Her Body, Their Virtue: The Black Female Figure of Abolition in French Memorial Culture

In metropolitan France, public memorials to slavery and its abolition emerged only in the early 2000s, often featuring Black female figures that reveal the intersection of colonial memory and gender dynamics. This article examines how these figures embody both the legacies of colonialism and patriarchy and the resilience and agency of women. Two contrasting commemorative trends emerge. Some monuments, like Solitude (Bagneux, 2007), Héloïse (Fontenay-sous-Bois, 2008), and Supplique (Argenteuil, 2011), depict the enslaved Black woman as an allegorical figure, disconnected from historical realities, while others, such as Modeste Testas (Bordeaux, 2019) and Solitude (Paris, 2022), celebrate historical agency, tentatively rehabilitating their struggles for freedom. Drawing on postcolonial, gender, and memory studies, I argue that these statues, by crystallizing the tension between invisibilization and recognition, reflect a belated memorialization that remains a gynocentric, often instrumentalized commemoration, undermining reparation toward a conceivable collective redemption.