Nantes was the centre of the French slave trade from the 17th-19th centuries. Basically, it was the French equivalent of Bristol or Liverpool, which were the main ports for the slave trade in Britain. Ships from Nantes made 1,744 trips to Africa and brought over 500,000 enslaved people to the French colonies North and South America and the Caribbean, as well as some who were brought back to Nantes and sold in France. This represents about 40% of the total French slave trade.
Slavery was temporarily abolished during the French Revolution in 1793, but it was reintroduced under Napoleon in 1802. The slave trade itself actually remained illegal after 1802, but slave ships continued to sail from Nantes until 1831, when the slave trade was formally abolished. Slavery was not abolished again until 1848.
It's not usually immediately obvious that Nantes was a slave trade port, unless you visit the history museum in the
Château des Ducs de Bretagne. About 30% of the museum is dedicated to the slave trade. It's full of accounts from the wealthy slave traders who lived in Nantes, through their financial and personal records, as well as accounts from enslaved people themselves. There are also lots of artifacts from slave ships. It's rather moving and sometimes a quite emotional experience. I spent a whole day in this part of the museum once, and it still felt like I could go back several times and find new things that I missed.
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| Monument to the Abolition of Slavery |
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take any pictures when I was there, but there is also a second monument/museum in Nantes specifically about the slave trade, the Monument to the Abolition of Slavery. The monument opened in 2012 on the Quai de la Fosse, which used to be a branch of the Loire surrounding the Île Feydeau where slave ships would land with their human cargo. (The quai has since been filled in and the Île is attached to the rest of the city.)
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| Words for freedom in different languages on the monument. |
This post was inspired by the destruction of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in June 2020, but as far as I know there are no statues or monuments for individual slave traders in Nantes. However, all the old 18th-century “hôtels particuliers” in Nantes were built by wealthy merchants who were involved in the slave trade. One of them near where I lived was built by the Montaudouin family, who profited from the slave trade.
These are the most well known buildings in Nantes and the ones that the city is most proud of and promotes to tourists. The Théâtre Graslin, among others, was built at the height of the slave trade.
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Théatre Graslin in Place Graslin, not far from
Quai de la Fosse |
Everywhere you look, Nantes is full of reminders that the most prosperous period of its history was the result of slavery. But it also has a museum that explains its role in the slave trade, and a modern monument to the abolition of slavery. Does it completely engage with its past and attempt to decolonize the way it tells its history? I'm not sure. There is still racism in Nantes and in France (against black people, against Muslims, against Roma), so the situation is not perfect. But the history music and the Abolition of Slavery monument do seem to deal with Nantes' past more openly than we do in the English-speaking world.
