France gave back artefacts looted by Napoleon. So what’s different today? asks Martin Gayford
‘Give us back our marbles’ is the cry. Passionate demands are made for the return of famous works of ancient sculpture. In response, there is equally heated resistance. Sending them back would be an offence against civilisation, it would break up a great collection. Only in a mighty museum in a sophisticated metropolis can such works truly make sense. Their surrender would be an aesthetic tragedy and — worse — national humiliation. Of course, it all sounds extremely, indeed wearyingly, familiar.
But this is not another account of the eternal dispute about the Elgin (or, if you prefer, Parthenon) Marbles, but a resumé of the debates that preceded the breaking-up of the Musée Napoléon in 1815. It’s just that the arguments deployed were almost exactly the same — and, ominously for the BM and its supporters, 191 years ago it was the let’s-not-lose-our-marbles brigade who lost.
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