Confronting Colonial Modernity in a French City: Slavery and Racism in Bordeaux’s Musée d’Aquitaine

ABSTRACT What is the purpose of an exhibit on Atlantic slavery? Does it seek to raise awareness of the trade in enslaved people, with a view to highlighting and overcoming its racist legacy, or to situate the Atlantic trade within the historical – and ongoing – continuum of slavery, or to draw attention to the role of slavery in constituting colonial modernity? Does giving this history its rightful place within the national story of France, Britain or elsewhere ultimately serve to embed racial divisions in contemporary society, or to expunge them? In other words, does a reckoning with Atlantic slavery open a path to tackling racism today? This article addresses these questions in turn. Its principal referent is the Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux, set in the wider context of the city’s self-image and French debates around commemorating the Atlantic slave trade. The article concludes that even though Bordeaux’s slaving past is integrated into the Musée d’Aquitaine’s guiding chronology, the full ramifications of slavery for colonial modernity have not been understood or represented. Beyond simplistic dichotomies of guilt and innocence, accusation and repentance, the enormous significance of coloniality and slavery in constituting European modernity, not least the Enlightenment, have yet to be grasped and assimilated in Bordeaux.

Bordeaux is a major national and international tourist destination, its historic center recognised by UNESCO since 2007.A ruined amphitheater testifies to Roman origins, but today it is perhaps best known for its wines and surrounding vineyards.The history of wine is celebrated in the Cité du Vin, a tourist attraction inaugurated in 2016 under a conservative mayor as part of Bordeaux's dockland regeneration, from which the nearby Musée Mer Marine also stands to benefit.Opened in 2019 and designed by the experienced museum architect Olivier Brochet, the Musée Mer Marine's 6000 m² exhibition space devoted to the sea was funded to the tune of twenty million euros by local real estate developer and cultural philanthropist Norbert Fradin, and features many objects from his private collection (Le Mao 2022).
Unlike Liverpool's historic center and docklands, deleted from the UNESCO world heritage list in 2021 due to development deemed detrimental to its urban ensemble, neither Empire nor slavery appear in UNESCO's description of Bordeaux's significance.Rather, UNESCO (no date, online) describes Bordeaux as "an outstanding urban and architectural ensemble, created in the age of the Enlightenment, whose values continued up to the first half of the twentieth century […] Its urban form represents the success of philosophers who wanted to make towns into melting pots of humanism, universality and culture."The association between Bordeaux's architectural unity and Enlightenment values and ideals is thus central to its civic pride.As a key constituent of colonial modernity, however, the European Enlightenment's humanism was also premised on denying many millions of non-Europeans their humanity, rights and freedoms, particularly those in the Caribbean colonies on whose labor Bordeaux's beauty was built.
Bordeaux is keen to project its credentials as a dynamic, ecologically-minded tourist destination (Bordeaux Business 2020).It boasts 350 listed buildings and monuments, and clearly intends to avoid Liverpool's fate in losing UNESCO world heritage status.Claiming the Enlightenment's legacy also entails acknowledging its dark side, however, as French slavery reached its apogee in the eighteenth century (Duprat 2020, 10;Coquery-Vidrovitch 2018, 19).That the Musée d'Aquitaine has yet to achieve this, as the novelist Anne-Marie Garat (2021) amply demonstrates, shows that a broader decolonial turn has yet to take place in how the city understands and represents its heritage.The following discussion is structured around the series of questions posed at the outset of the article.It places the Musée d'Aquitaine's slavery exhibit in the context of French debates around the memorialization of slavery, the city's broader commemorative landscape, and the museum as a whole.
Methodologically, the article uses discourse analysis to "read" how the museum's slavery exhibit fits within its overall content and layoutspecifically its non-European collections, rooms on colonialism, and temporary exhibitionswhile also reflecting the city's official identity as a paragon of the Enlightenment set in stone.Studying museum discourse "like a text for its narrative structure and strategies" (Mason 2011, 26) is not limited to written text, but can also include spatial ordering, lighting, choice of artefacts and multimedia, among other exhibition techniques.Complementary close reading of official municipal and museum websites and publications, such as the city's presentation of its slavery heritage trail (parcours mémoriel), puts the exhibition strategy in the wider discursive context of Bordeaux's UNESCO world heritage status (Mason 2011, 29).Interrogating this overarching "meta-Discourse" also pays attention to its silences and elisions to understand how Bordeaux's treatment of its slavery history relates to racism today (Sutherland 2005).
Madeleine Dobie (2010, xi, emphasis in original) highlighted the relative "absence of representation" of France's colonies in the material culture and literary texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, noting that "relations of domination are not always mediated by discourse.They can also be grounded in silence, ignorance and various modes of cultural censorship and repression."Likewise, colonialism and slavery's legacies are not strongly marked on Bordeaux's contemporary cityscape.However, following Timm Knudsen and Kølvraa's (2020, 14) modalities of heritage practice, something like a re-emergence can be discerned after a long period of repression.While Timm Knudsen and Kølvraa show that the city of Nantes may be co-opting its slaving past as part of developing an "avant-garde" municipal identity, Bordeaux is very different in how it seeks to control and partly reframe this heritage.Despite some important developments since 2005, Christine Chivallon's (2005, 69) assessment that Bordeaux is slowly introducing certain historical truths about slavery while not upsetting the existing memorial landscape is still largely accurate.

