MEMORY – Anachronistic or relevant question? In recent months, the debunking of statues and the debaptization of public places have become a recurring source of controversy, in the wake of similar debates initiated in the United States by the #BlackLiveMatters movement.
In France, it is the figure of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, former minister of Louis XIV and one of the drafters of the “Black Code”, a legislative text governing slavery, which provoked the most heated debates.
On June 24, MP Paula Forteza (ex-LREM, now unregistered) notably proposed to rename the Colbert room to the National Assembly, at the same time proposing to honor the memory of the feminist revolutionary Olympe de Gouges. A few days earlier, statues of the Controller General of Finance, but also of General de Gaulle and Léon Gambetta, had been vandalized.
This article is part of our dossier “Memory in motion”. While Emmanuel Macron calls for the creation of a list of personalities to better represent “the diversity of our national identity”, The HuffPost delves into the history of France and current events to question our collective memory.
According to the President of the National Assembly, the Colbert room should keep its name. “To revisit History” or “to want to censor it in what it is sometimes paradoxical is absurd”, declared Richard Ferrand (LREM) after the degradation of the statue in front of the Palais Bourbon.
“In the life of a public figure of the seventeenth century, there are inevitably parts of shadow and parts of light”, he added, estimating that it “would perhaps not be a bad idea to enrich these statues with a plaque, with a panel which explains why this statue is there, the highlights of a character, the glorious facts as well as those which are less so ”.
To extend the debate, and as you can see in the video at the top of the article, we questioned several deputies in the National Assembly on the figure of Colbert. Should we rename or name this room? What name then to give it? And more broadly, can France unbolt or not its statues?
See also on The HuffPost: In Paris, statues of women are rare, but in addition they are problematic
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