When I was young, I lived at the corner of Faidherbe and Chanzy streets in a working class city on the outskirts of Paris. Rue Faidherbe, five hundred meters long, led to the station. Chanzy Street, much shorter, was on clay. All this has hardly changed. The memories are found there as at home, almost intact. The population was then overwhelmingly white. It mixed origins, essentially European, with North African immigration which was beginning to settle and integrate. At the time, no one dreamed of overthrowing the statues of our great men.
Read also: Nicolas Chaudun: "Unbolting statues, the reign of anachronism and ignorance"
General Faidherbe was one of them. Having been born in Lille in 1818, two centuries ago, it was there that he was buried after the nation had reserved a state funeral for him in 1889. It was there that he received, posthumously, the marks of honor most visible, including the name of a high school, as well as the equestrian statue recently vilified by activists of the Indigenist cause
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