The Role of Slavery in Colonial Modernity
It is important to distinguish slavery and its legacy from colonial modernity more broadly, although the two are closely imbricated (Barthélemy 2019).From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, European slave ships were a crucial component in a global capitalist economy that traded and exported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic in their millions to work plantations in the Americas.These plantations produced the sugar, tobacco, rum, cotton and other consumer products for sale and manufacture in Europe's industrial centers, only for the infernal cycle to begin again with the export of finished goods to West Africa.The impact of this capitalist commerce across three continents was profound.It operated across a huge swathe of North-West to South-West Africa, from present-day Senegal to Angola.It disrupted social relations and sometimes emptied entire villages hundreds of miles into the interior, as traders ventured further inland to kidnap people often misleadingly presented to slave ship captains as "prisoners of war."Those captains, who might spend up to six months gathering a "cargo" of enslaved Africans, were unlikely to make further enquiries.Meanwhile, Arab traders were enslaving people from Africa's east coast, some of whom crossed the Atlantic.The wholesale hollowing out of the African continent's population reached epic proportions.An estimated 12.4 million crossed the Atlantic alone, 1.8 million dying on the journey.Survivors were exposed to more disease, discipline and death on arrival.An unknown number died on the march overland before even reaching the coast (Rediker 2007, 5).
The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint Domingue, which eventually led to Haitian independence in 1804, was not considered a fight for freedom in revolutionary France because it was led by black men like Toussaint Louverture and thus represented a mortal danger to colonial modernity, as embodied in white property and prosperity (James 2001(James [1938]]; Hazareesingh 2020).Freedom was conceptualized within racialised limits, and did not extend to emancipating the enslaved.The history of slavery is thus a crucial, constitutive part of European history, not least that of the Enlightenment.Minimizing or compartmentalizing it ignores the fundamental fact that many European freedoms were made possible by slave labor.Black history is colonial history and thus European history.Its legacy is still being played out today, most obviously as racism, a colonial creation used to justify the wholesale enslavement of Africans (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000).
Binaries contrasting civilized and savage, adult and child, and black and white were frequently employed to justify chattel slavery, paternalistic, "improving" colonialism, or the gradual extinction of supposedly "inferior" races.Conversely, European thought was deemed the epitome of civilization.The eighteenth-century Enlightenment flourished alongside the most intense period of the Atlantic slave trade, providing the foundation for colonizing powers' prosperity and the siècle des lumières.Enlightenment thinkers could be opposed to slavery and oppression in principle while ignoring it in practice.For example, Immanuel Kant and David Hume's racist writings reflect how racial hierarchies were ingrained in the way they apprehended the world, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau omitted France's 1685 slavery code from his treatise, the Social Contract (Stovall 2021, 107).
In time, "genetic coordinates were mapped onto cultural stereotypes" (Valluvan 2019, 99), as already laid out by Carl Linnaeus' binomial classification in his Systema Naturae (1758).Supposedly "scientific" racial taxonomies of whiteness and color were shaped by slavery, prejudiced value judgements and self-serving, muddled thinking."Scientific racism" was well-established in France, with proponents including Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), Paul Broca (1824-1880) and Georges Vacher de Lapouge , whose virulent anti-Semitism was much admired in Nazi Germany (Painter 2010, 216, 314).The spurious association of relative intelligence with dolichocephalic and brachycephalic cranial types endured beyond the Holocaust, as evidenced in Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism (1972Colonialism ( [1955]], 50), an excoriating critique of post-war racism.White freedoms were enshrined within a racial hierarchy, other races deemed either biologically different or less educated and "evolved" according to a scale of human development and progress.This was a foundation stone of the European Enlightenment.
At the eighteenth century's end, as French and American revolutionaries fought for freedom from oppression, around half a million slaves toiled on French Saint Domingue.Enslaved people in Virginia carried symbolic chains when their owners protested against British taxation as a form of "enslavement" (Olusoga 2016, 146).In 1775, the English diarist Samuel Johnson and the abolitionist campaigner Granville Sharp both noted the obvious hypocrisy at play; "How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty amongst the drivers of Negroes?" (Johnson, cited in Olusoga 2016, 146).Freedom for white men, in terms of property ownership and its attendant economic independence and voting rights, was built on the backs of enslaved Africans and the expropriation and massacre of Native Americans.It was unthinkable that a white man of property should be reduced to slavery.On the contrary, the liberty for which he fought depended on slavery, and he saw no contradiction in this; "freedom was the privilege of white men, and therefore reducing them to the level of Blacks by 'enslaving' them was morally and politically unacceptable' (Stovall 2021, 111).An information panel in Bordeaux's Musée Mer Marine clearly identifies this stark distinction, without seeking to explain or explore the all too apparent contradiction in terms of racism (Figure 1).Using a two-tone design to distinguish its themes, it begins by discussing the Atlantic slave trade before setting it aside to introduce another (hi)story (une autre histoire) "based on a shared love of freedom and its values." These two stories are contrasted, rather than presented as corollaries, their fundamental co-dependence neither acknowledged nor addressed.
