I

From the beginning of the Wars of the French Revolution, it was widely assumed that plundering foreign cultural property was questionable behaviour and that it could therefore only be legitimate under certain conditions. This was not just because, as successive constitutions stated, the right to own and enjoy property per se was ‘inviolable’ and could only be compromised when required for ‘a legally established public necessity’.Footnote ³ Those who justified or opposed the confiscation of foreign cultural property were also conscious that it could be seen as the revival of barbaric practices. If attitudes differed enormously, there was nevertheless a shared assumption that expropriations could be opposed and required legitimizing. This had by no means always been the case. From antiquity to the seventeenth century, sovereigns and generals had expropriated cultural property from enemies with near impunity.Footnote ⁴ Just as they had no sympathy for the vanquished or respect for their possessions, they felt no need to justify their actions. Only a sense of self-preservation and realpolitik sometimes limited their conduct: excesses, such as violating sacred temples, might result in retribution; the imported artefacts of weak peoples risked corrupting a hitherto virile people; and stealing from allies was impolitic.Footnote ⁵ As with collecting in general, appropriating foreign cultural property was often a symbolic means by which sovereigns expressed their rank both in their own country and in relation to other monarchs.Footnote ⁶

As late as the Thirty Years War, when the word ‘plunder’ entered the English language, Europe's sovereigns treated books from Heidelberg and paintings from Prague as whimsical gifts and dynastic trophies.Footnote ⁷ However, they were watchful to ensure that cultural property was taken during wartime and thus before treaties were signed.Footnote ⁸ This measure was symptomatic of how the conditions under which cultural property could be legitimately acquired became more complex over the early modern period. First, there was the genesis of an idea of heritage, above all in Renaissance Rome and Florence, according to which some forms of cultural property were the inalienable patrimony of the community and thus not ordinarily transferable by force or sale between sovereigns even if they had legal ownership. This idea became more entrenched and widespread in the eighteenth century. For Scipio Maffei, a museum conceived as jus comune was a means of ensuring that the vestiges of Roman past were not sold abroad by noble families.Footnote ⁹ In 1772, Gustavus III of Sweden transferred ownership of his art collection to the state. And in the 1770s and 1780s, the Papal States and Kingdom of Naples started to enforce export restrictions more effectively than before, much to the frustration of British dealers.Footnote ¹⁰ Second, jurists helped form a notion of cultural property, arguing that works of beauty in enemy possession that would not prolong conflict should not be destroyed because they were a special kind of property that was of universal benefit. This sentiment reflected the new belief in civilization and progress.Footnote ¹¹ Third, in the eighteenth century the nature of conflict within Europe changed. Just as enlightened monarchs such as Frederick the Great paid their soldiers rather than encouraging pillage, they also considered art collections and libraries to be outside the rights of war. Plunder declined to such an extent that in 1796 Quatremère de Quincy could reasonably claim that the ‘cultivation of the arts and sciences, combined with the true theory of the sacred rights of humanity and of the political relations of the nations’, had superseded ‘the Roman right of conquest’ until its untimely revival by the French Republic.Footnote ¹²

Yet, if it had increasingly become questionable behaviour to use force to displace cultural property, the circulation of precious objects by no means ended in the eighteenth century. Some unscrupulous generals such as the duc de Richelieu ensured that the tradition of military plunder never ceased entirely, and the cargo of requisitioned ships such as the Westmoreland could include cultural property. Moreover, since most cultural property remained the possession of ruling noble families, dynastic power politics continued to result in the displacement of art collections: a prominent example was the transfer of the Farnese property from Rome and Parma to Naples. However, it was now above all the flourishing international market and the culling of religious houses and orders that led to the large-scale circulation of art works and caused anxiety about the decline of artistic centres and loss of information about provenance.Footnote ¹³ These circumstances on the eve of the Wars of the Revolution and Napoleon were a constant reference point in reactions to expropriations carried out by the French state during the period.

Another, more immediate context shaped justifications for expropriating foreign cultural property in the revolutionary decade; namely, changing attitudes to domestic heritage. The revolutionary armies' first foray into the Austrian Netherlands and the Rhineland in late 1792 coincided with instructions at home to destroy ‘monuments erected to pride, injustice and tyranny’.Footnote ¹⁴ It was hardly surprising therefore that only ideologically inoffensive books and precious metals were seized, while paintings in churches were instead auctioned or destroyed.Footnote ¹⁵ But even before the Terror ended in July 1794, the French Republic changed tack at home and abroad. Indeed, the protection of cultural heritage became so important that the Committee of Public Instruction soon spent over one fifth of its budget on museums, libraries, and literary repositories.Footnote ¹⁶ While art created under the Old Regime had previously been considered corrupt on the grounds that genius only flourished under liberty, two arguments now helped form a stronger consensus safeguarding against vandalisme the patrimoine inherited by the state through the nationalization of church, émigré, and crown property. First, an ark of knowledge would preserve wisdom and save mankind from barbarism. In this light, even ‘the memories of monsters’ were worth preserving because they ensured that future generations would fear monarchy; equally, irrespective of their subject matters, artistic masterpieces could teach artists and inspire manufacturers.Footnote ¹⁷ Second, while geniuses had been forced by circumstances to work under many patrons, they had always striven toward liberty. Opposing plans to burn offensive literature in October 1793, Marie-Joseph Chenier thus reminded the Convention that ‘we owe the French Revolution [to books] … There are very republican books that are dedicated to princes.’Footnote ¹⁸ This meant that important cultural property from across France ought to be seized and that the otherwise natural and inviolable right to own and enjoy property could be overruled. It was argued that: seizing such property was part and parcel of fiscally necessary measures to nationalize landed wealth; the property in question belonged to ‘traitors’ rather than ‘patriots’ and was an indemnification for their crimes against the nation; and, in other cases, the state had already assumed ownership for what had belonged to abolished institutions.Footnote ¹⁹

The techniques for conserving heritage at home were in turn exported abroad. Government agencies such as the Committee of Public Instruction recommended that ‘artists and men of letters’ be appointed to Agences d'Extraction and accompany the armies abroad ‘in secret’. Experts such as the botanist André Thouin and the librarian Gaspard Michel Leblond who were already responsible for identifying and gathering cultural property at home continued their work abroad.Footnote ²⁰

The arguments used to justify preserving works of art at home were also adapted to justify seizures from abroad. Supporters of the seizures argued that it was no dynastic enlevement (abduction) of butin (booty) but rather the orderly extraction, confiscation, or saisie (seizure) by a legitimate authority in order to advance civilization. Extending the idea of the ark, Boissy d'Anglas asked why the Republic should respect arbitrary frontiers given that creating the ‘asylum of all human knowledge’ in Paris required ‘removing masterpieces from neighbouring countries’.Footnote ²¹ It was widely believed – in France and elsewhere – that possessing masterpieces increased national wealth by inspiring manufacturers, providing instruction, and attracting tourists. Some argued that importing the finest foreign examples would regenerate French art ‘from its long slavery’.Footnote ²² But many others cited the need to ‘save’ art from its owners' ‘negligence’ as a justification for confiscating masterpieces and creating an ark.Footnote ²³ For instance, the administration of the Louvre museum claimed that seizing Raphael's cartoon for The school of Athens from Milan enabled them to transfer it onto canvas; as a result, what ‘would have been lost for art shall instead be handed down to posterity’.Footnote ²⁴ Such arguments were made despite the earlier destruction of historic monuments. Indeed, the Abbé Grégoire argued that the opportunity to seize foreign cultural property could be used to dispel doubts that Paris was the safest ark of knowledge: the care with which the Republic gathered, transported, and restored art proved that republicans ‘love and preserve’ what ‘barbarians and slaves despise’; the ‘vandals’ had, in fact, been terrorists, aristocrats, and foreigners.Footnote ²⁵ Such was the importance of this rhetoric proclaiming France's superior restoration science that refutations were sent to foreign ambassadors when the Louvre's restorers were accused of bad practice.Footnote ²⁶

