نبذة مختصرة : International audience ; Talking for Things Restitution is in the air. Should European museums return cultural heritage to the descendants of the communities from whom it was illegally or immorally taken? In that case, what should be the extent and modalities of return? Far from new, such questions have been raging with revived fervor in recent years, especially in countries with an uncomfortable colonizing past. In France, the issue has been popping up intermittently over the past decades-in 2002, for example, when the skeleton and body cast of Saartjie Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus," was given back to South Africa and again in 2012 with the return of twenty mummified tattooed Maori heads, or Toi moko, to New Zealand. 1 Yet debates over restitution have recently gained momentum and shifted substantially in nature, especially after Emmanuel Macron's 2017 speech in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, during his first official visit to the African continent, when the president unexpectedly announced the return of African objects in French national collections to their communities of origin. The immediate and so far only tangible outcome of that speech was a report commissioned to scholars Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy: its release in 2018 and favorable views on restitution made a splash in the media and among museum professionals. Large European museums were put on the defensive. At the British Museum, whose piles of restitution demands stand among the highest, its director emphasized the institution's uniqueness as a "universal museum," a collection open to all "the citizens of the world" and whose value "resides in its breadth, its complexity, and its unity." The president of the Musée du Quai Brainly-Jacques Chirac at the time was far more straightforward, charging against the Sarr/Savoy report as "a cry of hate against the very notion of the museum" for advocating for transfers of property rather than long-term loans. 2
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