15 January 1759. The British Museum opens its doors in London.

15 January 1759. This date is often celebrated—rightly so—as a founding moment of modern museology: the birth of the public museum as a place for conservation, study, and access to knowledge. Europe’s great museums have played an essential role in safeguarding works that, in many cases, might otherwise have disappeared. Yet this anniversary also invites a more uncomfortable reflection. At the end of the eighteenth century, Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy wrote the Lettres à Miranda, a series of letters published in 1796 in which he denounced— with remarkable clarity— the systematic displacement of works of art from their original territories to the great European centres of power. It is important to be precise: Lettres à Miranda is not a book in the conventional sense, but a collection of letters. Only those written by Quatremère have survived; the replies of their recipient, the Lieutenant General Francisco de Miranda, have been lost. Even so—perhaps precisely because of this—the text remains intellectually powerful and strikingly relevant. Quatremère does not argue against conservation. He argues against displacement. He warns that removing a work of art from its historical, geographical, and cultural context constitutes a form of intellectual destruction, even if the object itself survives materially. His formulation is radical and enduring: to divide is to destroy. He goes further still: some places—Rome being his paradigmatic example—cannot be dismantled without losing their meaning, because they are, in themselves, living museums. It is telling that this text has been republished in recent decades, a sign that we are still grappling with the same unresolved questions more than two centuries later. Among them, a central tension remains: (1) without European museums, part of the world’s heritage would have been lost; (2) yet a significant portion of their collections originates in contexts of conquest, colonial domination, or outright spoliation. Today’s debate on the restitution of cultural property defies simplistic answers. It is at once legal, historical, political, and patrimonial. It touches on rights, responsibilities, wounded memories, and fragile international balances. It is, undeniably, a true Pandora’s box. And yet, as Quatremère already intuited, the time may have come to seek solutions through international forums—based on cooperation, restitution where appropriate, and new forms of shared custody. Not to rewrite history, but to confront it fully. One day, that box will have to be closed. Doing so wisely will be one of the great heritage challenges of our time. LC — Paris, January 2026