Last week, the monument sat on a roundabout in Bagneux, in the southern suburbs of Paris. Today, the partially destroyed facility is barely recognizable. Solitude, the monument of the municipality dedicated to the eponymous mulatto woman and to the slaves who entered the resistance during the colonial era, was burned down on the night of June 29 to 30. The memorial, a creation of the artist Nicolas Alquin, was set on fire and partially destroyed during the riots caused by the death of young Nahel, killed in Nanterre by a policeman.
Reached by telephone on Tuesday, the sculptor Nicolas Alquin was moved by the destruction of his work, an order from the town inaugurated in 2005. “It’s very sad, it’s humanly very sad”, he said. , deploring an indiscriminate attack on the public monuments of the Republic. “I don’t see why we would symbolically attack such a memorial,” added the artist, whose studio is located in Bagneux.
However, the person concerned does not express any resentment towards the demonstrators. “They probably didn’t realize what they were attacking,” wants to believe Nicolas Alquin. “I don’t take it personally. A sculpture is standing, it marks the public space. Mechanically, it also serves as a natural outlet, like a rock in water,” he observes. Before adding: “The violence is running out of steam, while the culture lasts.”
Marked by the destruction of the sculpture, Nicolas Alquin also said he had a lot of trouble “vis-à-vis the children” of the town. “Each year, we met with elected officials and schools to read poems at the foot of the memorial and ensure the transmission of the memory of the people who rose up against slavery”. According to the artist, the City of Bagneux filed a complaint following the degradation of the work. On June 30, Marie Hélène Amiable, PCF mayor of the town, deplored “unacceptable acts” following “degradation on public space”, without explicitly mentioning the fate of Solitude.
The statue, composed of three parts, was made by Nicolas Alquin from cast iron elements, as well as with Iroko wood, an African tropical essence. “I had gone to Ivory Coast to recover the wood for the sculpture, obtaining the authorization of the local sorcerer for the ritual felling of the tree”, explains the artist. Could the facility ever be retrofitted? “It could be done, but I don’t know if the town hall will have the necessary budget, if there is a desire for the monument to live again or to make it exist in another way”, he specifies again.
The mulatto Solitude (c. 1770-1802), also known by her first name Rosalie, was one of the figures of the Guadeloupe revolt of Louis Delgrès. Solitude takes up arms against the French forces charged with restoring slavery to the island. Captured, she died hanged on November 29, 1802, the day after her delivery. Nicolas Alquin’s sculpture in Bagneux is the first monument in the metropolis dedicated to the fighter against slavery. Installed on avenue Henri-Barbusse, when it was inaugurated, the work was moved to the Schweitzer roundabout in 2015, during road works. More recently, the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo inaugurated a statue dedicated to Solitude, in May 2022. A third monument, finally, is in Guadeloupe.