Le comité Britannique pour la Restitution des Marbres du Parthénon fait campagne depuis le début des années 80 pour que ces sculptures soient rendues à Athènes. Le Comité a gagné l'admiration de ses partisans et, bon gré mal gré, le respect de ses opposants, British Museum compris, par la manière dont il a mené ses recherches et contré un par un les arguments de ceux qui pensent que les Marbres du Parthénon devraient demeurer en Grande-Bretagne. Le Comité britannique a entrepris sa campagne bien avant que le sujet ne devienne à la mode. La tenacité de ses membres, et le dévouement de son indomptable secrétaire Eleni Cubitt, a contribué à créer une situation où le soutien à la cause du rapatriement en Grèce de ces sculptures est plus fort qu'il ne l'a jamais été.

Eleni Cubitt, secretaire du Comité Britannique pour la Restitution des Marbres du Parthénon.

Sur cette page, nous informerons nos visiteurs des activités du Comité. Ci-dessous, des extraits de la lettre d'information de janvier 1999. L'actualité des campagnes du Comité Britannique est publiée en page Nouvelles du front.

Si vous souhaitez contacter le Comité Britannique pour la Restitution des Marbres du Parthénon, veuillez écrire à la secrétaire, Eleni Cubitt au 5, St Paul's Place, London N1 2QD, UK, ou adresser un mél à
marbles@parthenon.demon.co.uk.

Qui est propriétaire de quoi ?
La partie appartient au tout

Il se trouve que la Parthénon, un édifice de quelque signification pour la civilisation européenne, est situé à Athènes. Le meilleur endroit pour le comprendre est au milieu des monuments qui l'entourent. Au cours de l'histoire, une partie du bâtiment a été détachée de sa structure. Il serait de bon sens d'exposer ces fragments détachés près de l'édifice lui-même, afin qu'il puisse être étudié comme un tout. La question est moins de savoir qui est propriétaire de ces fragments que de reconnaître la meilleure manière de permettre à tous de voir et de comprendre le Parthénon.

Puisque, à quelques rares exceptions près, tous les fragments détachés qui ne sont pas en Grèce sont en Grande-Bretagne, il serait honteux que des préjugés dérisoires fassent obstacle à la restitution des marbres dits "d'Elgin", non pas à la Grèce, mais au Parthénon. Il ne doit pas s'agir seulement d'une prise de bec entre la Grèce et la Grande-Bretagne. Il s'agit de savoir de quelle manière nous pouvons tous profiter au mieux de notre patrimoine.

Lors d'une interview avec Jeremy Paxman le 19 novembre 1998, M. Anderson, directeur du British Museum, a parlé de la "propriété légale" du musée, tout en reconnaissant les circonstances historiques de l'acquisition des parties sculptées de la structure du Parthénon. La "propriété légale" reste encore à démontrer, mais de la part de M. Anderson, en faire le fondement de son argumentation est l'indice d'une vision singulièrement pourvue d'oeillères. Le temps ne s'est pas arrêté. En 1770, le Capitaine Cook a hissé les couleurs britanniques sur les Nouvelles Galles du Sud, mais M. Anderson serait le premier à reconnaître que les circonstances sont maintenant dépassées. Il en va de même des Marbres. M. Venizelos, Ministre de la Culture, a fait preuve de bonne volonté dans sa manière d'aborder la question devant Mr Smith, mais Mr Smith continue, tel feu M. Molotov, à répéter Niet ! Niet ! Niet ! et à refuser de prendre part à toute réunion tant soit peu constructive sur la question. Il n'est pas hors de portée de l'intelligence des gouvernements de mettre au point une procédure capable de satisfaire l'amour-propre Elginien des Britanniques. Alors, cher Mr Smith, les Grecs souhaitent ces entretiens, l'UNESCO attend que vous participiez à ces entretiens, et une majorité de la population britannique attend elle aussi que vous participiez à ces entretiens, avec bonne volonté et un esprit ouvert. Pourquoi pas ?

Lorsque cette campagne a repris dans les années 80, la cause des Marbres du Parthénon n'avait pas très bonne presse auprès de la population britannique. Aujourd'hui, non seulement le public britannique est-il beaucoup plus au fait des circonstances qui l'entourent, mais chaque sondage fait apparaître que le peuple britannique et ses représentants sont de plus en plus favorables à leur restitution. Nous voulons donner l'élan final, afin qu'en 2004, lorsqu'Athènes accueillera les Jeux Olympiques, que le monde entier aura les yeux tournés vers elle, et que le nouveau musée ouvrira ses portes au pied de l'Acropole, les Marbres y soient pour l'honorer de leur présence.

L'exposition, "Monuments des dieux" "Pierres sans vaieur", que le Comité Britannique pour la Restitution des Marbres du Parthénon montre à travers le Royaume-Uni et l'Europe.

