"The quest of every human being is freedom", recalled three Strasbourg high school girls in front of the monument to the abolition of slavery in the Luxembourg Gardens to mark the National Day of Remembrance of the Slave Trade, and their abolition.
A special tribute was paid to Solitude, a former slave from Guadeloupe who participated in the revolt against the reestablishment of slavery by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802. Captured and then sentenced to death while pregnant, she was executed the day after her delivery, November 29, 1802.
His memory had been brought out of oblivion by the publication, 50 years ago, of La Mulatresse Solitude, a novel by the writer André Schwarz-Bart.
A statue in his honor was inaugurated on Tuesday by the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo in a garden that bears his name in the 17th arrondissement.
In 2019, Emmanuel Macron said that the history of slavery was part of "our history".
A year earlier, he had declared that this memory "needed action", celebrating the 170th anniversary of the signing by the provisional government of the Republic of the decree for the abolition of slavery in the French colonies.
© 2022 AFP