The Musée Mer Marine promised to address the question of slavery because "slaves were transported by sea" and held a televised debate on Bordeaux's slave trade in its unfinished exhibition space (Mer & Ocean 2018, online).In 2022, however, the permanent exhibition featured little about slavery beyond a panel describing the triangular trade, a model slave ship, and a figurehead (Sortir du colonialisme Gironde 2020, 206).The panel introducing Bordeaux's Atlantic trade describes it as "opening up to the Caribbean world," framing it in terms of direct trade in West Indian products, without specifying that these were produced by enslaved people in French colonies.Only the last line mentions slavery, specifying that Bordeaux organized "over 10%" of France's slaving expeditions, but again failing to connect this with the bulk of Bordeaux's trade with the Antilles.This minimizes slavery's importance to Bordeaux's eighteenth century economy and obscures the context of colonial modernity.
Starting from a similarly elliptical information panel in the Musée d'Aquitaine's slavery exhibit, Anne-Marie Garat (2021) analyses the causes and consequences of such obfuscatory language.Her intervention led to some limited changes being made to an exhibit that had been in place since 2009.Yet the Musée Mer Marine exhibit, installed a decade later, reproduced the same narrative.By contrast, the maritime museum in La Rochelle, a city which traded slaves on a similar scale to Bordeaux, clearly states that between 1775 and 1789, it was France's second-biggest slave-trading port, linking this to its heavy investment in Saint Domingue's plantations and "colonial products."In keeping with UNESCO's framing of the port city as embodying the Enlightenment, Bordeaux's engagement with its slave trading past focuses principally on the eighteenth century cityscape and its wealthy traders, rehabilitating them when it deems necessary.For example, the city's website in memory of slavery and the slave trade dedicates eight of its "portraits" to entrepreneurs "mistakenly associated" (Associés à tort) with the slave trade, compared to only two portraits of black residents.Two abolitionists and five slave traders are also profiled (Mairie de Bordeaux 2022a).Rescuing the reputation of unfairly maligned eighteenth century entrepreneurs thus appears to be one of its key focal points, when histories of enslaved and emancipated Bordeaux residents like Casimir Fidèle and Marie-Louise Charles are now readily available (Duprat 2021;Garat 2021).Toussaint Louverture's son Isaac also lived in Bordeaux, dying there in 1854, but is not profiled.His prolific correspondence and memoirs sought to cement his father's legacy.Isaac Louverture's commemorative plaque and his father's bust feature on the website's heritage trail, but there is more to be said about both father and son.
This preliminary evidence suggests that the city's prevailing concern is to maintain Bordeaux's image spatially and temporally as a prosperous commercial port, in line with how it is framed as a UNESCO world heritage site (Chivallon 2002;Hourcade 2012).There appears to be less appetite to explore the wider ramifications of colonial modernity in shaping capitalism, consumerism and racism today.This contrasts with the temporary exhibition entitled l'Abîme (the Abyss) on Nantes' role on the Atlantic slave trade and colonial slavery from 1707-1830.Held in the Nantes history museum from October 2021-June 2022 and drawing on its permanent collection, l'Abîme ended with a room dedicated to exploring contemporary racism.Featuring a series of documentary films and quotes from several Caribbean writers, it clearly connected remembering the past to addressing racism in the present.Displays also highlighted aspects of contemporary consumerism, including the human cost of mining minerals found in everything from lipstick to mobile phones, and enduring monocultures of colonial era products like cocoa and coffee in West Africa and elsewhere.Visitors were encouraged to reflect on the link between past and present through a series of questions and answers about racism.This is one example from which a possible future "house against slavery" in Bordeaux might learn.The next section turns to the steps Bordeaux has already taken in the context of France's wider commemorative landscape.

Raising Awareness of Bordeaux's Atlantic Slave Trade
In April 1998, France's then prime minister Lionel Jospin (1998, online) used the official slogan "Tous nés en 1848" (All of us were born in 1848) to commemorate the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of France's definitive abolition of slavery.Jospin quoted what he called the "felicitous phrase" (belle formule) in a ceremony focused on the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher.Jacques Chirac's presidential address conveyed the same message (Frith 2013b, 231).This prefigured 2007's so-called "Wilberfest" honoring William Wilberforce, Britain's best remembered abolitionist, on its bicentenary of abolishing the slave trade (British slavery and subsequent "apprenticeship" did not end until 1838) (Gwyn 2012).The significance for Chirac and Jospin of associating 1848 with abolition is that it appeared to absolve the French republic of responsibilitynot least for reparationsinstead laying the blame on the Ancien Régime and leaving the past resolutely behind.Choosing to memorialize the moment when France supposedly lived up to its universalist ideals and recognised a common humanity, regardless of race, was widely regarded as erasing the historic and socioeconomic legacies of French slavery.