It was also often argued through the revolutionary decade that centralizing the productions of art and knowledge in Paris would increase their usefulness. For the political economist Jean-Baptiste Say, the arrival of specimens and rare animals from the Dutch Stadhouder's collections meant that ‘the sciences will gain … from our [military] successes’.Footnote ²⁷ It seems that this utilitarian attitude was not entirely disingenuous, especially among French experts abroad. Believing that their role was to protect, democratize, and advance knowledge, they gathered topographical and agricultural knowledge. Alongside artistic masterpieces, they seized cultural property betraying their preoccupation with more utilitarian forms of knowledge: insects from Aachen, seeds from Cologne, agricultural tools from the Netherlands, the skeleton of an orangutan from the Hague, the fossil of the head of a new species of ‘crocodile’ from Maastricht, ‘the grain of plants of economic value’ from the institute of Bologna, volcanic rocks from Padua, optical devices from Milan, and a book of prayers in Arabic from the elector's library in Dusseldorf. They also formed friendships with foreign experts such as the natural history professors at Bonn University's botanical gardens, with whom they agreed to exchange samples.Footnote ²⁸ Both experts sent abroad and those advising the government from Paris chauvinistically assumed that Paris ought to be the ark of knowledge that served the interests of the cosmopolitan republic of letters. The artists Charles-Louis Clérisseau and Jacques Guillaume Legrand suggested that Belgians could be pacified with copies of seized paintings while the seized originals remained in Paris. Equally, Jacques-Julien de Labillardière could confiscate botanical specimens from Italian collections while exhorting Joseph Banks to return the specimens that the French expedition had gathered in Australia in 1791 but which had been captured in Java and ended up in British hands.Footnote ²⁹ The other argument for conservation at home – that geniuses had worked toward liberty – was also adapted in order to justify displacing cultural property from abroad. Supporters of the seizures argued that since the fruits of genius belonged to liberty rather than any particular nation, ‘repatriating’ them to the home of freedom allowed them to be admired by citizens rather than ‘soiled by the gaze of servitude’. Just as Luc Barbier told the Convention that the masterpieces of the Flemish school had arrived in Paris and were thus ‘no longer on alien soil’, Bonaparte later reminded the Italian astronomer Oriani that ‘every man of genius … in whatever country he may have been born, is a French citizen’.Footnote ³⁰ However, this attempt at legitimization never underpinned all justifications for seizing cultural property.Footnote ³¹ ‘Repatriation’ was never a credible argument for confiscations from other republics, annexed territories, or self-governing cities, and it was rarely used at all after 1795 once talk of liberty came to be perceived as Jacobinism. By the time that Bonaparte invaded Italy in 1796, it was argued that masterpieces ought to be imported in order to civilize Frenchmen – a far cry from the claim in 1794 that only citizens could admire masterpieces.Footnote ³² ‘Repatriation’ also seems to have been much less a ‘doctrine’ than it was the general assumption behind distinctive rationalizations that were hardly unique to revolutionary France. For instance, a select committee later asserted that Britain's ‘free government’ would provide the most ‘honourable asylum’ for the Parthenon sculptures.Footnote ³³

The confiscations during the Convention were not much contested. But when Bonaparte invaded northern Italy under the Directory, earlier justifications were sharpened and new arguments were fashioned in response to rigorous opposition against plans to expropriate Renaissance paintings, ancient sculptures, rare books and manuscripts, and scientific specimens. (Plans regarding the German front proved less controversial, not least because they were largely unfulfilled as a result of the unsuccessful military campaign fought there.)Footnote ³⁴ The existing attitude that Paris should become an ark was supplemented by democratic and museological arguments. Italy's iconic masterpieces, hitherto only enjoyed at the discretion of their noble owners by wealthy young men on the Grand Tour, would become accessible to all citizens.Footnote ³⁵ Moreover, as the dealer and art restorer Jean-Baptiste Le Brun argued, paintings displayed in a way that facilitated comparisons in fact improved rather than ‘suffocated one another’. This way of thinking was manifest in the catalogue produced in 1798 for the confiscated paintings from Italy, which provided information about their provenance.Footnote ³⁶ Equally, the attitude that France was the home of liberty now changed form, emphasizing what was negative about Italy above what was positive about Paris. It was argued that Rome was unsuitable as the centre of western civilization to the extent that ‘the schools of the arts in Paris and Rome have been reversed’. The papacy had failed to prevent the dispersal of its ancient heritage and to support living artists.Footnote ³⁷ Far from Christian Rome being the legatee of antiquity, the papal city's ties with the ancient city were incidental because the form of government mattered more than a polity's geographical location. According to this argument, modern Romans were less Roman than French citizens: as one member of the Commission for the research of objects of art and science complained, ‘imbecilic’ modern Romans were as foreigners among the ancient remains. However, there was a flaw inherent in the contention that republican France was the legatee of republican Rome. As Gaspard Monge discovered in Rome, little remained ‘from the time of the Republic; the majority of the great monuments were made under the Emperors, and that does not have as much charm for a republican’.Footnote ³⁸

New legitimizations were also devised. It was deemed that confiscations indemnified the financial and human cost of the Italian campaign and even the future cost of policing occupied territory.Footnote ³⁹ Since they were made from sovereigns rather than the people, seizures of art that was superabundant were veritable acts of charity when compared to taking bullion.Footnote ⁴⁰ (Earlier theorists of international relations might have informed such justifications, although their writings were not cited and their reflections on just indemnification concerned money rather than cultural property.)Footnote ⁴¹ This idea of measured indemnification was initially taken quite seriously: the experts selecting objects generally adhered to the rules and even rejected recommendations for objects that they had no right to under the terms of agreements. For instance, the Institut advised that Jules-Roman's Holy family in S. Maria dell'Anima could not be selected because it belonged to the Collegio Teutonico rather than the pope, and others argued against seizing cultural property from the public and ‘friends of the arts’.Footnote ⁴² However, other demands for indemnification were more eccentric and brutal. For one commentator, the seizures were overdue retribution for the ancient Roman spoliation of Gaul; for another, the transfer of Raphael's Transfiguration settled an existing grievance about ownership, because 300 years before the painting had been commissioned for Narbonne cathedral.Footnote ⁴³ There was also a sense of vengeance epitomized by the pillage of Verona and Loreto, heightened by the attitude that Italians' hostility justified further depredations.Footnote ⁴⁴

