Statue debate arrives in France
Bronze update roils birthplace of Victor Hugo
BESANÇON, France — The statue of Victor Hugo has loomed outside the city hall of his birthplace, on the Esplanade for Human Rights, since 2003, his white beard knotty, his black suit rumpled, his face cast down at his pocket watch.
Over the years, the colored bronze began to fade, turning to brown and green, until the mayor’s office recently hired an expert to do a restoration.
That is when the seemingly unremarkable refurbishment of a statue turned into another controversy in France about race, identity, and the importation of American “woke” ideas about racial injustice — what the French call “le wokisme.”
The city hall’s Facebook site announced the statue had been restored to reflect the original work by celebrated Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow, who, it said, liked color and was not keen on “simple bronzes.” The comments rolled in, some positive, others critical with one focus — the color of Hugo’s skin.
“We’ve gone from Victor Hugo to Morgan Freeman,” wrote one commentator.
Sow, who was often called the Auguste Rodin of Senegal, died in 2016. A reporter from the Besançon newspaper called Béatrice Soulé, Sow’s widowed partner in Dakar, Senegal’s capital.
She agreed that the restoration was flawed, saying that the statue “looks like a Black Victor Hugo, which was never Ousmane’s intention.”
In a later interview with The New York Times, Soulé said that perhaps she spoke too freely. “It was a sentence I should never have spoken,” she said. “And it let off a powder keg.”
After another attempt at restoration, the color of the statue was returned to what Soulé considered “magnificent” and an “exact replica of the original,” which reflected a man of lightbrown skin. But what might have been forgiven as part of a complicated restoration process — and quietly corrected — was immediately sucked up into an ugly, protracted battle waged over social media.
Right-wing politicians accused the city’s Green party mayor of literally trying to paint her politically correct views onto a French hero.
“Just how far will #wokisme and stupidity go?” Max Brisson, a senator with the center-right party, Les Républicains, wrote on Twitter.
National radio and newspapers picked up the story.
The city hall’s switchboard was flooded by so many furious calls that it was shut down.
Two nights after the Facebook post, masked men vandalized the statue, repainting Hugo’s face “a beautiful white color,” as they called it online, adding that it was now “truly French, truly from Besançon.” On the photo they took of their work, they added a Celtic cross and the words “white power.”
Two days later, the face of another statue created by Sow — this one erected near the war memorial to represent “hope” — was similarly vandalized with white paint.
“It signifies a sickness, a crisis in our society in relation to themes of immigration and racism,” Mayor Anne Vignot said in an interview in her office in the city hall, which faces the Hugo statue. She was not involved in the statue’s renovation beyond ordering it, she said, and she was still smarting at how discussion of race and identity had been weaponized in France to dismiss ideals she thinks should be upheld.
“I will always fight against discrimination,” she said. “So, for me, if wokism is the fight against discrimination, then I reaffirm, I am woke.”
On the other side are those such as Xavier-Laurent Salvador, who co-directs the Observatory of Colonialism and Identity Ideologies, set up to challenge the use of critical race and gender theories in France.
He said the real danger was not far-right vigilantes but attempts by a government to impose its race-centered view on society.
“Instead of removing the statues, we smear them, we repaint them to match something that is more in tune with the times,” said Salvador, an associate professor of modern literature at Université Sorbonne Paris Nord. “It’s a symbolic violence.”
Salvador said he believed that the mayor and restorer had been trying to impose a race-centered view on society perverting the country’s traditional universalist view where color and race are considered irrelevant, which he said Sow and Hugo adhered to.
And the political storm had stopped them.
There are few writers as celebrated as Hugo in France. The 19th-century author of “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame” and “Les Misérables” was born in this city close to the Swiss border. He stayed for only six weeks before his father’s military regiment was moved and never returned. Still, Besançon has capitalized on those precious six weeks, naming Victor Hugo schools and a Victor Hugo square, erecting many Victor Hugo busts and statues, and opening a Victor Hugo museum in the stone town house where he was born.
There, Hugo is celebrated as a human rights crusader, who was exiled from the country for 19 years during the reign of Napoleon III, and who fought for freedom, liberty, and the rights of people who were often excluded at the time, including slaves, prisoners, women, and children.
“This political storm was the opposite of the Victor Hugo we show here,” said Lise Lézennec, cultural and scientific manager at the museum. “If the definition of being woke is awaken to discrimination, and combating against it, then we can say he was woke.”
The process of adding color to bronze requires heating the metal with a blowtorch while painting on pigmented copper nitrate solution over many stages, explained Carlos Alves Ferreira, a bronze patina and restoration expert who carried out the restoration.
Ferreira said he had sent Soulé photographs of his initial work by e-mail and had been waiting for her approval when the political storm erupted. So he went back to do it again.
“I worked with Ousmane Sow for 20 years. Colors were part of his identity,” Ferreira said. “I didn’t want to betray him.”
A week later, another Hugo statue that Ferreira had worked on was delivered to the city’s Museum of Fine Arts and Archaeology. This one featured the town hero completely nude, cast entirely in a traditional black bronze. It was done by French sculptor Auguste Rodin. There was no uproar.
“They didn’t attack Rodin, a white French sculptor,” Ferreira said. “He could make Victor Hugo completely nude. But a Senegalese sculptor, who made Victor Hugo look human, they think it’s not a sculpture.”
On a recent sunny afternoon, many people stopped on the Esplanade of Human Rights to admire Hugo in his latest form, and to take photos before it.
At his feet is engraved a line from one of his famous letters. “I condemn slavery,” it begins, “I chase away extreme poverty. I teach ignorance, I treat sickness. I illuminate the night.”
It ends with “I hate hate.”