14
Silences can impart as much as words, and in the memory of the former slaving ports of France’s Atlantic coast, their role in the African slave trade was, throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a subject to be passed over in silence. The conditions on the plantations that had been a major cause of the Haitian Revolution were largely ignored, as were the profits the French merchants and their agents had extracted from slavery, racism and colonialism.1 What seems most shocking to us today, indeed, is the apparent absence of any public memory of the slave trade, or any acknowledgement of the role that it had played in building the cities’ prosperity. As recently as the 1970s and early 1980s, little interest was shown in the subject, whether among historians, political leaders or local authorities, little desire to disinter a past which was seen by many as distasteful and as damaging to the public image of their cities. Their commercial prosperity was explained in terms that were much more socially acceptable, deriving from a spirit of enterprise and a healthy preparedness to embrace risk. It was part of an imperial story in which Africans played no active part, where slaves were passive victims rather than political actors, and where abolition was attributed to liberal Europeans rather than to black leaders or slave activists. It followed that the merchants of Bordeaux, Nantes, and Le Havre were responsible for their own success; they needed to feel no shame about their past, nor to acknowledge their debt to the sufferings of others.
Similarly, those most lauded for their services to the abolitionist cause were liberal Europeans—all French and all white. Leading abolitionists like Condorcet and Raynal, the abbé Grégoire and Victor Schœlcher, were represented as all-French heroes in the humanist tradition of the Enlightenment and the French Republic. The black insurgents who had led the campaigns for slave rights, men like Toussaint Louverture in Saint-Domingue and Louis Delgrès in Guadeloupe, were quietly forgotten, or pushed to the margins of the narrative. So when, in 1949, the government wished to commemorate the abolition of slavery by transferring the remains of a Great Man to the hallowed ground of the Pantheon, it was Schœlcher who was honoured, not Toussaint.2 France was not alone, of course, in seeking to gain kudos and prestige from abolition, or in denying the slaves agency in their liberation. In Britain, too, the darker aspects of the Atlantic slave trade were persistently submerged in the more honourable story of British abolitionism, with its liberal heroes like Clarkson and Wilberforce, virtuous men in whom the British people could take patriotic pride. Until relatively recently, indeed, the history of the transatlantic slave trade was deliberately omitted from British collective remembrance, to be replaced, a recent study suggests, by something more socially and morally acceptable, ‘a stylised image of the campaign for its abolition, in the interests of maintaining a consistent national identity built around notions of humanitarian and philanthropic concern’.3 In the depiction of their slaving past, Le Havre and Nantes did little that Liverpool and Bristol had not done before them.4
If the extent of this collective amnesia seems shocking today, it is because so much has changed in public perceptions of race and slavery over the last quarter-century. Until the last decade of the twentieth century, the port cities that had profited so greatly from the slave trade had sought to conceal a past which, they felt, implied a stigma on their reputation and an assault on their very identity. And historians, as we have seen, showed little inclination to research in areas where there was little interest or chance of funding: they had access to excellent collections of merchant papers and most preferred to write in a more positive vein, about prosperity, wealth creation and enterprise, the embellishment of the Atlantic ports which ensued. Political leaders concurred, sharing in the nostalgia of the cities’ elites for a golden age of wealth and elegance. This nostalgia was expressed in eloquent, and not wholly untypical, terms by the mayor of Nantes in 1936 in a speech at a dinner of the Ligue Maritime celebrating the city’s seafaring past. ‘How could I fail to evoke the marvellous blossoming of our city two centuries ago that resulted from its spirit of adventure and the power of its shipping? It is a magnificent past that is written on the grey stone of our houses and on these proud facades facing on to the Loire that glory in the opulence of their finely-worked balconies and their grimacing caryatids.’5 The slave trade merited no more than a passing mention, here or in the other slaving cities, until many years later.
But in recent years, this has changed out of all recognition. The first major initiative in understanding the importance of slaving to the Atlantic economy came in the 1980s, and in the city most affected, Nantes. Serge Daget, who had attracted a team of researchers to the University of Nantes to work on slavery and the triangular trade, persuaded the municipal authorities that this was a subject of wider public interest. In 1982, he drew up a detailed plan to hold a major international conference, ‘Nantes 85’—the first ever to be organized in France—on the subject of the slave trade.6 The timing was pertinent, as 1985 marked the 300th anniversary of the introduction of the Code noir to France’s colonies, the document that provided a legal framework for slavery and established protocols governing the conditions under which slaves were held.7 But the viability of the conference, and of various public displays and exhibitions that were planned across the city, was reliant on funding from the municipal council, and almost immediately local politics intervened. Was this, it was asked, an appropriate way to fund local history? Were there not aspects of the city’s past more worthy of celebration and public funding? Financial support became the subject of public debate and inter-party wrangling, with first the Right withdrawing the promise of a grant, then the Left using it as a major plank of their election campaign. In the event, the wider cultural events that had been proposed had to be scaled back, with the consequence that only the academic conference went ahead, with support not from sources in Nantes or its département, but from an international agency, UNESCO.8 The memory of the slave trade had indeed been resurrected, but in the process it had become a partisan issue, the outward symbol of deep divisions over the city’s acceptance of its past.
