Dear Mayor,
On the occasion of the bicentenary of the birth of Louis Faidherbe, born in Lille on 3 June 1818, the city council decided to restore the statue erected in his honour on Place Richebé, overlooking Place de la République.
The restoration of this statue, which costs much and which was decided with no public consultation, is scandalous. Do you not know that it glorifies, in the person of Louis Faidherbe (1818-1889), one of the great figures of French colonialism?
You might say that this monument does not pay tribute to Faidherbe’s colonial career but to the general’s “deeds” during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 [1]. That may be so, but this is a truncated description that misses the point.
It is true that Faidherbe “resisted” – for three months – the Prussian invasion of France but it is also true that he dedicated the rest of his career – decades – to the French invasion of Africa.
The conquest, which brought him to Algeria and then to Senegal, took the form, in his own words, of a ‘war of extermination’. This unleashing of violence and terror cost the lives of countless Africans and led to the imposition of a system of racist oppression in these countries that many historians rightly call a ‘crime against humanity’.
All over the world, from Johannesburg to Barcelona, from New York to Berlin, city councils are proceeding to remove statues and to rename streets that glorify the crimes of slavery and colonialism. The restoration of Faidherbe’s statue is a permanent insult to the memory of colonised people and their descendants and hence a mistake.
At the 2011 World Social Forum in Dakar, you called on Europeans to “face up to their own history”. And according to you, this implied “recognising the crimes of slavery and the tragedies of colonisation”. Right in your belief that there are no “positive aspects” to be found in criminal political systems, you added: “Colonisation must be condemned with no reservations [2].
Now is the time to turn these words into actions.
We, the descendants of colonised people, anti-colonialist activists and anti-racist residents, demand the removal from public spaces in Lille of the statue of Louis Faidherbe and of all symbols that glorify colonialism. We ask that in their place tribute be paid to the victims of colonisation and to those who heroically resisted it.
Signatories: Survie Nord, Collectif Afrique, Atelier d’Histoire Critique, Front Uni des Immigrations et des Quartiers Populaires (FUIQP), the Collectif Sénégalais Contre la Célébration de Faidherbe.
[1] Presentation of the Faidherbe statue on the official website of Lille City Hall (www.lille.fr/Nos-equipements/Statue-de-Faidherbe).
[2] “L’anti-discours de Dakar de Martine Aubry”, AFP, 9 February 2011.