In May 1998, 40 000 people took to the streets of Paris to protest against the apparent silencing of the memory of French slavery itself, and of enslaved people in liberating themselves.All were not created equal in 1848.Colonialism continued, as did the sense of white French superiority, not least among abolitionists.The widely held view at the time was also to assume formal equality and expect emancipated people to prove themselves worthy of the freedom France had benevolently bestowed upon them (Cottias 1997).Yet they were hard put to overcome the well-established fact that "liberty was associated with whiteness, bondage with blackness," as enshrined in the 1685 Code Noir (Vergès 2005, 263).
France's official praise of abolition without reckoning with slavery itself prompted the Bordeaux resident Karfa Diallo to create the organization Diverscités, a play on the words "diverse city" and "diversity."The small group spent a dozen years campaigning unsuccessfully for a monument to slavery and to rename Bordeaux streets linked to slavers, before winding up in 2010 (Cody 2009;Valognes 2013).Diallo believed that the opening of the Musee d'Aquitaine's slavery exhibit in 2009 was as far as Bordeaux's municipality was prepared to go (Rousset 2010), but later resumed his activities as the founder of Mémoires et Partages, which offered walking tours on slavery, racism and colonialism, among other events.As one of several anti-racist collectives (see CMO 2017), relations with Bordeaux's municipality have been difficult at times, leading to accusations that the town hall does not do enough to communicate and include them in its initiatives (Fonteneau 2020).
Following France's 2001 Taubira law declaring slavery a crime against humanity, a French Committee for the commemoration of slavery was launched in 2004.Its goals included integrating the memory of slavery into national remembrance, developing teaching materials, supporting research, identifying relevant museum objects and creating an annual day of commemoration on 10th May.In a belated response to a commissioned report by the Caribbean poet Edouard Glissant delivered in 2007, France created the Fondation pour la mémoire de l'esclavage (foundation for the commemoration of slavery) in 2019.Alongside these developments, however, France passed a law in 2005 stipulating that schools should recognize colonialism's positive role overseas, especially in North Africa, prompting a national debate before President Jacques Chirac initiated its deletion from the statute books in 2006 (Araujo 2010, 78).
Both Bordeaux and the Musée d'Aquitaine have moved on since the "Bordeaux, Rhum et les Antilles"  and "Regard sur les Antilles" (a view of the West Indies) exhibitions in 1999-2000, in which slavery remained a marginal presence in a largely positive and even poetic portrayal of Bordeaux's commercial exchanges with its Caribbean colonies (Chivallon 2005).In 2018, a commission on the commemoration of slavery and the slave trade made ten recommendations for Bordeaux's future (Bordeaux.fr 2021).A new commission on the question was certainly necessary, judging by the flippant terms in which the president of a previous commission summarized the issues in 2006 (Tillinac, cited in Hazera 2006; pace de Cauna 2018), defending the ordinary (white) Bordeaux resident's "right to indifference" (Frith 2013a, 30).New recommendations included building a dedicated website, adding explanations to street signs named after slavers, creating a memory garden and commemorative statues, and renovating the square and bust of Toussaint Louverture inaugurated in 2005 across the Garonne river from the center.This was criticized at the time as an insult to his memory, compounding the fact that only a cul-de-sac had previously been named in his honor.Many of these recommendations were quickly realized, but the municipality's rather top-down approach, with limited external involvement, led to a range of criticisms from community groups.Tensions between Bordeaux's academics, curators and activists remained over how best to reconcile the work of history with that of memory (Bonin 2019).
Debates surrounding public memory can take place on different planes.Historical accuracy is often uppermost in academics' minds, for example, whereas activists are principally concerned with representations that can anchor their communities' sense of inclusion and belonging in the present.In a sense, these actors are talking past each other, hence recent interdisciplinary efforts to propose a common vocabulary (Bessone and Cottias 2021, 12).Artists can also help bridge gaps in shared understanding by emphasizing the relevance for the present of commemorating the past.In June 2020, just as the statue of the seventeenth century slaver Edward Colston was being pulled from its plinth in Bristol -Bordeaux's twinned citysix street names commemorating slaving families were updated with explanatory signs.Marik Fetouh, Bordeaux's then deputy mayor for equalities and citizenship, dismissed this as a coincidence at the time, emphasizing instead the link with an outdoor anti-racism exhibition held in partnership with UNESCO (Fonteneau 2020;Wang 2019).In 2021, the city also supported a photography installation linked to the new street signs, thereby encouraging public engagement as part of a program of cultural events (Falibois 2021).This is an important indicator of what makes such memorials significant.Their purpose lies not only in accurately representing the past but also in "empowerment and transforming black subjectivities" (Schütz 2020, 63).The initiatives took place in the city center, near a life-size bronze statue of Marthe Adélaïde Modeste Testas (1765-1870) by the Haitian sculptor known as Filipod (Figure 2).
Inaugurated in 2019, Modeste Testas' statue is significant because it represents an enslaved African woman.The accompanying plaque explains that she was a domestic and sexual slave to François Testas, a Bordeaux merchant who renamed her, kept her on his plantation in Saint Domingue, fathered two of her children, and freed her on his death in 1795.It goes on to relate that her grandson, François Denys Légitime, was briefly president of Haiti, before putting her extraordinarily long life in the context of the 150,000 Africans enslaved as a consequence of Bordeaux's triangular trade.The plaque ends by paying homage to these victims and lists those present at the statue's unveiling, including Bordeaux's mayor, a descendant of Modeste Testas and an anthropologist involved in coordinating the project.Although critics generally approved of the statue's central location and remembering a specific individual with a known history, the choice of individual and the project's execution were both questioned.