A separate ‘realist’ argument was more compelling. Exponents such as Joachim Lebreton argued that displacing cultural property from Rome was a regrettable necessity. Rome had indeed been a great historic centre, and it provided a spectacular backdrop to studying the finest works of art in Europe. But since Rome was already in decline, the papacy was powerless to prevent this heritage from being dispersed. This meant that only ‘French iron’, as the Rédacteur put it, could ensure that it remained a publicly accessible corpus; indeed, as Monge urged, French supremacy entailed a historic responsibility to protect civilization, using pre-emptive seizures to prevent the finest objects from ‘decorating the triumphs of our enemies, the enemies of humanity’. Without French intervention, ‘British gold’ would buy these artworks, which would be dispersed across collections in stately homes.Footnote ⁴⁵ According to this argument, leaving Europe's heritage in Rome was no longer an option. For General Pommereul, the ‘twelve-centuries of suffering’ the papacy had inflicted meant that it was too backward to remain Europe's cultural epicentre.Footnote ⁴⁶ An artists' petition to the Directors in October 1796 went even further, asserting that leaving Rome with its artistic heritage would only serve to ‘entrench the worthlessness and pride of that indolent and superstitious city’. Rome's cultural property had become a ‘servile and precarious resource’ that created a cycle of economic dependency upon court culture and foreign visitors, whose spending inflated the cost of living and prevented a more mixed economy from developing.Footnote ⁴⁷

The use of experts also evolved during the Italian campaign. A single Commission was now formed, bringing together experts from a range of scientific and artistic disciplines. It was more judicious than the teams sent to Belgium and the Rhineland in 1794, and it received clearer recommendations in order to fill gaps in the national collections.Footnote ⁴⁸ While Bonaparte was asked to ensure that the Commission selected oriental manuscripts and elementary books on oriental languages for ‘students of the special school in the national library’ from the Vatican libraries, the Institut national advised seizing Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts on mechanics from the Bibliotecca Ambrosiana in Milan – upon finding it, the Commission expressed surprise that the artist's ‘writing runs from right to left’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Commission initially claimed objects only in general accordance with the terms inserted into peace agreements. However, after the Fructidor coup in September 1797 the ‘second’ Directory asked agents in Italy to take what was previously off-limits (such as rare items from churches) or unavailable (including antiquities from Pompeii and Herculaneum). Some artists who had opposed seizing art from Rome in 1796 now offered to advise on and assist with gathering cultural property in Italy: for instance, the architect Legrand helped to gather paintings in Turin.Footnote ⁵⁰ With less scope in general for opposition in domestic politics, there was less need to justify confiscations in terms of their benefits for knowledge in Europe as a whole: consistent with the perception that France was once again ‘the great nation’, ancient precedent was cited to justify seizing trophies of conquest. Spectacles such as the display of captured weapons in the Louvre and the triumphal entry of the third convoy from Rome and Venice in July 1798 improved morale and honoured the military.Footnote ⁵¹

The legitimization for displacing cultural property from Egypt between 1798 and 1801 was again distinctive. At least in France and Britain, there was little sense in the eighteenth century that taking artefacts from Ottoman territories violated international norms, although diplomats from Sweden complained that in practice the removal of artefacts from Ottoman Greece by French and British agents contravened the new archaeological convention of recording provenances. Over the century, many western European travellers and diplomats in the Ottoman empire referred to the dilapidation of ancient artefacts and locals' superstitious use of them both to justify removing them and to underline the potential difficulties of overcoming resistance.Footnote ⁵² The implicit rhetorical justification in France during Bonaparte's expedition was that gathering study materials was part of a broader civilizing mission to regenerate Egypt by restoring the land to its ancient greatness under the Pharaohs. French intentions and justifications aside, Britain famously seized the Rosetta stone and everything else that the Egypt expedition had gathered, leaving its members with only small items that they had taken as their personal property.Footnote ⁵³

On 27 and 28 July 1798, Paris celebrated the anniversary of the fall of Robespierre with the arrival of the third convoy carrying cultural property from Rome and Venice. This triumphal ‘fête de la liberté’ had been planned months in advance because it was feared that without any such spectacle the Republic would give the impression of treating ‘the precious spoils of Rome’ like objects of commerce, shiploads of ‘coal’, or ‘cases of soap’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The procession of horse-drawn carts carrying the objects moved westwards from the quay by the Jardin des Plantes to the Champs de Mars. The discourse surrounding the festival encapsulated many of the justifications for displacing cultural property that had been used since 1794. The messages on banners and in sung verses insisted that confiscations were pedagogically useful (‘Artists hurry! Your masters have arrived’) and belonged to the free (‘The sciences and arts support and embellish liberty’; ‘It is by the right of virtue, not the right of conquest’), and that they were of economic benefit (foreign seeds ‘shall multiply our wealth’). But the festival also presented martial power in a way that prefigured the Empire: objects such as the Apollo Belvedere were trophies to ‘recall … our victories’. Owning them brought France ‘glory’.Footnote ⁵⁵

II

During the confiscations from the Low Countries and the Rhineland in 1794–5, a handful of individuals in France voiced scepticism about the costs of importing religious paintings that might ‘encourage fanaticism’.Footnote ⁵⁶ One reviewer warned that ‘the tortures of catholic mythology’ depicted in Rubens's Descent from the cross looked horrendous when seen close up in a museum.Footnote ⁵⁷ Overall, however, before 1796 there was little French opposition. This may have been because the confiscations were not much publicized until cultural property arrived in Paris, or because the territories occupied up until then were seen as culturally peripheral. In Batavia, only the Stadhouder's property was seized, thereby nullifying potential criticism about plundering other republics.Footnote ⁵⁸ Above all, within France there was little or no political capital to be gained from opposing the seizures.

In occupied territories in Belgium and the Rhineland, by contrast, there was lively popular and municipal opposition, suggestive of the extent to which there was a localized sense of heritage. There was evasive action: local officials evacuated valuable artefacts, and some Flemish churchgoers hid their parishes' paintings in a grain silo with disastrous consequences. But there was also reasoned argument. Councillors in Cologne argued that the former Jesuit College's collections provided ‘the public with free instruction’, adding that they had already exercised public ownership by rejecting private bids for the library.Footnote ⁵⁹ Created in February 1795, the Central and Superior Administration of Belgium obstructed the French experts, complaining to the Committee of Public Instruction in Paris that the confiscations were gratuitous, excessive, and irregular, requesting that the Administration itself should be responsible for executing French demands. Even before the Belgian departments were annexed in October 1795, the Administration questioned why ‘children of the Republic’ were treated as a conquered territory.Footnote ⁶⁰

