The Art of Decolonization: The Battle for Algeria’s French Art,1962–70

On the morning of 14 May 1962, two months before Algeria was to gain its independence, a unit of French gendarmes escorted eleven wooden crates to a military quayside in Algiers and placed them on a naval transport bound for Marseille. ¹ From Marseille the cases were loaded on to a train for Paris, where on 23 May they were brought to the Louvre. The museum’s curators examined the contents of the crates that had been so carefully transported from Algeria and discovered over 300 works of art, including work by such celebrated French artists as Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Pissarro, Degas, Courbet, and Delacroix. According to an inventory drawn up by the curatorial team the cases contained 188 paintings and 136 drawings, sketches, and charcoals. ² The total value of the collection was considerable; the paintings alone were later estimated at approximately 28 million new francs – today approximately US$50 million when adjusted for inflation. ³

With the impending referendum on Algerian self-determination only weeks away, tensions in the streets of Algiers had reached a fever pitch and French administrators in Algeria had sent the collection to the metropole in a panic. But the artwork no longer belonged to France. Due to a technicality in the accords signed at Evian in March 1962 between the French government and the Algerian National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale [FLN]) the majority of the artwork that had been transported from the Fine Arts Museum in Algiers (Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger [MBA]) had become the official property of the Algerian state-to-be, and the incoming nationalist government wanted it back. The fate of Algeria’s artwork would be debated between diplomatic officials, museum administrators, and various local actors on both sides of the Mediterranean for more than seven years until the French government agreed to repatriate nearly the entire collection. Only in December 1969 did the artwork, which the Algerian press enthusiastically labeled ‘our artistic patrimony’ [notre patrimoine artistique], return to Algiers amid a flurry of official ceremonies and an outpouring of national pride. ⁴ Today the collection remains on display at Algeria’s National Museum of Fine Arts where it comprises part of the largest collection of European art on the African continent.

The little-known story of how Algeria came to possess such an impressive collection of European art epitomizes the awkward realities of colonial disentanglement that do not fit neatly into the common narrative of the ‘end of empire’. It also raises a number of compelling questions: What does it mean for artwork produced by some of France’s most iconic artists – Monet, Delacroix, Courbet – to become the cultural property of a former colony? Moreover, what is at stake when a former colony demands the repatriation of artwork emblematic of the former colonizer, deeming it a valuable part of the newly independent nation’s cultural heritage? Such questions challenge our perception of postcolonial heritage struggles as ones primarily concerned with the restitution of indigenous artifacts hauled off to Europe by empire’s scientific elite. They also challenge the received wisdom of what the postcolonial experience should have entailed, particularly as the anti-colonial rhetoric of national liberation – with its emphasis on decolonizing the mind as well as the nation – suggests that the valorization of the former colonizer’s culture would have been an unlikely development. ⁵ Indeed, a month before Algerian independence, the National Council of the Algerian Revolution drew up the ‘Tripoli Program’ – a charter that attacked the recently signed Evian Accords as neo-colonial and called for a ‘new definition of culture’ to combat the ‘cultural cosmopolitanism and Western impregnation that instilled contempt in so many Algerians for their national values’. ⁶ The fact that, in the wake of independence, Algerian policymakers sought the restitution of artwork depicting Orientalist nudes, French countryside landscapes, and Christian panel paintings from the Renaissance illustrates that the reality of Algeria’s postcolonial cultural refashioning was more nuanced than such pronouncements would insinuate. This article, then, will examine not only the origins of the French decision to remove the artwork from Algeria and the ensuing negotiations that took place to return it, but more importantly, it will analyze what this episode reveals about the cultural complexities of decolonization.

In our current moment of contested sovereignties and changing borders, the study of decolonization has attracted renewed interest. But the history of decolonization, so often told from the perspective of high-level diplomacy, tells us little about how this phenomenon was experienced on the ground and what became of complex colonial relationships after flags were lowered and street names changed. ⁷ Recent scholarship has, however, greatly nuanced the social, cultural, and political stakes of decolonization and moved us beyond narratives that focused on the bloody battlefields of the late-colonial period and ‘transfers of power’. ⁸ Regardless, independence still tends to remain the end point in much of the historiography. As Frederick Cooper has recently asserted, decolonization ‘was not simply a moment dividing a neat “before” from a clear “after”, but a process [that] shape[d] postcolonial possibilities’. ⁹ The story of Algeria’s artwork provides a concrete example of that process, one that might offer an additional perspective to current scholarship and further nuance the more political interpretations of decolonization, as well as the triumphalism of postcolonial narratives. The events described here span not only political boundaries, but also temporal ones. As we will see, the controversies and negotiations surrounding the removal and restitution of Algeria’s French art suggest that, rather than a discrete moment with a clearly defined endpoint, decolonization was an unbounded, constantly re-defined process that straddled the chronological meridian of independence. Beginning in the final months of French Algeria and continuing well into the first decade of Algeria’s independence, our story of contested patrimony forced the former colonizer and the once-colonized to work together to sort out the untidy logistics of colonial divorce.

