EUROPE INSIGHT
A Vibrant Place:
The Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes
Krystel Gualdé Nantes History Museum
In Nantes, there is a place where silence speaks, where footsteps slow, caught by the weight of a long-buried history. A vibrant place, on the riverbank, where memory takes form: the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery. Its very existence, at the heart of this port city, stands as a powerful and dizzying dissonance. For between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Nantes was France’ s principal centre of the Atlantic slave trade— a commercial crossroads from which more than 1,800 expeditions set sail, tearing hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children from their homelands to deliver them to Europe’ s colonial plantations in the Americas.
More than 555,000 people were deported under the flag of Nantes— in the name of a prosperity built on inhumanity. Although other cities, such as Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Le Havre, also participated in this trade in human lives, Nantes dominated. Its fortune was rooted in this globalised economy of violence: in the slave trade, the refining of sugar, the weaving of cotton, commercial alliances with Asia, and the beginnings of an incipient industrialisation. A network of powerful interests bound Europe, Africa and America together in a relentless and particularly brutal web.
The paradox is even starker when one considers Nantes was far from an abolitionist stronghold; it was, in fact, an avowed opponent. In 1794, the city fiercely resisted the first abolition of slavery proclaimed by the French Revolution. It celebrated Napoleon Bonaparte’ s reinstatement of slavery in 1802 and continued illegal trading until 1831. For a long time, memory chose oblivion.
Today, that buried history has resurfaced. The Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery, inaugurated on 25 March 2012— a highly symbolic date marking Britain’ s abolition of the slave trade in 1807— embodies the return of a past long accepted, yet repressed after the Second World War and during the era of decolonisation.
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Observing Memories ISSUE 9