Page en cours de traduction.

Clean, honest and truthful?

This cover-up has, if anything, extended the gravity of the original offence from 1939 up to the present day. The museum continues to be shifty. It has announced that it intends to hold an international conference in November 1999 (17 months after Mr St Clair's revelations) to report on its own findings and also to widen the discussion to include the condition and treatment of similar monuments elsewhere since the 1930s.

The clear intention is to obfuscate the issue by attempting to identify scandalous mistreatment of artefacts elsewhere and so spread the odium over a wider area. It is a well known defensive tactic, deceives no one, and is surely unworthy of a great institution. The scandal that has at last been fully uncovered relates to the British Museum alone.

Why we should make a great gift to the Greeks

When John Major restored the Stone of Scone to Edinburgh nobody said that if it went on like this there wouldn't be one stone to pile upon another in Westminster Abbey. When the British Museum returned a portion of the beard of the Sphinx to Egypt so that the fabulous couchant beast could be properly restored, nobody howled about the emptying of the world's galleries. When the Lane Collection was returned to Dublin, the sky remained in place.

But just you try mentioning the British Museum's Elgin collection on a radio show or in a pub or simply in conversation, and some saloon-bar philosopher is absolutely certain to strike up. Give them back and where will it all end, the museum's of Europe the denuded, Bloomsbury a place of banging shutters and tumbleweed...

There are two reasons for this endless incantation, which is nearly as durable as the simple pun on "losing our marbles" which every saloon-bar savant believes he has coined for the first time. The first reason is the pricking of a poor conscience. Even people who claim that Lord Elgin rescued the Marbles from a worse fate -- an argument which does have some truth to it -- are dimly aware that by saving the property of a neighbour you do not become the sole owner of that property.

It's also quite well understood that Elgin negotiated the removal with the then Turkish occupiers, and that the Greeks were helpless to prevent their colonial bosses from disposing of treasures they did not especially rever. No great cause for British pride there.

The second reason has to do with a simple misunderstanding. No international law governs the allocation of sculptures, paintings, bronzes or any other artefact. And there is no international body, let alone an international authority, to which application can be made. The European Parliament can express an opinion, if it so desires, and so may UNESCO for all the good that may do. But what any nation "has", by way of museum objects, it is free to hold or to return.

The whole question of precedent, then, is a huge waste of breath. There are no precedents, only individual instances like the ones I mentioned above.

In the case of the Parthenon sculptures, to give them their proper name, the precedent argument is unusually silly. For one thing, the Greeks do not want anything else "back". They are rather pleased that samples of the heroic age are on display everywhere. But the sculpture that was cast under the direction of Phidias himself, to adorn the Temple of Athena, is as close as you can come to a unique case. In 500 or so feet of almost breathing stone, it tells a story. It was cast as a unity. It is an integral part of perhaps the most beautiful building that still survives from antiquity.

If the Marbles were a canvas, and that canvass had been arbitrarily cut or torn in two, and the two halves were in separate galleries they would have been reunited by now on aesthetic grounds alone. Short of moving the rest of the Parthenon to Great Russell Street, there is only one way that an intelligent visitor will ever be able to see the whole design, and that is by an act of generous restitution. To hear some people talk, you would think that such a restitution would cause the Marbles to disappear fro m view. But during the past few years the Greek authorities have been taking the matter very seriously. A new museum is in preparation, on the slopes of the Acropolis, in which it will be possible to house all the sculpture in one place, in controlled conditions which will prevent damage from pollution. This one place will be right next to the temple, so that a student can view the building and its decoration in the exact historical geographic and architectural context, all in one day. It is partly the faul t of the Greeks that this was not possible before, so that the long-running argument over the sculpture, which began when Byron first lampooned Lord Elgin in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1817, has always been a case of either/or. Should we give them back, or have we acquired nine points of the law by careful possession? Deadlock and constipation and amour-propre.

Now, a completely different proposition can be made. Would the British people, through their parliament, care to become co-sponsors of a restored Acropolis, complete with its Parthenon centrepiece? I do not think the handsomeness of this offer has begun to be appreciated. Picture the scene. The museum is opened in the shadow of the Acropolis. The Speaker of the House of Commons, and the Prime Minister, perhaps, are honoured guests of the Greek parliament. They jointly announce that, for the first time in al most two hundred years, the caryatids, Lapiths, Centaurs, horses and chariots can be seen as they were intended to be seen, as an aesthetic unity. At least one of the ravages of time, war and chaos has been, as far as is humanely possible, undone.

In Greek and Cypriot tavernas all over the world, it is announced that on this day British guests eat and drink for nothing. A stone on the site records that, like Gladstone's return of the Ionian Islands, a great act of magnanimity and symmetry has been performed by the islanders of the North Sea.

