Since the beginning of the protests against racism and police violence in the United States, many activists and left wing politicians are demanding the withdrawal of the public space statues featuring leaders of the former Confederacy of the south, defenders of slavery during the american Civil war (1861-1865).
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Wednesday, the president of the House of us representatives Nancy Pelosi spoke in favor of the removal of the Congress of the statues of the Confederate. A week earlier, the governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, had announced the upcoming transfer in a museum of the statue of general Robert Lee, at the centre of Richmond, the capital of the former Confederacy. Elsewhere, activists have not waited for the green light from the authorities to bring down the symbols of Secession. In Richmond, a statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederation, has been déboulonnée in the night from Wednesday to Thursday. The previous week, a statue of general Lee had been overturned in Montgomery, Alabama.
Recurring for decades, the debate on the removal of statues of figures from the Confederation occupies the front of the american political scene since the attack racist to Charleston in June 2015, during which nine Afro-Americans had been murdered in a church. If some see in the storage of these statues a work safety civic so as not to glorify personalities who fought to preserve slavery, many others are speaking out against what they see as the obliteration of a cultural heritage, and the memory of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers southerners who died during these four years of civil war. In August 2017, the explosive nature of this controversy has been tragically illustrated in Charlottesville after a militant right-wing rammed into the crowd at the wheel of his vehicle to oppose the removal of the statue of general Lee.
to Understand this cleavage in mortal requires to consider the origins of the presence of these statues in the public space american. “This paradoxical situation – since usually we set up statues to the victors and not the vanquished – is explained at the bottom simply enough : gradually, from the 1880s, the Confederates won the battle of the memoirs of the war of Secession,” says the historian Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, in an article published in 2017 in the journal of american studies Transatlantica.
monuments erected in the 20th century
Ruined by the conflict, the States southerners do not erect little monuments to their veterans in the immediate post-war period. The general southern Lee himself, when asked in 1869 the subject of a possible memorial on the site of the battle of Gettysburg, had opposed it, arguing that it would be “wisest not to keep open the wounds of war, but to follow the example of those nations who have chosen to erase the marks left by the civil war, and vow to forget the passions generated”. It was not until the turn of the century to see the monuments to begin to create a number.
In 2017, the american association Southern Poverty Law Center identified 700 monuments or statues to the glory of the figures of the Confederation in the public space, most located in the Southern States. After this count, the overwhelming majority of these monuments have been erected between 1900 and 1915.
“This momentum stems from several factors”, explains Farid Ameur, historian, specialist of the american Civil war. “It is an effort of memory brought by powerful associations of veterans and children of veterans, such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy. But it also reflects a resumption in hand of these States by the confederates, after a time of military occupation by the troops of the North and the failure of the reconstruction. It is also the symbol of the segregation regime is put in place in 1896 in these States to keep Blacks in an inferior position. These statues are a way to “add a layer”, edit that the old social order, adapted but prevails always.”
If the first memorials raised in the post-war period were monuments to the dead relatively neutral, those that appear in the 1910s and 1920s have a policy far more important, note James Leloudis, professor of history at the university of Chapel Hill, in an interview with the american newspaper Durham Herald Sun. Student specifically the case of a statue erected in may of 1924 in Durham, North Carolina, he noticed how the speeches at his inauguration are addressed to young generations and future-oriented : “The financial support and policies behind these monuments say very explicitly that they want to provide a legitimacy to the era of the laws of Jim Crow and the domination of the white man.”
A domination that is illustrated in the discourse, but also the aesthetic chosen for these statues, reminiscent of Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, citing an analysis by the historian of the american art Maurie D. McInnis : “Very characteristic of the monuments to the heroes of the Confederacy, the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee at Richmond, inaugurated in 1890, embodied the permanence of the white power slave : master foremen and surveillance patrols, indeed, it is the horse that the Whites needed the control of the private space and the public before the war. In addition, the choice of an equestrian statue to Lee accentuated the romance of the fighter and allowed the analogy with George Washington, also represented on horseback in Richmond.”
Mitigated at the time of the First world war, the construction of the monument will continue at a pace significantly less sustained, up to a resurgence observed in the 1950s and 1960s, under the double effect of the centenary of the conflict, and a reaction to the movement for the civil rights of African-Americans. Of a smaller magnitude than the first wave, this new period of revival of the south is, however, remarkable for the number of school baptised by the name of figures of the Confederation, and par the comeback of the flag confederate in the political symbolism.
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“Almost all of these monuments have been erected outside of any democratic process, African-americans have not had a voice in the chapter,” notes the american Society of history in a communiqué issued after the bombing of Charlottesville, in which it recommended a reconsideration of the place of these statues in the public space. “The debate is not whether to preserve or erase History,” says the professor of architectural history Dell Upton in an article published on the website of the Society of Architectural Historians. “The story is intangible and complex, and tells the story again and again as we move forward in time. The debate this is to know what aspects of the Story deserve to be celebrated in the space of civic pride.”
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