The displacement of cultural property from Italy between 1796 and 1798 provoked wider opposition. Although a sense of national outrage only developed retrospectively, there was nevertheless some popular discontent at the time.Footnote ⁶¹ For instance, several knife-carrying Romans were convicted for seeking to murder the French experts on the Commission.Footnote ⁶² As in Cologne, municipal representatives in the northern papal cities of Perugia and Bologna argued that cultural property belonged to the public: since the paintings by famous native artists were the pride of their cities, they should be considered local property rather than that of the sovereign pontiff.Footnote ⁶³ In the same vein, two ‘Roman patriots’ asked their liberators to nationalize the Vatican collections, making them an inalienable public possession rather than displacing the finest objects to Paris.Footnote ⁶⁴ While they were unsuccessful, the director of the Uffizi gallery in Florence convincingly argued that this ‘public sanctuary of the arts’ was already a possession of ‘the [Tuscan] nation’ rather than the grand duke because the last Medici had bequeathed it to the people in 1737.Footnote ⁶⁵ Some Italian intellectuals criticized the French: for Vittorio Barzoni, art plunder was part of the wider exploitation of Italy; and indeed part of a broader pattern since ancient times by which ‘no foreign army ever comes into a country solely to set it free’.Footnote ⁶⁶ By contrast, others collaborated: the architect Guiseppe Valadier designed carts for transporting cases of artefacts and books; a sculptor-restorer called Mariano accompanied the convoy from Rome; and the prefect for antiquities in the Pio-Clementino museum, Ennio Quirino Visconti, followed his collection to Paris and became director of antiquities in the Louvre.Footnote ⁶⁷

The confiscations from Italy also caused great consternation abroad. In Paris during the second half of 1796, there was ‘a quarrel between spoliators and friends of justice’ over plans to displace antiquities and artworks from Rome.Footnote ⁶⁸ This vigorous domestic response – expressed in newspaper articles, treatises, and artists' petitions – arose partly because events were publicized for propaganda reasons, and equally because of Italy's cultural importance at the time. But the quarrel occurred above all because plans to confiscate cultural property from Rome coincided with a set of circumstances that briefly made it expedient for disparate political and artistic groups to use the matter as a proxy for pursuing their own agendas.Footnote ⁶⁹

A number of arguments were made in France against displacing cultural property from Italy. First, repeating the venerable idea that it was inexpedient to offend neutral powers, the ‘faction of past frontiers’ argued that displacing cultural property harmed French military interests by infuriating occupied peoples. Charles Lacretelle warned that France's ‘vanity for artistic masterpieces’ risked making Italians favour Habsburg rule.Footnote ⁷⁰

More sophisticated criticism was soon developed, above all by the political economist Pierre-Louis Rœderer and the royalist politician and art theorist Antoine Quatremère de Quincy. Although their views and motives were distinctive, each maintained that displacing cultural property from Italy was not just impolitic but also harmful to civilization. Rœderer made pedagogical and conservation arguments against accumulating objects of art and knowledge in Paris: just as the sight of such superabundance would be exhausting, such a concentration in one place would mean that a single disaster could destroy the greater part of Europe's moveable heritage. But he also argued that displaced artworks would no longer be the same in Paris: without Rome's geography, light, and atmosphere, the Apollo Belvedere would only be a ‘piece of furniture’.Footnote ⁷¹

Shortly afterward, at the end of July 1796, Quatremère published the most famous contribution to the debate, his Letters on the plan to abduct monuments from Italy, in which he defended the papacy and aimed to undermine La Révellière and divide the Directors in order to restore the Bourbon monarchy.Footnote ⁷² In order to sustain his thesis that the papacy was the best ‘custodian’ of the museum of the ‘republic of the arts and sciences’ and therefore deserved to be sponsored rather than plundered, Quatremère contrived a co-operation problem to rebut the realist argument that protecting civilization required displacing the finest objects to Paris.Footnote ⁷³ The form of this co-operation problem might have been derived from Emmerich de Vattel's principle that mutual assistance was the best foundation for felicity between nations: ‘promote the happiness of mankind and in return all mankind will … promote ours’, but if one pursued selfish interests ‘the whole human race together will be immersed in the deepest wretchedness’.Footnote ⁷⁴ In Quatremère's comparable schema, if any great power broke the ‘hen that laid the golden eggs’ by violating Rome, then Europe would return to the dark ages; but if the powers continued collectively to support the papacy's efforts in resurrecting art and knowledge, then they would improve mankind.Footnote ⁷⁵ While Quatremère shared with exponents of the realist argument the view that art and knowledge should be centralized, he disputed their predictions concerning the consequences of creating a centre in Paris by displacing cultural property from Rome: transferring a selection of objects would not ensure the integrity of the corpus of art and science; on the contrary, ‘to divide’ would be ‘to destroy’ rather than to save from dispersal. Worse still, such expropriations would start a scramble for Rome in which even the immediate beneficiary would soon be afflicted by the ‘contagion of ignorance’ that it had precipitated.Footnote ⁷⁶ He argued that positive predictions for what would result from the confiscations were made in bad faith or ignorance. Ostensibly anodyne plans to relocate cultural property (conveyed by words such as ‘transfer’, ‘displace’, ‘transport’, and ‘import’) would actually surpass the destructiveness of the 1527 sack of Rome by Charles V's soldiers. Rome's heritage would be ‘scattered’ after being ‘torn’ from its native land. Rome herself, with her finest objects abducted from a system in which each had its place, would be ‘deflowered’, ‘violated’, ‘ravaged’, and ‘mutilated’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In opposition to a classic realist argument of pre-emption, therefore, Quatremère's argument was predicated upon the potentially dire consequences of setting a negative precedent.

Quatremère mobilized an eclectic range of sub-arguments to illustrate what he maintained would be the real consequences of helping Rome, in the one scenario, or plundering the city, in the other. For instance, he used concepts of incentive and property rights to praise excavations in which the sponsor shared finds with the landowner and the papacy: he warned that this partage would cease if any power plundered Rome, because no one would choose to excavate knowing that their ‘salary’ for their labour and investment would be stolen.Footnote ⁷⁸ Many other sub-arguments depended on the familiar idea of centralizing knowledge into a metaphorical book or museum: the education of artists and connoisseurs and the ability of antiquarians to gather facts were facilitated by the concentration of objects in the favourable context provided by Rome's spiritual, historical, and geographical associations. Given that the ‘museum of Rome’ already contained many centuries of plunder, creating another ‘map of the world’ at its expense was absurd.Footnote ⁷⁹

