Chapter One
Slavery and its Legacies: Remembering Labour Exploitation in the Francophone World
Nicola Frith (University of Edinburgh) and Kate Hodgson (University of Liverpool)
Over the past decade, the field of memory studies has given rise to a growing body of literature that has responded to the recent boom in memories of slavery and the slave trade. The proliferation of memorial sites relating to Europe’s slaving past has largely coincided with two key commemorative dates relating to abolitionism: the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807 (UK) and the Abolition of Slavery in 1848 (France). The accompanying literature — not least of which are the extensive studies conducted by Christine Chivallon and Françoise Vergès which bookend the current volume[1] — has served to enrich our understanding of this boom within both Francophone and Anglophone spheres. Within the particular socio-political context of the French Republic, research to date has tended to focus on the so-called ‘guerre de mémoires’ [‘memory war’] and its relevance to slavery studies, as well as on the (competing) forms of memory work that are taking place within and across distinct regions of the Republic as compared with other nation-states.[2] Yet until now there has been no collective study dedicated to considering how these memorialization processes are operating across multiple Francophone contexts, or rather within and between countries that have a historical connection to France and its former colonial empire. While this volume cannot hope to be exhaustive in its scope, it nonetheless provides an important intervention that foregrounds the multiplicity of memories of slavery within the Francophone world, while also moving beyond slavery and, importantly, towards memories of other forms of colonial labour exploitation that took place in the post-abolition period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
As is clearly revealed by the contributions presented here, memories of slavery and its colonial aftermath continue to represent a highly contentious subject of debate and have created complex matrices for the formation of national, regional and transnational identities. Chapters focusing on the French Caribbean and Haiti, West and North Africa, the Indian Ocean and metropolitan France do not simply showcase the breadth of memory work within the Francophone world, but additionally draw out important historical and discursive specificities that relate to the legacies of French-led slavery and labour exploitation. Divided into two parts, this volume highlights the blind spots that have marked public memories of slavery and slavery commemorations in all their many forms. It simultaneously engages with the (lack of) remembrance of other slave trades and other forms of labour exploitation that took place within and beyond the Atlantic triangle, including histories of domestic slavery in Francophone countries and the relationship between slavery and patterns of indenture and forced labour that followed the legal abolition of slavery in France’s colonies in 1848. Part one — ‘The Limits of Memorialization: Commemoration, Musealization andPatrimony’ — focuses on nation-centred patrimonial processes and considers alternative forms of citizen-led resistance that are responding to state-centred imaginings of the past, while additionally exploring future memorial projects, such as Mémorial ACTe in Guadeloupe. In contrast, part two — ‘Beyond the Abolitionist Moment:Memories and Counter-Memories ofLabour Exploitation’ — moves the debate beyond abolitionism, as the title suggests, by engaging with the complex legacies of other forms of labour exploitation in France’s former empire post-1848 and by investigating some of the creative responses to the hegemony of western-centric and nation-centred abolitionist iconographies.
As will be explained in more depth below, these chapters serve collectively to problematize the much-celebrated abolitionist moment. They highlight the importance of transcending nation-centred configurations of memory and teleological historiographies that have disconnected slavery from its pre- and post-abolitionist mutations. As such, they reveal the limitations of the ways in which the colonial past has been understood whenever it becomes locked into particular terminologies, iconicities and chronologies. In drawing from the fields of memory studies and postcolonial studies, it has thus been our intention to explore the eclectic forms of memory work being undertaken across France and its former empire. This ranges from memory work within nation-states, which is here explored to expose the workings of patrimonial discourses, to that which explodes the national narrative by reaching for a more complex, transnational and transhistorical understanding of the slave past and its meaning for society today.