By looking at sources that reveal the fate of objects caught up in the dynamics of decolonization, we can look across the dividing line of independence, beyond the simple ‘before’ and ‘after’ partition of colonial and postcolonial history and examine how the process of decolonization operated between local actors on either side of the Mediterranean. To that end, this article has used the archives of the French national museums administration (Archives des Musées Nationaux), which served as the administrative clearinghouse between the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, Foreign Affairs, and Algerian Affairs concerning the Fine Arts Museum in Algiers. In addition to correspondence, these archives also contain the original inventories of the artwork taken from Algiers in May 1962, the various lists that were drafted and redrafted during the negotiation process, and the minutes of meetings between French and Algerian museum officials – all of which chart the tedious and contingent nature of restitution. It is important to note here that access to Algerian source material at the time of writing has been limited, particularly as it concerns official government documents and the archives of the Fine Arts Museum that remain in Algiers. The opinions and reactions of Algerian policymakers, therefore, have not been parsed as carefully as those of the French, upon which this article has relied heavily. However, correspondence preserved in archives at the Louvre, and contemporary reporting by the Algerian press, reveals a complex dynamic at work: local instances of interdependence, collaboration, confrontation, and reconciliation that emerged from the crucible of decolonization.

Over the next few pages, we will explore the history of the Fine Arts Museums in Algiers, its collection, and the basis on which that collection came to be considered the property of an independent Algerian state. We will also examine the aborted French plan to incorporate the MBA into the museum structure of metropolitan France as an eleventh-hour attempt to retain the artwork as French property. Lastly, we will look at the French removal of the artwork, the negotiations that led to its repatriation, and the ways in which different groups on either side of the Mediterranean reacted to its return to Algeria. In doing so, we can better understand how a particular culture of decolonization emerged during this period – one which has continued to influence not only modern relations between nations like France and Algeria, but also the cultural identities within them.

The Fine Arts Museum of Algiers was inaugurated on 4 May 1930 as part of France’s yearlong centenary commemoration of the 1830 conquest of Algeria. The decision to create the new museum came three years earlier at the behest of Jean Alazard, an art historian at the University of Algiers and curator of the municipality’s modest fine arts collection, who was supported in his endeavor by several well-connected pied-noir notables, and a number of Parisian museum curators. Bending to public pressure and anticipating the impending centenary, the Governor General of Algeria, Pierre Bordes, allocated seven million francs in December 1927 from the planning committee’s generous budget in order to begin construction for a new fine arts museum. ¹⁰ Constructed on a leafy bluff overlooking the Mediterranean, the whitewashed art-deco building designed by Paul Guion was meant to represent the coming of age of France’s most important overseas territory, one that had been considered an administrative extension of the French metropole itself since 1848. ¹¹

The original fine arts collection was rather humble, comprising works ‘of vast dimensions and mediocre artistic quality’, as well as a few finer pieces donated by wealthy French residents of Algeria. ¹² However, with the promise of the new museum’s completion, the Government General of Algeria put three million francs at the disposal of Jean Alazard in 1929 to purchase new art for an inaugural exhibition worthy of the upcoming anniversary. ¹³ It was at this moment that the MBA began acquiring its impressive collection of French masters: Le giaour traversant un gué by Eugène Delacroix (1849), Femme à sa fenêtre by Camille Pissarro (1884), Paysage de Bretagne by Paul Gauguin (1885), Rochers de Belle-Isle by Claude Monet (1886), and Paysage de printemps by Auguste Renoir (1877), among many others. Additionally, the French metropolitan government arranged for a number of pieces from the Musée du Louvre and the Château de Versailles to enter the new museum’s collection as long-term loans in honor of the centennial. In the years following 1930, Jean Alazard focused on expanding the museum’s catalogue by acquiring pieces ranging from Renaissance triptychs to charcoal drawings by Pablo Picasso. As a museum of fine arts, the MBA’s collection was meant, foremost, to be an ecumenical representation of Western art, and this was reflected by the inclusion of Italian, German, and Dutch artists into the museum’s collection. Nonetheless, the majority of the collection comprised artwork from the major French schools, and it would be the collection’s seemingly undeniable French character that would later become the focus of the debates to transfer the art to the metropole and, later, to repatriate it to Algeria. Additionally, given the museum’s location in North Africa, a large number of Orientalist paintings also entered the collection, including work by Théodore Chassériau, Eugène Fromentin, and Alphonse-Etienne Dinet (who converted to Islam and took the name Nasreddine). By the outbreak of the Algerian War for Independence on 1 November 1954, the Fine Arts Museum boasted one of the finest collections of French art outside of metropolitan France. Even as fighting raged in the mountains of the Aurès and the casbah of Algiers, the museum continued to purchase new pieces until Alazard’s death in September 1960. ¹⁴