Many ideas in Quatremère's Letters were disseminated and repeated.Footnote ⁸⁰ This was not least through the attention that he attracted through a petition that questioned the planned seizures from Rome which was signed by forty-six artists and printed in Rœderer's Journal de Paris. Besides soliciting a vituperative backlash, Quatremère's stand also received some support. For instance, the architect Victor Louis repeated Quatremère's assertion that France would not benefit from despoiling Rome, although he also cited practical concerns about ‘conveying for a considerable distance those beautiful statues that are already mutilated’.Footnote ⁸¹ The Letters and petition also forced reflection: as one foreign visitor noted, public opinion in Paris was now divided.Footnote ⁸² While one policeman reported a conversation in which the enrichment of France with ‘the spoils of our enemies’ was ‘commented upon with pleasure’, some former supporters of the seizures instead argued for moderation. They suggested a policy of ‘exchanges’ between France and Italian cities as an alternative while others condemned the ‘rapacious excess’ of seizing paintings from Perugia.Footnote ⁸³ Those responsible for the confiscations may have become more scrupulous, but they also used the critical gaze to their own ends. Exploiting the accusation that displacing cultural property to Paris would make it inaccessible, the Conservatoire of the Louvre and the Commission in Italy demanded that artworks be displayed immediately and that extra funding be made available to create a unified museum that included antiquities. As the Commission commented, ‘it would be inadvisable for the nation that has displaced these sublime productions of genius from the sumptuous galleries of the Vatican and Capitole to leave them in an obscure repository’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Whether opportunistic or not, their complaint was well founded: since opening in August 1793, the Louvre had been politically dominated, civic focused, and chaotic; the name of the museum housed in part of the former palace had changed several times; it lacked space for antiquities; and much of the museum was often closed because of construction work.Footnote ⁸⁵ Strikingly, criticism dissipated once the professional and political capital to be gained from taking a stand diminished. Several former critics even became the cheerleaders and agents of confiscations.Footnote ⁸⁶ By the time of the triumphal entry of seized objects in July 1798, one of Jacques-Louis David's students claimed that his master was alone in expressing reservations to the effect that the imported objects would burden sooner than inspire artists.Footnote ⁸⁷

While the London press questioned how such precious freight could be transported from Italy, there was even greater interest in Germany.Footnote ⁸⁸ Germans living in Rome described developments in their letters home, and the quarrel in Paris was reported in newspapers such as the Journal des luxus und der moden and Minerva.Footnote ⁸⁹ The Weimar archaeologist Karl August Böttiger questioned what France could display given that it lacked a museum for antiquities. The art critic Karl Ludwig Fernow accused the French of being more preoccupied with ‘fashion’ and ‘vandalism’ than cultural custodianship. And if Goethe presciently recommended waiting to see whether a ‘new corpus of art’ (kunstkorper) could be formed in Paris, he also regretted the violent ‘dislocation’ of objects from a Rome where they had been both cosmopolitan and rooted to the city as if part of a single organism.Footnote ⁹⁰ Other German writers questioned whether republican ‘freedom’ entitled France to the ‘patrimony of liberty’ given that real freedom was in fact the personal freedom for ‘self-cultivation’ (bildung). These responses to the seizures from Rome were in stark contrast to the relative indifference in Germany to further spoliation in the Rhineland. While Anton Kiel's confiscation and sale of books in towns such as Treves was resented locally, elsewhere in Germany these events closer to home failed to arouse attention and were generally seen as an inevitable feature of war. This somewhat surprising contrast has been explained as the result of the German elites' preference for classical Italian over Germanic culture and their greater familiarity with Italian museums compared to the ecclesiastical and princely collections in the Rhineland.Footnote ⁹¹

III

Three shifting contexts caused attitudes to change during the Consulate and Empire. The potential for confiscations increased alongside growing French hegemony, but equally the potential for public debate in response decreased dramatically because the Napoleonic state curbed freedom of expression. As a result, the contest between attitudes was no longer fought in the public eye in newspapers and treatises but instead took place in the context of the conflicting interests of different parts of the bureaucracy. Finally, attitudes also changed due to improvements to the Louvre, which in 1803 was renamed the Musée Napoléon. Positive visitor reports went some way toward undercutting earlier anxieties about the wisdom of displacing artworks from across Europe. The Louvre changed drastically after 1800: it incorporated antiquities; it became the centre of a network of museums; its purpose shifted toward the display of a fine selection rather than exhaustive compendium of objects; and the Napoleonic Louvre resumed traditional museum rationales of advancing art, knowledge, and dynastic glory in place of the revolutionaries' ideal of public access.Footnote ⁹² Such was its transformation that the leading critic of the original plans to displace ‘monuments of art and science’ from Rome now lauded the fact that ‘Rome is no longer in Rome: it is all where I am.’Footnote ⁹³

These shifting contexts meant that after 1800 confiscations were rationalized in different ways. Napoleon reverted to what was normal practice before the eighteenth century, considering it acceptable behaviour to confiscate a vast quantity of cultural property from great enemy sovereigns. Many confiscations during the Empire were thus acts of revenge intended to glorify France and her emperor. After defeating Prussia in 1805 and Austria in 1809, for instance, Napoleon not only allowed Denon a free hand selecting artwork but also demanded symbolic trophies. In Berlin, these included the Brandenburg gate Quadriga and Frederick the Great's sword.Footnote ⁹⁴

However, the doctrine of revenge was not applied everywhere. There was a stubborn perception that there were conditions limiting what could be expropriated from neutral states, allies, satellite kingdoms, annexed territories, and collections owned by nobles rather than sovereigns. There was also a sense that celebrated collections in allied territories, such as those in Dresden and Florence, were untouchable; Napoleon himself was reluctant to deprive either the great cities of his Empire or prospective museums in satellite kingdoms of their greatest treasures.Footnote ⁹⁵ In such circumstances, rhetorical fig-leaves helped contrive what the Louvre administration referred to in one document as the ‘right conditions’.Footnote ⁹⁶

A relatively common legitimization was that objects were already the legal property of France through earlier agreements or territorial annexations. As the 1801 treaty of Florence stipulated, ‘His Majesty the King of Two Sicilies recognizes the need to return to the French Republic the statues, paintings, and other objects of art that had been removed in Rome by Neapolitan troops.’Footnote ⁹⁷ Another justification was that the displacement of cultural property was simply centralization because the French government was now the legitimate authority. Though hardly new, throughout the Consulate and Empire this argument underpinned the appropriation of antique columns from Barcelona and fresco paintings from Parma alike.Footnote ⁹⁸

A façade of fair-play could also be created by acquiring objects through exchanges, purchases, and ‘gifts’. Without the credible threat of force during the Consulate, such expedients were often ineffective. François-Marie Neveu tried to acquire rare books and primitive German paintings from across Bavaria; equally unsuccessfully, the Louvre administration suggested that sculptures by Giambologna be sent from Florence as gifts for the First Consul.Footnote ⁹⁹ However, France did acquire some objects from dependent sovereigns through the shallow conceit of ‘gifts’, such as the Medici Venus in 1802 and a group of Spanish paintings in 1809.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The fairness of purchases was more equivocal. In the most spectacular purchase, Napoleon paid his brother-in-law Prince Camillo Borghese the above-market sum of thirteen million francs in cash and land for some 700 antiquities from his family collection in Rome. If not obtained through physical coercion, this and other sales of antiquities in Italy were arguably necessitated by the liquidity crisis resulting from the French occupation.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Such economic duress blurred the distinction between voluntary and involuntary transactions.

