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Napoleon Bonaparte Shutterstock/Everett Collection
evening sitdown
Your evening longread: Returning the masterpieces Napoleon stole
We bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
The story of how the masterpieces stolen by Napoleon were returned.
(The New York Times, approx 10 mins reading time)
He brought back enough loot from his conquests to fill what would soon become the Louvre Museum. And his ravenous and methodical art seizures — a cultural legacy now being highlighted in 200th-anniversary commemorations of his death — paved the way for similar French excesses in sub-Saharan Africa a century later. Yet many of those works were returned after Napoleon’s defeat, setting precedents that still inform debates about restitution.
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