I expect that the controversy currently raging in the UK at the moment, about there legacy of slavery, will not have passed unnoticed in other countries. The dramatic toppling and defacing of statues and other public monuments is the kind of thing that secures headline treatment in the press the world over. Perhaps something similar is happening in other countries too. I have been thinking about these events over the past week and have been surprised by the trails along which this reflection has led me.
For some reason I was thinking earlier today about the work of Edgar Degas, whose painting I have long admired (especially as a pastellist). It came into my head that he might also have had connections with slavery in the USA. He came from a wealthy family, and his uncle and brothers lived in New Orleans where they ran a business that included insurance as well as the cotton trade. Edgar decided to visit the American family in 1872-3. This is reflected not only in some of his best portraits but also in his widely-reproduced study The Cotton Office. There is a possibility, perhaps, that he might have settled in Louisiana, as we know that he contemplated marriage at this time. In the event, he returned to Paris, although he remained involved in the family’s business fortunes, later helping his cousins to settle debts.
It is inescapable that the Degas family must have been touched by slavery, even if indirectly, through their cotton interests. His visit to New Orleans was many years after the American Civil War (1861-65), but the Southern states were still riven by the social, political and economic consequences of that struggle. The Francophone community in New Orleans (I gather) had close links with the Creole population, which remained largely French -speaking, and we know that Degas had several experiences of relations with this group during his visit. Social and economic life in the city would have involved negotiating the consequences of the former slave economy at every turn.
By coincidence, I was reading yesterday an interesting piece in Apollo magazine, about the history of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (Apollo June 2020, pp. 17-18.) I was struck by the fact that one of the early bequests (described as “the museum’s first major coup”), in the days when the collection was being established, came from Ralph Bernal, whose family had made its fortune in the West Indies, undoubtedly as slave owners on a large scale.
The dishonouring of statues and other monuments because the individuals commemorated in them had links with slavery, although perhaps it has has its value in stimulating discussion of the question, will hardly touch the problem to be addressed. The more I think about it the more it becomes clear to me that there is probably no corner of European culture that, to one degree or another, does not have roots in the slave economy. Purging our public spaces of statues is not a substitute for a more careful reading of our history, and an honest acknowledgement of the ground upon which our “civilisation” rests.