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Colonialism and slavery may be over, but France still maintains many of the remote islands as French provinces, where French law is applied, the French curriculum is taught in schools, and even the descendants of white slave owners reside there and dominate the economy and politics.
On the island of Guadeloupe, France built a memorial museum in a sugar factory that relied on slaves, but many black residents see it as a miserable attempt to erase France's bleak history and are demanding reparations and even independence instead of memorials in the service of justice.
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Long before it was turned into a memorial to slavery in the French West Indies, the Derbusier sugar mill was the mainstay of France's Caribbean empire.
In the 19th century, the 77,000-square-foot factory, located in Pointe-a-Pitre, the largest city on the island of Guadeloupe, exported large quantities of slave-produced goods to France.
This factory transformed the Lesser Antilles from a remote and forgotten place into a white gold mine.
Today, the factory, which was abandoned after France formally abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848, is known as the Memorial ACT (the last word is an acronym in French for the Caribbean Center to express and remember the slave trade and slavery).
Strings of quartz, representing lives lost as a result of the slave trade, climb up the outer walls of the black-box-like building, embodying what has become the museum's unofficial motto: "Memory inspires the future."
Guadeloupe's colonial history began when Christopher Columbus first arrived on the island in 1493. Control of the island then passed from the indigenous Arawak people to the Caribbean Indians and then to the Spanish until the French expelled them and massacred the local population, then officially declared it the colony of Guadeloupe in 1635. In 1946 It became a French province, a loose legal status that gives the island a locally elected government but is governed by the national government in Paris.
Efforts to build the memorial began 58 years later when Victorin Laurel, Guadeloupe's representative in the French parliament, declared that the island needed a memorial to slavery so that "the children of Guadeloupe could acquire a new sense of humanity based on reconciliation and brotherhood".
The decision to build it on the site of the old factory was a symbolic gesture toward this "rebirth," as Laurel described it.
But for some, building a museum memorial to slavery in Guadeloupe is a strange idea.
Nearly three-quarters of the 405,000 people on the island are descended from West African slaves, but most do not know much about their ancestors.
When slavery ended, the former slaves were declared French citizens, however there is no official record of when their ancestors arrived on the island.
It was as if history had been erased, plunging Guadeloupe's community into a state of "cultural amnesia," says Jacques Marshall, the French actor who currently heads the museum.
“Everyone wanted to forget the past after 1848, but no one could forget. The people of Guadeloupe would say: 'Enough.
We cannot go on and forget our ancestors.” However, the Memorial Act shrine, which today receives up to 300,000 visitors annually - almost all of them foreigners - has been a source of controversy since it opened on May 10, 2015.
But off center, the mood was not reflective of this line of thinking.
The demonstrators who gathered there chanted: "Guadeloupe is ours, not theirs!"
Most of them viewed the presence of a French president at the opening ceremony of the Memorial to Slavery Museum as an extension of France's colonial heritage.
Others demanded that the museum be reimbursed for slavery: most of its costs were covered by local tax revenue, according to the European Commission, and that cost was exorbitant in a place where the average salary was less than 1,200 euros a month.
For many islanders, the museum was for France a way to escape the bloody legacy of the 200-year slave trade without repenting of its past, according to Elie Dumouta, leader of the Lianyage Cong Povitacion (LKP), the creole anti-exploitation coalition. (a mixture of French and other languages on the island).
Emmanuel Macron, the current president of France, also seems to prefer this approach to ignoring the past.
Last November on a trip to Burkina Faso, another former French colony, he gave a speech in which he said that the history of France's empire should not dominate his current government's relationship with the country.
He said, "Africa is engraved in French history, culture and identity. There have been mistakes and crimes, there have been happy moments, but our responsibility is not to get caught up in the past!"
Then on a December trip to Algeria, also a former French colony, Macron visited President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and urged the country's youth "not to dwell on past crimes!"
In March, he said that French should be the official language of Africa, because it is "the language of freedom."
His first and only visit to Guadeloupe came in the wake of Hurricane Irma, where he pledged that France would pay 50 million euros in aid and offer free flights from the island to France.
But locals criticized his visit, alerting to the fact that white tourists had been given priority access to aid during the crisis!
Since that incident, Macron has not visited the Caribbean.
There is still fundamental tension among the people of Guadeloupe, then, about how to handle their relationship with France, especially on an island where the local economy is entirely dependent on French tourists.
The role of the museum in resolving this tension remains an open question, but the opposition against it revealed two contradictory visions on the island about the future of Guadeloupe: continued unity with France, or autonomy and independence from it.
Unlike Puerto Rico for America or Anguilla for Britain, Guadeloupe is a modern colonial problem for France.
Residents hold French passports, can travel freely within the European Union, and can vote in French elections.
(But in the last presidential election, abstention rates in Guadeloupe were above 60%.)
Outside of schools and outside of cities, Creole is the unofficial language.
The population follows the French legal and political system.
At school, they learn the same curriculum as in France.
However, few residents of Guadeloupe enjoy a standard of living comparable to that of France.
Although Guadeloupe receives 972 million euros from the European Union annually, the youth unemployment rate has been hovering around 50% for several decades.
