March 24, 2021 marks the 60th anniversary of the murderous general strike of the cane workers whose epicenter was in Lamentin. More than ever, it is important to know where we come from.
–
Lamentin, Friday March 24, 1961. The crowd is compact in the streets of the city center, especially near the church. Lent Mass has just been celebrated there. Suddenly gunshots break out. A machine gun shooting started by mobile gendarmes causes panic. A heavy toll is drawn: two farm workers and a seamstress are killed and 25 other people injured.
A drama constituting the high point of this umpteenth strike by workers in the cane sector, motivated by the demand for an increase in their wages. The gendarmes will go unpunished, as were most of those who killed or injured farm workers during the numerous strikes that marked our social history throughout the 20th century.
During the funerals of the three innocent victims, the funeral oration pronounced by the mayor of the city, the communist lawyer Georges Gratiant, will result in him being removed from his mandate, at the request of the Minister of the Armed Forces, Pierre Messmer. The Attorney General asks, in vain, his colleagues to prosecute, or even remove this tenor from the bar.
The mayor is removed from his mandate
Beyond the human dimension of the drama, these tragic events reveal the intensity of a double crisis: an economic depression due to the fall in the price of cane sugar, in competition with beet sugar; a political crisis born of multiple frustrations at the broken promises of departmentalization obtained fifteen years earlier, in March 1946.
Equality of rights is not acquired. The feeling of being French citizens entirely apart, and not in their own right, prevails. However, the government of General de Gaulle does not intend to separate from the overseas departments and territories. They give France the role of a planetary giant, between the United States and the Communist bloc led by Russia.
The repression of the Lamentin strike is ruthless because it is an additional opportunity offered to power to cut short the demands expressed by supporters of self-management or, at the very least, greater participation of local elected officials in the conduct territorial affairs.
Ruthless repression
The riots of December 1959 are still in everyone’s mind. At the end of this bloody episode during which three young men were killed, the general advisers, supporters and opponents of the government, demanded to be associated with the conduct of business alongside the prefect. A unanimous appeal remained a dead letter.
On the contrary, the State is intensifying the economic and administrative integration of the French overseas departments and territories into the whole of France. Whoever opposes this dynamic is marginalized. This will be the case with the Communist Party of Armand Nicolas and the Progressive Party of Aimé Césaire. Faced with an inflexible government with a roadmap aimed at eradicating the desire for emancipation, several elected socialists agree to play the game. This is to say whether we must walk straight, if we do not want to suffer reprisals from the prefect.
It is important to place these events in their context in order to better understand Martinique today. “When history is forgotten, the generations no longer understand each other ” said historian Richard Chateau-Dégat in 2007, during a public conference at the Fort-de-France cultural festival in tribute to the victims of the Lamentin massacre. It is up to us to ensure that history is always learned and transmitted, so as to be a bridge between generations.
–