Yet, how did such an extensive collection of what was widely considered to be French cultural patrimony become the official property of a former colony, particularly one that had fought so hard to overthrow French colonial rule? The answer is not without irony. Even though the MBA had carried the title of ‘national museum’ since its inauguration, the museum had always been administrated and financed by the Government General of Algeria. Designed to be an economically self-sufficient colony, Algeria was financially autonomous from the metropole and managed its own budget, financed by revenue extracted from the colony through taxes levied on the local population, the export of agricultural products and natural resources, and the collection of customs duties. Therefore, the credits allocated for the creation of the museum and the acquisition of much of its artwork came not from the metropole, but from the colonial authority of French Algeria. The Organic Statute of 1947 further expanded Algeria’s administrative autonomy, which in turn created a unique legal status exempting the colony from the application of any metropolitan ordinances that would have otherwise altered the administration of institutions in Algeria. ¹⁵ Given this state of affairs, the Fine Arts Museum of Algiers remained a colonial institution and was not incorporated into the metropolitan Réunion des Musées Nationaux following an institutional reorganization of museums that occurred in the wake of the Second World War. Only a decree submitted for approval to the French Council of State would be able to change the juridical status of Algeria’s cultural institutions. ¹⁶ Decidedly a colonial institution, the museum and its collection – including those works of art donated by private individuals – would be devolved to Algerian ownership upon independence.

On 18 March 1962, French representatives and members of the FLN’s political wing, the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne [GPRA]), signed a ceasefire agreement at Evian, bringing the bloody, seven-year war to a close. The Evian Accords outlined the transition to Algerian independence, which was to be decided by popular referendum on 1 July 1962. Over the course of negotiations at Evian, French and Algerian representatives agreed that all institutions and infrastructure previously financed by the budget of the autonomous colonial government of Algeria would be transferred to the future Algerian state. ¹⁷ On a more philosophical level, Algerian negotiators believed that those institutions that had been financed with revenue extracted from Algerian soil and Algerian labor were the rightful property of the indigenous Algerian people. While the accords never specifically addressed the museum and its collection, negotiators reasoned that a future Algerian state would logically assume responsibility over property previously administered by the Government General of Algeria. This included other kinds of infrastructure, such as roads, railways, and school buildings – all of which went equally unnamed in the accords – in the understanding that the vast majority of property and assets formerly controlled by the colony would be transferred to the new state as a condition of sovereignty. The archival record shows that following independence French administrators repeatedly used the Evian Accords as their rationale for repatriating the French art.

As early as April 1961, the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs anticipated that such an agreement might be reached and initiated an attempt to incorporate the Fine Arts Museum into the metropolitan museum system – a process referred to as ‘nationalization’ by museum officials. It was a last-ditch effort to ensure that the European artwork housed in Algiers – the vast majority of which was produced by French artists – would remain the property of France. ¹⁸ A proposal was drawn up to investigate the possibility of transferring all credits allocated to the operation of the museum to the metropolitan budget and having the French Council of State change the museum’s official status. In June 1961, Michel Laclotte, the Louvre’s Inspector General of Provincial Museums, traveled to Algeria on a fact-finding mission to study the feasibility of nationalizing not only the MBA in Algiers, but a number of other museums and cultural institutions across French Algeria. ¹⁹

Even though certain high-profile individuals, such as the Minister of Cultural Affairs André Malraux, expressed initial interest in the project, it never materialized. The questions surrounding the juridical status of the museum – and the necessity to submit a request to the French Council of State in order to change that status – proved too complex, delaying a decision until it was too late. Furthermore, certain policymakers considered the potential cost associated with transferring the budget of the museum to that of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux too prohibitive. ²⁰ While one report estimated that only 200,000 francs would have to be allocated for the 1962 budget, there still remained the question of what was to be done with the museum staff, not to mention the building itself, in the case of Algerian independence. ²¹ And lastly, with the resumption of negotiations with the GPRA at the end of 1961, the diplomatic situation had evolved to such an extent that the project to nationalize the museum was eventually dropped for the sake of avoiding any logistical complication or political controversy that might compromise a negotiated cease-fire agreement. ²² Indeed, in a letter drafted on 21 March 1962, three days following the signing of the Evian Accords, the Minister of State for Algerian Affairs, proclaimed that the plan to nationalize the MBA had been ‘ruled out definitively’. ²³