Modeste Testas was an enslaved woman, but subsequently freed and given a significant acreage on St Domingue, which became the independent republic of Haiti in 1804.She returned there to live out her days, presumably with laborers working the land.There is no record of her taking part in the fight against slavery which convulsed Saint Domingue at the time (Diallo 2019).As an emancipated woman, her fate was not comparable to that of most enslaved Africans, who worked the fields in atrocious conditions and whose average life expectancy was consequently very short (Bonin 2019, 12-13).Some critics objected not only to her status but also that she is commonly remembered by her enslaved name and not her given name, passed down as Al Poessi.Others felt the statue was too small-scale to evoke any real emotion or sense of history, and that its inauguration was an embarrassingly modest affair.Though life size, the decision not to use a plinth was intended to make it approachable and relatable, but also invited the taking of selfies and other interactions some considered disrespectful and inappropriate, such as walking over the plaque laid into the ground.Overall, the critical consensus bemoaned a lack of ambition and commitment worthy of the importance of commemorating Bordeaux's slaving past (Bonnefoi 2021).This might have been avoided with a more inclusive and consultative memorial project, and more mutual understanding of the different but valid and complementary perspectives that people of color with lived experience of racism and expert historians of slavery would have brought to the task.
Since the statue was unveiled, the Bordeaux municipality's office for equality, diversity and citizenship has sought to consolidate the link between anti-racism and the collective memory of slavery.It has also highlighted this aspect of its shared heritage with Bristol, long unacknowledged in their time as twin cities (Chivallon 2005).The municipality's call for community associations to bid for funds as part of its May 2022 commemoration of slavery, the slave trade and their abolition was framed in terms of "a growing dynamism in Bordeaux's collective memory […] necessary because racism and discrimination are rooted in theories elaborated to justify the inhuman treatment suffered by millions of people" (Mairie de Bordeaux 2022b). 1 Bristol was made guest of honor at the 2022 days of remembrance to mark its 75th anniversary as Bordeaux's twin, and their shared slave-trading past was noted.This shows how the municipality now not only links contemporary racism to the legacy of slavery, but also makes explicit connections to Bristol's experience, specifically referring to the toppled statue of the seventeenth century slaver Edward Colston later in the document.This is clearly an attempt to harness "the capacity of commemorations to foster anti-racism" (Fleming 2017, 14).The Musée d'Aquitaine may well have some catching up to do here, as discussed in the next section.
As Bordeaux's then deputy mayor, Marik Fetouh (cited in Bonin 2019, 16) played a leading role in attempts to transcend divisive debates and move away from a perception that city initiatives were undertaken grudgingly (à reculons), towards a "calm" (apaisée) politics of memory.Pierre Hurmic was elected mayor for the Green party in 2020 after seventy-three years of conservative incumbents.His stated wish was to go beyond what has been done to commemorate slavery to date, characterizing it as rather "timid" (Hurmic cited in Lamant 2021, online).Plans included a review and extension of the work on street names to specify that slavery was a crime against humanity, and a centrally located public monument dedicated to the victims of slavery.As the next section will show, however, the danger remains that a "calm" politics of memory will work to contain it within conventional temporal and historical frames that manage Bordeaux's "reputational risk" without really addressing the legacies of slavery and colonial modernity, not least contemporary racism (Hubert and Block 2013, 9).

Atlantic Slavery's Racist Legacy
How to remember the suffering of the Middle Passage in a way that evokes solidarity and not pity (Gilroy 2000, 26;Cheah 2014, 79)? Paul Gilroy's aim in Against Race was to retrieve the project of modernity from the depredations of racism.This is so very difficult because, as we have seen, the European Enlightenment was built on the distinction between human and less-than-human colonized and enslaved subjects who, despite the Enlightenment's putative universalism, were not deemed worthy of enjoying the freedoms valued by "Western civilisation."Far from constituting the hoped for caesura, the experience of the Holocaust did not overcome this division; racism and anti-semitism persist because they are implicit in modernity (Gilroy 2000, 96).That is, they cannot be expunged from the project of modernity because they are irredeemably constitutive of it, as decolonial perspectives make clear (Mignolo 2011;Tlostanova 2017).
The Musée d'Aquitaine's director, Laurent Védrine (cited in Lamant 2021, online), has made his curatorial approach clear: "Co-production does not take place.A museum is created through expertise [Il n'y a pas de coproduction, un musée est fait avec une expertise.]"He evidently does not espouse new museology principles of collaborating with community groups, nor is his "a campaigning museum and an active supporter of social change and social justice," as the Liverpool International Slavery Museum's director described his own institution (Benjamin cited in Araujo 2021, 128).Védrine has responded to Anne-Marie Garat's accusations, made both in book form and in the pages of Le Monde newspaper, namely not clearly representing how black people came to reside in Bordeaux and downplaying the slave trade's role in a "golden age" of commerce (Védrine 2019;Araujo 2021, 112;Garat 2021).The specific exhibition panel Garat critiques, entitled "Blacks and people of colour in Bordeaux" (Noirs et gens de couleur à Bordeaux), has indeed been changed to clarify that there were both enslaved domestic workers and free people of color among their number.It outlines some of the methods used to control them and points out that they were not emancipated, even though pre-revolution French law forbade slavery on French soil.
