Didier Rykner is a journalist and historian of French art. Committed to the defense of heritage, he regularly publishes his surveys and analyzes on The Art Tribune .
The statue of Victor Schoelcher, which could be seen a few days ago in front of the old Palace of Justice in Fort-de-France, was due to Anatole Marquet de Vasselot. It was, as much as the celebration of a great man in our history, a work of art. Admittedly, this artist does not benefit from an aura comparable to some of his contemporaries like Auguste Rodin, but he is a very honorable sculptor whose works are preserved in particular at the museums of Fine Arts in Lyon and Angers , at the Petit Palais in Paris or at the Maison de Balzac, writer he has often represented.
This preamble seems necessary to explain that the destruction on May 22 of the two sculptures representing Schoelcher (we do not know the author of the second, of much lower quality, who was in the city having taken the name of the abolitionist ), thrown to the ground and broken into several pieces in such a way that they cannot be restored, are in reality acts of vandalism hardly different from those that have been known until recently in Syria and Iraq, which have affected masterpieces but also more common and less important objects. For vandals, only the symbol counts. Works of art or historical heritage have no value whatsoever.
The new censors are persuaded to hold the truth and to be the guardians of virtue.In recent years, there have been many attempts to destroy or, at best, to make representations of controversial figures disappear from the public space. The new censors are persuaded to hold the truth and to be the guardians of virtue. They do not support the complexity proper to all human life and understand existence only as a permanent battle for absolute good (them) and absolute evil (everything that is not them). Worse yet, they want to judge history by the yardstick of today, refusing to understand that history cannot be changed and that the main thing is to understand it to avoid the return of what it has produced worse.
What happened in Fort-de-France and Schoelcher nevertheless goes even further. When some are outraged to see effigies of Colbert under the pretext that he is at the origin of the legalization of slavery, others now attack the one who, on the contrary, abolished it. So these new vandals are racists with a fascinating tendency? Not at all: they are, more or less, the same. In a well-known observation which wants that the extremes always end up finding themselves, they are activists marked very on the left, who consider that Victor Schoelcher would have acted only for personal interest, and that he was therefore not enough anti-racist. Celebrating it (as if sculptures more than a century old still constituted a celebration) would therefore be intolerable, which would justify their destruction.
Even Aimé Césaire who paid a vibrant tribute to Victor Schoelcher would no longer find favor in their eyes.With this degree of reflection (a badly chosen term, I agree), it is clear that no longer any work of art, no more sculpture, no more painting representing a historical figure can henceforth be tolerated. For what men or women have been virtuous all their lives, in the least of their actions? Especially if virtue consists only in thinking as our new censors would like us to think. Even Aimé Césaire would no longer find favor in their eyes, he who paid a vibrant tribute to Victor Schoelcher, declaring in particular: “Against the propensity to tyranny, there is an antidote: the spirit of Victor Schoelcher. Against prejudice and injustice, there is an antidote: the spirit of Victor Schoelcher ”.
Also read: 1833: Victor Schoelcher's Slavery of the Blacks delights Le Figaro
The rest is not difficult to guess. If our predecessors are to be condemned because they did not have all these virtues required by our new Savonarola, we are even more so, we who do not think like them. Behind this vandalism hides in reality a totalitarian will to control the thoughts and actions of all those who dare to oppose their vision of existence. These self-proclaimed anti-fascists, anti-racists are the worst fascists and racists that we have seen in a long time. They must be fought foot to foot.
