Commentary – Korean President welcomes home the returned

The Royal Protocol Book (의궤儀軌, Uigwe) which was produced between the 17^th and early 20^th centuries records royal rituals such as birthdays, funerals, weddings and royal processions of Joseon Dynasty (1394–1910). Written and drawn entirely by hand, the proceedings of every royal event were transcribed in prose and illustrated in detail. Their meticulous depiction of royal court rites provides a vivid account of Joseon dynasty culture, a unique form of documentary heritage that was listed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World program in 2007. Among books, one superior copy was made only for the king, and five to nine additional copies were reproduced and kept in various libraries in the country. In 1782, the Outer Gyujanggak Library (외규장각外奎章閣, Oegyganggak) was built on Ganghwa island, considered by Koreans to be a naturally secured place, and housed most of the royal viewing copies, along with other important documents. The French military took several hundred royal protocol books from this library in 1866. From the 1990s onwards, these books, known as the Oegyusanggak books (외규장각도서) in Korea and les manuscrits coréens in French, were the object of restitution negotiations between the Republic of Korea and France. From the Korean President’s welcome remarks addressed to the Korean people, several key points of this 20-year-long return procedure of these books can be extracted: plunder, passion of the people, negotiation and national power, these describe the Korean perspective on this dispute and its conclusion.

From October 11 to November 12, 1866, Admiral Roze of France’s 2^nd Empire led 800 troops in an attack on Ganghwa Island on the pretext that Korea had executed seven French Catholic missionaries, but also in order to ultimately force a commercial treaty between two countries. When the French naval forces retreated without result, they had destructed and set fire to government offices, and seized a number of royal books including the protocol book from the Outer Gyujanggak library. Prior to this expedition, more than 5,000 books were known to be stored in this library, however, there is no conclusive inventory to date specifying what the French looted during this military expedition.

For a long time, in Korea, these books were thought to have been destroyed by fire during the military expedition or scattered and lost in France during the Second World War. In 1975, a Korean librarian at the Bibliothéque nationale de France (BNF), Park Byeong-seon, who was looking for the protocol books plundered from the Outer Gyujanggak library of Ganghwa, reported to Korea that she found some Royal Protocol Books in the Versailles annexes of BNF, where damaged books are stored. These books, mistakenly classified among the Chinese collection, were lying, forgotten, in the French National Library (Yu, 2013 and Oe, 1978). This discovery of the Korean books in France prompted a movement in Korean civil society calling for their restitution to Korea. When the diplomatic negotiation reached an impasse in the mid-2000s, a Korean TV program and NGO launched a fund-raising campaign to put an advertisement in the French newspaper Le Monde to put pressure on public opinion in France, and filed a lawsuit for their return in the French courts in 2007 (Park, 2014).

On both the Korean and French sides, the decision to return these books was dismissed as political showmanship because its procedural milestones were strongly linked with summit meetings. The negotiations can be summarized as a confrontation between the »inalienabilité« of national collection in French law and the unconditional redemption of looted cultural assets demanded by Korean nationalist emotion. In 1991, the Gyujanggak of Seoul National University asked the Korean government to lodge a demand for restitution with the French government. And during France’s first presidential visit to Korea in 1993, President Francois Mitterrand brought two books from France, delivering one of them to the Korean president, Kim Youngsam, during the summit banquet, and promising that all books would ultimately be returned to Korea.

However, this marked the beginning of a long dispute over restitution. This transfer of this book prompted strong opposition from the BNF and other French cultural institutions. Korean media published this news with bold headlines of »Return«, while a TGV high-speed rail contract was concluded at the same time as full-fledged diplomatic negotiations started. Combined with the eventual use of the term »lease«, the result was that Korean public opinion branded the French liars and the Korean government a traitor (Kim 1999).

In 2008, the two countries resumed the negotiating process, and in 2010, President Lee Myungbak and Nicolas Sarkozy agreed on the five year-renewal lease. Between March and May 2011, 297 books were delivered to Seoul and housed in the National Museum of Korea. Despite criticism of the contract method employed by both countries, they realized the objective to end the dispute in the name of national interest (Falleti 2010).

In the president’s remarks, the growing national power of the Republic of Korea was mentioned as one of the forces behind this return. A wide-spread myth in Korean society concerning the return is that France accepted the restitution of the Royal protocol book as a condition for the TGV purchase. Also, Korean negotiators calculated that the French government could oppose the return no longer, as the economic relationship between France and Korea was becoming ever closer. Therefore, from a Korean perspective, the return of a cultural property which was plundered while Korea was weak would not only serve the cause of justice, it would be a historical victory for Korea.

Nevertheless, in these politically shaped remarks, some important facts of the return were subtly concealed rather than addressed. One is a particularity of the Royal protocol book which helped ease its repatriation from France. While these books are generally referred to as cultural property, the protocol book was especially eligible for restitution because it is a manuscript containing the historical records of a political culture and is thus strongly related to identity. This was one of the arguments upheld by Nicolas Sakozy and Jack Lang in persuading their compatriots (Guerrin 2010; Salzmann and Berger 2010). The other is that this return is not a permanent repatriation, but a loan. This was never mentioned in the president’s remarks. The »loan« format was a result of extensive negotiation and offers a realistic solution for both countries, but without publicly sharing this contractual fact, the old dispute of ownership would always leave room for retrieval.

Dr. Ji Young Park is PostDoc Fellow in the translocations research cluster at Technische Universität Berlin.

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