The issues of political responsibility, moral recognition and material reparation have come to the forefront of public attention several times in recent decades, spurred by a series of controversies surrounding legal intiatives and commemorative acts. Among these, one can list the 2001 “Taubira” law, recognizing the Atlantic slave trade and slavery as laws against humanity, the demands for colonial reparations made in 2003 by Haitian president Jean-Betrand Aristide, the 2004 and 2010 measures prohibiting, respectively, the ostentatious display of religious symbols and the concealment of the face in public places (interpreted as laws against the Islamic scarf), the 2005 law requiring high-school teachers to highlight the “positive role of the French presence abroad,” the increased attention given to the lack of recognition and the administrative mistreatment of indigenous soldiers who fought in the French army during the First and Second World Wars (such as the Senegalese sharpshooters), and the fiftieth anniversarys of the end of the war in Algeria celebrated in 2012.

The topic of reparation has often been brought up in these debates, but, rather than serving to clarify matters, it has served as a catalyst for exposing their political and ideological ambivalence. Thus, the term has been used not only in a symbolic but also in a material sense to refer both to the gratitude that formerly colonized countries should display toward their colonizers and the latter's responsibility for the damage caused by their subjugation and exploitation of the former. Moral and pecuniary worth, market and symbolic value, sacrificial and civilizing ethics are thus inextricably entangled.The idea of colonial debt, innervated by the symbolism of recognition and reparation, exhibits a considerable degree of plasticity being associated with symbolic notions (moral and political) incompatible and incommensurable with a given monetary value, yet it persistently translates into the claim for material reparations that alone can express the historical and ethical enormity to which it refers. Moreover, the reversible nature of the concept proves a fertile ground for the literary imagination.

The political and literary genealogy of the colonial debt can hardly be overestimated. Originating in the messianic pathos that, in the nineteenth century, binds together the ideologies of nationalism, progress, vitalism and the civilizing mission, the relationship between France and its colonies is shaped, both implicitly and explicitly, by the rhetoric of public figures, especially writers and politicians such as Victor Hugo and Victor Schoelcher.