Slavery memorial stirs French debate
Listing names draws praise, criticism
PARIS — As the color drained from the sky, a group gathered before the whitestoned basilica of St. Denis, where dozens of French kings are buried, to pay homage to their ancestors.
Not to King Louis XIII, who formerly authorized the slave trade in 1642, or his son, the Sun King, who introduced slavery’s legal code, both of whose remains are buried inside the gothic building. They came for the victims, who are honored by a modest memorial outside.
“This is Jean-Pierre Calodat,” said Josée Grard, 81, running her fingers along the name written on the globeshaped sculpture as tambour drums echoed around her. “He was freed four years before abolition. His wife, Marie Lette, must be nearby.”
There are just four memorials like this around France. Last autumn, the government announced it would do more: build a “National Memorial for the Victims of Slavery” in Trocadéro Gardens, the tourist destination that is an Instagram favorite because of its clear view of the Eiffel Tower.
But the monument, intended as a gesture of reconciliation in a country that has been loath to address the unsavory parts of its past, has itself become a source of division.
It will bear the names of some 224,000 people who were freed from slavery by France in 1848, made citizens and assigned a family name.
While some see it as a hopeful sign of progress, others have dismissed it as contradictory lip service. Specifically, they say, by listing the names of people who were freed, the memorial will again glorify France for abolishing slavery, not atone for holding some 4 million people in bondage over two centuries.
The group that has lobbied for the memorial for decades, which includes Parisians who grew up in Guadeloupe and Martinique, hopes it will offer something more intimate.
“This is not a memorial for political confrontation, but one to give people peace,” said Serge Romana, a doctor who was named the co-director of the memorial together with a government Cabinet minister. “To have the state honor these people is to not be ashamed.”
In a country where national history is so important that the president has a special memorial adviser, the history of slavery — and its lingering effects — remains largely taboo. The capital is crowded with historical statues and commemorative plaques, yet only a handful speak to the issue. Not one of Paris’ more than 130 museums is dedicated entirely to slavery or to the history of colonialism.
President Emmanuel Macron promised to change that and “look our past in the face.” He has taken some steps, such as officially establishing the Foundation for the Memory of Slavery in 2018 and paying tribute last year to Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture in the French prison where he died.
But he has not gone as far as his critics wished. When Black Lives Matter protesters splashed red paint on the statue of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the statesman who wrote the 1685 Code Noir regulating slavery, and demanded that it be removed from its prominent pedestal before the National Assembly, Macron adamantly refused.
The acute sensitivity among French leaders underscores a contradiction at the root of the national identity: How can the country that heralds itself as revolutionary champion of universal human rights have enslaved millions of people at the same time?
“The challenge is to integrate in a communal story the complexities and contradictions of a society,” explained Jean-Marc Ayrault, a former prime minister who leads the Foundation for the Memory of Slavery. “Our objective isn’t to pit communities against one another or create a war of personal histories. It’s to construct a shared history.”
His foundation does that often by highlighting French fighters against slavery over those who profited from and maintained it.
The committee pushing for the memorial was born in protest of just that kind of national reframing. On the 150th anniversary of France’s abolition of slavery in 1998, the government announced national celebrations with the slogan “All born in 1848.”
“We said no — our people were created in slavery,” said Emmanuel Gordien, 65, another doctor and former independence activist from Guadeloupe. “We didn’t want to erase history.”
Together with Romana and other Guadeloupean activists, he put out a call for a funeral march through the streets of Paris to pay homage to ancestors who had been enslaved. Tens of thousands came.
Later, the group formed an association named for that protest — the Committee of the May 23, 1998 March — to search for that history. They spent years digging into various French archives.
Gordien grew up learning that his great-great-grandfather Bouirqui had been born in West Africa, sold into slavery and named George, and that his family owned a piece of land in Guadeloupe that had been part of the former slave plantation.
“That kind of knowledge had been lost because of shame,” Gordien said, “and also because of French assimilation.”
Volunteers compiled more than 160,000 records from Guadeloupe and Martinique and put all the information into two books and a searchable online registry. Those names will be combined with others found by historians and activists in other former French colonies — now overseas departments — where slavery was enforced.
Since then, the group has hosted weekly genealogy and research sessions out of its small office in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, to help people trace their own family stories. In some cases, their searches have unearthed documents from before abolition — ancient notary acts for the sale of enslaved people, whom they’ve been able to verify were the ancient relatives of community members. Their research often elicits strong reactions.
“One woman fell to the ground, like she’d had a stroke. Another person left right away; she didn’t want to know,” said Grard, who, after finding her own ancestors, has spent years volunteering with the group to help others do the same. “It’s a huge shock.”
But for others, the research leads to a deeper understanding of their past, themselves and how they connect into the larger story of France. “This is my family,” said Grard, hanging a paper lantern on the memorial by her ancestors’ names. “They are part of me.”