Are Colbert, Faidherbe, Ferry also on the hot seat in France? In the wake of American anti-racist protests, monuments and statues linked to French colonial history or the slave trade find themselves at the heart of a controversy at risk, for historian Jacqueline Lalouette, author ofA people of statues. The sculpted celebration of great men. 1801-2018.
What are the last statues in France to have been “unbolted”?
The practice of removing statues or destroying them is not a contemporary phenomenon: from Protestants in the time of religious wars, to the destruction and reworking of the revolutionary period, including the few statues that suffered from regime changes in the 19th century… There was no mass destruction, however.
We must of course add the large overhaul of the bronze statues ordered by Vichy in October 1941 (to recover the metal for armament purposes, N.D.L.R.) but it is something different.
Unbolting can take various forms. If it is done outside of any official decision, in a kind of “popular emotion”, the statue will probably be destroyed immediately after. But unbolting can be done by official decision, as has just been done for Robert Milligan in London or Leopold II in Antwerp, in this case, the statue is then transported to a museum or a museum store.
What could be the current points of tension for certain anti-racist activists in France?
There remain on French territory a certain number of statues which can feed the current vindictiveness. Without wanting to draw up a list, one can think of ministers favorable to colonization, residents general and governors of colonies, soldiers who reduced and sometimes massacred hostile peoples, clergymen who contributed to the spread of Catholicism in Africa and in Asia.
But, it should be understood that no man, certainly, was statufujet because he had engaged in the triangular trade or owned slaves. Colbert was not established as an editor of the Code noir, but as a minister of Louis XIV and because of his preponderant action in all the major sectors of the state. On the other hand, the colonizers were well glorified because, thanks to their political and legislative action, to their military “achievements”, they helped to give an Empire to France, at a time when the European peoples shared continents .
What is the political effectiveness of this practice?
First, launching a controversy against a statue is to give it an existence that it certainly did not have for most people, because the statues blend into the landscape and the inhabitants of cities no longer see them, or give them no more importance than a lamppost, and do not read the inscriptions on the pedestal.
When a statue is removed by decision of the authorities, there is a real historic erasure, unless we manage to recover the work, take it out of the water for example. Second scenario, if it is exhibited in a museum hall, there is no erasure of history, but a proposal to resort to history in a different, more rational and more educational manner.
The best, compared to History, is undoubtedly to explain that the ideological criteria, that the republican values have evolved and that acts which appeared normal and even commendable a few decades ago, or a few centuries, are now condemnable . But to explain is neither to erase nor to destroy.
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