Before providing an overview of the motifs that recur throughout this volume, it is worth outlining some of the historical and contemporary specificities relating to France’s history of colonial slavery and abolition. This will provide the context for a more extensive understanding of the three key themes developed in individual chapters and which underpin the contents of this volume, namely: the need to find a broader definition of slavery and its relation to subsequent forms of labour exploitation; the instrumentalization of memories of slavery by state discourses and their use of particular iconographies, in contrast to ‘guerrilla’ or counter-forms of memorialization; and the more general need to move beyond the fixation on memory within national boundaries by moving out towards a more transnational approach to scholarship in slavery studies, while recognizing and exploring specific places and moments shaped by the history of French-led slavery and its contemporary legacies.
Historical Complexities, Complex Terminologies: Defining Slavery and Forced Labour
France’s history of slavery and its subsequent construction of a public memory are atypical in many respects. The only European power to re-establish colonial slavery after having abolished it, France consequently lost the heart of its empire and its most valuable possession, Saint Domingue. Haiti, as it became known, was the first independent country in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the only Black Republic to have been founded by former slaves. In addition to the former losses of Canada and India to the British at the end of the Seven Years War (1754–63), the fundamental loss of Haiti and the subsequent attempts to forget it, notably by building a new colonial empire across Africa and Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are central to understanding how slavery has been both of vital importance to, and completely obscured within, French national history. Importantly, this process of forgetting has, in recent years, seen a turning point. France has become the first, and indeed the only, European country to recognize slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity with the passing of the Taubira law on 10 May 2001.
In many other respects, however, the history of France’s slave past can be compared to that of other European powers. As the third most prolific slave-trading nation of Europe (after Portugal and Britain), France was responsible for an estimated total of nearly 1.4 million slaves transported across the Atlantic over the course of three and a half centuries.[3] Like Britain, France developed a tradition of abolitionism, which saw major intellectual and political figures engaging with the problem of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This historical legacy has dominated contemporary initiatives to commemorate slavery on a state-led level: while Britain saw the ‘Wilberfest’ of white abolitionist sentiment perpetuated in the bicentenary year of 2007, France’s public memory of slavery during the 150th anniversary of the 1848 Abolition Act has equally been dominated by metropolitan abolitionism and particularly by the key figure of Victor Schœlcher (1804–93). Abolitionism, as part of a nation-centred narrative, has overshadowed the various international forms of Black resistance that were so prominent and central to the history of the colonial and postcolonial francophone world, and has done so despite widespread acknowledgement among contemporary scholars of the fundamental significance of major historical events like the Haitian revolution in marking the beginning of the end of transatlantic slavery and heralding the modern postcolonial and neo-colonial era (Geggus, 2001; Nesbitt, 2005; Bongie, 2008).
We turn now to the first of our three themes; that is the need for definitions that acknowledge the full complexity of French colonial labour exploitation before and after the supposed turning point of 1848. Like many other European imperial powers, research into France’s colonial legacies has revealed a complex picture of the different forms of slavery and unfree labour that continued beyond the moment of abolition. These included the institutionalized practice of authorities turning a blind eye to entrenched generational servitude and debt bondage, as well as forced labour imposed by the state on colonized populations. The 1929 ILO report on global forced labour practices, published as France reached the apex of imperial ambition, revealed that the corvée (the system of unpaid labour for the state that was imposed by the colonial government) was widely employed across the French empire, although its administration was left to the governor of each individual colony. Similar systems were in operation throughout the British empire and the colonies of other European countries, including the Belgian Congo. The report concluded that the strict regulation of compulsory labour in colonial situations was needed to avoid it becoming ‘a more or less disguised form of slavery’ (International Labour Conference, 1929: 9).
