Remembering and forgetting: How France's slaving ports have come to terms with their past

Abstract

AbstractIn the decades before the French Revolution, France's Atlantic ports grew rich on the profits of colonial trade with the Americas, not least through the triangular trade in slaves between France, West Africa and the Caribbean. But by the end of the century, that prosperity was threatened. The French Revolution, leading to the first abolition of the slave trade in 1794, was partly responsible; but so were long years of war and blockade; the loss of France's richest sugar island, Saint‐Domingue, to slave insurrection; and the growth of a new moral conscience which challenged the rights of Europeans to sacrifice the freedom of others for their own economic advantage. After 1815, the Atlantic ports were condemned to long years of economic decline, when merchants looked back nostalgically on a world they had lost. In this article, I examine how the revolutionary era left an uneasy memory of the slave trade and suggest how these cities have belatedly come to terms with their past as public memory has evolved to reflect the changing balance of French society.