Bénédicte Savoy, an outspoken advocate for the repatriation of African art and artifacts, has been named as the next “Chaire du Louvre” of the Louvre Museum in Paris, a move that sends a strong signal about France’s changing attitude toward the issue of returning artworks wrongfully removed during the colonial era.
Savoy, a French art historian who is a professor at the Technical University of Berlin, confirmed her appointment via email on Wednesday. She will begin the job next year, she said.
The Louvre press office confirmed the appointment. The press officer Coralie James said that since 2009, the museum had appointed a guest “great thinker” as “La Chaire du Louvre,” to consider the museum’s history, culture and collections and deliver a series of lectures. Although the post is largely ceremonial and has no policy-making element, it can be influential.
Savoy was traveling from Paris to Geneva on Wednesday to accept the European Essay Prize, a prestigious award for writing that offers “a fertile critique of our current societies.” She will receive the award for her 2024 nonfiction book, “À Qui Appartient la Beauté?” or “Who Owns Beauty?,” which will be published in English translation this month.
She declined an interview request but said that after having two New Yorkers in the yearlong role — the philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne in 2024 and Glenn Lowry, the former Museum of Modern Art director, this year — “it will be my turn in 2026.”
Lowry will deliver his lectures later this year.
Savoy will assume the position amid a landscape that has changed since President Emmanuel Macron of France, while on a trip to Burkina Faso in 2017, unexpectedly pledged to return stolen “patrimony” to African countries within five years. He said that he could not “accept that a large share of several African countries’ cultural heritage be kept in France,” and pledged to promote conditions “for temporary or permanent returns of African heritage to Africa.”
Macron set up a commission to assess French museum collections and determine which works might belong in Africa, enlisting Savoy and another scholar, Felwine Sarr, a Senegalese academic who now works at Duke University, to research the matter.
Their report, “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics,” issued in 2018, asserted that more than 90 percent of the significant art and artifacts from sub-Saharan Africa were held by museums off the continent.
“By recognizing the legitimacy of the requests made by African countries to recover a significant part of their cultural heritage and their memory,” the report concluded, the process of restitution could bring about “the possibility of writing a new page of a shared and peaceful history.”
In the almost eight years since then, France has returned about three dozen works, drawing criticism for taking little action after initiating a global debate on questions of colonial repatriation.
In July, the French government took up a bill introduced by Culture Minister Rachida Dati that aims to expedite returns of cultural property removed from former French colonies between 1815 and 1972. Parliament is expected to vote on the bill on Sept. 24.
Savoy’s 2022 book, “Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: Story of a Postcolonial Defeat,” explored the global repatriation debates of the 1960s through the 1980s, a period during which many African nations gained independence after generations of European colonial rule.
“Savoy betrays a frustration with having to win the argument all over again,” noted a review in Art Review magazine, “even though restitution has now become a football between virtue-signaling Western elites internationally and culture-war controversies at home.”
Sarr and Savoy were named as two of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021. The magazine described their work as “a radical call for understanding how restitution can become a tool for restoring lost memories.”
In November, Savoy gave a series of lectures at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid about the reverberating effects of European art looting by Napoleon, and the European laws passed after his defeat, which required the French state to repatriate some of his “spoils of war.”
The series, “Returning Looted Heritage: 1815, the Dismantling of the Louvre and the Rebirth of Museums in Europe,” discussed the moral and ethical underpinnings of restitution and made the case for extending similar efforts toward nations that European countries once colonized.
“Who Owns Beauty?,” her latest book, “maps geographies of extraction and desire, encountering along the way claims to possession, acts of looting, and pathways towards return,” the University of Oxford professor Dan Hicks wrote in a blurb for the book jacket.
In an interview published this week by the French newspaper La Vie, Savoy articulated her vision for a more progressive approach to the return of cultural heritage. “A restitution is not a loss,” she said. “It can open a new dialogue.”
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