There are therefore good and bad memory laws. If that of February 2005 which had dared to mention “ the positive role of the French presence overseas » was the occasion of noisy opprobrium, the Taubira law of May 2001 is today celebrated by the Republic. While the United Nations has just decreed, without any real scientific support, that slavery is the “gravest crime against humanity”, the Taubira law, “ biased, ambiguous and dangerous” according to specialist Bernard Gainot, is contested both in substance and in form.
The legislative text only incriminates “ the transatlantic slave trade (…) from the 15th century » eluding all other forms of a timeless and universal phenomenon. Instead of seeking to reconcile memories, the law only fuels resentment against the West, which did not invent slavery. But undoubtedly because the Europeans were the first to accuse themselves of this abomination and to take the initiative in its abolition, when the rest of the world sought to maintain it, they must be the only ones to atone for their crime.
History belongs to historians, not judges. However, for a quarter of a century, the court seems to have become the place where historical truth is enacted. Memorial laws should cause concern beyond academic circles because they do not seek to create commonality but to reinforce the communitarian secessions which undermine the foundation of our common history.
The forgetting of intra-African trafficking
We are first surprised by the absence of mention of slavery practices prior to the 16th century in the Taubira law. There is no condemnation of the Babylonians, the Greeks or even the Romans. The well-documented intra-African trafficking is no longer mentioned. However, the Malian empire like the Nigerian caliphate of Sokoto enslaved many tribes. The law especially avoids the trans-Saharan Islamic slave trade which, from Syria to Al-Andalus, reduces millions of beings to a servile state. Nor is there any word about the deliveries of Slavic victims by the Vikings to the Iberian Peninsula, nor the sale of captives as Mamluks by Ottoman corsairs, fueling what Erasmus called the ” slavery of Turkish rule “. The “Western” slave trade does not exhaust all forms of slavery present on all continents.
From the 16th century, 2 to 3 million slaves transited the Mediterranean. In Algiers, the playwright Cervantes was among the 20,000 slaves present in the city at the end of the 16th century. It was not a moral awareness that put an end to this practice but a balance of power imposed by European colonization. And even after the abolition of 1848, it persisted until it resurfaced, since 2014, in the Islamic State (IS).
European civilization was the first to abolish the slave trade
The chronological bias of the law also presupposes racism justifying the domination of people because of their skin color. If it is possible to find obvious signs of it in the United States in the 19th century or in Japan during the Second World War, this process is ineffective for France. Yves Bénot thus showed that it is slavery which produces racism, and not the other way around, to justify a practice essentially motivated by profitability. In 1802, Bonaparte only reestablished its use, abolished in 1794 in the face of the English threat, for geopolitical purposes.
European civilization was, in any case, the first to abolish the slave trade, in 1833 for Great Britain and in 1848 for France, the culmination of a long process begun in the 17th century. In 1888, Cardinal Lavigerie continued the French tradition hostile to slavery condemned by the monarchy since 1315. European diplomacy, based on the colonial balance of power, put an end to human trafficking in the Mediterranean. Slavery, however, persists in the Ottoman Empire and in Africa where tribal leaders deplore the end of the trade windfall.
In 1885, the famous Treaty of Berlin established, in the name of natural law, the right of humanitarian intervention against “the slave trade”. The qualification of “crime against humanity” has long designated slavery, condemned by the international conventions of 1926 and 1956 and enshrined in our law, in an attempt to put an end to practices still in progress in the customary state in sub-Saharan Africa or in factories in Latin America and Asia. But the Taubira law does not seek to punish current crimes and only harps on the past by applying, retroactively, perfectly anachronistic contemporary moral concepts.
The 2001 law seeks less the truth of History than its judicialization. Memorial laws have allowed “victims” associations to sue public authorities to obtain reparations. In 2013, the Caisse des Dépôts had to pay one million euros to the Representative Council of Black Associations of France (Cran). In the name of article 2 of the Taubira law, families now have complete freedom to initiate litigation against a teacher who has not granted “to the slave trade and slavery the substantial place they deserve “.
A law of memory is by nature conflicting
It is hard to see who other than historians could be condemned today. For daring a plural history of slavery, the historian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau paid the price. Article 5 allows anyone to claim to be “descendant of slaves”, nebulous legal category, to defend in court one’s honor violated by a work or a speech. But what should we do with those who, like Alexandre Dumas, are descended from both a slave and a slave owner? In 2021, decolonial activist Françoise Vergès was greatly embarrassed by the revelation of her ancestors’ slavery past. The status of executioner or victim is not hereditary.
A law of memory is by nature conflicting. It forces the historian to arbitrate a victim competition by looking for culprits and forms of reparation rather than the truth. It locks up communities affected by unspeakable suffering in the inconsolable folds of their tragic history, always pushing back their integration into a shared national culture. The thinker Sanjay Subrahmanyam rebelled against vindictive rhetoric in the service of a multicultural ideology.
Repealing memory laws will not put an end to memory abuses but will prevent the historian from “ sing the past at the expense of my present and my future », in the words of Frantz Fanon who refused to “ asking the white man of today to be responsible for the slave traders of the 18th century » and for whom, History should remain “ a perpetual question “.
