Paris, France
CNN
—
When an elderly couple held a garage sale after selling their second home in the south of France, little did they know they would be embroiled in a legal battle with millions of euros at stake
The 88-year-old and his 81-year-old wife, identified by their initials in court documents but confirmed to CNN as Mr. and Mrs. Fournier by their lawyer, have put up for sale an ancient African mask, which had been inherited from Mr. Fournier’s grandfather .
The grandfather, René-Victor Edward Maurice Fournier, had served as a colonial governor in Central Africa in the early 20th century, when significant parts of the continent were under French colonial rule.
The Fourniers sold their mask in September 2021 to a second-hand dealer for €150, court documents projection. According to their lawyer, Frédéric Mansat Jaffré, the two did not know the market value of the mask and believed the dealer was offering a fair price.
A few months later, their lawyer said they learned through a newspaper article that their old mask was up for auction and was worth significantly more than the dealer paid.
Two days later, it sold for 4.2 million euros, a sales receipt shared with CNN showed, which equates to more than $4.5 million.
The Fourniers launched a civil case against the dealer which they lost in the fall of 2022 and were ordered to pay court costs.
They are now appealing the previous court decision, arguing that the trader did not “fulfill its obligation to provide pre-contractual information” and committed a “breach of consent”.
The couple are seeking to cancel the sale of the mask and want the proceeds of the auction to be given to them.
CNN has reached out to the dealer’s attorney for further comment.
As the appeal began at the Alès court in southern France on Tuesday, the Gabonese government intervened and formally requested a stay of proceedings.
The dealer’s defense, according to court documents, says he didn’t know the value of the mask when he bought it from the couple and only discovered it when he went to the auction house to have it appraised.
Court documents show his lawyers argued that “the sellers have no cause to allege wrongdoing. They themselves offered the item for sale at 150 euros. They made an inaccurate financial assessment of the value that the mask presented.”
Gabon has filed a separate court case over the handling of stolen goods, accusing Mr. Fournier’s ancestor of stealing the Ngil mask and therefore never being its rightful owner, Olivia Betoe Bi Evie, one of the lawyers, told CNN representing Gabon.
If the court accepts his request to stay the current legal proceedings over the sale of the Ngil mask, the country will be able to continue its separate case over the handling of the stolen goods and fight to have the mask returned to its country of origin.
The court is expected to announce its decision on December 19.
The mask is an extremely rare artifact of great spiritual value to the Gabonese people, Betoe Bi Evie told CNN.
Dating back to the 19th century, it belonged to the powerful Ngil society, a secret group tasked with administering justice to Gabon’s Fang communities, according to Betoe Bi Evie.
“For Westerners, the mask is an art object,” said Betoe Bi Evie, “but for Africans, for Gabonese people… it is a ritual object used to ensure peace in society. It is very important.”
According to Sotheby’s registration for a similar Ngil mask, these artifacts “are among the rarest and most famous of all African art,” making them “highly sought after as integral cornerstones of the best African art collections.”
The auction catalog for the mask said it was “collected around 1917, under unknown circumstances, by the French colonial governor René-Victor Edward Maurice Fournier (1873-1931), probably during a tour of Gabon,” according to BFMTV of CNN.
The couple’s lawyer argued in court that their dealer deliberately withheld information about the mask’s origin and planned to split the money with their gardener, who had tipped him off about the Fourniers’ ties to the former colonial governor.
It was through this information that the dealer was able to deduce the origin of the mask, lawyer Mansat Jaffré told CNN.
The dealer and the gardener allegedly visited the auction house together, introducing themselves as co-owners of the mask, the sellers allege in court documents.
The couple say the dealer did not inform them of his relationship with their gardener, nor that he intended to auction off their mask, according to their lawyer.
“We think he (the dealer) already had an idea in the back of his head and that he knew the mask was rare,” Mansat Jaffré told CNN. “My clients … are not art collectors, they are amateurs … they didn’t know any better,” he added.
After the Fourniers discovered the mask was up for auction, they contacted the dealer, who offered 300,000 euros in compensation, equal to the auction house’s estimate of the mask’s value, Mansat Jaffré said.
The couple’s children advised their parents to refuse the amount and file a lawsuit.
For now, 3.2 million euros, the amount the trader earned from the sale of the mask after tax rebates and commissions, have been frozen in his bank account by the courts, Mansat Jaffré said.
The trial has attracted the attention of France’s large African diaspora, and among those in court were several Gabonese protesters demanding the mask be returned to their country.
Some were also present at the auction house when the mask was sold in March 2022, according to Solange Bizeau, president of Collectif Gabon Occitanie, the organization behind the protests.
She told CNN she was “shocked” to see how little respect for her culture was shown in court.
“The two lawyers told the court that we, the Gabonese people and the Gabonese state, have no legal claim to (the mask),” Bizou said. “I was shocked to see that they (those involved in the trial) didn’t care about the mask, they didn’t care what it meant to us, all they wanted was money.”
Today, only a dozen Ngil masks remain in the world, according to court documents.
Many, according to Betoe Bi Evie, are in the hands of private collectors. So far, the identity of the mask’s buyer remains unknown to all but the dealer and the auction house, neither of whom have disclosed it, Mansat Jaffré told CNN.
French President Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly called for the return of colonial artefacts from French collections to their original owners. After his election in 2017, he expressed his desire “to have the conditions in place within five years for temporary or permanent restorations of African heritage in Africa”.
According to a report presented to Macron in 2018, there are at least 80,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa in French public collections. So far, only a few have been returned to their countries of origin.
Some artifacts have returned indefinitelyas are the 26 looted royal artifacts that make up the Behanzin Treasure, restored to Benin in 2020.
Others returned to their hometowns long term loanslike West African leader Omar Tal’s sword and scabbard, currently on display at Senegal’s Museum of Black Cultures.
In addition to Benin and Senegal, five other African countries – Chad, Madagascar, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia and Mali – have made formal requests for reparations from the French government.
However, since the Ngil mask at the center of the ongoing trial was not held in a public collection, Gabon cannot demand its restoration from France.