[LINK] "Is memory enough? Remembering the racial legacies of slavery in France today"

[rfmcdonald]

Nicola Frith and Kate Hodgson write at Open Democracy about race and slavery and historical memory in France, and their complications.

Race was central to constructing and maintaining slavery in France’s colonies, as it was across the colonial plantation world more generally. Key distinctions between subjects racialised as ‘white’ and ‘black’ shaped economic patterns, legal affairs and social relationships. Enslaved Africans were sought-after merchandise among the French merchants and plantation owners who made fortunes from the sale of what they crudely referred to as ‘ebony wood’. A legal text governing master-slave relations was created called the Black Code (1685). This outlawed relationships between free and enslaved persons, restricted the movements of slaves, and defined the harsh punishments to be used against slaves for any minor infringement or attempt to escape. The original colonial system placed a small white minority in control of a large but enslaved African majority, and was from the start a regime of terror, brutality and exploitation.

Yet the Black Code was not completely successful in its attempt to segregate and subjugate. This is evident in multiple forms of resistance, including poisoning, slave-led uprisings and ‘marronage’ (fugitive slaves). A growing free black and mixed-race population also began to emerge, posing a challenge to the stark, racialised binaries on which the colonial system was based. In response, additional colonial legislation was passed to restrict the activities of free people of colour. A total of 128 categories of skin colour were meticulously catalogued, from black to white, from ‘Sacatra’ to ‘Quarteron’.

The resentment provoked by this apartheid-esque system exploded with the arrival of French revolutionary ideas to the colonies, culminating in the mass revolt of the enslaved Africans in Saint Domingue. This became known as the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). The French Atlantic world was transformed with the birth of Haiti as the first black-led, post-slave, post-colonial nation state. One of the most radical aspects of Haiti’s independence was the article in the 1805 constitution that abolished distinctions of skin colour, with all Haitians henceforth identified as black. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the constitution’s creator, did this to help unify a nation still deeply marked by the structural racism of its French origins.

The French colonial bureaucracy took the opposite stance after it abolished slavery in the rest of France’s plantation colonies in 1848. In contrast to Haiti’s assertion of blackness, French republicanism embraced a ‘neutral’ identity based on the idea of assimilation to French cultural values and a desire to forget the slave past. This rhetoric of neutrality towards racial difference masked the reality of continued exploitation, including forced labour, indenture, and the use of detention centres. These and other practices effectively created a two-tier system of national identity based upon racial divisions. Numerous individuals who grew up during this period have testified to the profoundly alienating effects of a colonial education that worked to deny their history and erase their identity.