By Joseph W. Peterson

As monuments to enslavers and colonialists have increasingly come under fire across the US and Europe, from Robert E. Lee to Cecil Rhodes, from Bristol’s Edward Colston to Paris’s Jean-Baptiste Colbert, some Europeans have embraced the narrative that American-style “Black Lives Matter” protests and “woke” ideology are to blame for such iconoclasm.^[1] Especially in France, which prides itself on a supposedly colorblind tradition of Republican equality, America’s own toxic relationship with race is a convenient scapegoat for French people resentful of racial justice protests. For if racial consciousness and protest is a foreign import from an allegedly more racist society, then France would be justified in maintaining its colorblind approach to national belonging, justified in ignoring the current grievances of minority groups. More insidiously, treating France’s monument wars as a recent import falsely implies that previous generations saw no problem with monuments to white supremacists—that “in their own context” the builders of white supremacist monuments could not have known they were wrong. 

Of course, anti-racist activism and iconoclasm are far from new in France, a country that witnessed the careers of such fierce Caribbean anti-colonialists as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. But as recent research has shown, even generations before Césaire or Fanon, people of African and Afro-Caribbean descent already lived, worked, and built their communities and consciousness in France. 

One such story is that of the remarkable nineteenth-century antiracist Sainte-Suzanne Melvil-Bloncourt—a Paris-based activist from Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean, educated in France but proud of his African heritage. Living in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, as a self-described “mulatto” and “creole of color,” Melvil-Bloncourt watched and wrote about the American Civil War and the status of formerly-enslaved Black Americans, corresponded with Frederick Douglass, published with the New Orleans Tribune (the first Black daily newspaper in America), and began to develop a sense of “trans-Atlantic” solidarity between all people of African descent.^[2] Melvil-Bloncourt also denounced a monument to white supremacy in Paris, a monument which stands to this day in the famous Père Lachaise cemetery. Melvil-Bloncourt did not need “wokeism” to understand the power that monuments and collective memory have to erase and rewrite the past. He already knew well that monuments are seldom neutral—seldom the innocent product of a “different time”—but are exercises of power, often on behalf of the dominant against the marginalized.^[3]

Who was Melvil-Bloncourt? Born in Guadeloupe in the mid-1820s—the son of a minor French aristocrat and a woman of color—he lived free at a time when the institution of slavery, abolished during the Revolution, had been violently reinstated by Napoleon, was thriving once again, and would not be abolished again until the Revolution of 1848. From this background, he arrived in Paris and, likely due to his father’s influence, gained admittance to the elite Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He also studied law and was active in student protests, political journals, and the Revolution of 1848.^[4]

Melvil-Bloncourt, from H. Adolphe Lara, Contribution de la Guadeloupe à la Pensée Française (Paris: Éditions Jean Crès, 1936).

Living in France during Napoleon III’s restored Second Empire, Melvil-Bloncourt identified instead with the “true French” traditions of revolutionary republicanism and abolitionism.^[5] In keeping with his Caribbean abolitionist republicanism, more consistently and expansively republican than France itself,^[6] he wrote that people of African descent had reason to “love the Revolution the most,” but to “loathe Corsica…the most,” because the first Napoleon, a figure mistakenly admired by some French Republicans, had “put the black man back in slavery and withdrew from men of color their political rights.”^[7] Republicans of color, like Melvil-Bloncourt, knew better than anyone that the first Napoleon had not represented a fulfilment but rather a betrayal of the Revolution.

But Melvil-Bloncourt was never merely interested in France’s domestic politics and seesawing revolutions. What is most striking about him was his commitment to “trans-Atlantic,” even global solidarity with all people of African descent.^[8] Beginning in the 1860s with his advocacy for enslaved people in the United States, Melvil-Bloncourt became perhaps one of the first pan-African activists in history. In the context of the American Civil War, as a Paris-based journalist and activist, Melvil-Bloncourt offered coverage of slavery and emancipation in the Americas, with a regular “Chronicle of North America” column in the Revue du monde colonial. He also cultivated a relationship and exchanged news with the first Black-run daily newspaper in the United States, theNew Orleans Tribune, published in both English and French by free people of color in the Union-occupied city. The New Orleans Tribune is a powerful story in its own right, as it became a center of unity between free people of color and newly-emancipated Black Americans in New Orleans, and a forceful advocate for Black voting rights and political power in the South.^[9] Against policies that sought to divide elite creoles of color from the recently emancipated, the radicals at the Tribune demanded political rights for all, and land and economic opportunities for the formerly enslaved.^[10]