In contrast to the 1790s, confiscations during the Empire were virtually synonymous with one man: the newly appointed director-general of French museums, Dominique-Vivant Denon. Unlike the use of teams of experts in 1794–6 or individual specialists in 1797–1804, Denon travelled across Europe to select culture property himself. Denon deployed flattery and duplicity in order to persuade Napoleon and other administrators when he lacked a free hand to take as he pleased: he asked Napoleon for ‘a trophy of [the Emperor's] victories’ from Germany; he encouraged the purchase of entire collections rather than the individual items that Napoleon had requested; and he even falsely insisted that certain requests were ‘the emperor's will’. Perhaps realising Napoleon's reluctance to touch the Uffizi, Denon proposed seizing objects that it had only recently acquired which could therefore be taken without undermining the Medici's historic bequest to Florence.Footnote ¹⁰²

Denon repeated justifications about the usefulness of creating a great centre: transferring the finest objects to Paris, he told one German museum director, was ‘the only means to make them useful for the world’. This argument proved surprisingly persuasive in Germany. As the musician Karl Friedrich Zelter wrote to Goethe (who received Denon as a visiting celebrity and friend), Paris would be a worthy home for confiscated art because ‘what is good belongs to the entire world’. Art-world professionals such as Johann Emperius revered Denon for his transformation of the Louvre, his account of the Egypt expedition, and his rare interest in early German painting; they saw him as a ‘truly good man’ who wanted to protect their collections from the perils of war. Denon added to this aura of professional accountability by drawing up inventories of the German collections that he visited and insisting that all parties present sign them.Footnote ¹⁰³

Denon also created museological legitimizations. Far from ‘piling up’ decontextualized objects and causing a ‘confusion of ideas’, the new rooms for antiquities in the Louvre, he argued, were laid out and decorated to facilitate stylistic comparisons. Rather than appearing displaced, therefore, it almost seemed as if the objects had been commissioned to decorate the rooms.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ With regards to the collection itself, Denon argued that the acquisitions he sought would fill gaps. He contrasted his approach of seeking only what was rare and fine with the gratuitous harvesting of cultural property during the 1790s. For instance, he argued that the fresco known as the Aldobrandini Wedding needed to be part of Musée Napoleon because it was ‘the most precious painting of the ancients’; equally, he claimed that alternatives to various objects he sought in the Uffizi could not be found anywhere else.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In requesting the catalogue of the library of Wolfenbüttel, Denon insisted that he sought only to fill gaps in the national library's collection by acquiring copies of the Koran, volumes of Turkish and Arabic poetry, and texts about Persian grammar.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ After the nationalization of religious institutions in northern Italian departments, Denon defended confiscating early Renaissance paintings in the same vein. His modest selection, intended to satisfy ‘the curiosity of the public and the instruction of artists’, was ‘the only means to enrich the superb museum with several paintings by famous painters that it lacks … I shall never demand the works of painters that we already possess, since my goal is to obtain what is … very rare’ rather than to ‘despoil the cities of the Empire’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Needless to say, this rhetoric was disingenuous. Denon's pathological drive to collect meant that filling gaps became a self-perpetuating enterprise. Particularly unreasonable was his desire to use frescoes from Rome and Parma to decorate the Louvre: while he made the familiar argument that they were in a ‘state of dilapidation’, other French experts warned that their removal with disputed techniques would constitute ‘the most odious devastation without any public utility’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Not content with having Rome in Paris, Denon proposed remaking Rome and conducting a vast programme of excavations outside the radius of the city.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

IV

There was limited opposition in France after 1800. Talleyrand recommended that Rome remained a great centre and insisted upon the return of sensitive religious objects with no artistic value, such as the wooden statue of the Virgin that had been gratuitously plundered from Loreto.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Prefects also complained. The prefect of the department of Taro lamented after Denon's visit that ‘there remains almost nothing to serve as models for the school of painting in Parma’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Prefects in the long-annexed Belgian departments cited the abuses of the 1790s and some commentators in Paris favoured compensating them.Footnote ¹¹² For example, while applauding the Louvre's collection overall, Pierre-Louis Ginguené criticized the superabundance of Rubens's paintings in the Louvre and suggested returning The elevation of the cross to Antwerp's church of Our Lady, for which it had been created.Footnote ¹¹³ Armand-Gaston Camus (a commissioner for gathering cultural property) argued that libraries in the annexed Belgian departments should receive modern French books in order to replace those seized during the Convention.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Although most French opposition came from foreign ministers and prefects, other criticism should not be ignored. In Corinne, or Italy (published in exile in 1807), Germaine de Staël expressed dissent through a defiant juxtaposition of reality and fiction: in her novel, Rome's artistic riches still ‘surpassed all those in the rest of the world’; her eponymous heroine and Oswald admire artworks that had, in fact, been in Paris almost a decade.Footnote ¹¹⁵ More commonly, artists complained that Denon's preference for confiscating and buying art from abroad deprived them of commissions. In 1806, Quatremère spoke on artists' behalf, attacking how art was commissioned and displayed. Although the polemical thrust of his lectures ‘on the destination of works of art’ was domestic, he nevertheless used several examples of displaced foreign cultural property in order to argue in favour of prescriptive patronage and returning seized artworks to churches in France. For instance, he lamented how ancient sarcophagi that had inspired emotion in Rome were mere objects of scholarly interest in Paris.Footnote ¹¹⁶

While in 1796 German intellectuals had criticized the plunder of Rome, their attitude soon became rather more ambiguous. Johann Friedrich Cotta even suggested that Italians had exchanged art for ‘their first steps toward liberty’. German visitors such as Friedrich Schlegel were more interested in the Louvre's collection and what concentrations of Old Master paintings revealed about the history of style than how the collection had been formed. Arguably, this formed the context for their failure to mobilize public opinion before 1814 when faced by confiscations from Germany.Footnote ¹¹⁷ But their indifference should not be overstated. Most German museum directors were collegial toward Denon only when they were no longer able to hide their collections. Far from Denon being universally admired in Germany, Ludwig Völkel was hostile toward him, confronting his unwelcome visitor with the argument that it was absurd to expropriate the collection of Fridericianum museum, because in Paris it would simply duplicate the Louvre's collection while in Kassel it served the city and the arts.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Throughout the period, representatives from Cologne pressed for the return of Rubens's Martyrdom of Saint Peter. They argued that the painting had been created for the city and was therefore a special part of their civic heritage; moreover, its restitution would not only repay Cologne for its sacrifices to France but would also stimulate its art and commerce.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Similarly, officials in Vienna and Berlin were quick to seek restitution or compensation in the form of artworks or casts of original antiquities seized from Italy.Footnote ¹²⁰

In Italy, criticism was expressed in various forms, including visual media. One caricature depicted an allegory of France suffering ‘indigestion’ after gorging on Italian art, and Canova's allegory against tyranny – Perseus holding the head of Medusa (1801) – was pointedly commissioned by Pius VII to fill the niche vacated by the Apollo Belvedere. More effective was Canova's skilful exploitation of the deprivations to gain funding from Napoleon for excavations in Italy.Footnote ¹²¹ Drawing upon Quatremère's arguments in the Letters, Canova and Carlo Fea also made the case for legislation to prevent the export from Rome of antiquities of scientific rather than just aesthetic value.Footnote ¹²² There was also some diplomatic resistance. In 1801, Louis of Etruria opposed French demands to hand over the Medici Venus; his prime minister, Giulio Mozzi, warned that requisitioning it would undermine the legitimate sovereign, showing Florentines that he was unable to act as ‘the watchful guardian of their property’, thus implicitly harming the French interest that had led to him being installed.Footnote ¹²³ Another strategy was to sabotage Denon's efforts. Just as Francisco Goya sent a false selection of paintings from Madrid, Giovanni degli Alessandri – having offered to select ‘twelve paintings by the first European masters’ of the Florentine Renaissance – sent works that Denon deemed ‘in too poor condition to be accepted’.Footnote ¹²⁴

