A day of memory, a day of history. This Tuesday, May 10, France commemorated the National Day of Remembrance of the Slave Trade, Slavery and their Abolition. The ceremony, celebrated since 2006, was held in the Luxembourg Gardens, in Paris. Nearly 400 young people from all over France gathered around Emmanuel Macron to pay tribute to the victims and salute the struggle of women, like the Guadeloupean slave Solitude, executed in 1802 after revolting.
“Every human’s quest is freedom,” recalled three Strasbourg high school girls in front of the monument to the abolition of slavery. In the presence of around twenty ministers, the Head of State did not speak during the ceremony, which mixed songs and testimonies from class pupils from Saint-Denis de la Réunion, Fougères or Sotteville-les. -Rouen winners of the national Flame of Equality competition.
The Solitude Mulatto
A special tribute was paid to Solitude, a former slave from Guadeloupe who participated in the revolt against the reestablishment of slavery by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802. Captured and then sentenced to death while pregnant, she was executed the day after her delivery, November 29, 1802. His memory had been brought out of oblivion by the publication, 50 years ago, of The Solitude Mulattoa novel by writer André Schwarz-Bart.
A statue in her honor was also inaugurated on Tuesday by the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo in a garden that bears her name in the 17th arrondissement, inaugurated in September 2020. This creation by the sculptor Didier Audrat represents her with a raised fist clutching the declaration of Louis Delgrès, another Guadeloupean figure in the fight against slavery, the other hand protecting his round belly.
“A message to future generations”
“The actions we take must have meaning in relation to those we want to honor but also in relation to the future”, declared the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, explaining that the inauguration of this statue represented “an act reparation vis-à-vis the descendants of slavery”, but also “a message to the generations to come”.
“Black women in statue there are already some in Paris, but these are allegorical statues of representations of Africa, of an exotic continent”, declared for his part Jean-Marc Ayrault, former Prime Minister and President of the Foundation for the Memory of Slavery. “Today it is not the abstract idea that is represented, it is a woman whose name and destiny we know, a woman and a mother, a Guadeloupean and a Frenchwoman, a rebel and a citizen, in when power had ceased to believe in freedom,” he added.
In 2019, Emmanuel Macron affirmed that the history of slavery was part of “our history”. A year earlier, he had declared that this memory “needed action”, celebrating the 170th anniversary of the signing by the provisional government of the Republic of the decree abolishing slavery in the French colonies.