In 2018, I visited Nantes, France, with my wife, nearly 260 years after my 5th-great-grandfather Antoine Pavageau and his brother Simon left to help their father rebuild their fortune in Sante Domingue, present-day Haiti. Besides curiosity about seeing the place where my French ancestors had come from, I wanted to see the International Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery.
The monument itself is imposing. On the banks of the Loire River, it was a re-creation of a slave ship, over a half-mile long. Entering the museum, which is built underground, was like entering the belly of a slave vessel. The names of the more than 1,500 slave vessels that left Nantes, their destinations in the New World, along with the number of slaves transported in each vessel, were memorialized along the path to the museum.
When we think about the Atlantic slave trade, French involvement is often overlooked. Although 40% of all French slave ships left from Nantes, the city is barely mentioned when slave ports are named. More than 550,000 enslaved people were transported to the Americas by ships from Nantes. There may be collective amnesia about Nantes’ involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade that extends into this century. Some Nantes natives we talked to knew nothing of the memorial.
The Atlantic Slave Trade was a vicious institution of international commerce for over three centuries. First, material and fabrics from Europe were shipped to Africa. They were then traded for slaves captured in Africa. These slaves were transported across the Middle Passage for sale in the Americas. The money from the sale, or slaves themselves, was traded for products of the New World: rum, sugar, tobacco, coffee, indigo and most importantly cotton. These goods were then traded and sold in Europe to complete the vicious cycle. This process fueled the entire Industrial Revolution and generated much of the wealth America and Europe hold today. Estimates for the U.S. alone are as much as $25 trillion in wealth that was generated from slavery.
By any standards, Nantes appeared to be a prosperous city. Nantes largely escaped the ravages of mass bombing during WWII, with about a thousand casualties during the several days of bombing in 1943. With large buildings neatly bordering its long, tree-lined avenues and clean tramline, and the perfectly preserved Norman castle, Nantes radiated the feeling of old wealth. The castle’s museum showed some of the wealth of the early slave traders, who were pictured in portraits along with their slaves. It was an easy jump for me to realize that the wealth of the city had been generated by planters like my 5th-great-grandfather Antoine and his brother Simon Pavageau, who had become wealthy in Sante Domingue using slave labor to grow coffee and indigo.
My 5th-great-grandfather and uncle amassed enormous wealth during nearly 30 years of owning two plantations near present day St. Marc, Haiti. They received reparations from their losses during the Haitian Revolution totaling about $2 million in today’s dollars; one-tenth of the value of their two plantations, a wharf and saline (for creating salt) they lost. Ironically, the reparations were used to benefit my 5th-great-grandfather’s free children of color in New Orleans. I do not have an accurate figure on how much of their wealth returned directly to their father in Nantes to help him rebuild his fortune.
In the same way I learned of my personal history, the developed countries need to be constantly reminded of how much wealth they have stolen from Africa. Their standard of living and much of their wealth were literally built on the humanity and resources they plundered during and after the Transcontinental Slave Trade. The International Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery and museums like it are necessary to keep the developed world from getting collective amnesia about how their lives were enhanced by slavery and exploitation.
My visit to the museum reminded me that my grandmother Olga Hartman née Pavageau had always had a potted coffee plant in her homes. Was this coffee plant a longstanding tradition to honor our ancestors? Or a sad remembrance of the institution that gave so much money and the pain of being refugees after the Haitian Revolution, and suffering of slavery and its aftermath inflicted on our family of color? Was this to honor the slaves whose labor had given us so much, or just a coincidence? My grandmother passed away long before I got the chance to ask her.
My trip to my ancestors’ home, Nantes, and its Monument to the Abolition of Slavery, gave me a window into a reality that I had never considered. It’s a reality that many French and Americans also seem not know, or to ignore.
