Senate, thanks to the work of the rapporteur Béatrice Gosselin, then in the Assembly, thanks in particular to you, the rapporteur, dear Fabienne Colboc. You are fully committed to ensuring that this text is as precise as possible, that the words chosen are as accurate as possible, and that it can gather as widely as possible.
Thank you.
In closing, I would like to read to you the words I read in the Senate because they have accompanied me since my arrival at the Department of Culture and have informed my decision to make this Justice Act the first bill I will bring before this chamber.
This is what Patrick Modiano wrote in Dora Bruder a little more than twenty-five years ago, as we began to appreciate the extent of the tragedy of spoliation.
“It takes a long time,” he wrote, “for what has been erased to reappear in the light. There are traces left in records and it is not known where they are hidden and which guards are watching over them and whether these guards will consent to show them to you. Or perhaps they have simply forgotten that these registers existed” (…) “In writing this book, I make calls, like beacons, which I unfortunately doubt they can illuminate at night.”
Researchers, historians, associations, descendants of families, elected representatives: many of them heard these calls and helped us to illuminate the night.
I would like to thank them here. Their mobilization for decades has made this bill possible.
The last witnesses of the Shoah are still with us, but not for very long. And unfortunately, anti-Semitism still does not belong to the past. Fighting it remains an absolute commitment, a daily commitment.
So that we can never again say that the Holocaust would be a detail of history.
In her book, La carte postale, Anne Berest links her family genealogy to the present. “I am the daughter and granddaughter of survivors,” she writes. And I realize today that I was my mother’s age, the same age as my grandmother, when they had received the insults and the stones. My daughter’s age when she was told in a playground that she did not like Jews in her family.” These words, these insults, these assaults, we never want to live them again.
This bill is only a modest contribution to this ongoing fight. Nonetheless, it is historic. It is part of a path opened by the resistance, in the maquis, in London, in North Africa, but also in our museums. Opened by Rose Valland, opened by all those who fought for justice and humanity.
With this legislation, we honour their commitment, their courage, and we are worthy of it.