Can the Western museum be decolonised? This is the question posed by Françoise Vergès in A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonising the Museum, which takes its name from French Afro-Caribbean Marxist philosopher Frantz Fanon’s invocation of anti-colonial practice in his influential 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth.

In her book, first published in France in 2023 and translated by Melissa Thackway for Pluto Press, Vergès charts the evolution of the ‘universal museum’. This was a product of the Enlightenment, and especially of the French Revolution, with its unquestioning belief that its superior values should be applied to all other countries and civilisations feeding into the establishment of the Louvre, Vergès’ main case study, and itself a product of colonialism and Western Europe’s self-appointed position as the supposed guardians of global culture and heritage.

The world’s most visited museum, with over 9 million ticket buyers annually, the Louvre opened in 1793 after the National Assembly declared that the former palace should display masterpieces from across France. These were mostly confiscated royal and church property, which they framed as a revolutionary act, but also, in time, works plundered from elsewhere, either as spoils of the Napoleonic Wars or France’s imperial conquests. In the case of the Louvre more than any other, writes Vergès, the seizure of works was justified in terms of the ‘freedom’ that France gave them.

Vergès deals with how the ‘universal museum’ has reacted to growing demands for restitution, detailing the Louvre’s evolving but ultimately consistent practice of incorporating elements of anti-colonial critique as a way of preventing a serious reckoning with the ideological blind spots within its constitution, let alone returning its items to their places of origin. Vergès points to a notorious UK example, suggesting that the British Museum’s ongoing refusal to return the Parthenon Sculptures, taken by Lord Elgin in 1801–12, to Greece is partly because doing so would open the door to numerous other requests for restitution, from high-profile items such as the Rosetta Stone to the many smaller artefacts that give its collection the impression of volume.

Getting such institutions to agree to such requests, Vergès argues, will not be easy, necessitating the ‘construction of a post-racist, post-imperialist, and post-patriarchal world’ at a time when exploitation and inequality are as rampant as they were at the height of European empire. Vergès does not offer a systematic programme for this, but forensically diagnoses the problems: she argues we cannot content ourselves with diversifying what is on display; or by offering institutional explanations or apologies that do not return colonial loot to its place of origin; nor by simply increasing diversity programmes for museum staff, as such initiatives have tended to maintain a rigid racial hierarchy with guards, cleaners, and catering staff tending to be people of colour, while board positions mostly remain white.

Importantly, Vergès — a historian, curator, and activist, and daughter of the founder of the Communist Party of the French overseas department of Réunion — points towards practices, including her own, that could lead towards a new model for a post-colonialist post-museum.

Vergès describes her involvement in a project to turn the Réunionese Communist Party dream of an anti-colonial museum, which faded after the party dropped its calls for autonomy in the 1980s after harsh repression, into reality. With poet and professor Carpanin Marimoutou, she worked on a proposal for a ‘museum without objects’ where, instead of French narratives about bringing civilisation to the Indian Ocean territory, the Réunionese could hold exhibitions and discussions of reparations, restitution, and the negative impact of ‘universalism’ on their culture.

She illustrates the depressingly large and perhaps inevitable backlash, with bourgeois historians or artists joining in with endless media attacks that validated institutional resistance, before backing a regional candidate who won election on a promise to terminate the project. Vergés is prosaic about this failure: it highlighted how much the French had entrenched their narratives about their paternalistic benevolence and constantly impeded demands for decolonisation. At best, the museum might have been completed, but with such demands used as a ‘talking point’, rather than underpinning any conception of its purpose. As Vergès says, none of these outcomes would have ended the forms of Réunionese social, cultural, or artistic resistance: those involved should use the failure as a case study and look for new ways to express demands for autonomy.

In this context, it makes sense that A Programme of Absolute Disorder manifests itself more as a set of lessons than, well, a programme. Frustratingly, negative examples are far more abundant than positive, but she does look at movements to boycott institutions complicit with the occupation of Palestine, to criticise the gender balance of collections from a feminist perspective, and to stop museums from accepting fossil fuel sponsorship. Limited British programmes such as Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum dismantling its notorious ‘Treatment of Dead Enemies’ exhibit or Paxton House in the English–Scottish border creating displays that highlight its historical links with slavery do not feature here, but as the Museums Association says on its website, these are small steps in a ‘long-term’ process. Whether existing museums can ever meaningfully decolonise remains, at best, debatable.

Influenced by Edward Said’s Orientalism, Vergès looks at how the flawed ideals of the French Revolution are still exported, unimpeded by the apparent contradictions in, for example, setting up a Louvre in Abu Dhabi in the face of protests by migrant labourers who worked on it and were routinely exploited. Electoralism is unlikely to fix the art world, as even the communist mayor of post-industrial Arles in southern France invited a private foundation, LUMA, to help ‘regenerate’ the town, adding a starchitect-designed gallery to its land and buildings. Vergès is under no illusions about the scale of the activism, advocacy, and artistic work required to advance a decolonial programme under such global circumstances: her book does, at least, provide an urgent impetus.