A statue of this Guadeloupean, a figure of the fight against slavery, was inaugurated on Tuesday in Paris. A first, for a black woman.
Le Monde
Do you know who was solitude? Tuesday, May 10, a statue of this Guadeloupean, a figure of the fight against slavery, was inaugurated by the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, in a garden which already bears her name, in the 17 > arrondissement. The decision is highly symbolic: it is the first statue of black woman in the capital.
of statues, Paris has about a thousand. A overwhelming majority of men, including colonizers, such as Joseph Gallieni, head of the Menalamba massacre, in Madagascar. Very few women. If we exclude mythological figures and allegories – the Republic, abundance … -, only forty women are visible in Parisian public space. Among them, Jeanne d’Arc, George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf or Dalida. But no black woman. Until today.
The choice of date owes nothing to chance. In France, since 2006, May 10 is the national day of the milking, slavery and their abolitions. “From the XV e
é> to the 19th e century, more than 11 million men, women and children were captured in Africa, transported through the Atlantic and Reduced into slavery to work in very harsh conditions within colonial operations in America “, recalls the vie-publique.fr site .
May 10 was chosen by Jacques Chirac, then President of the Republic, in reference to the date of adoption by the Parliament of the final text of The Taubira law (2001), which makes the slave trade and slavery a crime against humanity.
Monuments in honor of solitude already exist. In 1999, a statue of this little-known heroine, produced by the sculptor Jacky Poulier, was erected on the boulevard des Héros, Aux Abymes, in Guadeloupe . In 2007, a sculpture created by Nicolas Alquin was inaugurated avenue Henri-Barbusse, in Bagneux, in the Hauts-de-Seine.
insurgent against slavery before being hanged
Solitude – her real name, Rosalie – was born around 1772. She was the child of an African slave raped by a white sailor on the slave ship which deported her to the Antilles. It is therefore a “mulatto”, according to the term used at the time by the settlers to designate people born of a white parent and a black parent. The little girl is separated from her mother and becomes a house slave. She was twenty years old when she benefited, in 1794, from the first abolition of slavery by France.
Eight years later, in 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte sent soldiers to restore slavery in Guadeloupe. The young Rosalie changes her name and becomes solitude. A few months pregnant, she participates in the resistance and even joins the fights. But the insurgents are defeated. Arrested and sentenced to death by colonial troops, Loneliness was hanged on November 29, 1802, the day after his childbirth.
Loneliness historicity is, in fact, very skinny. In his book Histoire de la Guadeloupe, published in 1858, Auguste Lacour devotes about fifteen lines to him. His memory had been out of oblivion by the publication, in 1972, of the Molititude Solitude, a novel by the writer André Schwarz Bart, which largely extrapolated the elements of the text of Auguste Lacour.
In September 2020, the Guadeloupe actor Jacques Martial, assistant in charge of overseas at the town hall of Paris, soberly summed up his life as follows:
This woman is politically committed, took up arms to defend the values of the Republic, and paid for her in her life.