The question of acceptance was common to all the slaving ports, but was especially acute in Nantes, where much of its material past had been destroyed by wartime bombing. Much of the city’s shared memory is of a twentieth century scarred by two world wars and of Nantes’ literary associations, most especially with Jules Verne.9 But, above all, Nantes was defined by its links with the sea, and by the great merchant families of the Quai de la Fosse and the Île Feydeau who had contributed to its greatness. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the years of prosperity had seemed an age away, hidden from the eyes of future generations by decades of decline, and there was little desire to question the city’s myths of its past glories. In particular, there was a reluctance to admit any responsibility, individual or collective, for Nantes’ slaving past. But the public debate over ‘Nantes 85’ left deep scars, and since then both historians and politicians have been prepared to advocate a more open and honest appraisal of the city’s role in the slave trade.10 For a page had been turned: it was time, as the city’s mayor, Jean-Marc Ayrault, wrote in the preface to a major exhibition on the slave trade staged in 1992 to mark the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America, for Nantes to perform an ‘autopsy’ on its own history and that of all the European ports that had engaged in the Atlantic slave trade in the two centuries from 1650 to 1850.11 By holding the conference in 1985 and inviting participants from around the world to discuss slavery in all its aspects, and then by promoting the exhibition seven years later, Nantes took two pioneering steps in breaking what had been a stifling taboo both in Nantes and across France.
For some, in their quest for respectability, the taboo remained, and talk of the slave trade was discouraged.12 They preferred to cling to their cities’ myths and to their nostalgic vision of the past, emphasizing growth and enterprise, concentrating on what gave them added lustre. Bordeaux was typical in this regard, at least until the 1990s. It was the city of Montaigne and Montesquieu, of art and architecture, wine and commerce. But its part in the slave trade was passed over in relative silence. So when, in 1997, the twinned cities of Bordeaux and Bristol celebrated fifty years of international cooperation, they did so by holding a joint conference on the theme of ‘The Port and the Imaginary of the Port’.13 It was a significant subject for both cities: both had played a leading role in the triangular trade with West Africa and the Caribbean, and in both there was some awareness of the moral climate of the times. Yet only one paper was brave—or impolite—enough to discuss their shared heritage in this regard. The ‘imaginary’ concerned the islands, exoticism, and colonial comforts, while more disturbing topics like slavery were glossed over or erased.14
Perhaps we should not be too critical: the occasion was one for celebration rather than self-analysis. And there was evidence, during the 1990s, that Bordeaux was becoming more aware of its slaving past, aided, no doubt, by a renewed interest among historians at the University of Bordeaux in the colonies and communication between the two shores of the Atlantic.15 In 1992, the Archives of the Gironde took a first step in opening up public debate when it marked the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America with an exhibition on the eighteenth-century slave trade.16 And in 1999, on receipt of an important legacy of iconographical materials from Dr Marcel Chatillon, who had represented the Ministry of Culture in Guadeloupe, the Musée d’Aquitaine curated a major exhibition of paintings, maps, and sketches showing how the French viewed the Antilles and outlining the memories they held for them.17 In his preface the mayor, Alain Juppé, acknowledged that the city’s experience of the islands was not wholly innocent, that Bordeaux’s story was both of commercial prosperity and enslavement. The ‘regard sur les Antilles’ had to be balanced, a multiple gaze that took in both the ‘tropical Edens’ of the colonists and the insurrection of Toussaint Louverture.18 If the people of Bordeaux remained deeply attached to the memory of its colonial past and especially to the Caribbean, they were not yet ready to place the African experience of slavery at the heart of their narrative.19
The change in public consciousness was a gradual one. Before the last decades of the twentieth century, there had been little public demand that slave ports acknowledge their slaving past. This was true of other slaving countries, too, and not only in Europe. In the United States, there were few monuments or memorials commemorating slavery before the 1990s; the new National Museum of African American history on the National Mall in Washington, a part of the Smithsonian Institute, is a creation of the twenty-first century, with legislation coming in 2003 and its formal opening in 2016. Indeed, Congress was long resistant to the idea of ethnically specific museums as part of the Nation’s public history.20 In Britain, too, progress was slow. Until relatively recently, anti-slavery continued to be viewed through the lens of abolitionists like Wilberforce, and none of the ports which had profited from the slave trade wished to take the lead in claiming primacy. It was a subject where it seemed more decent to maintain a dignified silence. But here, too, pressure-groups, often drawn from local immigrant communities from Africa or the West Indies, began to militate for recognition, and in 1994, in what would prove a landmark moment, National Museums Liverpool opened a major gallery, the Transatlantic Slavery gallery, to explore Liverpool’s part in the African slave trade. It was an acknowledgement of the part that Liverpool merchants had played in shipping millions of African to the New World, and it was the first of its kind in Western Europe. In 2007, to mark the bicentenary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade, Liverpool would go further, opening a new Museum devoted to the whole subject of modern slavery. Its aim, in the words of its director, David Fleming, was ambitious: ‘to address ignorance and misunderstanding by looking at the deep and permanent impact of slavery and the slave trade on Africa, South America, the USA, the Caribbean and Western Europe.’21 Today the Museum sees itself as a vehicle for social change, openly campaigning for social justice and for an end to all forms of modern slavery, and it engages with its local community, especially with ethnic minorities in Liverpool. It also participates actively in the Federation of International Human Rights Museums.22 This reflects a new consciousness of the importance of the slave trade, and a feeling of guilt for the crimes of the past. By 2007, the bicentenary of Britain’s abolition legislation, that feeling was being shared across much of the Atlantic world. Having been for so long ignored or downplayed in national narratives, the black experience has finally found its place in both historical accounts of the slave trade and public representations in galleries and museums.