A large part of the local economy is still controlled by the "Piques", the white descendants of the French slave owners who received compensation from the French government after 1848 after losing their "livelihood"!
Black resentment towards France dates back to the 1950s.
In those years, a number of blacks from the islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guinea immigrated to France in search of work.
But many of them returned home, disappointed with the lack of opportunities there.
At the same time, violent separatist groups began to form, especially in Guadeloupe.
Support for them increased during the 1960s and 1970s, with Creole slogans on the walls denouncing the "French killers" and calling for "French people, leave" in Pointe-a-Pitre.
In 1980, after orchestrating a series of bombings over a period of nine months, the Guadeloupe Liberation Army issued a warning to all white French on the island to "pack your bags and leave".
The French government panicked, and new laws were imposed in all its lands outside Europe: anyone who threatened the "geographical unity" of France would be arrested.
In 2009, residents of the island staged demonstrations to protest exorbitant oil prices set by France.
The protests soon turned into a 45-day national movement against colonial exploitation.
Led by Domota, head of the Alliance Against Exploitation, 100,000 people took to the streets, many of them chanting what has since become the movement's slogan: "Guadeloupe is ours, not theirs!".
Then the international airports in Guadeloupe were closed.
Sarkozy's government sent 500 soldiers to quell the popular uprising, further angering the protesters after one of them was killed.
By the end of March, Sarkozy had summoned union leaders from Guadeloupe to Paris to negotiate a 120-point reform plan that would give workers higher wages but not independence.
However, as Yarimar Bonilla argues in her book French Caribbean Politics in the Aftermath of Resentment, the protests in 2009 expressed more than just growing frustration with France's politics: they led to a major shift in the Guadeloupean political imagination.
What was once impossible is now possible.
What began as a growing resentment toward what many local workers referred to as “pwofitasyon” – a Creole expression for French colonial exploitation – became a “strike to redress the continuing social legacy of colonialism and slavery,” in particular the racial hierarchy that still exists. On the island and the discrimination felt by local workers, according to Bonilla.
When I came to Pointe-ah-Peter last February to learn more about France's ethnic history, I initially did not find enough evidence of its violent past.
The city was a modern maze of massive apartment buildings, highways, and hybrid cars rented by tourists as it headed toward the island's stunning white beaches.
But a kind of strong resentment towards France could be felt everywhere.
"Guadeloupe's drivers are like the people of Paris' suburbs," a taxi driver told me, referring to the slums outside Paris where immigrants live. "The only difference is that it's hot here."
Built off Pointe-a-Peter Bay, the Memorial Act is a two-story ultra-modern building, flanked by wire columns and a series of statues in its courtyard.
On my three-hour tour of the Memorial Museum, the American-accented audio of the guide told me the story of the first French to reach Guadeloupe in 1626 to establish a trading colony.
The tour included a series of virtual and interactive maps and exhibits, including different types of whips and handcuffs used against slaves.
Divided into six rooms, the memorial museum houses works by internationally known black artists such as Kara Walker, Chuck Wan and Abdullah Konate.
But when it came to the Memorial Museum's depiction of the present, the narrative started poorly: one darkroom showed a sequential abstract picture of "present-day Guadeloupe" shot by Nicolas Merol, a local graphic designer.
And I saw a screen showing the water slowly trickling down an unknown face.
The next screen showed a dilapidated building, some birds perched on its balcony.
The room offered no questions, explanations, or even words.
François Hollande on a visit to the "Memorial Act" museum (communication sites)
Museums and antiquities can help perpetuate history and play a vital role in building citizenship itself, as Hannah Arendt wrote in her book The Human Situation about World War I memorials: “These monuments honored the anonymous, all those whom the war failed to recognize and thus He robbed them, not of their achievements but of their human dignity.”
But the boundaries between the past and the present can be blurry.
For many who live in Guadeloupe, the past that the Memorial Act seeks to remember lives on in their present.
"The memorial museum should be burned," Domotta told me when I met him at his residence in Pointe-a-Pitre.
For him and his 80,000 followers, the museum was a way for France to control or suppress local culture.
“All countries need museums,” he says, before adding, “But France wants to re-create history. They built Memorial Acts to rewrite colonial history to make us believe that they always loved us, that they still loved us, and that now we have to forget the past.”
However, this memory of the past is at the heart of the idea behind the founding of the museum, and as Jack Marshall told me: "Old slave owners didn't want to remember what happened. But we haven't forgotten."
When I asked him about Domotta's criticism of the Memorial Museum, he sounded frustrated, "We need new answers, new ways of understanding, making connections, not accusing each other. We're not kids here. Domotta's way is not the way forward. How do you pretend to educate people without telling them what? Event?"
But Dumouta says the French have no right to tell their history of slavery.
He adds: "Macron may be irresponsible or guilty of colonialism, but he is its heir... France cannot escape a crime from which it is still profiting."
For him, the islanders did not need an apology or a memorial, but a chance to live independently: to have the right to vote and legislate locally, to build a grassroots economy, to speak their own language, and to learn their own history.
Dumouta concludes: "Slavery has not ended... we are still the modern slaves of France."
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Translation: Karim Traboulsi
This report has been translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily reflect the website of Meydan.