On 1 May 1998, a statue created by an art student, Lisa Marcault-Dérouard, in honour of the abolition of slavery in 1848 was found desecrated on the quayside in the city of Nantes. It had been inaugurated six days earlier as part of the nation-wide celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the 1848 Abolition Act. Commissioned without the authorization of the municipal council by a group of citizen-led associations, the statue's illicit unveiling in the midst of a state-led ceremony was intended to alert Nantes's politicians to the need for a permanent memorial site (Chérel, 2012: 58). The violence subsequently committed against the statue represented a clear refusal on the part of an undisclosed sector of public opinion to engage with the memory of slavery, the statue having been knocked down from its standing position and its ankles re-shackled. Its creation and destruction forced the elected representatives, notably the then mayor and socialist minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, to recognize the necessity of creating a permanent memorial site to assist the city of Nantes in confronting the history of its slave past (Chérel, 2012: 58). After twelve years of negotiation between the municipality, citizen-led associations and the artists Krzysztof Wodiczko (a world-renowned artist now based in New York, but originally from Poland) and Julian Bonder (an architect originally from Argentina), the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery was inaugurated on 25 March 2012.

The realization of this memorial raises a number of important questions concerning the flexibility of republican discourse when confronted with histories that do not serve to glorify the French nation. Traditionally, the function of state memorialization has been to celebrate itself and its values (Barcellini, 2010: 210). In recent years, however, demands to commemorate historical traumas in which the French state has been directly implicated have meant that the ‘victim’, not the state, has emerged as the ‘moteur de la vie mémorielle française’ [‘driving force behind French memorialization’] (Barcellini, 2010: 216). The political response to this shift has been either to reposition the Republic as the symbolic champion of the victim's rights and/ or to place itself at a careful temporal remove from a past which now exists in ‘a world apart’ and defines ‘what we are in the light of what we are no longer’ (Nora, 1989: 17–18).