Far from continuing to hide their slaving past, the main Atlantic ports have shown a willingness to discuss it more openly, in exhibitions for the general public as well as in seminars restricted to scholars and specialists. In part, this may be ascribed to the chance factor of two anniversaries: the two hundredth anniversary of the first abolition of slavery in 1994, followed rapidly by the 150th anniversary of the second, in 1998. Anniversaries are important in raising popular awareness and focusing discussion, and it is surely not without significance that the resurgence of a collective memory of the slave trade in France should have taken place during the 1990s, just as public memory of the slave trade in Britain was reawakened during the celebrations to mark the bicentenary of the abolitionists’ victory in 1807. Until then, though there were constant reminders of the slave trade in the fabric of French slaving cities—in Bordeaux, for instance, the private hotels of leading slave-traders like Nairac, Saige, and Balguerie now housed official buildings like the Prefecture or the tax office—this had little resonance with the public. There was what one historian has recently called ‘a lack of readability and visibility’ in these buildings, and in the street names and facades that people passed every day.23 They had to be explained and given meaning in a new moral climate, and in both France and Britain the anniversaries of the 1990s and 2000s produced an opportunity to take stock and to consider how best to present slavery and the slave trade to a wider public.
The initiative in this campaign was largely political, though French academics, like those of the United States and Britain, were increasingly looking at slavery in a different way, often through the lens of cultural and post-colonial studies. It was a campaign by a part of its citizenry, in particular those of African and Caribbean descent, who demanded some recognition of the sufferings of their ancestors and asked that France come to terms with both its colonial past and its multicultural present. Often they looked to the political left for support and leadership, and they took to the streets in defence of their claims and their communities, linking France’s slaving past with the criminalization of black communities today and with periodic police shootings of unarmed black teenagers. In particular, they wanted their role as black men and women to be recognized at a time when mayors and municipal authorities, even as they denounced the slave trade as morally reprehensible, went out of their way to avoid mentioning race. Indeed, French politicians were prone to take moral credit for abolition rather than point the finger at those responsible. Jacques Chirac’s words in 2006 are symptomatic, looking on the commemoration of the slave trade as a sign that France now had the courage to face its past. His words, uttered to justify the public commemoration of slavery, incensed the black community by heaping credit on the purveyors of memory. ‘Slavery and the slave trade,’ he said, ‘were an indelible stain for humanity. The Republic can be proud of the battle that she won against this ignominy. In commemorating this history, France is showing the way. This is her honour, her grandeur, and her strength.’24 For an increasingly voluble part of the black population, deriving pride from France’s slaving past caused outrage; the slave trade could only be seen as a scar on France’s reputation and a source of national shame.
When organizing events to mark the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 1998, local associations linked up with political movements, including a number that were affiliated to the CGT and to the French Communist Party. DiversCités organized in several of the former slaving ports, and militated for greater exposure of the facts of the cities’ slaving past. In Nantes, the collective that was established to organize the festivities drew on the expertise of eleven associations, including the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, SOS-Racisme, and Amnesty International.25 Often they started by consulting locally and involving people of African and Caribbean descent. Thus in Bordeaux they set up study sessions to explore the city’s colonial history and the work of the French Revolution of 1789 in abolishing the slave trade; they asked how best abolition should be commemorated and celebrated; and they explored links between the eighteenth-century slave trade and current problems, like the relations between France and Africa and North–South relations today. Academics and activists worked together to assess the damage wreaked by the slave trade in Africa and across the world, while local associations sought out traces of the slave trade in the modern city. A group called the ‘Friends of Toussaint Louverture’ demanded that street names be changed and that all trace of those merchants who had profited from the slave trade should be expunged.26 Again, black and Caribbean groups were active in the movement as a young generation of French men and women came of political age.