Melvil-Bloncourt shared this goal of unity between established free people of color and the recently emancipated. Anticipating the pan-Africanist and Négritude movements, he outlined a vision of global solidarity between all people of African descent, “a single family” across the world that would work not only for Black political rights and the “triumph of the African race,” but also contribute to the “universal task of humanity.” For Melvil-Bloncourt, no person of color was truly free, “as long as a black man or mulatto—whether American, Spanish, or Portuguese” was still denied his freedom or political rights.^[11] These beliefs led him to raise funds in France and Guadeloupe to donate to newly-emancipated Black Americans, via the offices of the Tribune. That “creoles of color” like himself would participate in the struggle of enslaved Black people represented “the first ring of this chain of solidarity that I would like to see unite the entire African race in the New World.”^[12]Melvil-Bloncourt rejected colorism with vehemence, explaining that only “the privileged” benefited from “[dividing] the class of the oppressed,”^[13] and mocking any people of color who attempted to “pass for whites.”^[14]

Finally, Melvil-Bloncourt even anticipated our current monument wars. For Melvil-Bloncourt, collective memory mattered. The historical record of Black revolutionary consciousness had to be rescued from erasure. It was in this spirit that he publicly criticized and sought correction of a monument in Paris’s famed Père Lachaise cemetery—a monument that glorified Napoleon’s restoration of slavery in the French Caribbean and perpetuated a white supremacist myth. 

In Père Lachaise in the mid-nineteenth century, there was one corner of the cemetery—the “General’s Quarter”—where it became customary for old Napoleonic generals and marshals, veterans of the Revolution or of Napoleon’s wars, to be buried in proximity to each other.^[15]

G.al [Général] Gobert p. [par] David d’Angers : Père Lachaise : [photographie] / [Atget] Atget, Eugène (1857-1927). Photographe. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10519941z/f1.item.r=gobert%20monument#

When the General Jacques-Nicolas Gobert, who died fighting in Napoleon’s campaigns in Spain in 1808, finally achieved his monumental status amongst the Napoleonic heroes of Père Lachaise almost forty years after his death, his monument included a scene commemorating his role in Napoleon’s violent reestablishment of slavery in France’s colonies.^[16] Gobert’s monument is placed on a pedestal with four bas-reliefs, one on each side, commemorating several of the general’s exploits.^[17] One of the reliefs depicts Gobert leading French troops in Guadeloupe, where he helped to defeat the armies of Black Guadeloupeans and reinstate slavery. Like Toussaint Louverture and so many other free and formerly enslaved people of color in Haiti, in Guadeloupe people like Louis Delgrès and Joseph Ignace had fought bravely on France’s behalf during the revolutionary wars against the British. They believed themselves loyal Frenchmen and worthy of France’s gratitude. Yet their islands were reinvaded by the French, their leaders arrested, their armies surrounded—largely through treachery and deceit.^[18] The restoration of enslavement in Guadeloupe was an odd choice of subject to illustrate Gobert’s heroism, on a monument that was raised just one year before France’s second, definitive abolition of slavery in 1848. But perhaps even worse than the racism of the subject in general, the specific skirmish depicted enacted an even more pointed white supremacist myth. 

In L’Illustration, Journal Universel. 14 Aout 1847 (Vol. IX: No. 233). https://archive.org/details/lillustrationjou09pari/page/368/mode/2up

The episode shown on the relief is based on an apocryphal version of Gobert’s rescue of some white prisoners at a place called Dolé. According to the story, the Black Guadeloupeans had taken white prisoners (including women and children) hostage in a house, and placed explosives for its destruction. On the relief, Gobert is shown with a pistol in his hand, shooting a Black soldier—point blank in the throat—who was rushing to detonate the explosives. The torch falls just short of the powder barrel, the innocent white hostages saved in the nick of time. All around, the soldiers of color are shown in a swirl of frenzied action, shirtless, fighting with savagery: one resorts to his teeth to bite Gobert or some other Frenchman on the thigh, “while another…digs his hands into a soldier’s face.”^[19] In the bas-relief’s composition, this bedlam of Black savagery is near the ground, defeated, repressed, no match for the more upright, well-armed, smartly-uniformed and organized armies of Gobert. To complete the tableau, the relief was erroneously titled “MARTINIQUE”—a French territory that never revolted against enslavement, and a place where General Gobert never set foot. And the relief’s caption obscured rather more than it explained the story’s context: “General Gobert saving from death, in the colonies, eighty prisoners of the negroes.”^[20]