Despite the failure to nationalize the Fine Arts Museum in Algiers, French authorities on both sides of the Mediterranean were well aware that the decisions made at Evian placed a large collection of what they considered to be French patrimony in the hands of the independent Algerian state. Many officials felt uneasy at the prospect, but considered it a necessary sacrifice to secure the end to a nearly eight-year long war of attrition. The notion that artistic heritage was an integral part of French national identity was made explicit in the years following the Second World War, particularly in the aftermath of German designs to plunder French patrimony. André Malraux, in his role as France’s first Minister of Cultural Affairs, was foremost involved in making such a notion official policy. Created by President de Gaulle in July 1959, Malraux’s portfolio came with the express mission to promote French culture not only as a way for France to regain international pre-eminence in the wake of war and occupation, but also as a means to solidify internal unity at a moment when it was being threatened by past memories of collaboration and present traumas of decolonization. ²⁴ The synthesis of heritage, art, and national identity that came to represent Malraux’s state-sponsored cultural policy might naturally have led to uncomfortable associations between the ceding of French Algeria and the ceding of French art, in much the same way that Nazi looting had come to be so symbolic of France’s wartime experiences a decade and a half prior. Many right-wing commentators in France would draw precisely this conclusion when France repatriated the majority of Algeria’s art in 1969.

Others, however, like the archaeologist Henri Seyrig, who served as Director of French Museums from 1960 to 1962, thought that Algerian stewardship of French artwork might have positive consequences for Franco–Algerian relations. Against the idea of nationalizing the MBA from the start, he claimed that such reminders of France’s cultural heritage

will never cease to inspire in Algerians an admiration and respect for French civilization, nor will they ever cease to demonstrate to foreigners the care that France took to give these African territories access to that which her arts have produced most nobly. ²⁵

Notwithstanding views like Seyrig’s, French officials continued to express uncertainty about the potential for unrest and instability following the referendum on Algerian self-determination scheduled for 1 July 1962. Concerned by the precarious security situation that developed in the spring, and the potential threat of pillage and vandalism that could follow the withdrawal of French authority, museum administrators in Algiers hastily drew up plans to evacuate the Fine Art Museum’s most important works in an effort to protect them, regardless of their future ownership status.

Following the announcement of the Evian Accords on 20 March 1962, French Algeria was convulsed with violence. Reflecting the anger and anguish of a dying society, extremist partisans of French Algeria instigated a wave of bloody retribution aimed at both Algerian Muslims and the French military, which, in their eyes, had betrayed the cause of Algérie Française by siding with de Gaulle. The FLN retaliated, setting off a vicious cycle of urban terror, kidnappings, and last-minute score settling – all of which took place amid the backdrop of fleeing European settlers uncertain about their future in an independent Algeria. The fighting might have officially ceased between the French Army and the Algerian National Liberation Army (Armée de Libération Nationale [ALN]), but peace in the streets remained elusive.

Officials in the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, witnessing these tensions intensify on the eve of Algerian independence, cited two particular threats when later justifying their decision to remove artwork from the MBA in May 1962. The first was the danger posed by the dissident Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), the right-wing paramilitary group formed in February 1961 by disaffected colonial officers and militant pied-noir ‘Ultras’ who vowed to keep Algeria French at all costs. Unable to halt the inevitable, the OAS launched a scorched earth campaign to ‘return Algeria to 1830’. ²⁹ OAS partisans sought to assassinate Algerian Muslims arbitrarily and destroy as much infrastructure as possible before France relinquished control of its colony. This campaign of terror targeted a number of cultural institutions, most famously the library at the University of Algiers, which members of the OAS set alight on 7 June 1962, destroying an estimated 500,000 books. ³⁰ Earlier, the OAS had even targeted the Fine Arts Museum. On the night of 26 November 1961 OAS commandos bombed a large bronze statue by Antoine Bourdelle symbolizing ‘La France’ located in the museum’s forecourt, causing structural damage to the first floor gallery. ³¹ Consequently, French authorities had good reason to believe that the museum and its collection might become the target of another OAS attack in the final weeks leading up to the referendum on Algerian independence. There was also widespread fear that the Algerians themselves might target the museum. French officials were concerned that the museum’s nudes and Christian artwork would offend Muslim sensibilities or else Algerian nationalists might target French artwork in order to exact some kind of postcolonial revenge. ³² Over the course of the war and during the ceasefire period, Algerian nationalists had already vandalized a number of churches as well as certain statues and commemorative monuments that had been erected under the auspices of the colonial government. ³³

Thus, with the tacit agreement of the Exécutif Provisoire – the transitional government comprising both French and Algerian policymakers that had been created in the wake of Evian to manage the cease-fire – the curatorial team at the Fine Arts Museum made the hurried decision to carefully place those works of art considered to be the finest in the museum’s collection into 11 crates and expedite them to France. ³⁴ Additionally, three other paintings from the museum that had been on loan to an exposition of French art in Tokyo earlier in 1962 were intercepted in Paris during their return from Japan and brought to the Louvre to join the other repatriated artwork. ³⁵

This policy of emergency repatriation, however, was never intended to be permanent – at least not by administrators at the Louvre. In a letter sent by Jean Chatelain, Director of French Museums, to Jacqueline Bouchot-Saupique, the curator of the Louvre’s Department of Prints and Drawings, on 26 May 1962, Chatelain stated that the removal of the art from Algeria had been a precautionary ‘salvage operation in which we have intervened because of our technical expertise and not as part of an officially determined procedure’. ³⁶ Chatelain went on to clarify that Bouchot-Saupique was to make a detailed inventory of the collection of sketches she had received from Algeria so that there would be no ‘later doubt about its existence when we will have to return it’. ³⁷ Despite the intentions of French administrators, the legality of such a decision, as interpreted by the Evian Accords, remains murky considering that the French had removed the artwork before it had formally passed into Algerian possession with the recognition of Algerian sovereignty by France on 3 July 1962 and the proclamation of independence by Algeria on 5 July 1962. Such legal concerns, however, were not a priority for French, and later Algerian, officials who soon came to face an even greater problem.