Their activism was important, as it helped to politicize the moment. In Nantes, the Anneaux de la Mémoire brought academics and citizens together in a common cause: again they had a strong membership among students at the university and the black communities from the Nantes suburbs. They held meetings and published an annual review on slaving issues, the Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire, and organized the inaugural exhibition on the slave trade at the city’s main museum in 1992–4. This exhibition made the point that the slave trade is a central part of Nantes’ history; but it created new polemics through the subjects it omitted, such as the provenance of money for the slave trade, or the illegal trade in the nineteenth century, or the role played by African chiefs and princes.27 Theirs was, they insisted, a fight to correct past injustices, and, crucially, they were given financial assistance by the municipal authorities.28 Events were planned bringing together historians and museum professionals on the one hand, political activists and members of the general public on the other, and for the first time the issue of race was given prominence.29 A new sensitivity was being shown to the descendants of slaves, and there was at least a nod in the direction of recognizing France’s multi-cultural composition. The different racial communities that are present in France today, and who make up the populations of the cities that Bordeaux, Nantes, and Marseille have become, expect to be consulted, and increasingly they are. Their aim, in the words of the Anneaux de la Mémoire, is ‘to favour dialogue between our diverse cultures and to contribute to the fight against all forms of apartheid’.30
Outside France, the timing was curiously similar, and again immigrant communities and the descendants of slaves were deeply involved in raising public awareness. In Bristol, for instance, a Slave Trade Action Group was formed in 1996, bringing together a panel of curators, city councillors, and academics with the express purpose of acknowledging this part of Bristol’s history. Their work over three years culminated in a major exhibition at the City Museum and Art Gallery in 1999, bearing the title ‘A Respectable Trade?: Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery’, which highlighted the part which the city had played in the African slave trade. The exhibition made no effort to conceal the cruelty of plantation life or the degradation of the Middle Passage; and it exposed the wide range of Bristol businesses, from sugar-refining to iron smelting, that had profited from slaving. Many of the business leaders involved had been honoured as benefactors to the city, or were commemorated in street names in the centre of Bristol, and many Bristolians, as the catalogue acknowledged, felt uneasy about opening up this chapter of their city’s past. ‘Some would prefer to avoid the issue and its problems, others feel that denial is equally likely to create tension.’31 The responses that the exhibition elicited would seem to support this view: indeed, the reactions of Bristolians were not so different from those of their counterparts in Nantes or Bordeaux. But the moment heralded an important change, with increasing demands that the names of those who had engaged in slaving should be erased from the public sphere.
There was no shortage of candidates for erasure in any of the Atlantic port cities. In Bordeaux, where merchants were well respected and figured prominently among municipal officials and benefactors, streets and squares often commemorated their work. Several had been mayors or city councillors in the nineteenth century, or else they had enjoyed rich and varied careers in commerce, trading in wines and colonial produce as they built up their fortunes and bestowed largesse on the city. Their names were especially frequent in the nineteenth-century suburbs of the city, in the Chartrons, of course, but also in the newer areas stretching out towards the Barrières or towards Saint-Jean. Few of them were thought of as slave-traders, but it was not long before anti-slavery campaigners found evidence of their involvement or that of their fathers before them. Gradis, Laffon de Ladebat, Baour, Balguerie-Stuttenberg, Mendès, and Couturier had all made a substantial fortune from the triangular trade, and a number of them had invested in sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Increasingly intolerant of what they saw as Bordeaux’s culpable silence over these fortunes and their provenance, lobbying groups and voluntary associations formed to raise public awareness, and some, like DiversCités, were increasingly political in their demands, insisting that those who had profited from the slave trade should no longer be honoured in the streets of France’s ports.32 When in 2009 they campaigned for streets like the Rue Saige to be renamed, however, they received short shrift from the city’s mayor, Alain Juppé, who noted that the merchants had made many other contributions to civic life and dismissed their demands out of hand. To date no streets in Bordeaux have been renamed as a result of the campaign, and other slaving ports have also resisted the pressure to change. But the efforts of the campaigners continue, demanding the removal of all trace of some of the more racist or repressive figures in the French Caribbean, and a few have met with more success. Most famously, Antoine Richepanse, a slave-owner and the general notorious for his role in the brutal suppression of the slave revolt in Guadeloupe, was expunged from the street maps of Paris at the insistence of the then mayor, Bertrand Delanoë: in 2002 the rue Richepanse was formally stripped of its slaving associations to bear a new name, the rue du Chevalier-de-Saint-Georges, that quite explicitly honoured the son of a Haitian slave.33
Campaigners, of course, want more, and routinely search out the names of local merchants, planters, or ships’ captains who were tarred with accusations of slave-trading, and demand that local authorities follow Delanoë’s example and purge them from public memory. School pupils have felt mobilized, where their collèges or lycées have taken the names of slave-owners or colonial figures, to protest and to demand change: in 2017, there was even a campaign across much of France calling for the renaming of all establishments called after Louis XIV’s minister, Colbert, on the grounds that he had legalized the institution of slavery and was therefore complicit in a crime against humanity.34 Antislavery has turned into a campaign issue for the left, and with it the destruction of all public memory of what they see as a horrific episode in France’s colonial past. For some groups in France today there seems no reason for compromise, and no one connected to the slave trade should be accorded any public recognition. Or, if the slave trade is to be memorialized, then it is the slaves, not the slave-owners, whose memory should be honoured, as victims but also as the heroes of the Atlantic world. The memory of the slave trade is now intimately bound up in twenty-first-century concerns about race, ethnicity, and human equality. Museum displays are expected to offer an emotional as well as an intellectual response.
