When an elderly couple held a garage sale after selling their second home in the south of France, little did they know they would become embroiled in a legal battle with millions of euros at stake <\/p>\n
The grandfather, Ren\u00e9-Victor Edward Maurice Fournier, had served as a colonial governor in Central Africa during the early 20th century, when significant parts of the continent were under French colonial rule. <\/p>\n
The Fourniers sold their mask in September of 2021 to a second-hand dealer for 150 euros, <\/strong>court documents<\/strong> <\/strong>show. According to their lawyer, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Mansat Jaffr\u00e9, the two were unaware of the mask\u2019s market value and believed the dealer was offering a fair price. <\/p>\n A few months later, their lawyer said they learned through a newspaper article that their old mask was being auctioned off, and that it was worth substantially more than what the dealer paid. <\/p>\n The Fourniers launched a civil case against the dealer which they lost in the fall of 2022 and were ordered to pay court costs. <\/p>\n Now they are appealing the earlier court decision, claiming the dealer failed \u201cin his obligation to provide pre-contractual information\u201d and committed \u201ca breach of consent.\u201d <\/p>\n The couple seeks to annul the sale of the mask and want the auction\u2019s proceeds to be given to them. <\/p>\n As the appeal commenced at the Al\u00e8s Tribunal in southern France on Tuesday, the Gabonese government waded in and formally requested a suspension of the proceedings.. <\/p>\n The dealer\u2019s defense, according to court documents, maintains that he was unaware of the value of the mask when he purchased it from the couple and only discovered it once he went to the auction house to have it appraised. <\/p>\n Court documents show that his lawyers argued that \u201cthe sellers have no grounds for claiming error. They themselves offered the item for sale at 150 euros. They made an inaccurate economic assessment of the value presented by the mask.\u201d <\/p>\n If the court accepts its petition to suspend the current legal proceedings on the sale of the Ngil mask, the country will be able to pursue their separate case for the handling of stolen goods and fight for the mask to be returned to its country of origin. <\/p>\n The court is expected to make its decision known on December 19. <\/p>\n Dating from the 19th century, it belonged to the powerful Ngil society, a secret group tasked with administering justice within the Fang communities of Gabon, according to Betoe Bi Evie. <\/p>\n \u201cFor Westerners, the mask is an art object,\u201d Betoe Bi Evie said, \u201cbut for Africans, for the Gabonese\u2026 it\u2019s a ritual object used to ensure peace in society. It\u2019s very important.\u201d <\/p>\n According to a Sotheby\u2019s listing for a similar Ngil mask, these artifacts \u201care among the rarest and most highly celebrated of all African artworks,\u201d making them \u201ckeenly sought after as indispensable keystones of the best collections of African art.\u201d <\/p>\n The couple\u2019s lawyer argued in court that the dealer deliberately withheld information about the origins of the mask from them and planned to split the money with their gardener, who had provided him with information about the Fourniers\u2019 ties to the former colonial governor. <\/p>\n The dealer and the gardener allegedly visited the auction house together, presenting themselves as co-owners of the mask, the sellers assert in court documents. <\/p>\n The couple say the dealer did not inform them of his relationship with their gardener, nor that he had any intention of auctioning off their mask, according to their lawyer. <\/p>\n After the Fourniers discovered the mask was being auctioned off, they contacted the dealer, who offered 300,000 euros in compensation, equivalent to the auction house\u2019s estimate of the mask\u2019s worth, Mansat Jaffr\u00e9 said. <\/p>\n The couple\u2019s children advised their parents to refuse the sum and file a lawsuit. <\/p>\n For the moment, 3.2 million euros, the amount the dealer earned from the sale of the mask after tax deductions and commission fees, have been frozen in his bank account by the courts, Mansat Jaffr\u00e9 said. <\/p>\n The trial has attracted attention among France\u2019s large African diaspora and among those at the court were several Gabonese protesters demanding that the mask be returned to their country. <\/p>\n Some were also present at the auction house when the mask was sold, back in March 2022, according to Solange Bizeau, president of the Collectif Gabon Occitanie, the organization behind the protests. <\/p>\n \u201cThe two lawyers told the court that we, the Gabonese people and the Gabonese State, have no legitimate claim to (the mask),\u201d said Bizou. \u201cI was shocked to see that they (those participating in the trial) weren\u2019t interested in the mask, they didn\u2019t care what it meant for us, all they wanted was money.\u201d <\/p>\n Today, only a dozen Ngil masks remain in the world, according to court documents. <\/p>\n French President Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly called for the restitution of colonial artifacts from French collections to their original owners. After his election in 2017, he expressed his desire for \u201cthe conditions to be in place within five years for temporary or permanent restitutions of African heritage to Africa.\u201d <\/p>\n According to a report submitted to Macron in 2018, there are at least 80,000 objects from Sub-Saharan Africa held in French public collections. Until now, only a handful have been returned to their countries of origin. <\/p>\n Some artifacts have been returned indefinitely, like the 26 looted royal objects that comprise the Treasure of Behanzin, restituted to Benin in 2020. <\/p>\n Others were returned to their birthplaces on long-term loans, like a sword and scabbard of West African leader Omar Tall, currently exhibited in Senegal\u2019s Museum of Black Civilizations. <\/p>\n In addition to Benin and Senegal, five other African countries \u2013 Chad, Madagascar, the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia and Mali \u2013 have made official requests for restitutions from the French government. <\/p>\n However, as the Ngil mask at the center of the ongoing trial wasn\u2019t held in a public collection, Gabon cannot demand its restitution from France. <\/p>\n\n When an elderly couple held a garage sale after selling their second home in the south of France, little did they know they would become embroiled in a legal battle with millions of euros at stake The grandfather, Ren\u00e9-Victor Edward Maurice Fournier, had served as a colonial governor in Central Africa during the early 20th <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11190,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11189","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} An extremely rare artifact<\/h2>\n
A fraught legal battle<\/h2>\n
Calls for restitution<\/h2>\n