Defining slavery in the face of these multiple, fragmented and interconnected memories, which attest to the multiple forms of labour exploitation imposed during the period of French colonialism, is necessary, but also problematic. Historically, definitions of chattel slavery have been focused on the question of property and legal rights: a slave’s right to dispose of his or her own person is removed upon legally becoming the property of another. The 1926 UN ‘Slavery Convention’, which considered slavery, servitude, forced labour and similar institutions and practices, defined the slave as a person over whom ‘the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised’. This legal definition has subsequently been nuanced by social theorists, such as Orlando Patterson (1982), who views the slave’s status as one based on alienation, violence and the fundamental imbalance of power to the extent that the ‘social death’ of the subject results. Ownership and power are thus key elements in defining slave status. Other characteristics that have contributed towards a shared definition of slavery include a system of inheritance, where the status of both master and slave is passed down from generation to generation, and caste where slavery is an inescapably permanent state attached to a subordinated social group.
The process of alienation implicit in enslavement is thus based on the differentiation of the enslaved person from the dominant strata of society within which he or she exists, particularly through ethnic and/or racial distinction or other violent forms of othering. The absolute nature of the social alienation imposed on the slave was fundamental to the construction of the European Atlantic empires from the fifteenth century onwards. Spain, Portugal, Britain and France repeatedly justified their appropriation of the labour of indigenous peoples and imported Africans by staking their claims to a higher ‘civilization’ based upon race, culture and religion. The social alienation of the enslaved was also key in many parts of West Africa. In this context, ethnic identity and religion were determining factors in defining slave status and their suitability to be sold either to the domestic market or to the transatlantic trade (Lovejoy, 2009: 150). Once removed from his or her own social group and transported into an unfamiliar context, the slave is vulnerable to alienation and ‘social death’; his or her descendants likewise becoming vulnerable to inheriting slave status.
Chattel slavery was not the sole form of labour appropriation practiced in the colonies of the European powers, yet it quickly constituted the dominant and most sought-after workforce on the plantation. The majority of those who arrived as migrants in the Americas (forced or otherwise) prior to 1820 were enslaved Africans, as this was a labour force in particularly high demand among the European colonists of the time (Eltis, 2007). It was widely believed by the colonists that sub-Saharan Africans were constitutionally suited to hard labour in tropical climates. Despite the risks and expenses of procuring slaves from Africa, the transatlantic trade thrived, reaching its high point in the second half of the eighteenth century with nearly four million forcibly embarked upon the Middle Passage in a period of just fifty years (Eltis and Richardson, 2010). In the Francophone Atlantic context, the lion’s share of slave imports went to Saint Domingue, generally considered to be the most prosperous and successful colony in the world. The other French Caribbean colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique also received substantial numbers of imported and enslaved Africans. The very few slaves not consumed by the booming Antillean market sometimes made it to Louisiana and French Guiana, where demand was equally high, but purchasing power was weaker (Hall, 1992).
Early systems of indenture constituted another important source of labour, especially in the early years of the development of colonial plantations in the Americas. Before the transatlantic trade hit its peak, European workers, known as engagés or trente-six mois (three years commonly being the length of their period of servitude), were taken on by plantation owners desperate for labour. The nineteenth-century Haitian historian Thomas Madiou explained this phenomenon in the context of the colonial society of Saint Domingue, drawing clear distinctions between the fundamental and permanent alienation from the dominant colonial society experienced by the largely African-born enslaved population and the temporary legalized appropriation of labour or alienation to which European indentured labourers were subject:
L’Africain arraché de son pays, par ruse ou par violence, était soumis à une éternelle servitude lui et sa postérité […] Quant à l’engagé européen, il aliénait volontairement sa liberté pour trente-six mois seulement. A l’expiration de son contrat, il devenait l’égal de son ancien patron, flibustier comme lui, grand seigneur, et atteignait souvent au premier rang de la société coloniale (Madiou, 1847: 16).
The African forced to leave his country, either by ruse or by violence, was subjected to eternal servitude for himself and his progeny […] As for the European indentured labourer, he voluntarily alienated himself for the period of 36 months only. At the end of his contract, he became the social equal of his former employer; a buccaneer like him, or a powerful landowner, and was often able to reach the highest ranks of colonial society.[4]