But how should France honour men and women whom it had once enslaved and exploited for profit? Were slaves to be honoured as individuals, or dismissed as a faceless mass of humanity, victims rather than people with individual stories and achievements? Toussaint apart, there are few slaves from France’s black Atlantic who gained real notoriety in the European world, in part because of the lack of a written record. For, in contrast to the English-speaking world, no former slaves from the French Caribbean left accounts of their experience, and where we have access to the words they spoke, it is from judicial records of their testimonies in court.35 France had no equivalent of Olaudah Equiano, born the son of a tribal chief in present-day Nigeria, who was shipped at the age of eleven to Barbados on a British slave ship, but who then gained his freedom and travelled the world as a free man, before reaching a wide readership with his Extraordinary Life. Equiano was a celebrity in his own right, a campaigner for the cause of abolition, and a sufficiently rich character to warrant a special exhibition in Birmingham in 2007 devoted to him and the values that he represented.36 Thanks to Equiano, the exhibition could move seamlessly from slave ships to the cause of abolition and the men who championed it. As the exhibition catalogue made clear, it was curated in a way that would both celebrate Equiano’s life and commemorate British abolitionism, ‘the 1807 Act of Parliament to abolish the transatlantic slave trade’.37 African struggle and British idealism could thus co-exist in apparent harmony, to create a narrative that resonated for many in both the white and black communities. It is a pity that there is no parallel to Equiano in France’s memory of slavery, since it makes it much harder to create a black narrative of the French slave trade.
The French government has played its part in encouraging public debate on slavery and in insisting that such issues as the slave trade and France’s colonial past have their place in the school curriculum. Indeed, they have become central themes in the classroom, where until recently they were often treated as part of a ‘metanarrative of modernity’, as collateral damage in the advancement of France.38 But the transformation is far from complete. If the old stereotype has been challenged, as Françoise Vergès reminds us, the discussion is often limited in scope, focusing principally on the abolitionists and the slave trade, not on slavery itself. This matters, she insists, because slavery and the slave trade, though separate topics for analysis, are intimately connected, two aspects of a system of human degradation to which the merchants and, more generally, the wider communities of the slaving ports owed their prosperity.39 By focusing too exclusively on the commercial activity of merchants and ship-owners, the extent of this degradation can still be deliberately underplayed.
But even recognizing their debt to the slave trade has been a huge step forward in coming to terms with France’s colonial past, both for those who live in the slaving ports and for those whose ancestors were enslaved. In large measure, this reflects the concerns of contemporary French society, a France where many of the descendants of slaves have come to live, French citizens from former colonies and départements d’outre-mer who have brought a new level of cultural diversity to the cities of the metropole. It is surely significant that they have been among the most vociferous in demanding to know more about their history and to press for greater recognition and memorialization of the slave trade and of France’s slaving past. From the late 1990s, they have shown a new awareness of that past and a greater sense of entitlement, insisting that the French state must recognize its part in their historical tragedy in the same was as it had done for other groups in France—most notably the Jewish population over the Holocaust and the Armenian community over the massacres suffered at the hands of the Turks in 1915–17. In 1990, when Holocaust denial became a criminal offence in France, black activists found themselves with a political model to pursue, especially when, in 2000, France went further, complying with the demands of Jewish organizations for financial compensation to those who had suffered loss. In 2001, the state also recognized the Turkish massacres as genocide. Activists from the Caribbean and their political supporters in France felt that their moment for recognition had come, and that slavery, too, would now be given the status of the ‘crime against humanity’ that it was.40 Anything less, they believed, smacked of racism and discrimination.
They did not have long to wait. In 2001, under legislation introduced by Christiane Taubira, France became the first nation in the world to declare slavery and the slave trade ‘crimes against humanity’, and to introduce a national day of remembrance for the victims of slavery, comparable to that with which the French commemorated the victims of the Holocaust. But which date would they choose? There had been criticism from the black community in 1998 when Jacques Chirac had chosen 27 April, the day when Schœlcher’s law was passed in 1848.41 This time they pressed for a more neutral date, one less associated with French initiatives. In the event, the date of 10 May was chosen for the official commemoration, which was simply the day when the new law was passed, and the commemoration has taken place on that date every year since. Politicians regularly take part in parades and ceremonies, the president of the republic is often present, and France’s various ethnic communities are invited to take part. The law also sought to improve public education on the slave trade: it attached greater importance to the history of the slave trade in the school curriculum, so that the young should be informed of it. And it increased funding for academic research on slavery, calling for cooperation between scholars in Europe and those in Africa and the Caribbean, and urging that the written records in France be set against the archaeological evidence and oral traditions of Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean.42 It did not go as far as some on the left would have liked: unlike the Jews, former slaves were offered no financial compensation for past mistreatment. But it had real significance for the black community. For the first time, France had made it clear that it took its slaving past seriously, and made a point, before the world, of integrating its record of anti-slavery into its republican heritage. The Taubira Law was at the same time a gesture to France’s ethnic minorities and a contribution to the nation’s politics of memory.43 It helped to raise public consciousness of the legacy of slavery, and to instil a sense of right and wrong. And interestingly, it was passed without opposition in the French National Assembly.
