France’s decision last week to simplify the restitution of cultural artifacts acquired through illicit appropriation is an admission that history leaves debts that must be honored.

The French Parliament’s overwhelming approval of the legislation — 343 votes in favor and none against in the Sénat, following unanimous passage in the Assemblée Nationale — shows the country’s willingness to reconcile itself with its past.

The importance of this law lies not only in what it permits, but in what it dismantles. For generations, France’s doctrine of the “inalienability” of public collections functioned almost as a secular catechism of the republic. Once an object entered the national collection, it became virtually untouchable, requiring painstaking parliamentary intervention for every single restitution. The Louvre, Quai Branly and countless provincial museums became guardians not merely of art, but of imperial memory itself.

Now, for the first time, France has established a legal framework enabling the return of cultural objects acquired through looting, coercion or colonial expropriation between 1815 and 1972.

Across the West, debates over colonial history have grown increasingly polarized. The United Kingdom continues its endless evasions over the Parthenon Marbles and the Benin Bronzes. It is not surprising that Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian expressed China’s appreciation that France has stepped up to its responsibility in returning lost artifacts to their countries of origin, regarding the issue as an opportunity for dialogue and “mutual learning between civilizations”.

These remarks point toward something deeper. Cultural restitution is not merely about objects. It is about the right of nations to tell their own stories through the artifacts that embody their memory.

Few episodes symbolize this more vividly than the destruction of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860 by Anglo-French Alliance Forces during the Second Opium War (1856-60). The looting of that palace, which is called Yuanmingyuan Park today, remains one of the traumas in modern Chinese historical consciousness.

In 1861, French writer Victor Hugo wrote a letter to his friend Captain Butler, one of the leaders of the Anglo-French forces, describing the looting of the Old Summer Palace as a crime against civilization, damning it as the act of “two bandits” — “One plundered, the other burned”.

“The day will come,” he wrote, “when France, once freed and cleansed, will return this plunder to China.”

Although the sentence now reads like prophecy, the step toward its realization took more than one and a half centuries. And France is not now emptying its museums. The law excludes military objects and certain archaeological materials, and restitution cases will still require extensive review. Nor does this legislation erase the asymmetry of centuries of colonial extraction.

But symbols matter in diplomacy. What France has recognized is that cultural diplomacy cannot survive on nostalgia alone. A museum is not morally neutral simply because it is beautiful.

This is why French Senator Catherine Morin-Desailly captured the significance of the legislation when she said the law “opens a path where memory is no longer confiscated but shared, where the wounds of history become the foundations of a renewed dialogue between nations”.

France at least understands something that many of the Western colonial powers still struggle to accept: that status comes not from the trappings of display but from respect.

And respect cannot be earned by displaying heirlooms stolen from others.