On 17 November 1892, the French general Alfred Amédée Dodds entered Abomey, capital of the Danxomè kingdom, after two years of merciless warfare. The French troops looted the palaces and the city. Dodds and his troops seized important royal goods which they brought back to France.

In the period that followed, France organised a colonial area which it operated under the name of the colony of Dahomey and Dependencies. Upon decolonisation in the 1960s, many countries demanded the return of the property taken during the colonial period. For several decades, these appeals were in vain.

It wasnot until 2016 that France admitted that the request of President Patrice Talon's government was legitimate, although restitution remained legally impossible under French property law. In November 2017, President Emmanuel Macron affirmed in his speech at the University of Ouagadougou the French willingness to undertake restitutions. The process is finally underway.

On 24 December 2020, the law relating to the restitution of 26 cultural properties to Benin was promulgated in France, by derogation to the principle of inalienability of French public collections. On 9 November 2021, the act of physical transfer of ownership of these 26 items to the Republic of Benin by the French Republic was signed at the Élysée Palace, in the presence of President Patrice Talon and President Emmanuel Macron. The next day, the 26 works of the royal treasures of Abomey arrived in Cotonou in a plane specially chartered by the Beninese government and were received at the Marina Palace during an official ceremony. After decades of requests and waiting, the 26 works presented in this exhibition are the first to be returned by France to Benin. They are back in the land of their ancestors.