The mayors of the Atlantic slave ports were stirred to act, often at the instigation of the immigrant communities of their cities. Alain Juppé, for instance, the mayor of Bordeaux for much of this period, has taken a leading role in ensuring that his city has embraced the spirit of the Taubira Law, by enacting a series of measures which, adapting the words of the historian Paul Ricoeur, he termed ‘a politics of just memory’.44 The work had been started by his predecessors in the wake of the 150th anniversary celebrations. In 1999, Bordeaux staged a major exhibition on the Caribbean, ‘Regards sur les Antilles’; in 2003, a plaque was placed on the house where Toussaint Louverture’s son, Isaac, had spent his final years (he is buried nearby, in the cemetery at La Chartreuse); and a square named in Toussaint’s honour was inaugurated on the opposite side of the Garonne, in 2005, in the presence of Haiti’s Minister of Culture.45 In 2008, as Bordeaux prepared to open new galleries in the Musée d’Aquitaine devoted to the city’s slaving past, the mayor led a delegation from Bordeaux to Liverpool to take inspiration from the International Museum of Slavery, which had opened the previous year. Bordeaux, he wished to make clear, was sensitive in its treatment of slavery and of issues of colour, and responsive to its own black communities. The curators had learned a lot from Liverpool, even if, as Renaud Hourcade insists, there is an important difference in the way in which they presented their slaving history. ‘Whereas Liverpool’s museum is mainly a museum about black history,’ he explains, ‘Bordeaux’s museum is mainly a museum about Bordeaux.’46 And if Saint-Domingue is omnipresent in the museum, it is still presented as a source of riches, as ‘L’Eldorado des Aquitains’.47 The emphasis is highly significant, since it means that the slave trade is not allowed to become the principal focus of the exhibition: it is just one subject among many to be covered in the museum’s galleries. As a result, the slaves do not become the principal actors, though, learning from Liverpool’s experience, the display makes a commendable effort to link with contemporary issues like racism and cultural diversity.48
This was also true, to a greater of lesser degree, of the other museums in France’s Atlantic ports which contain important displays of material on the slave trade. All now make some acknowledgement of their slaving past, but—despite the demands of the Anneaux de la Mémoire and others—there is no museum devoted to the single issue of the slave trade, and none which, like Liverpool, organizes its narrative around the slave experience. In the Château des Ducs de Bretagne in Nantes, where the city’s principal historical museum is housed, much has been done to educate the citizenry on the evils of the slave trade, and to integrate it into the history of both the city and of France. There is an acknowledgement that what was done was morally wrong, particularly the eagerness shown by so many merchants to re-engage with the slave trade after the Napoleonic Wars. The new gallery on the slave trade is richly documented, including in its display the log of a Nantes slaver, the Bonne Mère, which sailed from the Loire estuary in February 1815 for the coast of Africa, took on a cargo of slaves, and reached the Caribbean before being seized by the English off Pointe-à-Pitre in September. It is a graphic example of the uncertainties of international law at that time, for between these dates what had been a legal trade had been transformed into a criminal activity. The log recreates the moral dilemma of the moment, one which the visitor is invited to share.49
But again, the slave trade is one theme among several given a privileged place in the museum’s galleries, and it is presented as part of a wider history of the city and the Nantes estuary across the centuries. The same pattern is to be found elsewhere. In La Rochelle, where, as in the other ports, there is now a permanent display on the slave trade, the obfuscation is perhaps greater, as the city’s role in the slave trade is buried in a broader and richer Atlantic narrative. But then, the city’s museum, the Musée du Nouveau Monde, does not pretend to focus particularly on the slave trade, nor yet on the Caribbean, as it traces the part played by La Rochelle in a succession of transatlantic contexts: the discovery of the Americas, the opening up of New France and the city’s part in the fur trade, and the various indigenous peoples of the United States, all are treated with the same empathy and the same concern for detail as the city’s part in slaving. This may seem somewhat perverse, as the museum is housed in the Hôtel Fleuriau, the elegant town house of one of La Rochelle’s great slave-owning families, which was purchased by the municipality in 1979.50 Until then there had been no public acknowledgement in the town of its slaving past, and it was never intended that it should become a museum dedicated to the slave trade. Rather, it aims to explore La Rochelle’s multi-faceted presence in the Atlantic world and the interactions between French colonists and the native peoples of the Americas. The opening of the new museum, in 1982, represents something of a first for the port cities of the west. Its inaugural exhibition emphasized its overall theme (Mémoire d’un port: La Rochelle et l’Atlantique, 16e–19e siècle), and its opening passed off without protest. It was planned and conceived well before the current wave of interest in the slave trade, and before the whole issue became politicized. By 2002, with the growth of associations dedicated to perpetuating the memory of the slave trade, the display in the Musée Fleuriau came under attack for its discretion and ambiguity, and La Rochelle’s memorialization of its past became increasingly contested.51
An important line had, however, been crossed. On 10 May 2009, when the official celebration of the abolition of slavery was held in Bordeaux, ministers and dignitaries filed into the Musée d’Aquitaine, and they made it clear that the museum’s purpose was central to their goal of fostering education on France’s slaving past—education, in Alain Juppé’s words, to combat ignorance, ‘the ignorance that nourishes fear and the fear that generates hatred’, and to spread the values of the republic which slavery insults. His speech was a searing rebuttal of slavery, expressed with a vigour and directness that Bordeaux had not previously heard. But there was a note of caution, and one that those who dreamt of pursuing claims for reparations had no reason to welcome. For if he recognized the need to understand the city’s past and its responsibility for the slave trade, Juppé was in no mood to apologize. ‘Is it a question of our expressing repentance?’ he asked, rhetorically. ‘I prefer to speak of it as an acknowledgement of the truth. We, as citizens of the twenty-first century, the sons and daughters of Bordeaux in 2009, we are obviously not responsible for or guilty of actions committed in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a historical context that was profoundly different.’52 For those clamouring for remorse or compensation, this was an unwelcome answer, but it was one for which Alain Juppé was widely applauded across the city.