From a census taken in 1777, Julie Duprat (2021) estimates that around five percent of Bordeaux's domestic servants were free or enslaved people of color.Numbers have been estimated at around 5 000 in the later eighteenth century (Semley 2020, 48).Employed by successful merchants who had made their fortunes from colonial trade, they would most likely have been working in the buildings springing up in the town center at the time, which continue to characterize the city's urban core today.As noted in the museum, the presence of enslaved people on French soil went against "the legal fiction that there were no slaves in France" (Palmer 2016, 46).A source of contention and court proceedings that turned on enslaved people being classed as "moveable property" under French law, this went to the heart of the sacrosanct right to private property as a core characteristic of colonial modernity.Unlike Nantes, Bordeaux did not continue with the slave trade when it first became illegal in 1814, but in 1848 its port commissioner publicly regretted the final abolition of slavery in French colonies (Saugera 2002, 24).The museum misses an opportunity to go beyond the mere reproduction of log books, which list enslaved people as chattel, to tell stories that restore their humanity, such as that of the pastry chef, luxury hotelier and entrepreneur Casimir Fidèle, emancipated in the mid-1770s (Duprat 2021).Given the type of colonial products being traded, there is also a great deal of scope to explore the links between France's colonies and the development of French gastronomy, for example (Noël 2020).This would begin to recognize how colonial slavery shaped Enlightenment tastes and culinary culture (UNESCO, no date).As it is, the museum underplays the obvious connection between Bordeaux's strong colonial commerce and slavery (see Figure 3).
The information panels introducing eighteenth century Bordeaux acknowledge the role of slavery while always putting the city's mercantile dynamism first, featuring titles like "Bordeaux: Gateway to the Ocean" and "Aquitaine's Eldorado."Without the slave trade, there would have been no slaves to grow the colonial products that made the city's fortunes, such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, indigo and cotton.In addition to the triangular trade, the labor of each cargo of enslaved Africans led to many direct trading voyages between Bordeaux and the West Indies (Saugera 2002, 15).The museum certainly acknowledges colonial links: An information panel notes that Bordeaux was France's most important colonial port on the eve of the revolution, noting that it was sending twice as many ships to the West Indies as Nantes or Marseille.However, it then goes on to say that the "West Indian colonies' demand for slave labor incited the shipowners of Bordeaux to develop the triangular slave trade."Specifying that the triangular trade amounted to less than 5% of the city's colonial ventures across the eighteenth century, and that Bordeaux grew rich on direct trade (en droiture) rather than slavery itself, appears designed to relativize or even minimize its role in slavery and, by extension, the dark side of the Enlightenment and colonial modernity.For example, a nearby information panel entitled "direct trade" emphasizes that "The main part (95%) of Bordeaux's trade with the West Indies was direct trade."In fact, the proportion of slaving expeditions from the port actually grew from 2.2% in the 1730s to 11.2% in the 1780s, coming to rival Nantes after the French revolution.Some critics of the exhibition have expressed disappointment at perceived attempts to "normalise" slavery and the presentation of African devotional items (Araujo 2021; Jean-Charles 2019).For example, a side room of the exhibition is devoted to putting the slave trade in wider context, tracing it historically to Mesopotamia and providing maps (some undated) of European and Arab slaving routes in East Africa, the Middle East and India, and across North Africa.This is in line with the tendency for French research and debate to frame the history of slavery in the plural, attending to internal African and trans-Saharan slavery alongside the Atlantic trade (Araujo 2010, 80;Le Figaro Histoire 2021).For example, an information panel discusses how; "Like many other civilisations, African societies practised slavery."A life-sized, mid-nineteenth century photograph of people in chains at Zanzibar's slave market is described as a "hub of the Arab slave trade," though it is mentioned elsewhere that after 1870, Bordeaux's merchants also bought enslaved Africans there.The label accompanying a model Wolof village notes that they were both "victims and perpetrators of the slave trade."Nearby, a model plantation is somewhat sanitized, empty of human figures.This approach fails to convey the industrial scale and intensity of Atlantic slavery compared to other forms, and to explain its role in colonial modernity.Overall, the evidence suggests that the museum is at pains to relativize and even minimize Bordeaux's historical, national and international role in the slave trade.What is more, much of the work done in the slavery exhibit to identify and call out racial prejudice is immediately undone in the colonial exhibition and in the adjacent rooms, entitled World Cultures.
