Toulouse
An appeal court in Toulouse has ruled that the French government is to pay FFr87.5 million ($12 million) in compensation to three families whose land was expropriated following the 1994 discovery of the Chauvet caves which contain the oldest paintings ever found.
The three families, who held land directly above the site in Ardèche where the caves were discovered, had previously been granted FFr31,730 by a judge with jurisdiction over the region, a verdict upheld by an appeal court in Nîmes. The case then passed through the high court (where the judgment was quashed) before it was heard in Toulouse.
In determining the amount for compensation, the court estimated that the families had been “deprived of their inheritance as represented by this land”. The court considered that the landowners could have made money by using images of the paintings “for commercial gain”, or by “creating a museum on the site”. The court noted that since the expropriation, an agreement has been reached with authorities in Ardèche for the creation of a centre designed to accommodate 300,000 annual visitors. In order to calculate the profit of which the owners are being deprived, the income from the Chauvet caves was estimated as being at least 15 times as much as the income from the Lascaux caves, which were open for 15 years before the government took them over in 1972. The plaintiff’s demands were judged to be reasonable, with reference to the 1996 decision made in the high court over Van Gogh’s “Jardin à Auvers” when the State was obliged to compensate the owner of the painting FFr145 million ($20 million) for blocking the work’s export.
To prevent similar cases, a disposition has now been written into the law on rescue archaeology. The proprietor of a site on which discoveries are made is entitled to “compensation for damage that may arise from the need for access to the site”, but landowners will no longer be considered the rightful possessors of the ground below the surface.
The Chauvet caves have been at the centre of legal battles since their discovery. In 1999, a criminal court in Lyons fined two Ministry of Culture officials FFr5,000 ($800) for forging official documents in 1994. The court ruled that the officials had falsified papers stating that Mr Chauvet, an employee of the regional office of the Ministry of Culture, had been on official business when he discovered the caves, which gave the Ministry of Culture the pretext to claim copyright to the photographs and video of the cave paintings taken by Mr Chauvet. Mr Chauvet had, in fact, been in his own time and not subject to orders from the ministry when he stumbled upon the caves.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as ‘Test case for French archaeology'