Something like this was actually proposed by the Tory MP Thelma Cazalet in the Commons in 1944. The gesture then was intended to commemorate the moment when Britain and Greece had been sole partners in the fight against Nazi imperialism. That chance was missed, thanks to pettifogging in the Foreign Office, and the old, grudging repetitions were resumed.

But now there's no excuse. Nobody needs to give anything up. Everybody can be a winner. It would be a shame, I think, churlishly to decline such an offer. But no doubt there will be those who want to go to the last ditch, grumbling in their warm beer that the next thing you know we'll be appeasing the Babylonians.

This article is reproduced with kind permission of Christopher Hitchens and the Evening Standard, in which it appeared on 4 March 1998.

Time to make Greeks a gift of their Marbles

Back in the bright new dawn of the Labour government, when the nation was still creeping across the stage like the prisoners' chorus in Fidelio, blinking in the unaccustomed brightness of the day, a sudden, discordant note was struck. It wasn't very loud, but loud enough to jolt the harmony. It came from the freshly minted Minister of Culture: in Mr Smith's first policy disclosure, the Minister declared that, contrary to widespread expectation and in defiance of what appears to be the majority opinion of th e British public, the so-called Elgin Marbles would not be returning to Athens. They were, he said, an integral part of the British museum's collection and it was not a "feasible or a sensible option" to send them back. It was a bit like saying that Hong Kong was an integral part of Britain's collection of colonies: true enough, in its way, but not, at this stage in history, quite the view you expect a Labour government to embrace.

The pronouncement caused consternation in Athens, but some dismay in this country, too. The rejoicing in Greece at the news of the Labour government's landslide was founded on a promise made by the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, 12 years ago. The Parthenon without its marble frieze, Mr Kinnock had said, was like a smile without a tooth. The Marbles, he pledged, would be returned as soon as the Labour Party gained power.

What changed their minds? It can hardly have been the fear of a backlash. Last June, in the wake of a channel 4 poll which showed an overwhelming majority of the British people in favour of the return of the Marbles, more than 100 MPs signed an early day motion calling on the Conservative government to enter into immediate negotiations. In the European Parliament 250 MEPs, including more than 40 Labour members, supported a similar motion. If the polls are to be believed, they could even have achieved that r are thing in politics -- doing well by doing good. No wonder the Greek Minister of Culture, Evangelos Venizelos, whose slightly precipitate enthusiasm had provoked Mr Smith's response, was stunned.

The arguments against return have grown steadily more threadbare over the years, though a number of myths have lodged themselves in the darker corners of the British consciousness. One is that the seventh Earl of Elgin somehow rescued the Marbles from the Parthenon, where passing Barbarians would undoubtedly have destroyed them. In fact, Lord Elgin, who at the time was British ambassador to Constantinople, was on a personal shopping expedition looking for useful bits of antiquity with which to decorate the country seat he was having built back home. His original intention was to copy them, but when that proved difficult and the opportunity arose to remove the originals he seized it.

The poor Greeks, who were part of the Ottoman empire at time, had no say in the matter and the Turks cared less about the fact that a frieze the Greeks placed at the centre of their identity and culture was being hacked off and carted away than they did about securing British support against Napoleon.

It was only later --in 1816 -- when his marriage had collapsed and he had lost both his diplomatic position and his seat in the Lords, that Lord Elgin sold them to the nation to recover some of his costs. Even at the time, some thought the whole episode a disgrace to a nation that prided itself on its lofty cultural values -- the most famous of them being Lord Byron.

The Marbles have now been demanded many times by successive, democratically elected governments of Greece, which is a fellow member of Nato, the European Union and the Council of Europe. The notion that they are safer in London no longer stands; the Barbarians are no more of a threat in Athens than in London and the Greek government, which has spent millions of pounds on the restoration and conservation of cultural objects, is currently building a special Museum at the foot of the Acropolis to house the mod els. There they would be protected from the air pollution that serves as another part of the British case for retention.

It's an old argument, but surely one that we should now settle. British museums are, course, stuffed with other nations' treasures, many acquired in circumstances that do not bear examination in the light of today's moral and cultural values. But the Elgin Marbles are unique not only in their ranking as one of the world's greatest cultural artefacts: they are at the heart of Greek cultural identity. As Professor John Boardman put it: 'the story of the Parthenon...embraces the beginnings of organised religio us life in Greece...the physical, political, economic, social and military history of Athens itself."

For generations, cultured Britons have studied ancient Greece as a prime source of the cultural mix we define as British. Such studies were thought to enrich both the cultural and the moral understanding. Now that we have a proper Minister of Culture in a government that proclaims itself intent on joining the modern world, surely we can abandon the fustian pretence that the Parthenon Marbles play a more important cultural role in Bloomsbury than they did -- and would again -- in Greece.

A substantial part of the article time to make Greeks a gift of the Marbles has been reproduced here with kind permission of Isabel Hilton and the Guardian.

Numbers game