The museum's layout seems to be designed to turn the page on slavery and its legacy before moving on to focus on Bordeaux's significant colonial commerce, as catalogued in the city's own colonial museum from 1901-1937(Zytnicki 2007)).As with France's commemorations of abolition in 1998, the Musée d'Aquitaine conveys the impression that slavery and its legacy are now in the past.The exhibit culminates in a room featuring extremely racist historical artefacts, labeled as examples of "colour prejudice" (préjugés de couleur) rather than racism (racisme) in French (but not in English), and a mural of smiling portraits of anonymous people of color interspersed with messages of tolerance and human rights (Figure 4).Inspired by the Black Achievers Wall in Liverpool's International Slavery Museum, Bordeaux's version differs in that none of them are named.Further, the close proximity of racist stereotyping seems to work against individualizing and humanizing black lives and black excellence (Moody 2020, 161-2, 168).The museum also fails to make the connection between slavery and continuing colonial exploitation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, built on the hard labor of newly colonized African and Asian peoples and a perceived mission civilisatrice (Conklin 1997).Instead, it displays aestheticized, decontextualized artefacts and racist imagery which is not labeled or presented as such.Together with the museum's curatorial approach, based solely on experts and excluding community dialogue, this could be cited as evidence of what Christine Chivallon (2015, 31) identifies as enduring "socioracial divides" where "the slave has entered the museum, yet the memory carried by his or her descendant has arguably been left at the door."By failing both to consult Afro-descendants and to connect both slavery and colonialism to contemporary racism, the museum has not grasped colonial modernity's enduring impact.
Having fought for France during World War II and been interned as a prisoner of war, the poet and future president of Senegal Léopold Sédhar Senghor (cited in Gilroy 2000, 92) dared to hope that black people would be recognised as fully human and that the Enlightenment's universalizing pretence might at last be realized; "it is thus, I thought close to the barbed wire of the camp, that our most incarnate voice, our most Negro works would be at the same time our most human."But this was not to be.In a speech to students in Dakar, Senegal, in 2007, the newly elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy would state that Africans had not sufficiently "entered into history" (cited in Agier 2008, 79), leading to widespread condemnation and a group of experts putting together a pointedly titled primer on African history addressed to him (Ba Konaré 2008).Sarkozy's speech unselfconsciously served up the same tropes of colonial modernity that Senghor hoped were in the past, namely that African peoples were underdeveloped compared to Europeans and in need of France's civilizing mission to make them part of historical progress and universal ideals (Satia 2020).
The Musée d'Aquitaine still reflects this racialised creation of colonial modernity, whereby " dominant groups could enlist the irresistible momentum of history on their side and treat their apparently anachronistic subordinates as if they belonged to the past and had no future" (Gilroy 2000, 57).This is made abundantly clear in the museum, which follows a linear, chronological pathway across no less than 600 000 years, from prehistory to the present day.On ascending to the first floor, visitors enter the slavery exhibit, followed by the galleries devoted to Bordeaux's colonial commerce.Off to the side of the main thoroughfare, in a series of plain, unadorned rooms, are ethnographical exhibits from Africa, Oceania and North America.There could hardly be a starker example of African and indigenous people's perceived timelessness and essentialised nature than this.Not only are they situated outside of the exhibition's main timeline, but they are also displayed in a markedly different spatiotemporal framing, which has been pithily described as: "Beyond Europe was henceforth before Europe" (McGrane cited in Gilroy 2000, 329).This reflects an anthropological view squarely derived from colonial modernity, whereby different racial and ethnic groupings are placed on a developmental continuum from the savage to the civilized, with Euro-America naturally representing the latter.
The Musée d'Aquitaine's "World Cultures" rooms are introduced by centering Bordeaux's colonial expansion and the "travellers, missionaries, sailors, entrepreneurs and administrators" whose collections made their way to the museum by "donation and purchase."The provenance of the artefacts themselves is principally addressed geographically in a panel questionably titled Le goût des Autres (a taste for the Other/the taste of Others) that ends with a passing reference to a "painful colonial history, founded on exploitation and domination."The only contextualization thereafter consists in undated, black and white photographs featuring warriors, thatched huts, barkcloth makers and traditional festivals, which present "primitive" cultures in an extremely stereotypical way (Figure 5).For example, Africa is treated as a single entity, with displays devoted to daily life, masks and musical instruments "presented according to a classification established by researchers in the late nineteenth century."The introductory panel, illustrated with a grass-skirted warrior brandishing a shield and a spear, begins with a series of negative, sweeping generalizations about "poor soils" and a "difficult climate," citing the 7 th century as the only specific date (linked to slavery) before going on to discuss "African Arts" as an undifferentiated whole.