It became clear almost immediately that, while the majority of the artwork removed from Algiers in the course of the emergency repatriation was indeed Algerian property, some of the pieces brought to Paris in May 1962 were actually the property of France. Furthermore, not all of the artwork that remained hanging in the galleries of the Fine Arts Museum belonged to Algeria either. There was an immense administrative and logistical knot to disentangle concerning which country owned which piece of art and which was currently in possession of it.

The problem lay in the fact that the museum’s collection had been classified into three principal categories of ownership. ³⁸ The first comprised works that had been purchased with funds provided by the former Government General of Algeria, or else acquired by private citizens and donated to the museum. As outlined above, this was the collection of artwork that had officially become the property of the independent Algerian state following the Evian Accords. This category comprised the majority of pieces that France repatriated to Paris in May 1962 and therefore were to be sent back to Algeria. Other categories of art, however, still rightfully belonged to the French state. Works that had been loaned to the museum in Algiers by France from the collections of metropolitan museums (known as dépôts de l’état) remained French property. Most of the artwork in this category had been sent to Algiers in 1929 and 1930 in celebration of the centenary. Apart from about a dozen paintings that had been sent to France in May 1962 as part of the emergency repatriation, the majority of these works still remained in Algeria at the time of independence. Then there was the unique case of 29 paintings from the Récupération Artistique – artwork taken by the Germans during the occupation of France and recovered by the Allies, but whose rightful owners could not be identified following the Second World War. These pieces had been loaned to the museum in Algiers in 1951 and 1952 by the French state and were repatriated to the metropole earlier in 1962. ³⁹

Given the harried circumstances under which the curators at the Fine Arts Museum had prepared the artwork’s departure from Algiers, and the absence of complete records or catalogues on either side of the Mediterranean to determine provenance, it was not clear which pieces of art belonged to Algeria and which belonged to France. Thus began the tedious process of investigation, identification, and negotiation that commenced in the autumn of 1962 and continued for another seven years.

Despite Paris’s fears that the museum would be pillaged following independence, the MBA remained unharmed. In October 1962, Jean Mallon, the former librarian of the Fine Arts Museum, was invited back to Algiers by the Algerian government as the newly appointed deputy director of Fine Arts. There he found that the Algerian staff employed by the museum prior to independence had stayed on, maintaining the building even after the French personnel had departed. ⁴⁰ He also found over a hundred empty frames scattered among the museum’s galleries and evidence that many other works of art were missing. ⁴¹ Upon contacting the French ambassador, Jean-Marcel Jeanneney, it became clear to Mallon that not even the French embassy in Algeria had been made aware of what had transpired in May 1962. ⁴² Jeanneney immediately cabled the Quai d’Orsay for clarification, concerned that it was only a matter of time before Algerian representatives began asking questions. Indeed, reopening the museum and recovering the missing artwork was an immediate priority for the Algerian government, particularly following Ahmed Ben Bella’s successful bid for power against his political rivals in the FLN during the summer of 1962. Ben Bella saw to it that there was no disruption in the museum’s financing and named Jean de Maisonseul as the museum’s curator in November 1962. ⁴³ Maisonseul, a pied-noir, was an artist, urban planner, and close friend of Albert Camus who had supported the nationalist movement. Eight months after his appointment Maisonseul reopened the museum on 3 July 1963 as the National Museum of Fine Arts of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria.

It was partly due to Maisonseul’s ability to act as a respected French interlocutor on behalf of Algiers that plans to negotiate the return of Algeria’s property coalesced so quickly. Support for the restitution of Algeria’s artwork also came from Jean Chatelain and, most importantly, André Malraux who, despite having initially supported the earlier project to nationalize the MBA, recognized the right of Algeria to its cultural property as a ‘pure and simple’ application of the Evian Accords. ⁴⁴ Formal negotiations to return Algeria’s art began in September 1963 when Jean Chatelain sent Louvre curator Hélène Adhémar and civil administrator Hubert Delesalle to Algiers to meet with representatives from the Algerian government. ⁴⁵ Over the course of three days the two parties began work on a proposal to determine the fate of Algeria’s artwork in France and France’s artwork in Algeria. ⁴⁶ From these initial meetings, a mixed committee of French and Algerian negotiators drew up seven lists with the goal of organizing which art belonged to Algeria and which art belonged to France, as well as which pieces of artwork would be the subject of long-term loans between the two countries and which pieces, although the property of the other, might be traded as retrocessions (see Table 1).

