Legacies of Slavery in the French Republic: Politics, Activism, Reparation

Legacies of Slavery and the French Republic explores the complex dynamics between social movements invested in remembering and addressing the legacies of African enslavement and the French State. It has four principle aims. First, to investigate strategies used by the French State to delink the recognition of France’s enslaving past from contemporary issues with anti-Black racism and reparation. Second, to understand why, in the wake of the first Taubira law that recognized slavery as a crime against humanity (2001), the State has legitimized the work certain activist groups, while delegitimizing others. Third, to use critical race theory and decolonial theory to examine the extent to which the State’s approach to recognizing its past is structured by a ‘colonial matrix of power’. And fourth, to highlight and contest political and media misconceptions about reparations by showcasing the work of grassroots activists operating in France, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. Organized into eight chapters, it follows a loose chronology that travels from the build-up to the 150th anniversary of the Abolition Act (1998) through to the present day. In doing so, it showcases some of the key shifts that have taken place in the recent history of activist work in parallel with the successive metamorphoses of the French State as it responds to social and political pressure to recognize more fully the nation’s enslaving past and its racial legacies.