The French parliament has symbolically repealed the 'Code Noir' legislation on slavery, 170 years after slavery was abolished, while in 2001 the country recognised slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity.
But for the French port cities which built their wealth on the slave trade, a recognition and acknowledgment of their history is an ongoing, and sometimes painful, process.
“For a long time, this history remained invisible, even though it was everywhere,” said Coralie De Souza Vernay from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de l'Esclavage (FME), who spoke to The Local about the challenges of bringing slavery into France’s public historical narrative.
Created in 2019, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de l'Esclavage is a public-interest foundation dedicated to preserving and promoting the history of slavery, the slave trade and their lasting legacies in France and its overseas territories.
A little history
France was one of Europe’s major slave-trading powers between the 17th and 19th centuries. French ships transported more than a million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, while colonial plantations in the Caribbean generated enormous wealth through sugar, coffee and tobacco.
Nantes became France’s leading slave-trading port during the 18th century, accounting for nearly half of the country’s slave voyages. The ports of Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Le Havre also prospered from colonial commerce, while Saint-Malo’s merchants benefited from maritime trade networks linked to the wider colonial economy.
Today, many French cities are grappling with how to acknowledge this history in public spaces, museums and schools.
Nantes
Among French cities, Nantes is often seen as the furthest advanced in acknowledging its role in the slave trade.
The city opened its Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in 2012 after decades of activism by historians and associations. Nantes has also integrated the history of slavery into museum exhibitions, school programmes and guided tours throughout the city.
For De Souza Vernay, this kind of visibility matters because it places history directly in public spaces and not just in museums. “It creates historical continuity,” she said. “It explains how the city was built. And because it’s in public spaces, it’s accessible to everyone.”
Barbara Chiron, coordinator of the Nantes-based association Les Anneaux de la Mémoire, agrees that remembrance must extend beyond historical commemoration.
"Our work is about understanding the history of slavery and colonialism, but also their contemporary consequences," she said.
The association runs local projects, educational programmes and public initiatives, while maintaining close links with universities and researchers.
Chiron noted that unlike cities such as Bristol in the UK, Nantes has no statues explicitly celebrating slave traders. Instead, the challenge has been making visible a history that was embedded in the city's economic development but often absent from public narratives.
"Our objective is to increase knowledge of the history of the slave trade, colonial slavery and their contemporary repercussions," Chiron told The Local. "We work on cultural and artistic legacies, but also on wider issues such as racism and discrimination."
La Rochelle and Bordeaux
In La Rochelle (Charente-Maritime), memory work has taken a somewhat different form, centred more heavily around museums and historical interpretation.
The city’s maritime museums and archives increasingly acknowledge La Rochelle’s role in triangular trade and colonial commerce - the Musée du Nouveau Monde, situated in the former home of a wealthy merchant involved in the slave trade, tells the story of La Rochelle, the French slave trade and France's wider involvement in the 'new world' of the Americas and the Caribbean.
Seven streets in the city feature plaques explaining their names in reference to its history of slavery, while in 2024 a statue showing an enslaved woman working as a wet nurse was added to the seafront promenade. Created by the Haitian sculptor Filipo, it depicts a woman named Clarisse who appears in local records as a freed slave.
In Bordeaux, plaques have also been added to former colonial warehouses to explain how goods produced by enslaved labour circulated through French commerce.
This broader approach aims to show slavery not as an isolated historical episode but as a system woven into French economic and cultural development.
Le Havre and Saint-Malo
Both Le Havre and Saint-Malo are cities that are strongly associated with broader maritime histories like trade, exploration, and fishing, which can overshadow connections to slavery and colonial commerce.
Yet historians have increasingly documented how merchants from both ports participated in colonial trade networks tied to plantation economies in the Caribbean.
De Souza Vernay said this relative silence partly reflects the complexity of historical memory in mainland France.
“In metropolitan France, there is so much heritage and so many national narratives that attention becomes diluted,” she explained. “These figures and the history are present, but they are less visible than in overseas territories where slavery directly structured society.”
She contrasted mainland France with territories such as Martinique, Guadeloupe and Réunion, where monuments linked to colonial figures have long carried a much more immediate emotional and political charge.
Debates over statues and public space
Across France and its overseas territories, disputes over statues and memorials have intensified in recent years, particularly since 2020.
De Souza Vernay cited the example of the statue of Joséphine de Beauharnais in Martinique, which was first decapitated in the 1990s before eventually being taken down in 2020.
“The life of monuments has always been turbulent,” she said. “During the French Revolution, statues of kings were destroyed. Monuments are never fixed forever.”
In some cases, French authorities have opted for contextualisation rather than removal. She pointed to the “Au Nègre Joyeux” sign in Paris, criticised for racist imagery, which was eventually transferred to the Musée Carnavalet with a historical explanation added.
“The goal isn’t necessarily erasure,” she said. “It’s making these objects speak.”
Education
Although the 2001 Taubira Law, which officially recognised slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity, encouraged the teaching of slavery in schools, Chiron says students' exposure to the topic still varies considerably.
"My feeling is that it depends a lot on individual teachers," she said. "School programmes are already extremely full, so some teachers will choose to spend more time on this history while others may devote less attention to it."
Geography also plays a role. "In Nantes and more broadly in western France, schools often show a particular interest because these are regions directly connected to the history of the slave trade," she explained. "That may be less the case in places such as Alsace or eastern France."
A growing push for recognition
Every year on May 10th, France marks the National Day of Remembrance for the Slave Trade, Slavery and their Abolition, a commemoration established by former president Jacques Chirac in 2006 following the passage of the Taubira law.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the law, with commemorative events taking place across France. Nantes, for example, organised its annual Le Temps des Mémoires programme, featuring exhibitions, public discussions and educational projects.
The Fondation pour la Mémoire de l'Esclavage is also marking the anniversary of the law with a nationwide programme of exhibitions, commemorations and educational initiatives.
"There are increasingly important discussions about how we recognise this history and how we address the harm that was done," Chiron said. "The question is no longer only how we remember slavery, but also how we recognise its consequences and what forms of repair are possible."
De Souza Vernay also argued that understanding slavery remains essential to understanding modern France itself. “The legal system of slavery was abolished,” she said, “but it still structures the world we live in - through inequalities, through anti-Black racism, and through relationships between territories.”
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