British views of the French expropriation of cultural property from across Europe formed a relatively clear pattern. Articles in and letters to The Times suggest that while many Britons condemned the ‘robbery and plunder’ that enriched the Louvre's collection, visitors to the museum admired the result and praised the French government for its accessibility.Footnote ¹²⁵ Unlike most of his compatriots, William Hazlitt had little doubt that the ends had justified the means. For Hazlitt, the concentration of the ‘trophies of human liberty’ in the Louvre ‘shortened the road to Italy’. Freed from its sacerdotal purpose, ‘art, no longer a bondswoman, was seated on a throne’: ‘Instead of robbery and sacrilege, it was [thus] the crowning and consecration of art. These works, instead of being taken from their respective countries, were given to the world.’Footnote ¹²⁶

V

If the large-scale restitution that followed the fall of the Empire was unprecedented, it might nevertheless appear an unsurprising outcome given that contemporaries considered the displacement of cultural property since 1794 to have been questionable behaviour. Yet the actions of the alliance that led to the return of cultural property were haphazard. The principle of restitution was not part of any of the treaties that followed the defeat of Napoleon, and it had virtually no place in documented diplomatic affairs. Indeed, even after the battle of Waterloo in June 1815, the victors could not reach a consensus.Footnote ¹²⁷ From the outset, many diplomats and commentators questioned whether it was even the best principle. Just as cosmopolitan German diplomats and visitors to the Louvre expressed mixed feelings about breaking up such a spectacular collection, some in England suggested that the original owners be given the choice of selling their property in Paris at ‘a just price’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Incoherent in theory, restitution was equally fraught in practice, since much appropriated art either remained in France or was sent to the wrong country.Footnote ¹²⁹

How, then, did restitution unfold and what arguments were mobilized? Demands for restitution predated the first Restoration in April 1814, although now powers such as Prussia added the argument that it was ‘compensation’ for restoring the Bourbons. For several years, representatives for Berlin, Vienna, Munich, and Cologne had made requests to have objects returned, which Denon had usually brushed aside.Footnote ¹³⁰ At the first Restoration, these representatives had already published inventories of displaced objects and appointed experts to oversee their restitution. The Bourbon administration rejected all their claims, arguing that the alliance's decision to leave the Royal Museum intact implicitly ratified French ownership. As Louis XVIII declared, the collection now ‘belonged to France by rights stronger than those of war’.Footnote ¹³¹ The Bourbon position was supported by Britain and Russia, two great powers with no restitution claims and a shared strategic preference for a stable regime to counterbalance Austria and Prussia.Footnote ¹³²

Faced with threats of force, French officials schemed to accommodate Austrian and Prussian demands without compromising the principle that the Louvre's collection was legitimate. They planned that French paintings could be offered to buy co-operation; artefacts from Austria and Prussia which were not on display could be returned as ‘gifts’; displayed artworks could be secretly returned in the future; and the claims of powers unable to use the threat of force should be ignored and their great power backers' ulterior motives attacked.Footnote ¹³³ Despite France's efforts, demands intensified and broadened after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo and the start of the second Restoration. The billeting of a million troops in and around Paris drastically reduced the scope for obstructing restitution. Britain reversed its earlier policy. The foreign minister Viscount Castlereagh argued, first, that leaving displaced cultural property in Paris would legitimize theft, because peace agreements such as Tolentino were signed under duress; and, second, that reinstating France's 1792 borders meant that it could not retain acquisitions commensurate with its 1810 borders, because the result would otherwise produce an inconsistent peace settlement.Footnote ¹³⁴ If supporting the claims of minor powers was a way of increasing Britain's diplomatic leverage – above all in the strategically important Low Countries – the strategy also chimed with populist demands to give France what Wellington called ‘a great moral lesson’.Footnote ¹³⁵ Even before the first Restoration, The Times had called for the ‘thief to be stripped’ as a matter of ‘justice’, and in 1815 the newspaper reprinted Quatremère's petition of 1796 to prove that Frenchmen recognized that their actions had been unjust.Footnote ¹³⁶ The representatives of German countries also became more forthright. Symptomatic of the shift from transnational to patriotic conceptions of heritage that Napoleon had inadvertently helped incubate, the Rheinischer merkur and Allgemeine zeitung urged diplomats to cease behaving like ‘supine cosmopolitan philosophers’ and to reclaim ‘inalienable German property’ (volkseigenthum) for the ‘cultural nation’: such were the superficiality of French taste and the commercial distractions of Paris, they argued, that the contemplation required to appreciate profound Germanic creations necessitated their removal to more appropriate environments. Restitution thus became a patriotic duty in which the specific qualities of the objects were less important than their symbolic homecoming. As a Prussian representative confided to the French prime minister, the clamour had less to do with the actual art works than the ‘values that public opinion associates with them’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Fittingly, paintings returned to Berlin formed a patriotic exhibition with profits donated to wounded soldiers.Footnote ¹³⁸

In response, Talleyrand argued that the Hundred Days undermined the case for restitution: after defeating the French nation in 1814, the allies undermined a legitimate case for restitution by taking no action; by contrast, in 1815 they had defeated a mere usurper and thus had no right to punish the nation for his actions. However, as demands grew, Talleyrand treated restitution as a means to normalize France's relationship with potential allies. His relationship with Denon and the Louvre administration became strained; they protested that the museum was essential for the French school of art, manufacturing, and public morale.Footnote ¹³⁹ With the removal of artworks underway despite what a British visitor reported as ‘the agitation of the French public’, it was left to representatives of the Museum, National Library, and Institut to make counterarguments and obstacles.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Their arguments were partly redolent of Quatremère's earlier rhetoric in favour of leaving Rome's cultural property in place: since the selection in the Louvre was a coherent whole, nothing could be removed without shattering its integrity; and, far from being the ‘exclusive property’ of France, they maintained, the collections were in the hands of a custodian who oversaw ‘a repository for the greatest advantage of Europe’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Mazier du Heaume stated in the same vein: ‘Neighbouring countries could admire and study these immortal masterpieces easily and without effort, since France by its fortunate position is placed almost at the centre of Europe.’Footnote ¹⁴² Might the Louvre not be renamed ‘The European Museum’ and its collections ‘considered the common property of European nations, confided to the care of the Parisians’?Footnote ¹⁴³ Their practical conceits and actions proved more effective: they claimed that certain paintings were lost in the provinces and churches, and that coins and manuscripts had been irreversibly merged with existing French collections; they argued that some items were too fragile or heavy to be worth returning; and they swapped important volumes and manuscripts due for restitution with inferior copies so that they could keep the originals.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

