The future of slavery in France

Françoise Vergès

In recent years, the movement for a revision of the French national narrative around slave trade, slavery and colonialism has been met with strong counter-offensive from the Left and the Right, from academics, journalists and commentators. The noise around the legitimacy and necessity of presenting apologies has recovered more political issues: the demand for a revision of the European narrative of progress without catastrophes, the relation between citizenship and race, and a reflection on the funding role of the economy of predation and disposability in capitalism and twentieth century socialism. The semantic field has been occupied with terms like repentance, apologies, responsibility masking an analysis on the conditions that have made slave trade and slavery, despite their inscription as crimes in international law in nineteenth century, operative terms in the present. The battle has focused on the legitimacy of words ­ colonization, slavery ­ and meanwhile the political debate has been marginalized. The commitment to an abstract universalism of 'rights' or to a politics of moral reparation has led to the habit of casting every political choice in binary terms. In this light, the battle for a moralization of the vocabulary appears seductive to groups which find in that battle the possibility of holding a moral upper hand.

Françoise Vergès

biography