French debate new museum

France opens a new museum celebrating tribal arts and culture next week, but at a time of heightened tensions over the country’s colonial legacy, critics fear it could deepen divisions further.

Built next to the Eiffel Tower, the Musee du Quai Branly gathers together 300,000 works of art and objects collected over the centuries from Africa, the Americas, Oceania and Asia -- including Congolese harps and Amazonian feathered masks.

Featuring a vertical flowerbed on one of its walls, a cinema, a library and a garden bigger than two soccer fields, the museum represents a personal triumph for President Jacques Chirac, who promoted the project. “It’s a sign and a symbol of a France that knows and recognizes the world’s cultures,” Chirac said this week.

He says the museum, costing $290 million, will be a counterweight to the array of European collections dedicated to Western art and has dismissed suggestions that Paris already has too many galleries. But the inauguration of the Musee du Quai Branly comes at a tense time for France, divided over a tough new immigration bill and stunned by suburban riots last year. Some critics say the decision to show indigenous art in isolation could create or reinforce a “them and us” mentality.

Museum chief Stephane Martin said the museum sought to provide a fresh insight.

“I think it will be very clear that it is not our idea to show a France that has conquered the world. And neither do we want to put the world into a box. It’s not an ‘Around the World in 80 Showcases,’ ” Martin said.