The monument’s mislabeling—its lack of care in correctly naming the colony where the hostage rescue was supposed to have taken place—can itself be seen as an act of erasure. Perhaps for many French, irrational Black violence was mythic, common to all colonies, and the specifics of place and context did not matter anyway. As historian Robin Mitchell has shown, in the decades after the revolutionary loss of Haiti to the armies of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the humiliation of postcolonial defeat (and the specter of Black violence) loomed large in the imaginary of white Frenchmen. People of African descent, many white Frenchmen believed, had to be put back in their place, exorcised from the French nation, re-associated with backwardness and savagery in the art and literature of the time.^[21] From this perspective, the myth of black savagery—and of white innocence and rescue—depicted on the Gobert monument was timeless and universal. For the French, such an event might as well have taken place anywhere in the French Caribbean, from Martinique, to Guadeloupe, to the place that most troubled French minds, Haiti. (The mislabeling of the monument may also have functioned to erase a further historical embarrassment—the fact that Martinique was not even in French possession during the Revolutionary wars but was occupied by the British.^[22]) 

For Melvil-Bloncourt, this monument was a travesty which not only showed how ignorant metropolitan French were of their colonies (confusing Guadeloupe and Martinique), but also how one-sided and racist France’s collective memory was. The monument showed how “unworthily insulted” was the legacy of Black freedom fighters who had been more faithful to France’s ideals than Napoleon and his generals were.^[23]

According to Melvil-Bloncourt, other witnesses in Guadeloupe did not tell the story of the 80 rescued prisoners at Dolé, and it appears in no official account of the battle. Only Gobert mentions it, and even Gobert makes no mention of a fuse or torch-bearing black man, and says it was his soldiers who hurried to free the prisoners, not himself. For Melvil-Bloncourt, “when one considers the hatred against Blacks that animated this general,” it was more than likely that Gobert fabricated the dramatic rescue scene.^[24]

Indeed, in General Gobert’s own report to the Minister of the Navy and the Colonies about the subjugation of Guadeloupe, he repeatedly disdained Black revolutionaries as mere “brigands” and eventually no better than “maroons” (runaways); improbably claimed that he and his men killed many Black soldiers while scarcely suffering any loss; and repeatedly used the euphemism that they subjected these “brigands” to “great carnage” or “horrible carnage,” at one point even admitting that his men executed the wounded. And Gobert tells not just one, but two different thinly evidenced stories about Black Guadeloupeans who supposedly planned to blow up prisoners. One might suspect that the repeated fear of explosives is more of a trope for discrediting Black revolution—comparable to the trope of arson that generated paranoia around the Haitian Revolution—rather than a literal-historical account.^[25] In any case, the reconquest of Guadeloupe was fought with a brutality bordering on “total war” by both sides, including the execution of non-combatants.^[26]

Moreover, the brave resistance of the formerly-enslaved Guadeloupeans under General Delgrès, their determination to “live free or die,” did come to a violent, explosive end, when Delgrès and his last soldier-companions, surrounded at Matouba in the foothills of Guadeloupe’s volcano, chose to blow themselves up along with their women and children, rather than to surrender to execution or re-enslavement.^[27] Perhaps this explosion—that did certainly happen—was still reverberating in Gobert’s ears as he sat on a boat back to France, the insurrection crushed, and wrote his self-aggrandizing report about a different explosion he supposedly had prevented. Perhaps, as another scholar has suggested, Delgrès’ symbolic act of heroic martyrdom, which inspired others in the French Empire to resist re-enslavement, had to be erased and conflated, in Gobert’s memory and on his monument, with a different, less noble act of Black violence.^[28]

