A Lost Black Lady Liberty? — Frederick Douglass in Paris
One year after the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York in 1886, America’s greatest Black statesman finally arrived in Paris. Born a slave in 1818, he had quite literally broken the chains of slavery to do so.
Like generations of distinguished African American artists, authors, and activists who followed in his footsteps, Douglass’s sojourn set the stage for Paris as a place where African Americans could finally enjoy “the sense of just being a human being,” in the words of James Weldon Johnson. A courageous Black activist and composer, Johnson first arrived in Paris a decade later, in 1905.
There in Paris, Douglass discovered an entirely different form of Black freedom — and even a Statue of Liberty utterly different than the one he had left behind in New York Harbor.
Initially Douglass was distressed to discover that American-style minstrel shows (white performers in black-face makeup) continued to spread their musical poison, even in France: “In addition to these Ethiopian Buffoons,” Douglass lamented, “there are malicious American writers who take pleasure in assailing us, as an inferior and good for nothing race of which it is impossible to make anything.” So Paris was far from a paradise.
And yet here in Paris, he insisted, “the masses of the people both in France and in England are sound in their convictions and feelings concerning the colored race” and hence “just and charitable towards us.”
That distinctly different sense and sensibility shook Douglass to the core. “Could I have seen forty years ago,” he muses, “what I have now seen, I should have been much better fortified to meet the arguments against the negro” at home.
Douglass was, of course, far from the first American visitor to note the vast differences in race relations he experienced in the streets of Paris.
As explored in detail in my article on “The First Black American Hero in Paris” (as well as in articles on other aspects of French versus American slavery in this series), the complex and conflicted history of racism, of slavery (and of slavery’s abolition) in France took an entirely different trajectory than they had in the U.S. or U.K.
Prior to 1776, when the French spoke of Americans in Paris they meant “gens de couleur libres” — free men of color from France’s fabulously wealthy sugar colonies in the Caribbean. Buoyed by immense wealth, many led lives of educated sophistication and fashionable extravagance.
Hence by the 1880s, even as America was busy desecrating the legacy of Reconstruction in the dawning era of Jim Crow segregation, domestic terrorism, and lynchings, newly-arrived gens de couleur libres such as Douglass himself were still free to walk the streets of Paris, to dine its most famous restaurants, and to be welcomed by its most famous hotels. In the words of one astonished American reporter,
“This extraordinary spectacle of the negro in society one sees also in France and throughout the continent, but it does not appear so strange as in England, the most socially conservative country on the face of the earth. In Paris, for example, one may frequently drive through the Bois de Boulogne behind African women handsomely gowned, lounging back gracefully in their elegant carriages. It is no uncommon sight to see a colored child carried in the arms of a white nurse. White women have married black men and forfeited no social standing in Paris, as, for instance, the white wife of the negro artist, Tanner [Henry Ossawa Tanner of Pennsylvania who moved to France in 1894].
She is received not only in bohemian Paris, but in social Paris as well. But most extraordinary of all, she has an entree, as the wife of her husband, which she would not have without him. Tanner is feted and sought for just like any other genius: one hears remarks now and then that he is a negro, but much the same as if the speaker had designated him as an Italian or a Russian.”
Alas it was already too late for Douglass to meet the visionary who had first conceived of the Statue of Liberty as massive monument to human freedom. The great French Abolitionist Édouard René de Laboulaye had passed away just a few years prior to his Statue of Liberty’s completion. But by his own description, Douglass did arrive in Paris just in time to meet another eminent French Abolitionist: “a venerable and highly distinguished member of the French senate, M. Schoelcher, the man who in the final hours of the Revolution of 1848 drew up the decree and carried through the measure of Emancipation to the slaves in all the French Colonies.”
Still serving in the French Senate, and now over eighty years of age, Douglass proudly reports that Schoelcher was also busy writing a life of Toussaint, “the hero of Haitian Independence and liberty.”
It was Schoelcher who showed Douglass a very different Statue of Liberty than the one he had seen while steaming out of New York Harbor toward Paris:
“A splendid testimonial of the gratitude of the Emancipated people of the French Colonies is seen in his house in the shape of a figure of Liberty in Bronze breaking the chains of the slave,” Douglass exclaims.
This astonishing work of art was, historians assert, a scale model of a very different French Caribbean statue of liberty: presented to Schoelcher as a gift for his years of leadership in the abolitionist cause.
But an alternative Statue of Liberty was not the last of the surprises Douglass encountered in Shoelcher’s presence:
“The house of this venerable and philanthropic senator has in it many of the relics of slaveholding barbarism and cruelty,” he reported grimly. For Douglass, who was literally born a slave (of mixed-race ancestry, on what he presumed to be his father’s plantation), such “relics” were all too familiar.
“Besides broken fetters and chains which had once gulled the limbs of slaves, he showed me one more collar with four huge prongs placed upon the necks of refracting slaves designed to entangle and impede them in the bushes, if they should attempt to run away. I had seen the same hellish equipment in the States — but did not know, until I saw them here, that they were also used in the French Islands.”
As Schoelcher knew, the French Sugar Empire in the Caribbean had invented and perfected many of the most brutal and hideous forms of torture and oppression later adopted by the American Cotton Kingdom (all within the formerly-French Territory of Louisiana).
But had Douglass even seen (or even known of) the broken chains that French abolitionists had placed at our own Lady Liberty’s feet back in New York harbor? Chains first forged — and first broken — in the workshops of Montmartre? After all, that’s where the Statue of Liberty was first cast and assembled by Loulaye’s inspired artist-friend Bartholdi (at Laboulaye’s explicit request).
Apparently not. Confronted by the Caribbean Statue of Liberty, Douglass makes no mention of our own Lady Liberty’s broken chains during his viist to Paris. And no wonder. For as we have learned in a previous posting (see “Lady Liberty in Paris” for details), the massive pedestal upon which Lady Liberty was placed in New York harbor effectively screened those same broken chains from the public view, except from above. Hence it’s entirely possible that, as he steamed out of New York toward France in 1886, Douglass could never have seen them.
To add insult to injury, Liberty’s pedestal had been built in part with subscription monies raised, penny by penny, from Negro contributors.
Similarly, one might argue that the American ideals upon which Lady Liberty now rests screens the decisive role that French slavery and French abolitionists like Schoelcher and Laboulaye played in American history from our sight.
Millions of visitors to Liberty Island learn about the French artist Bartholdi; and nearly all of them know the story of Ellis Island by heart: yet few, if any, ever learn the names of the great French freedom-fighters, such as Laboulaye or Schoelcher, without whom our Statue of Liberty might never have been created — and without whose courage human slavery in both France and America might never have been ended.
As the old saying goes, “Every pedestal is also a prison.” For all its colossal stature, the pedestal that supports our own Liberty sometimes seems similarly confining, and no less fragile — as Frederick Douglass above all knew well.
Yet as the contemporary American author Dave Eggers deftly points out in his magnificent new children’s book, “Liberty’s Foot” (2017), New York’s Statue of Liberty still faces out to sea, eastward toward France — just as the 1/3 replica of the Statue of Liberty that occupies an island in the Seine River in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower faces west toward the United States.
Better yet, as Eggers again emphasizes, Lady Liberty’s enormous right foot is clearly raised in a walking, striding position.
For Liberty itself is forever restless. Forever pushing forward. Forever on the move.
For Americans in Paris, just as Frederick Douglass once discovered, the arc of freedom still bends toward France.