In the other slaving ports, too, efforts have been made to give public recognition to the human cost of the slave trade, or to commemorate the leaders of the black insurrection against slavery. In May 2015, La Rochelle sought to rebalance its representation of the slave trade by inaugurating a statue in memory of Toussaint Louverture by the Senegalese artist Ousmane Sow. As in Nantes and Bordeaux, a voluntary association of local people, in this case calling themselves Mémoria, played an important part in championing the project and in bringing it to fruition, and Toussaint’s statue, in full military uniform, today stands proudly in the courtyard of the city’s museum with the Hôtel Fleuriau as its backcloth.53 Le Havre has done rather less, at least to date. There is a small memorial slab between the Malraux Art Museum and the entrance to the port, but it struggles to capture the attention of passers-by. By way of contrast, as protestors have noted, five major streets in Le Havre bear the names of merchants and civic dignitaries (Masurier, Begouёn, Boulogne, Eyriès, and Massieu) whose fortunes were made trading slaves.54
By far the greatest act of commemoration and expiation of the last few years has taken place in Nantes, appropriately perhaps, since it was the city where Serge Daget had done so much to launch the whole memorial movement with his initiative for ‘Nantes 85’. In 2012, Nantes inaugurated its own memorial to the abolition of the slave trade on the bank of the Loire close to the merchant quarter which had seen so many slave ships leave for the coast of Africa. The idea of commissioning a simple statue had been swiftly discarded, and the design of the Memorial was carefully planned, with submissions invited from a wide range of international sculptors and artists. The idea of preserving different memories of the slave trade and of providing a place for reflection was prioritized when the jury delivered its verdict and the commission was given to a Polish-American artist, Krzysztof Wodiczko. The memorial lies along the side of the river, looking out on the water; it is shaped like a slave ship, its hull filled with panels that trace the history of the slave trade and remind the visitor of the reality of the Middle Passage and the fight for abolition; and it recognizes the extent of Nantes’ responsibility for the slave trade, with the pavement above studded with images representing every slave voyage out of the port in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But it goes further in linking eighteenth-century slavery with other forms of slavery in the world today, in invoking human rights across the planet, and in inviting reflection on the cost of freedom and on man’s inhumanity to man. It is a timely symbol of a new mentality, one which has finally allowed one slaving port to come to terms with the memory of its past.55
1 This subject is treated at length in Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA, 1995).
2 Charles Forsdick, ‘The Pantheon’s empty plinth: commemorating slavery in contemporary France’, Atlantic Studies, 9 (2012), 279.
3 Lucy Ball, ‘Memory, myth and forgetting: the British transatlantic slave trade’ (PhD thesis, University of Portsmouth, 2013).
4 Geoffrey Cubitt, ‘Museums and Slavery in Britain: The Bicentenary of 1807’, in Ana Lucia Araujo (ed.), Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (London: Routledge, 2012), 162.
5 Didier Guyvarc’h, ‘Nantes, la traite en mémoire’, Place Publique Nantes-Saint-Nazaire, 29 (2011), 17.
6 Serge Daget, La Traite des Noirs. Opération «Nantes 85» (Nantes, 1982).
7 Robert Chesnais (ed.), L’esclavage à la française: le Code noir, 1685 et 1724 (Paris: Nautilus, 2006); Adriana Chira, ‘Le Code noir: Idées reçues sur un texte symbolique’, Comparative Legal History, 4 (2016), 251–54.
8 Serge Daget (ed.), De la traite à l’esclavage: Actes du Colloque international sur la traite des noirs (2 vols, Nantes, 1988).
9 Didier Guyvarc’h, ‘La construction de la mémoire d’une ville: Nantes, 1914–1992’, 600–1.
10 Marc Lastrucci, ‘L’évocation publique à Nantes de la traite négrière et de l’esclavage de «Nantes 85» aux «Anneaux de la Mémoire», 1983–1994’ (mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Nantes, 1996), passim.
11 Jean-Marc Ayrault, introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition, Les Anneaux de la Mémoire: Nantes-Europe/Afrique/Amériques (Nantes, 1992), 9.
12 See, for instance, Hubert Bonin, Les tabous de Bordeaux (Bordeaux: Le Festin, 2010).
13 Colloque ‘Le port et l’imaginaire du port: Bordeaux et Bristol, colloque international à l’occasion du 50e anniversaire du jumelage Bordeaux-Bristol’ (Bordeaux, 1997).
14 Christine Chivallon, ‘Construction d’une mémoire relative à l’esclavage et instrumentalisation politique: le cas des anciens ports négriers de Bordeaux et Bristol’, Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire, 4 (2002), 177–202.
15 Paul Butel set up a Centre d’histoire des Espaces Atlantiques at the Université de Bordeaux-III as early as 1981 with the aim of pursuing comparative economic and social history of the two shores of the Atlantic. The first issue of the Centre’s Bulletin appeared in 1983, and nine issues were produced between then and 1999, publishing the results of research on the wider Atlantic.
