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The largest will happen this spring, when the Réunion des Musées Nationaux opens its Exposition Napoléon in Paris.Īs a Black woman of Haitian descent and a scholar of French colonialism, I find it particularly galling to see that France plans to celebrate the man who restored slavery to the French Caribbean, an architect of modern genocide, whose troops created gas chambers to kill my ancestors.įirst, some history: In 1794, in the wake of the revolution that transformed France from a monarchy into a republic - and after an enormous slave rebellion ended slavery on the French island of Saint-Domingue (today, Haiti) - France declared slavery’s abolition throughout its territory.

The year 2021 is being hailed by many museums and institutions in the country as the “Year of Napoleon” to commemorate France’s biggest tyrant, an icon of white supremacy, Napoleon Bonaparte, who died 200 years ago on the island of Saint-Helena on May 5, 1821.ĭozens of events are planned in his honor. After a year in which statues of enslavers and colonizers were toppled, defaced or taken down across Europe and the United States, France has decided to move in the opposite direction.