1818 is definitely too long ago
The whole "stolen heritage" and "repatriation" thing is a tricky issue. On one hand, property rights should really persist in perpetuity, and theft is always wrong. On the other hand, thefts happen all the time, especially during wartime; nation states are imaginary actors (albeit powerful ones); and eventually new status quos get to be as legitimate as old ones. Should everything ever looted anywhere be returned to its rightful owners? Maybe, if those owners still exist, or if you can identify them. Should it be returned to their descendents? Well, who is that, actually? What does "descendents" mean in the case of, say, Ancient Greece (a rather 18th century category that would've had highly questionable currency before the Renaissance)? Are there any legitimate means by which one place might get the stuff produced in another, except through sale or gift? If we like the Greeks (Romans, French, Germans, Spaniards, Brits, Americans etc etc etc) do we also like their claims to war booty, their appropriation of the cultures of others? If we like the current boundaries of nation states but dislike looting, then how do we feel about the claim of, say, Italy to own Rome?
...who would we actually be pleasing, if we emptied the great museums of Europe and America and redistributed all their stuff back to what we today, contingently and politically, consider to be their sources?
I have no good answers, and I suspect no good answers exist to be found. Thus shorn of a principled stance, I mostly fall back on a practical one: if you decide that such-and-such an artifact should be forcibly "repatriated," what implications does that decision have for other artifacts? How much of the world museum trade do you think it's appropriate to unweave in order to satisfy some noisy (usually) nationalists or ethnists? Perhaps some of it, if you don't want to encourage a market in the present for looted antiquities, but how much? Should we set a global date - a statute of limitations - and decide not to pursue goods that changed hands before then (and should that date fall before or after WW2, or WW1, or the Crimea, or Napoleon, or what?)? Or are some heritage items more worthy of repatriation than others?
I don't know. But my practical antennae are shaking fit to fall off over France's seizure of some paintings that were stolen in 1818.
...who would we actually be pleasing, if we emptied the great museums of Europe and America and redistributed all their stuff back to what we today, contingently and politically, consider to be their sources?
I have no good answers, and I suspect no good answers exist to be found. Thus shorn of a principled stance, I mostly fall back on a practical one: if you decide that such-and-such an artifact should be forcibly "repatriated," what implications does that decision have for other artifacts? How much of the world museum trade do you think it's appropriate to unweave in order to satisfy some noisy (usually) nationalists or ethnists? Perhaps some of it, if you don't want to encourage a market in the present for looted antiquities, but how much? Should we set a global date - a statute of limitations - and decide not to pursue goods that changed hands before then (and should that date fall before or after WW2, or WW1, or the Crimea, or Napoleon, or what?)? Or are some heritage items more worthy of repatriation than others?
I don't know. But my practical antennae are shaking fit to fall off over France's seizure of some paintings that were stolen in 1818.