16 Archives Départementales de la Gironde, Exposition «La traite négrière», 1992.
17 Musée d’Aquitaine, Regards sur les Antilles. Collection Marcel Chatillon (Bordeaux: Musée d’Aquitaine, 1999).
18 Alain Juppé, ‘Préface’, in Regards sur les Antilles, 9.
19 Marguerite Figeac-Monthus, ‘Bordeaux et la traite’, Revue historique de Bordeaux et du Département de la Gironde, NS 17 (2011), 25–7.
20 Ana Lucia Araujo, ‘Introduction’, in Araujo (ed.), Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space, 4.
21 David Fleming, ‘Our Vision for the Museum’, International Slavery Museum, National Museums Liverpool; see the museum website: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/about.
22 Richard Benjamin, ‘Museums and Sensitive Histories: the International Slavery Museum’, in Araujo (ed.), Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space, 187.
23 Anne-Laure Coste, ‘Étude sur les représentations du passé négrier de Bordeaux: entre oubli et mémorisation’ (mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Bordeaux-2, 2001), 73–4.
24 Crystal Marie Fleming, Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), 54.
25 Emmanuelle Chérel, ‘Le Mémorial: enjeux, débats et controverses’, Place Publique Nantes-Saint-Nazaire, 29 (2011), 42.
26 Dominique Belougne, ‘Un travail d’une année autour des commémorations de 1998 à Bordeaux du 150e anniversaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage’, Institut aquitain d’Études Sociales, 75 (2000), 35–9.
27 Krystel Gualdé, ‘Musée versus mémorial ?’, Revue du Philanthrope, 7 (2018), 103.
28 ‘Avant-Propos’, Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire, 1 (1999), 5–8.
29 Madge Dresser, ‘Remembering slavery and abolition in Bristol’, Slavery and Abolition, 30 (2009),229.
30 These words appear on the title page of the Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire, the first number of which appeared in 1999.
31 Madge Dresser and Sue Giles (eds), Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery: Catalogue of the Exhibition ‘A Respectable Trade?: Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery at the City Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol, 1999 (Bristol, 2000), 9.
32 Danielle Pétrissans-Cavaillès, Sur les traces de la traite des Noirs à Bordeaux (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), 43–66.
33 Le Parisien, 4 February 2002.
34 Le Monde, 17 September 2017.
35 Frédéric Régent, Gilda Gonfier and Bruno Maillard, Libres et sans fers: Paroles d’esclaves français (Paris: Fayard, 2015), 7–17.
36 ‘Equiano: an exhibition of an extraordinary life’, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 2007–8; Stuart Burch, ‘Equiano: an exhibition of an extraordinary life’, Museums Journal, December 2007, 48–9.
37 Arthur Torrington (ed.), Equiano: Enslavement, Resistance and Abolition (Birmingham: Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 2007), introduction.
38 Marcus Otto, ‘The challenge of decolonization: school history textbooks as media and objects of the postcolonial politics of memory in France since the 1960s’, Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society, 5 (2013), 23.
39 Françoise Vergès, ‘Les troubles de la mémoire: traite négrière, esclavage et écriture de l’histoire’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 179–80 (2005), 1143.
40 Jean-Yves Camus, ‘The commemoration of slavery in France and the emergence of a black political consciousness’, The European Legacy, 11 (2006), 648–9.
41 Ibid., 649.
42 Law of 21 May 2001, the ‘Loi Taubira’.
43 Renaud Hourcade, ‘Commemorating a Guilty Past: The Politics of Memory in the French Former Trade Cities’, in Ana Lucia Araujo (ed.), Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (London: Routledge, 2012), 131.
44 Alain Juppé, ‘Un message de vérité et d’humanisme’, in Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle, le commerce atlantique et l’esclavage (catalogue of the permanent exhibition on the slave trade, Bordeaux, 2009), 9–10.
45 Marguerite Figeac-Monthus, ‘Bordeaux et la traite’, 27.
46 Renaud Hourcade, ‘Commemorating a Guilty Past’, 136.
47 Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle, le commerce atlantique et l’esclavage, 107–25.
48 Hourcade, ‘Commemorating a Guilty Past’, 137.
49 Musée d’Histoire de Nantes, Château des Ducs de Bretagne, Salle 19, Journal de bord d’un navire négrier nantais, 1815.
50 Musée du Nouveau Monde de La Rochelle, plan de visite.
51 Mickaël Augeron, ‘La mémoire de la traite des Noirs, de l’esclavage et de leurs abolitions à La Rochelle: les initiatives municipales, 1979–2015’, Revue du Philanthrope, 7 (2018), 78–81.
52 Journée nationale de commémoration de l’esclavage, speech by the mayor of Bordeaux, Alain Juppé, at the Musée d’Aquitaine, 10 May 2009.
53 Sud-Ouest, 20 May 2015.
54 ‘The Slave Streets of Le Havre’, Normandy Then and Now (http://www.normandythenandnow.com/the-slave-streets-of-le-havre/19, June 2018).
55 Emmanuelle Chérel, Le Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage de Nantes (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 263–8.