France Returns 26 Looted Treasures to Benin, 129 Years Later

On November 17, 1892, French colonial troops under Colonel Alfred-Amédée Dodds occupied Abomey, capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey, after a campaign the French Ministry of Defense’s own historical service describes as establishing France’s protectorate over the kingdom. King Béhanzin, Dahomey’s ruler, had ordered the palace burned rather than let it fall to the French intact, but French forces still found and seized a large cache of royal objects, thrones, ceremonial statues and other regalia from hidden stores around the compound. Dodds, promoted to general during the campaign, sent the seized objects to France, where they were eventually donated to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris and later transferred to the Musée du Quai Branly. Béhanzin himself was captured and deported after continuing to resist for another year, surrendering in January 1894.

The objects sat in French museums for well over a century before their return became a serious policy question. In 2018, French president Emmanuel Macron commissioned Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy to study restitution of African cultural heritage held in French collections. Their report, submitted November 21, 2018, concluded that roughly 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s material cultural heritage was held outside the continent, and recommended that objects taken without clear evidence of legitimate acquisition be returned permanently rather than merely loaned. Two days later, the Élysée announced Macron’s decision on the Benin objects specifically: “the President has decided to immediately return 26 works claimed by the authorities in Benin, looted by General Dodds from Behanzin’s palace following the bloody fighting of 1892.” The announcement was faster than the follow-through: French law barred the state from permanently alienating museum collections, so the return required a new law, passed by the French parliament in December 2020, before the objects could actually leave France.

The 26 objects were formally returned in a ceremony at the Musée du Quai Branly on October 27, 2021, and arrived in Benin shortly after. Benin’s president, Patrice Talon, called the collection “our soul” at the Paris ceremony, while Macron described the handover as “a symbolic, moving and historic moment.” The pieces, including royal thrones, ceremonial statues and other regalia from Béhanzin’s palace, went on display at sites including a former Portuguese fort in Ouidah while Benin completed a dedicated museum in Abomey to house them permanently. Talon was clear the moment was a first step rather than a resolution: French museums, above all the Quai Branly, still hold thousands of additional West and Central African objects taken during the colonial period, and he said he expected more to eventually follow the same path.

The Benin case is part of a broader, unresolved argument about African restitution that plays out object by object and institution by institution rather than through any single continent-wide settlement: this site has separately covered the University of Aberdeen’s return of a looted Benin Bronze and the Church of England’s more limited restitution pledge, two very different cases involving objects from the historically distinct Kingdom of Benin (in present-day Nigeria), unrelated to the Kingdom of Dahomey objects covered here beyond the shared colonial-era pattern of looting and the shared word “Benin” that causes frequent confusion between the two.