Black Lives Matter in Paris 1771 and 2021: Monuments Made, Unmade, and Not Made

This article reads the contemporary monument conflicts connected to the Black Lives Matter movement in France alongside the erection and destruction of fictional monuments in a bestselling utopian novel from three centuries ago: Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s’il en fût jamais (1771). The article throws light on how contemporary BLM interventions in the cityscape respond to still unresolved issues regarding the meaning of liberté, egalité, and fraternité in relation to colonialism, nationalism, and race; examines the discursive mechanisms behind the history of slavery becoming notoriously unremembered in France; and, in conclusion, considers the unrealized utopian potentiality of Mercier’s novel in relation to the most recent projects to memorialize slavery in Paris.