For Melvil-Bloncourt, it seems, a more accurate monument, would have shown the broader context of white violence and brutality in the colony, and of Napoleon’s re-enslaving armies, and would have commemorated the brave but doomed resistance of freedom fighters like Ignace and Delgrès. Yet the restorers of slavery and the white plantocracy had an interest in portraying revolutions of the enslaved as savage, disorganized, and irrational. Now, Melvil-Bloncourt wrote, a story that was quite possibly “invented” by racist colonists in Guadeloupe precisely in order to discredit enslaved people’s “legitimate resistance… to oppression” (“the holiest of duties”) was officialized in stone in Paris’s bucolic Père Lachaise cemetery.^[29] Here was a naked example of “victors” rewriting “the history of the vanquished.”^[30] Here was a monument to “the reestablishment of slavery at Guadeloupe,” a monument to “a shameful page that every honest soul would want to tear from the history of France.”^[31] Gobert had done deeds worthy of commemoration, Melvil-Bloncourt conceded, but the Guadeloupe episode was not among them. 

The Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot famously argued that, in the eighteenth century, white observers found the idea of a slave revolution quite literally “unthinkable”—found people of color incapable of organized, politically rational action. “Built into any system of domination is the tendency to proclaim its own normalcy,” Trouillot writes. “To acknowledge resistance as a mass phenomenon is to acknowledge the possibility that something is wrong with the system.”^[32] The existence of slave revolutionaries thus had to be silenced, repressed with euphemisms that denied Black political consciousness and organization. Haitians were not revolutionaries but simple runaways, maroons, or “brigands.” Such terms of “erasure” entered the archive and were perpetuated by generations of white historians (if they mentioned the Haitian Revolution at all). Today, Trouillot’s argument has become a classic reflection on the “power” that archives and historians have exerted to “trivialize” or erase evidence of Black revolution.^[33]

Melvil-Bloncourt’s verbal demolition of the Gobert monument and of the apocryphal story behind it anticipated Trouillot’s argument. Writing in the 1860s, Melvil-Bloncourt already knew well that the “archive” and collective memory of events in the revolutionary Caribbean had been shaped and distorted by self-interested white observers. 

Perhaps most insidiously, in honoring a revolutionary and Napoleonic veteran this way, with a monument designed by a sculptor known for his Republican convictions, the monument effectively exorcised Black Guadeloupeans from the French revolutionary and republican tradition.^[34] Showing Gobert as a soldier of the revolution—and Black Guadeloupeans as not—the monument reversed the truth almost exactly. In 1848, the year after Gobert’s monument was raised, Black people in the French Caribbean finally attained freedom from enslavement, only to face an onslaught of restrictions on their civil and political rights designed to maintain control of their labor, even as former enslavers received indemnification payments and consolidated their power.^[35] In this context, the monument seemed to say that, “free” or not, Black Guadeloupeans were not truly French, not entitled to the full protections of citizenship. Like confederate memorials raised across the Jim Crow-era Southern United States more than 50 years later, the Gobert Monument functioned to deny people of color citizenship and belonging in the very national community for which they had fought.^[36]

At the same time, against Trouillot, Melvil-Bloncourt reminds us that the archive was not all-powerful—that the ontology of white supremacy did not render Black revolution “unthinkable” for everyone. To be sure, Melvil-Bloncourt was not a typical nineteenth-century Parisian, but he was able to transcend his context and demand an alternative vision, for a more inclusive monument. Gobert’s restoration of enslavement was not the act that deserved commemoration. On the contrary, Louis Delgrès—the leader of Guadeloupe’s doomed uprising, who died in its final suicidal blast, but whose actions had been ignored and erased—was the one who deserved a monument, the one who best represented France and Guadeloupe’s true values. And Delgrès would one day have his monument, Melvil-Bloncourt prophesied. 

He was right. Writing more than a hundred years later, the Caribbean intellectual Edouard Glissant lamented the erasure of Delgrès heroic act, the suppression of his heroic choice to die rather than “to surrender”: “Delgrès was defeated all over again by the sly trickery of the dominant ideology, which succeeded for a while in twisting the meaning of this heroic act and removing it from popular memory…. Today, however, we are hearing the blast from Matouba.”^[37] Indeed, as historian Laurent Dubois has shown, Delgrès has now become an important figure in French and Guadeloupean commemoration.^[38] Delgrès is even memorialized by the Paris-based Blues and Rock band Delgres, led by Guadeloupean-descended Pascal Danaë. The frontman sings in Creole about Delgrès’ and other Guadeloupean revolutionaries’ heroic decision to “mo jodi” (die today), rather than to go back into chains. For Danaë, knowing the history of Delgrès has “[helped] me find my place in society and how I fit here [in France] by knowing more about who I am.” 