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Table 1.

Distribution of French and Algerian Artistic Property (c. 1963).

List	Notes
A	Artwork brought to the Louvre in May 1962 Property of the Algerian state to be repatriated to Algeria
A’	Artwork brought to the Louvre in May 1962 Property of the Algerian state granted to France on a 5 year renewable loan
B	Artwork brought to the Louvre in May 1962 Property of the French state to remain in France
B’	Artwork brought to the Louvre in May 1962 Property of the French state granted to Algeria on a 5 year renewable loan
C	Other artwork remaining in Algeria Property of the French state to be repatriated to France
C’	Other artwork remaining in Algeria Property of the French state granted to Algeria on a long-term loan
D	Artwork from list ‘C’ to be returned to France as soon as possible

The establishment of these lists provided an outline for how restitution would proceed. But assigning an appropriate work of art to the correct list proved to be a logistical nightmare. Inventories, catalogues, and museum records were now scattered across two different countries and curators in France and Algeria were required to delve into the archives at their disposal to verify whether or not a particular painting or sketch had been a dépôt de l’état in Algeria or else purchased with credits from the former Government General. Disentangling the intricacies of colonial-era policy to ascertain provenance took years. Yet, during this process the amount of transparency and communication between both sides was notable and showed that French and Algerian officials were perfectly willing to maintain cordial working relationships despite the rhetorical bluster that often colored the postcolonial period. As correspondence between Sid Ahmed Baghli, the director of Algerian museums, and Hubert Delesalle reflects, French and Algerian museum officials expressed a genuine desire to avoid mistakes and account for discrepancies. At times curators even removed frames and backings to ascertain a particular painting’s provenance. ⁴⁷ When a painting by Horace Vernet, a work belonging to France, could not be found among the collections in the Fine Arts Museum, the Algerian government used its own resources to locate it in Constantine. ⁴⁸

After a period of unexplained silence on the part of the Algerians, negotiations resumed in the beginning of 1965 to resolve outstanding claims and fix an eventual transfer. A joint committee formed by Sid Ahmed Baghli and Philippe Rebeyrol, the Minister-Counselor for Franco–Algerian cultural cooperation posted to the French embassy in Algiers, re-examined the original 1963 exchange protocol and set in motion a new set of inquiries regarding the lists established two years earlier. ⁴⁹ After yet another year of delicate back and forth, a delegation of French and Algerian experts met in Paris for four days in May 1967 to review the contents of the lists and make modifications before each party submitted them to their respective governments for final verification. ⁵⁰ This led to an accord between France and Algeria signed on 11 July 1968 by Pierre de Leusse, the French ambassador to Algeria, and Algeria’s then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. ⁵¹ According to the terms of the agreement, 157 paintings and all 136 drawings from the collection that had been sent to the Louvre in May 1962 were to be repatriated to Algeria. Algeria, in turn, was to expedite 18 paintings back to France that had been identified as dépôts de l’état. The accord also authorized a number of trades, most significantly the retrocession to France of a painting by Antoine-Jean Gros, Mamelouk à cheval, and the retrocession to Algeria of a marble plaque and a mosaic façade from the Tachfiniya madrasa in the western Algerian city of Tlemcen that had been housed at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. Barring last minute changes, the exchange – to be financed by the French state – was set for December 1968.

It was at this moment, however, that a small minority of French policymakers who had remained quietly hostile to the plan decided to act. They were led by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Michel Debré. Debré had previously served as the first Prime Minister of the Fifth Republic until he resigned in protest over the signing of the Evian Accords and the abandonment of French Algeria. On Christmas Eve 1968 Debré ordered André Malraux to postpone the transfer of the artwork, demanding that Malraux investigate the possibility of removing certain works placed on List ‘A’, which consisted of artwork brought to France in May 1962, but rightfully the property of the Algerian state. ⁵² Despite opposition from Malraux and Chatelain, the transfer was cancelled. Only when Maurice Schumann, a Christian Democrat and Gaullist supporter, replaced Debré as foreign minister in June 1969 was the restitution allowed to proceed as planned. Six months later, on 2 December 1969, 11 crates arrived at the MBA with the first shipment of Algeria’s French artwork.

