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The article explores the place of reparations for slavery in the contemporary politics and culture of France and the French-speaking Caribbean. Considerable attention has recently been paid to the recent decision of CARICOM leaders to set up a reparations commission, but similar questions relating to slavery and its (financial) afterlives have also been raised (and remain equally unresolved) in the Francophone world. In a press conference in Dakar in October 2012, François Hollande answered questions about the subject: "La réparation", he claimed, "elle n'est pas que morale, elle est aussi de savoir ce que nous voulons faire ensemble." (Weider, Thomas. "Couacs entre l'Elysée et Matignon sur les traites négrières." Le Monde. 14 October 2012). In the wake of these comments, legal action was launched in France by the group CRAN (Conseil représentatif des associations noires) against the Caisse des dépôts, itself accused of profiting from compensation paid by Haiti to the French state from 1825 onwards. The article draws on speeches by Sarkozy and Hollande as well as recent publications by the CRAN in order to locate reparations for slavery within the wider geopolitical, historical, and memorial context of the Francosphere. In conclusion, it will analyse one of the few cultural artefacts to address the question of reparations for slavery, the controversial 2011 comedy Case départ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes as its starting point a symbolically empty site in the French commemorative landscape – the plinth in the Panthéon to where Toussaint Louverture's remains may have been transferred had plans to pantheonize him ever been realized. It argues that the implications of this emblematic absence at the heart of official memorial practices in France are at least twofold: not only does this empty site reflect the persistent and systematic silencing of slavery and the enslaved in national commemorations (traditionally focused instead on abolition), but also, somewhat paradoxically, by avoiding any clear orthodoxy in formal processes of remembrance, it has permitted the opening up of possibilities for a range of alternative practices that have encouraged recognition of what Édouard Glissant dubbed the “nomadic,” “diffracted,” and plural memories of slavery. Drawing on Marcus Wood's recent study The Horrible Gift of Freedom (2010), the article suggests that national commemorations in France tend systematically to remember abolition whilst forgetting slavery. Having explored this analysis in the light of sites such as the Panthéon itself, the focus then shifts to the alternative memorials relating to slavery imagined by the artist Lubaina Himid in her work “What Are Monuments For? Possible Landmarks on the Urban Map.” Her reflection on the potential for politicians and citizens to collaborate actively in creating memorials and monuments allows a concluding study of two locations – Bordeaux and Nantes – where over the past decade different processes of commemoration have emerged, and where there have been dynamic, controversial, innovative, and, at times, highly constructive efforts to remember slavery and abolition in civic space, not least in the cities’ museums. The article concludes with a discussion of the distinctive project of a Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, a site whose ambition endeavours to reject any reduction of slavery to the histories of abolitionism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]