The Panthéon's empty plinth: commemorating slavery in contemporary France

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point a symbolically empty site in the French commemorative landscape – the plinth in the Panthéon to where Toussaint Louverture's remains may have been transferred had plans to pantheonize him ever been realized. It argues that the implications of this emblematic absence at the heart of official memorial practices in France are at least twofold: not only does this empty site reflect the persistent and systematic silencing of slavery and the enslaved in national commemorations (traditionally focused instead on abolition), but also, somewhat paradoxically, by avoiding any clear orthodoxy in formal processes of remembrance, it has permitted the opening up of possibilities for a range of alternative practices that have encouraged recognition of what Édouard Glissant dubbed the “nomadic,” “diffracted,” and plural memories of slavery. Drawing on Marcus Wood's recent study The Horrible Gift of Freedom (2010), the article suggests that national commemorations in France tend systematically to remember abolition whilst forgetting slavery. Having explored this analysis in the light of sites such as the Panthéon itself, the focus then shifts to the alternative memorials relating to slavery imagined by the artist Lubaina Himid in her work “What Are Monuments For? Possible Landmarks on the Urban Map.” Her reflection on the potential for politicians and citizens to collaborate actively in creating memorials and monuments allows a concluding study of two locations – Bordeaux and Nantes – where over the past decade different processes of commemoration have emerged, and where there have been dynamic, controversial, innovative, and, at times, highly constructive efforts to remember slavery and abolition in civic space, not least in the cities’ museums. The article concludes with a discussion of the distinctive project of a Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, a site whose ambition endeavours to reject any reduction of slavery to the histories of abolitionism.