The Ministry responsible for Overseas Territories and the City of Paris announced Thursday September 21 the location of the future National Memorial to the Victims of Slavery, the construction of which had been promised on April 27, 2018 by Emmanuel Macron, on the occasion of the 170th anniversary of the signing of the decree to abolish slavery in the French colonies. Following a meeting held at the Overseas Ministry on Wednesday, the Trocadéro gardens, located near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, were chosen to host the Memorial.
In a press release, the ministry and the City of Paris underlined the “strong symbolic significance since it is a site where the Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed and signed in 1948 and where the museum is located of Man”, specifying that the Memorial “will highlight nearly 200,000 names of slaves freed in 1848 in Guadeloupe, Guyana, Reunion, and Martinique”.
The press release further specifies that the architectural work “will pay a universal tribute to the memory of the four million slaves of the former French colonies”, but also “to the memory of the millions of victims of trafficking and slavery throughout the world “. A competitive procedure must be launched by the State, in collaboration with the City of Paris, in order to award the site to “artists and landscapers”.