Debré’s actions anticipated the broader popular backlash that was to come when newspapers reported on the repatriation during the winter of 1969–70. Officials in the Ministry of Cultural Affairs and the Louvre might have been keen to maintain Franco–Algerian cultural ties and respect the agreements made at Evian, but many in the French public felt differently. The widespread perception, particularly on the political right, was that the Evian Accords were a travesty and that Algeria had treacherously ignored the promises made to pieds-noirs in the accords by nationalizing land and seizing property belonging to French citizens without indemnification. ⁵³ The announcement of the planned restitution even stirred emotions in the French Senate. ⁵⁴ The repatriation to Algeria of nearly 300 works of art worth millions came to be perceived as more than the ‘surrender’ of precious French cultural patrimony to a former ‘adversary’: it was considered symbolic of yet another betrayal of French Algeria. ⁵⁵ While France’s major newspapers reported the return with little editorial commentary, the conservative press condemned the restitution as a ‘scandal’ and a ‘farce’ and accused the government of having ‘chucked out’ French national patrimony. ⁵⁶ The right-wing weekly Minute ran a multi-page spread with black-and-white reproductions of some of the repatriated paintings under the headline ‘Here are the paintings that Schumann has sold off to Boumediene’. ⁵⁷ The Dépêche de Paris, tapping into the belief that Algerian policymakers continuously took advantage of French goodwill, lamented ‘We continue to give, Algeria continues to take and receive’. ⁵⁸ And the far-right L’Aurore, while praising the initial decision to protect the art in 1962, described the restitution as a ‘sumptuous gift to the Republic of M. Boumediene’ made just in time for Christmas. ⁵⁹

The response in the Algerian francophone and Arabic-language press, however, was overwhelmingly positive. French-language papers financed by the Algerian state, such as La République and An Nasr (The Victory), lauded the return of ‘our country’s property’ and labeled the repatriated art ‘our artistic patrimony’. ⁶⁰ Even the rhetorically heavy-handed, government-operated Arabic daily Al-Sh‘ab (The People) deemed the Franco–Algerian negotiations a ‘great achievement’, designating the returned works of art as ‘Algerian masterpieces’ that ought to be appreciated for their ‘significant aesthetic and historical value’ since many Algerians were ‘ignorant of their country’s history’. ⁶¹ It would seem that to many Algerians, the romanticism of Delacroix, the realism of Courbet, and the impressionism of Monet could be appreciated as part of the nation’s artistic heritage alongside the illuminated miniatures of Mohammed Racim or the postcolonial works of Abdallah Benanteur and Mohammed Khadda. Nonetheless, the valorization of artwork strongly evoking the religion, culture, and aesthetic values of Western imperialism, demands a more profound interrogation of how ‘patrimony’ was perceived in the postcolonial context – particularly at a moment when Western culture was under rhetorical attack from the congress halls and university campuses of newly independent nations.

Considering that much of French Algeria’s colonial infrastructure was absorbed into the administrative fabric of the independent Algerian state, it is not surprising that French ideas concerning patrimony were equally assimilated into the cultural vernacular of the postcolonial nation. ⁶² The modern concept of patrimony evolved from its classical Roman usage as the principle of family inheritance (patrimonium). ⁶³ Understood in this way, is it possible to see the artwork of the MBA as part of the genealogical patrimony of colonialism – a family inheritance from French Algeria to its postcolonial successor? The postcolonial nation acquired many of the physical institutions necessary for sovereignty from the colonial regime and for newly independent nations museums possessed just as much discursive power as they did for their European and imperial counterparts. As the museologist Dominique Poulot claims, museums in the postcolonial context often responded to the imperatives of cultural development wrought by decolonization. ⁶⁴ Perhaps, then, FLN policymakers desired the restitution of the artwork not merely to pry a cultural concession from a former colonial power as a legal entitlement, but to cement the independent Algerian nation as the legitimate heir to French rule – one equally capable of maintaining the cultural infrastructure necessary for sovereignty and the construction of a modern state. ⁶⁵

In anticipation of the scheduled repatriation, the Algerian government had spent considerable resources to renovate the National Fine Arts Museum as part of the Pan-African Cultural Festival (Festival Culturel Panafricain) that was held in Algiers in July 1969. ⁶⁶ And on 2 December 1969 the Algerian Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs, in concert with the French embassy, presided over an official ceremony to welcome the collection back to Algeria. Hadj Ali, a representative from the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, praised the assistance of the French government, intimating that perhaps the same level of cooperation and good faith might be repeated in order to repatriate the vast collection of administrative archives that the French had removed from Algeria in 1962 and deposited in Aix-en-Provence. ⁶⁷ The story of Algeria’s archives provides a telling counterpoint and underscores the complexity, and limits, of restitution processes. The possibility of returning the archives was brought up alongside the issue of Algeria’s French art, but seems to have been marginalized in favor of securing the art’s return. ⁶⁸ To this day the fate of Algeria’s archives remains a contentious issue between France and Algeria. ⁶⁹

