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Gustave Caillebotte’s Boulevard vu d’en haut (1880) was designated a trésor national in February 2026 and its export remains barred until August 2028 Private collection
A legislative proposal introduced in March 2026 in the French senate could considerably impact the country’s art market. Proposed by senator Jacques Grosperrin, it seeks to strengthen mechanisms for controlling French cultural property, expanding the state’s power over works held in private collections and considerably extending an authority that is already substantial. So far the proposal has escaped the scrutiny of commentators on French art law.
The proposed bill’s authority is grounded in the Code du patrimoine, which defines trésor national (national treasure) in article L.111-1 as “property designated as historic monuments, objects belonging to public collections or any category deemed of major significance to the national heritage on historical, artistic or archaeological grounds”. An export certificate is required before any such property leaves French territory, and the administration can refuse that certificate outright, without compensation, once the work qualifies as a trésor national. Following a refusal, the work cannot leave the country for 30 months. It is this very framework that Grosperrin’s proposal seeks to expand, broadening the definition of a trésor national to French artists’ works regardless of age, and extending this pre-emption to private transactions conducted beyond the confines of auction houses.
France blocked the sale of Rembrandt’s The Standard Bearer (1636, above) in 2019 so it could try to acquire the painting, but it could not raise the necessary €165m Courtesy Rijksmuseum
France’s recent appetite for naming new trésors nationaux gives this framework renewed relevance. Gustave Caillebotte’s Boulevard vu d’en haut (1880) was designated in February 2026, and its export remains barred until August 2028.
Rembrandt’s The Standard Bearer (1636) shows the mechanism working as designed. In 2019, France blocked its sale to preserve the possibility of acquiring the painting itself, for €165m. Unable to raise the funds, the state relinquished its right in 2021, and the painting left for the Netherlands. During those two years, the owner could not access the proceeds, the buyer had to keep their financing in place, and the vendor kept paying to insure and store a painting frozen mid-sale, without compensation. France never acquired the work, and the Dutch state purchased it for the Rijksmuseum. The UK’s own Rembrandt moment offers a striking contrast. In August, the UK government placed an export bar on Rembrandt’s Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet (1657), valued at £71m. The initial deferral expires on 26 December, and although a further extension is available, the process is intended to conclude within around a year. Whereas British deferrals operate within a predictable, time-bound framework, France exacted the full 30-month limit merely to confirm its own insolvency.
A more revealing counterpart is found in the case of Hans Baldung Grien’s Portrait of Susanna Pfeffinger (1517), which was withdrawn from a sale at Drouot and classified a trésor national in March 2026, a decision that has prompted considerable debate in legal circles. No foreign buyer was involved and no export was ever attempted. By using export controls to restrict domestic commerce, the administration turns heritage protection into a pretext for unwarranted market intervention, reducing trading activity under the guise of cultural stewardship.
This creates a market shaped by apprehension. International buyers hesitate to bid on a work they may never be able to export, while French buyers can be just as wary, since state intervention signals the work is important enough for the authorities to want it themselves. In Italy, where a comparable mechanism exists, the president of the auction house Cambi Casa d’Aste estimates an export restriction can cut a work’s value by 70% to 80% when it holds major international appeal, precisely the category France’s trésors nationaux increasingly fall into.
Particularly insidious is the state’s retroactive intervention. Long after a lawful transaction is finalised, authorities can unilaterally reclaim ownership on the premise that a work never legally left the public domain in the first place. In 2002, the antiquarian firm Brimo de Laroussilhe acquired a sculpted fragment from the rood screen of Chartres Cathedral, itself dismantled in 1763. Years later, when the firm applied for an export certificate, the state asserted that the fragment had never left public ownership, for lack of a formal declassification act. The Paris Administrative Court sided with the state in 2017, and the Conseil d’État upheld that ruling on further appeal three years later. Accordingly, neither the buyer’s good faith nor years of undisturbed possession could alter the outcome. The deeper concern is that scarcely any private collection can trace its provenance that far back, leaving collectors perpetually vulnerable to retrospective claims.
Crucially, Caillebotte, Baldung Grien and Rembrandt belonged to an established historical canon long before the state took any interest in their work. The age threshold in the current definition of a trésor national has kept contemporary work beyond the state’s reach. Grosperrin’s bill would remove that threshold for French artists. The same process that took 30 months to determine that a Rembrandt was beyond its means could extend to a living artist’s most significant sale. In turn, rather than shielding national culture, this extension could begin to poison the contemporary art ecosystem, driving international collectors and galleries to avoid French artists altogether to escape bureaucratic entanglement.
More damaging than the mere breadth of this authority is how unevenly that reach is applied. It is swift and forceful once a work has already acquired real standing, and largely absent from the process that created that reputation in the first place. That value is built over years by collectors, galleries and buyers who identify an artist, take a risk on their work and construct the market that eventually turns a piece into something the state considers worth protecting. The state has comparatively little presence at that earlier stage.
Under Grosperrin’s proposed expansion, the state steps in only at the apex of a sale, seizing the fruits of private risk under the guise of public duty. Turning every mature masterpiece and every contemporary breakthrough into a perpetual liability goes beyond cultural safekeeping and binds the future of French art to a machinery of state control that this bill seeks to institutionalise.