For Melvil-Bloncourt in the mid-nineteenth century, as for many more in the twentieth and twenty-first, Delgrès was a hero of antislavery resistance, recovered from the silences and sediments of white supremacy. Delgrès’ actions—and Melvil-Bloncourt’s activism on behalf of his memory—speak not only to the historic role of Afro-Caribbean people in the fight for republican equality (a fight even against France at times), but speak powerfully also to the present, to the demand for equality of people of African and Caribbean descent in France still today. 

---

Joseph W. Peterson is a historian of France, empire, religion, and race, teaching at the University of Southern Mississippi. His writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. His book, Sacred Rivals: Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-Century France and Algeria, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. 

Title Image: An 1875 map of the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Endnotes:

^[1] Cp. Christina Okello, “France defends colonial-era statues in the face of anti-racism protests,” rfi, June 16, 2020.https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20200616-france-defends-colonial-era-statues-face-anti-racism-protests-macron-floyd. 

Thomas Chatterton Williams, “The French are in a Panic over Le Wokisme,” in The Atlantic, March 2023, 40-48; and Robert Tombs, “‘Wokeness’ and the collapse of intellectual freedom in the West,” in The Spectator, 28 August 2021. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/wokeness-and-the-collapse-of-intellectual-freedom-in-the-west/

^[2] Bryan LaPointe, “‘Moral electricity’: Melvil-Bloncourt and the trans-Atlantic struggle for abolition and equal rights,” in Slavery & Abolition, 2019, Vol. 40, No. 3, 543-562. 

^[3] Cp. Anne Twitty, “Ole Miss’s Monument to White Supremacy,” in The Atlantic, June 19, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/ole-misss-monument-white-supremacy/613255/

^[4] Willy Alante-Lima, Melvil-Bloncourt, Le communard marie-galantais ? (Saint-Maur-des-Fossés: Éditions Sépia, 2014), 10. On Melvil-Bloncourt, see also François Manchuelle, “Le rôle des Antillais dans l’apparition du nationalisme culturel en Afrique noire francophone,” in Cahiers d’études africaines, (32: 127, 1992), 388-389. Manchuelle emphasizes his “obvious racial pride,” which coexisted with his Republican universalism and cross-racial solidarity with all oppressed; and also Manchuelle, “Origines républicaines de la politique d’expansion coloniale de Jules Ferry (1838-1865),” in Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer, (75: 279, 2e trimestre, 1988), pp. 185-206. See also the entry on “Melvil-Bloncourt,” in H. Adolphe Lara, Contribution de la Guadeloupe a la Pensée Française, 1635 – 1935, (Paris: Éditions Jean Crès, 1936), 141-143.

^[5] Letter from Melvil-Bloncourt, Paris, 19 June 1865, in “Nouvelles de France : La Souscription en Faveur des Affranchis. – Sympathie dans les Colonies Françaises, etc.” New Orleans Tribune, July 20, 1865.

^[6] See Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

^[7] Qtd. in in Alante-Lima, 32-33. 

^[8] Bryan LaPointe, “‘Moral electricity’: Melvil-Bloncourt and the trans-Atlantic struggle for abolition and equal rights.” 

^[9] For a concise survey of the Tribune’s anti-racist activism and solidarity of Creole and Black New Orleanians, see Mark Charles Roudané and Matthew Charles Roudané, “The Color of Freedom: Louis Charles Roudanez, New Orleans, and the Transnational Origins of the African American Freedom Movement,” South Atlantic Review, Spring 2008, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Spring 2008), pp. 1-6. 

^[10] On the Tribune’s radical political and social thought, see William P. Connor, “Reconstruction Rebels: The New Orleans Tribune in Post-War Louisiana,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Spring, 1980, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Spring, 1980), pp. 159-181. 

^[11] “[Mr. Melvil-Bloncourt],” New Orleans Tribune, Nov. 15, 1864. 

