It had sparked a great controversy. The equestrian statue of Napoleon will be well placed on the Place de l’Hotel de Ville in Rouen, once restored. 68% of Rouennais voted for the return of the Emperor at the end of the public consultation launched by the socialist mayor, Nicolas Mayer Rossignol, who proposed to replace her with that of an illustrious woman. “The subject is not Napoleon, it is the representation of women in the public space”, argued the aedile. Decryption with historian Jacqueline Lalouette, author of the works The statues of discord (Past / Composed) and A people of statues (Mare and Martin).
L’Express: What do you think of the strong controversy aroused by this Napoleonic statue?
Jacqueline Lalouette : In this kind of case, ideological concerns soon take precedence over historical or aesthetic considerations. One could have feared an oriented presentation of the monument leading to an opinion of the Rouen population in accordance with the mayor’s wishes. Which did not happen and which is very encouraging and positive. The opponents to the maintenance of the statue absolutely did not take into account the local character of the monument, as often, there too. We can obviously see in this equestrian statue a representation of Napoleon, emperor and warlord, although the inscriptions on the pedestal do not evoke battles, but refer to the existence of the empire, to the Napoleon Code, to the Concordat, to the Legion of Honour. Thus the monument in itself does not refer to wars or slavery. In addition, it has clear roots in Rouen.
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We can compare this example with that of the statue of Louis Faidherbe in Lille, vandalized last year. Faidherbe, colonial administrator of the Second Empire, is represented as general commanding the army of the North during the war of 1870-1871, where he won two victories against the Prussians. However, he was attacked as governor general of Senegal. If this function is mentioned on the pedestal of the monument, everything around the work refers to the military operations of this conflict.
Woke activists always stick to one aspect of the character, the one that bothers them. For some, the very principle of placing a man on a pedestal is an undemocratic step and the notion of “great man” seems to them totally outdated. They also denounce the fact that public statuary in France, as in other European countries, is essentially male.
Do anti-sexism and anti-slavery meet here?
Yes, it’s a bit of intersectionality applied to statuary! A large majority of the statues were erected under the Third Republic, at a time when it was not thought at all that there could be great women among “great men”. In the 19th century, women did not have a public and political role, in a direct and obvious way. They did not vote, could not be ministers, let alone presidents of the Republic. Even if they could play a role, as in 1848, to demand universal suffrage. On the other hand, we could have erected statues of women artists or writers.
Of the 4000 or so statues that I have listed in my book A people of statues (Mare and Martin), less than 9% are women, many of whom are queens and saints, and again, thanks to the most sculpted character in the history of France, Joan of Arc. She is represented by more than 250 statues, because of her double profile: both savior of France against the English and saint of the fatherland. This patriotic symbolism was worn by Catholics, but also by Republicans.
How do you respond to those who want to restore some sort of gender balance in this highly iconic area?
It must be possible to add statues of women without removing statues of men! In the case of Rouen, there had been talk of replacing Napoleon with Gisèle Halimi. She was a remarkable feminist, but she had no obvious connection to the city. And he was curious to remove from the landscape a statue contested by some for ideological reasons, by replacing it with another which could also raise controversy. At a time when the question of relations between France and Algeria is still very hot, erecting a statue of someone who supported the FLN – an ideological point of view who can defend himself – did not seem very appropriate to me. Simone de Beauvoir, who taught in Rouen, would have been more suited to me, for example.
I am entirely in favor of the idea of installing statues of women who played a role in the history of slavery, for example, such as the mulatto Solitude, executed in Guadeloupe in 1802 for her role against the French occupation. But we are not going to correct in a snap of the fingers the product of decades of male domination. In addition, if Napoleon’s had been removed from Rouen, there would have been no reason to stop there. The same should have been done with those of Cherbourg, La Roche-sur-Yon, (greatly vandalized in 2020), the Vendôme column in Paris, etc … If we remove a statue, we must remove all the others who incur the same reproach.
The XIXth century was the great century of public statuary. What was the objective sought?
The message was civic and moral, much more than political. During Antiquity and the Renaissance, the basic purpose was to offer models, by choosing great men who served their country as soldiers, scholars, writers, politicians. Moreover, in the 19th century, erecting statues was considered a factor in the beautification of cities. Once the effigy was well established in the landscape, however, we ended up not really seeing any more, whereas the inaugurations very often gave rise to extremely solemn ceremonies and to festivities over several days, in which the participation of leading political figures. plan. We organized balls, used fireworks, distributed money and food to the poor. The paradox of the protest episode of 2020 is that he paid attention to statues that no one was paying attention to!
The LR deputy of the Alpes-Maritimes, Eric Ciotti, had proposed to recover the Rouen statue of Napoleon in his department and Eric Zemmour, presidential candidate, alludes to it in his candidacy clip. Last year, several monuments were vandalized, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Is the political use of statues a fact of the time?
You could add Jean-Luc Mélenchon, declaring on television that he had to “endure to pass under the statue of Louis XVI in Nantes”, following the exit of Rama Yade in your columns where she affirmed that to pass in front of the Colbert’s statue in Paris was for her a micro-aggression. Or Emmanuel Macron launching a “We will not unbolt any statue”, and mounting a commission to come up with new street names and ideas for new statues.
In reality, public statuary has often been the subject of political battles, whether during the wars of religion with the statues of Catholic saints on the facades of cathedrals, or the French Revolution, which overhauled all royal statues. Under Vichy, the French state ordered the overhaul of many effigies, to recover metals useful for economic purposes. But politics was not completely foreign to the choice of debunked statues.
Do you see a clear American influence in the protest episode of 2020 in France?
The cases of a dozen statues targeted were highly publicized. We must not forget that in 2020, the first to be vandalized were those of Victor Schoelcher in Martinique, on May 22, three days before the death of George Floyd. There was subsequently, undeniably, an influence of the rise of the BLM movement, passed from the United States to Great Britain, then to France, as in other European countries. But French anti-colonial and anti-slavery activists did not wait for the Americans to carry out their actions, some of which predate 2020.
What solutions do you see to put an end to these controversies?
I am not sure that local consultations are the ideal solution, because there is always the risk of a lack of objectivity in the presentation of the character on which the population must vote. It seems to me more judicious to erect new statues which make it possible to correct the overall vision of the statuary already in place.
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And for those who pose problems for one reason or another, we could put up a sign next to them explaining who were the characters represented, their connection with the city, why their effigy was built there and explaining the reasons for the disputes to which they are the subject. The solution is always in the truth.
