Cast in Stone

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Victor Schœlcher

has biography | a une biographie

French abolitionist and député of Martinique (1848-1849; 1871-1875) and Guadeloupe (1849; 1850-1851).

Born on July 22, 1804 in Paris, into a family of porcelain manufacturers of Alsatian origin (Fessenheim), he died on December 25, 1893 in Houilles. A politician and journalist, he traveled widely and amassed a collection of heterogeneous objects. As a journalist, he wrote for the Revue républicaine, the Revue indépendante and La Réforme. A Republican and abolitionist, in 1840 he published Abolition de l'esclavage. Examen critique du préjugé contre la couleur des Africains et des sang-mêlés. Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies in the Provisional Government of the Second Republic in 1848, he signed the decree of April 27, 1848 abolishing slavery in the colonies. Elected deputy for Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1848, he was a member of the Constituent Assembly and then the Legislative Assembly. Opposed to the coup d'état of December 2, 1851, he went into exile in England. Returning to France in 1870, he was re-elected deputy for Martinique and became an irremovable senator in 1875. On September 30, 1883, he bequeathed some of the objects collected during his travels to Guadeloupe, and the eponymous museum was inaugurated in Pointe-à-Pitre in 1887. Martinique received his books, which enabled the opening of the Schoelcher library in Fort de France. He died in 1893.
Since the Third Republic, the figure of Schoelcher has been imposed as a tool of the colonizer in the development of the old colony: the 32 communes of Guadeloupe all have a Schoelcher street; he is synonymous with all emancipations, for example that of women: a society, the "Vraies Filles de Schoelcher" organizes demonstrations and meetings, and has its own newspaper, La crucifiée, published on Sundays from November 1901 to June 1902, subtitled: guerre aux iniquités sociales, printed in Pointe a Pitre. It was especially mobilized by Schoelcherism, a current of thought glorifying, through the figure of Schoelcher, the work of the Republic represented as generous, emancipating slaves and assimilationist. This movement, mainly supported by the petty bourgeoisie of the former "free of color" class, spread to the working classes after the First World War.
In 1949, Schoelcher's ashes were transferred to the Pantheon along with those of Félix Eboué, born in French Guiana and the first very popular black governor of Guadeloupe from 1936 to 1938.
Criticism of Schoelcherism and the "cult" of Victor Schoelcher developed in the late 1970s, with the publication by the teachers' union of Jean Pierre Sainton's study of the abolitionist movement, showing that it was not the sole cause of the abolition of slavery in the French colonies. Since the 1980s, there has been a paradigm shift in the way the figure of Victor Schoelcher is viewed in the French West Indies: it is now considered to overshadow that of the local actors who, through their revolts, imposed abolition locally. Since the late 1990s, towns in the West Indies have been erecting statues of these actors, whether historical figures of resistance or symbolic figures of maroons.
The figure of Schoelcher is still criticized in the West Indies. In 2022, the Schoelcher Museum became the Musarth. The way in which it was able to acquire the works, but above all the local desire to break with what might be called a "cult" around the liberator of the slaves, led the department to change the museum's name after its renovation.

was born | est né

22 July 1804

died in | est mort par

25 December 1893

has nationality | a la nationalité

France

has type | est de type

depicted

is referred to by | est référencé par

Fondation pour la mémoire de l'esclavage

Musarth

Musarth

Médiapart

Danielle Bégot, « Territoires du temps : deux « moments » de l’historiographie des Antilles françaises (Guadeloupe, Martinique), les années 1930 et la décennie 1970-1980 », Outre-mers, t. 100, n°378-379, 2013.
Marie-José Jolivet, « La construction d’une mémoire historique à la Martinique : du schoelcherisme au marronisme », Cahiers d’études africaines, n°107-108, 1987, pp. 287-309.
Silyane Larcher, « Bibliographie sommaire sur la traite et l'esclavage colonial », Cités, vol. 25, no. 1, 2006, pp. 190-191.Nelly Schmidt, « Schoelchérisme et assimilation dans la politique coloniale française : de la théorie à la pratique aux Caraïbes entre 1848 et les années 1880 », Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, tome 35 N°2, Avril-juin 1988.
Nelly Schmidt, Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition de l’esclavage, Paris, Fayard, 1994.