A similar approach is also reflected in the main exhibition, which once again centers Bordeaux's port activity.For example, an aestheticised display entitled "Colonial Objets d'Art: Masks, statuettes, ivories, weapons" (Figure 6) provides more information about the collectors than any of the objects themselves.Situated after the room on racism, this imposing display sits near a racist advertisement showing white men in pith helmets enjoying a cool cola while caricatured black men in loincloths point at them in wide-eyed wonder.This artefact is neither problematized nor contextualized in relation to what the visitor has just experienced in the rooms on slavery and, if they took the detour, world cultures.There is no sign that the museum recognizes the Eurocentric dissonance and outright racism inherent in these displays.Any didactic impact that the room on racism might have made is immediately undone by jaunty displays of racist images, aestheticized objects, and timeless "Others."Instead, more could be made of the painting by Georges de Sonneville (Les Quais: Trois Nègres 1920-1922) depicting black African dockworkers in Bordeaux.Often former soldiers demobilized after World War I, they would be joined by students, traders and immigrant workers to make up the city's "black metropolis," principally in neighborhoods like Saint-Michel and suburban Talence (Semley 2020, 61;Fall 2011).The Musée d'Aquitaine does not appear to have learned lessons from its own room on racism, given its essentialising representation of non-European "Others", and even the inclusion of a shrunken human head in a temporary exhibition that ran from 19 th May 2021 to 6 th February 2022.Entitled Hugo Pratt, Lignes d'Horizon, the exhibition was devoted to an Italian cartoonist reportedly inspired by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling and Henry Rider Haggard's adventure stories, among others.Pratt's swashbuckling character Corto Maltese and his encounters with indigenous peoples across the world recall Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719 to huge success.Colonial modernity's archetypal man of action, Robinson Crusoe is a plantation owner shipwrecked while on a slaving expedition.Crusoe imposes order on his new home, domesticates animals, cultivates crops, faces up to cannibals and civilizes his own man Friday, who becomes his devoted servant.Wildly popular, it inspired so many castaway novels as to spawn its own literary genre, the Robinsonade.The myth of remote (is)lands ready and waiting to be "discovered" by European male adventurers has resonated down the centuries and continues to fuel stereotypes of non-Europeans as picturesque, simple peoples or wild savages isolated from European modernity.
The exhibition, wholly centered on Hugo Pratt's creativity, featured comic strips riddled with racist caricatures.For example, black mensometimes explicitly referred to as "savages"adorned with masks, ivories and skull necklaces, resist being arrested for slave-trafficking by a white man (who benevolently promises a fair trial).The comic strips are shown alongside selected objects representing different "geographies," without any regard whatsoever for their provenance or the people that made them (Pierre cited in Hakem 2018).Artefacts are thus displayed purely for their approximate resemblance to items featured in fanciful works of fiction, thereby associating a cartoon of a white man being burned on a cross by black warriors with a Maasai feathered headdress, for example.This exhibition strategy reached its apogee with a human "warrior head" from the Solomon islands, dated to the turn of the twentieth century, being displayed alongside stuffed animals, in order to illustrate Hugo Pratt's inspiration for an album published in 1962.In an era when museums are debating the ethics of displaying human remains, including ancient Egyptian mummies, the utter, abject dehumanization of the non-European "Other" was complete.

Conclusion
A curators' analysis of visitor comments refers to the perceived fear that the Musée d'Aquitaine's slavery exhibit would give the city a bad image, concluding reassuringly that this "reputational risk" had not in fact been realized (Hubert and Block 2013, 9).While incorporating slavery into Bordeaux's history, the museum fails to learn from its legacy and continues to exoticise, aestheticise and anonymise black bodies.Meanwhile, different political agendas are played out in public spaces.Some intervene in these debates to "denounce the persisting structures that maintain black individuals and other minorities economically and socially excluded" (Araujo 2021, 94).Others resist and seek to preserve the silence.The full ramifications of Bordeaux's slaving past for colonial modernity have not been understood or represented.Beyond simplistic dichotomies of guilt and innocence, accusation and repentance, the enormous significance of coloniality and slavery in constituting European modernity, not least the Enlightenment, have yet to be grasped and assimilated in Bordeaux and elsewhere.Only then can memory work be conducted on a basis of mutual understanding.
Change may come.Having laid simple wreaths in 2007, Bordeaux organized over twenty commemorative events from 10-23 rd May 2023 (Frith 2013a, 34).These included slavery-related talks and an exhibition of documents at the departmental archives, and film screenings at the Musée d'Aquitaine, whose bookshop is now better furnished with works on slavery (Richard 2023, 16a).The municipality has commissioned research into a possible "House against slavery," and made the link between slavery and racial discrimination (Mairie de Bordeaux 2023; see Moody 2020).More can be done; from rethinking the Musée d'Aquitaine's colonial, "World Cultures" and temporary galleries, through telling stories of Bordeaux's black residents, to showcasing how Bordeaux's muchadmired Enlightenment identity went hand in hand with enslavement (Semley 2020).To claim that Bordeaux's involvement in the slave trade was but a small cog in a vast system of industrial production is to neglect the system itself, and how it was constitutive of the European "mainstream," for want of a better word (Bonin 2019, 22).This is an imperative step towards mutual understanding of what is at stake in memory work.Further steps would be to amplify the voices and insights of minoritized academics in their fields (Fall 2011;Fleming 2017;Jean-Charles 2019), and to bring community representatives into the museum.Members of the Sandbach Steering Group, composed of young people from marginalized communities tasked with reinterpreting Liverpool museum collections associated with the slave-trading Sandbach family, sum up the value in this; "I think it's really important for people to acknowledge and be aware of, unfortunately, the really uncomfortable truths that lie behind their generational wealth, which is very evident in Liverpool […] It's not about necessarily blaming, or somebody having to, you know, go through any punishment."(Burnett-Charles and Ihiekwe cited in Liverpool Museums 2022, 15.21 & 17.01).

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. Racist soap advertisement from around 1910 against the backdrop of contemporary portraits in the Musée d'Aquitaine.Photography: Claire Sutherland, 2021.