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  • Race, Reason, Impasse:Césaire, Fanon, and the Legacy of Emancipation
  • Gary Wilder (bio)

Memory of Slavery

On April 27, 1948, Aimé Césaire, along with Gaston Monnerville and Léopold Senghor, addressed an audience gathered at the Sorbonne, including the president of France, Vincent Auriol, to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the abolition of slavery. These prominent colonial citizens, all members of the National Assembly, were clearly meant to embody the collaboration envisioned by the post-World War II attempt to reconfigure the empire under a new rubric, the French Union. French officials hoped that commemoration would affirm a tradition of republican tolerance and imperial benevolence at a moment when the post-World War I figure of "greater France" was under attack by currents of radical anticolonial nationalism in Indochina, Algeria, and Madagascar.

On one level, the speakers performed their roles. Invoking the glorious example of the 1848 revolution and eulogizing Victor Schoelcher, the iconic architect of abolition, each speaker thanked the people of France for abolishing slavery during the Second Republic.1 But all three speeches also deployed the memory of slavery, revolution, and emancipation strategically in order to critique current colonial politics. Monnerville and Senghor looked back to 1848 in order to induce the French public to honor and complete this history by respecting the new constitution and its colonial reforms. By contrast, Césaire did not invoke the memory of abolition in [End Page 31] order to identify a contradiction between colonial oppression and the republican tradition, but in order to present an immanent critique of that tradition itself. He discussed colonial slavery, which he referred to as a form of "civilized barbarism," as an expression of nineteenth-century bourgeois legality, not a violation of it (23).

Césaire underscored this connection with an elegant polysemic reference to slavery and colonial violence: "Tout est dans l'ordre" (23). On one level, by saying "everything is in order," Césaire conveys the sense that slavery was quite normal and legal in nineteenth-century France, not out of place. Everything, in other words, was just as it should be. But by translating this phrase as "everything is in the order," we can also read a stronger claim: plantation slavery, colonial violence, and antiblack racism were actually enabled by the modern French political order and inscribed in its social relations. Finally, this resonant expression also suggests that a relationship existed between colonial slavery and the very principle of order as organized, calculated, and methodical; it identifies an intrinsic connection between racism and rationality. "Tout est dans l'ordre" therefore condenses within it an overlapping sense of customary, legal, and epistemological normality.

Rather than canonize the 1848 revolution as a victory of enlightened republicanism over colonial backwardness, Césaire's speech presented a revisionist history of emancipation in order to recuperate a radical current within the republican tradition—militant, urban, popular—that itself had fallen victim to the revolution, but whose memory could be revived against the bourgeois-colonial elements dominating republican history. Césaire emphasized that between 1789 and 1848 the abolition of slavery was obtained despite the republic and against the opposition of prominent republicans. His speech, in short, presented an immanent critique of republicanism and a counterhistory of abolition that identified racism, colonial violence, and the legal order as complicit with one another. It thus challenged commemoration as a ritual affirmation of republican reason and tolerance that this Sorbonne gathering promised. Césaire thereby displaced the official memory of abolition as a struggle between the republican nation and anachronistic racist planters with an alternative account of struggle within the French nation between radical and conservative currents of republicanism.

What was at stake in these competing memories, of course, was not historical verisimilitude but contemporary politics. When Césaire invoked Schoelcher's abolitionist stance, he directed attention to the century-long failure of emancipation to deliver on its initial promise. He concluded his address by describing the 1848 emancipation as "at once immense and insufficient" (32). He pointed out that current social conditions in the Antilles remain degraded, substantially unchanged from 1848 despite departmentalization. Yet he also recognized that the history of slavery and abolition taught Antilleans...

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