With the return of the museum’s masterpieces, Algeria’s National Fine Arts Museum opened its new galleries to the public on 14 April 1970. The inaugural exhibit put the entire collection of repatriated art on display, including the Christian works and Orientalist nudes whose destruction was so feared by French officials. ⁷⁰ Perhaps most surprising was the place the museum gave to Orientalist paintings in a country whose revolutionary leaders had all but denounced French culture in their ‘Tripoli Program’ declaration of June 1962 and whose capital was styled throughout the 1960s and 1970s as the cradle of anti-colonial national liberation. But this irony was lost on contemporary commentators, at least in public. ⁷¹ Instead, the press covering the museum’s reopening preferred to focus on the fact that Algeria could boast nearly 8000 works of fine art representing seven centuries of history – at the time the largest collection in Africa, the Middle East, and the Asian mainland. ⁷²

For most of the 1990s insurgency gripped Algeria, pitting the country’s secular government, led by the FLN, against armed offshoots of the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut [FIS]). During the conflict’s violent nadir in 1995, the Algerian government ordered a detachment of troops to guard the Fine Arts Museum day and night while museum curators presided over the transfer of the collection’s most prized pieces to the vaults beneath the Bank of Algeria. The Algerian state was concerned that the large collection of Western art provided a tempting target for Islamists bent on destroying the museum’s Christian artwork and nudes. ⁷³

The story of Algeria’s French artwork poses more questions than it answers. Many are the battles over cultural restitution between former imperial power and former colony, but exploring the history of how a former colony came to claim stewardship over a large collection of artwork emblematic of the former colonizer’s culture, history, and religion nuances the typical story of European empires carting off indigenous artifacts for the sake of knowledge and prestige. Here, the artistic patrimony of the colonizer is at stake, recasting the notion of postcolonial restitution. This consideration also invites us to re-evaluate the process of decolonization as one marked by mutual claim-making and cultural negotiation rather than one foremost understood through a lens of rupture and trauma.

In the wake of independence, the cultural artifacts of France’s colonial occupation were not easily erased. But we ought not assume that their erasure was a foregone conclusion. Nor should we assume that such erasure was even a desired outcome of decolonization. The Algerian writer Kateb Yacine famously called the French language a ‘butin de guerre’ – a spoil of war. ⁷⁴ He argued that the use of French in Algerian literature, or even as a language of daily interaction between Algerians, did not assume the desire to mimic the former colonizer. Rather, the French language, ‘won’ through the force of arms, was used and appreciated on its own terms. The same might be suggested for the collection of artwork welcomed back to Algiers in 1969. Such cultural refashioning meant that Algerians could appreciate the merits of French art, as well as French artistic heritage more broadly, without equating their acceptance of such things with an acceptance of French colonialism.

For French policymakers and museum officials, the Fine Arts Museum affair exposed one of decolonization’s unintended consequences: a collection of mostly French art, placed in Algerian territory by French authorities and at the expense of the colonial regime, was to become the property of an independent Algeria. With the end of French Algeria near inevitable by 1961, a concerted effort was made to save this significant part of French patrimony by nationalizing the museum. While this plan was unsuccessful, it does illustrate the importance that French administrators attached to the museum and its collection of art, both as physical assets and as symbols of French cultural identity. Nonetheless, once the project was abandoned, Paris ultimately recognized the legal basis for Algeria’s claim as outlined by the property transfer clause in the Evian Accords. Such an outcome was not necessarily certain, however, especially at a time when Franco–Algerian relations in the postcolonial period were strained by such issues as Algerian nationalization of French-owned businesses, continued French nuclear testing in the Sahara, and the ambiguity surrounding Algeria’s administrative archives. The negotiations that took place between France and Algeria highlight the critical roles that contingency and individual actors played in this example of postcolonial restitution.

The historian Joshua Cole has put forward the compelling notion of decolonization’s ‘family romance’, stating that the experience of French colonialism in Algeria produced ‘intense … even intimate historical relationships’ that evolved into ‘powerful linkages whose singular effects could not be effaced by the political disaggregation that we call decolonization’. ⁷⁵ The restitution of French artwork to Algeria provides a tangible example of such a relationship and reveals an alternate narrative of decolonization, one that challenges the postcolonial idée fixe of ‘decolonizing the mind’. Rather than seeking to expunge the cultural imprint of the former colonizer, Algerians – or at least those acting in an official capacity – accepted the cultural legacy bequeathed to them through a diplomatic technicality and negotiated for the return of their state’s rightful property. A ‘spoil of war’ perhaps, but a national treasure nonetheless. Such a reassessment can act as a counterweight to the totalizing qualifications often associated with the drama of colonial disentanglement, particularly in the Algerian case, and enables us to see that instead of producing two, distinct nation-states with discrete histories, the process of decolonization redefined the relationship between them, maintaining inter-connections more often than it severed them. Unraveling the politics of postcolonial cultural restitution has thus allowed us to trace other trajectories of decolonization, ones that had contemporary counterparts in processes of decolonization elsewhere. ⁷⁶ In short, our perspective shifts: where once decolonization was the end point, now it is the place from which we can begin to investigate how the repercussions of colonial divorce reverberate across boundaries, forcing us to reconsider not only the imperial project itself, but the postcolonial realities that emerged from its destruction.