The French defence shifted decisively once the great powers started sending soldiers to the Louvre so that experts could remove and pack claimed property. Conceding that what had been taken illegally should be returned, France nevertheless insisted that it retain objects which had been acquired through gifts, purchases, centralizing cultural property in Paris from annexed departments in exchange for infrastructure investment or other objects, and, above all, through peace agreements.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In particular, French representations made the case for the legitimacy of the treaty of Tolentino, the single most important legal document stipulating the handover of cultural property. They pointed out that the treaty had been welcomed in Rome in 1797 rather than signed under duress as was now claimed. It had been signed in perpetuity with the French nation (rather than with Napoleon) and ratified by subsequent Franco-papal relations. Above all, they argued, the integrity of all the treaty's articles needed to be respected in order to avoid inconsistencies: since Comtat Venaissin was not being re-claimed, why undo the articles concerning cultural property?Footnote ¹⁴⁶

While France was ultimately forced to surrender almost all artworks gained through Tolentino, these contractual arguments made it difficult for the papacy to win the great powers' support. Cardinal Secretary of State Consalvi sent Canova to Paris in order to make an artistic rather than a legal case. Although his cause was supported by a petition to Castlereagh signed by thirty-nine foreign artists in Rome, Canova complained of ‘almost insurmountable obstacles’: besides the treaty, foreign diplomats pointed to the ‘convenience and public utility’ of leaving art in Paris rather than causing it to be ‘dispersed here and there in cloisters’, prompting Canova to promise that the papacy would ensure that its collections served ‘general and public utility’ once they were returned to Rome.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Britain eventually backed the papacy's claims with the threat of force just as Austrian might brought about the return of around one third of the paintings that had originally been taken from Parma.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Restitution was thus achieved by the bayonet rather than though the rule of law, giving the impression that the alliance abused the rights of the strongest by acting ‘without a treaty’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

VI

The article has shown how the displacement and restitution of cultural property between 1794 and 1815 caused unprecedented controversy. Besides the exceptional quantity and quality of seized items, French actions proved controversial because appropriating cultural property from abroad had increasingly become questionable behaviour over the preceding century. Moreover, the development of print culture, the cosmopolitanism of the republic of letters, and the status of French as a continental lingua franca facilitated debate.

The article showed how the terms of the debate evolved. In the 1790s, discussion about seized objects was often public; some criticism concerned the backward state of French museums; and arguments often contained appeals to public utility and the advance of art and science. After 1800, the debate changed: it was more likely to occur within the state apparatus; positive perceptions of the Louvre made it easier to accept Paris as a new centre for the arts; and the rubric of imperial glory partly superseded earlier legitimizations. The most fundamental evolution, however, concerned the nation's role as the custodian of heritage: by 1815, arguments over restitution were as likely to be made in the name of the cultural nation as they were in the name of civilization. Taken as a whole, the distinction between attitudes in favour of or against art seizures partly collapses: opposing stands often contained similar arguments and relied on the same assumptions; and individual protagonists did not simply embody fixed positions – just as Denon signed Quatremère's petition in 1796, Quatremère later praised both Napoleon and Elgin.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

The repertoire of attitudes deployed in the debate needs to be situated in a wider context in order to reassess its significance. The case for its importance as a turning point after which cultural property could no longer be expropriated without scruple is twofold. First, the change that occurred is underlined by the fact that the seizures proved controversial and generated opposition; without such a change, restitution on such a scale might have been unthinkable. Second, the repertoire appears significant from a presentist perspective because so much of it resembles modern day exchanges between representatives of western museums and those of ‘retentionist’ countries. In particular, restitution raised a question that remains pertinent: namely, what period of possession constitutes a right to cultural property? The papacy accepted the demand that some precious manuscripts taken from the Vatican to Paris in 1797 be returned to Heidelberg, from where they had been seized in 1623. By contrast, the Horses of Saint Marco, taken to Paris from Venice in 1797, were returned under Austrian protection to Venice rather than Constantinople, from where they had been plundered in 1204, or Corinth, where some experts believed that they had been created. At least one contemporary was left pondering whether the Horses ‘may not be destined to return one day to their original country, Greece’.Footnote ¹⁵¹

However, on closer inspection the key change that occurred was more of a revision than a rupture. Little suggests that behaviour, norms, or rules were overhauled. Just as treaties during the Restoration never formalized restitution, rules about when cultural property could legitimately be displaced were never systematized in the manner of the Lieber Code of 1863. Few examples suggest that the debate shaped regulations, legal proceedings, or actions during the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵² What is certain is that the quarrel in 1796 did not prevent the plunder that took place during the Directory and the Empire; and restitution did not dissuade European powers from enriching their museums with artefacts from across the world in the following century. In fact, contributions to the debate were more likely to be instrumental in other respects: sometimes they used the seizure of cultural property as a proxy for other matters, be it high politics, artistic patronage, and administrative positions in museums, or funding for transporting, restoring, and displaying seized artefacts.

The repertoire of attitudes deployed in the debates that took place between 1794 and 1815 also repeated older examples, arguments, and assumptions. Seizing cultural property symbolized greatness in the manner of ancient Rome, it was said, or it was not an act of injustice because the Republic was simply taking what Rome had expropriated from Greece. Arguments for municipal heritage and the popular devotional attachment to certain objects that led to resistance were equally rooted in earlier traditions. More indirectly, themes in the repertoire of attitudes naturally drew from those that were available: notions of indemnification and pre-emption pre-dated 1792, and eighteenth-century jurists had already discussed the problem of reconciling different national interests. Eighteenth-century commonplaces underpinned many attitudes: the association between art and freedom; the necessity of safeguarding knowledge in a Noah's ark or a tower of Babel against natural disasters; the idea that knowledge constituted an organic whole; the anxiety that displacement entailed degeneration; and the fear that displacing antiquities would result in the loss of information about their provenance.

The debate that took place during the period was nevertheless new in two respects. First, the disputation resulted in conceptual migrations that produced new combinations of ideas: classic ideas in political economy and international law came to be applied to questions about cultural property. Second, the conditions under which cultural property could legitimately be displaced were revised. Ostensibly, the rhetorical emphasis on seizing from enemies rather than allies and for the greater rather than private good was hardly new: Cicero had accused Verres of deploying duplicitous means to plunder allies for private gain in peacetime, not only looting what generals had thought fit to leave behind in Sicily but also ‘stealing spoils won from the enemy, memorials of our commander [Scipio]’.Footnote ¹⁵³ However, during the Wars of the French Revolution the traditional categories of dynastic allies and enemies were modified: traitors and foreign sovereigns were enemies, and foreign subjects of enemy kings and princes were allies. Thus apologists for the seizures from Italy were keen to emphasize that ‘we tear monuments of art from our royal enemies; we respect them in the hands of their subjects’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Moreover, while the common rationale throughout the period was that cultural property was seized for the greater good rather than for private purposes, the meaning of the greater good was revised. It became more powerful but also more elusive: in more abstract formulations, serving the greater good meant furthering civilization and knowledge; more concretely, it meant benefiting the people of a particular territory, although there was no consensus as to whether that public was the inhabitants of city, a nation, or the whole of Europe.

The disputation thus presented elements of continuity and change alike and was significant for reasons that differ from those usually claimed. There was no decisive change in behaviour, norms, and rules, and the attitudes expressed in response to the displacement of cultural property often repeated pre-existing arguments and assumptions. However, arguments from other subjects were brought to bear on matters of cultural property in innovative ways and the perceived conditions under which cultural property could legitimately be displaced were revised.