^[12] “Nouvelles de France. La souscription en Faveur des Affranchis.—Sympathie dans les Colonies Françaises, Etc.” [Letter from Melvil-Bloncourt], New Orleans Tribune, July 20, 1865. On these and other aspects of Melvil-Bloncourt’s “trans-Atlantic” activism, see Bryan LaPointe, “‘Moral electricity’: Melvil-Bloncourt and the trans-Atlantic struggle for abolition and equal rights,” in Slavery & Abolition, 2019, Vol. 40, No. 3, 543-562. 

^[13] Melvil-Bloncourt, “Les Heros de la Race Africaine : Vincent Ogé,” New Orleans Tribune, Sept. 21, 1865. 

^[14] Melvil-Bloncourt, “Souvenirs d’un Voyage a l’Ile de Cuba (Partie Orientale),” in Revue du monde colonial (7: 15, April 1865), pp. 302-303; see also Melvil-Bloncourt, “Chronique de l’Amerique du Nord,” in Revue du monde colonial (7: 15, April 1865), p. 85. 

^[15] Nadine A. Pantano, “Sculpture in the City and the Cemetery: The Formation of Political Identities in Paris and Père Lachaise 1804-1853,” (PhD diss., University College London, 1998), 31, 35, 245-300. 

^[16] Pantano, “Sculpture in the City and the Cemetery,” 269-270. 

^[17] Pantano, “Sculpture in the City and the Cemetery,” 272-275. 

^[18] Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 

^[19] Pantano, “Sculpture in the City and the Cemetery,” 275. 

^[20] Pantano, “Sculpture in the City and the Cemetery,” 274-275.

^[21] Robin Mitchell, Venus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France, (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2020).

^[22] Cp. Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Thanks to Matthew Casey for this insight. 

^[23] Melvil-Bloncourt, “La Guadeloupe. A Propos de La Guadeloupe Pittoresque par M. Armand Budan,” in Revue du monde colonial, (7: 16, July 1865), 311. 

^[24] Melvil-Bloncourt, “La Guadeloupe,” 314. 

^[25] See Gobert, Lacrosse and Vauchelet, “LE GÉNÉRAL GOBERT. TROISIÈME PARTIE. EXPÉDITION DE LA GUADELOUPE (1802),” in Revue Historique, T. 50, Fasc. 2 (1892), esp. pp. 319-329. For more on the trope of associating arson and fire with uprisings of enslaved people, an example of “irrational” and collective violence that was easy to blame on Black insurgents, and that terrified white enslavers throughout America for example after the widely-reported burning of Le Cap Français in Haiti, see Gary B. Nash, “Reverberations of Haiti in the American North: Black Saint Dominguans in Philadelphia,” in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, (1998, Vol. 65), Explorations in Early American Culture, esp. pp. 61-63. 

^[26] Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 395-397.

^[27] Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 400-401. 

^[28] Image of the Black Archive and Library [Sheldon Cheek], “French Sculptor Lies About a Slavery Rebellion, Turns White Guy Into a Hero,” The Root, March 25, 2014. https://www.theroot.com/french-sculptor-lies-about-a-slavery-rebellion-turns-w-1790875090

^[29] Melvil-Bloncourt, “La Guadeloupe,” 315, 317. 

^[30] Melvil-Bloncourt, “La Guadeloupe,” 315.

^[31] Melvil-Bloncourt, “La Guadeloupe,” 317. 

^[32] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), 84. 

^[33] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), 70-107. 

^[34] On David d’Angers, the sculptor of the Gobert Monument, see Hugh Honor, The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the American Revolution to World War I, Slaves and Liberators (Vol. IV, Part 1), eds. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 80-81. 

^[35] Cp. Naomi J. Andrews, “Breaking the Ties: French Romantic Socialism and the Critique of Liberal Slave Emancipation,” in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 85, No. 3 (September 2013), pp. 489-527; and Frederick Cooper et al, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 2000, 1-32. 

^[36] The argument of this paragraph is not one that Melvil-Bloncourt explicitly made about the monument. Matthew Casey helped me to articulate these points. 

^[37] Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989 [Caraf Books]), 62.

^[38] Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 423-429. I am indebted to Dubois throughout, and I am also following Dubois in quoting Glissant in this connection.