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Untimely Vision 111 if also shared with the mostly mulatto class of former gens de couleur libres. Property rights remained sacrosanct, and there was no corresponding redistribu- tion of land or wealth to former slaves. Despite suffrage, a moralized citizenship effectively helped to intensify old social stratifications, new processes of prole- tarianization, and a strict racial taxonomy. The suddenly disavowed legacy of slavery continued to weigh heavily on everyday life now organized around civic equality but suffused by fear and resentment among emancipated blacks and dis- enfranchised whites.16 Schoelcher spent the rest of his life calling on the French state to realize fully the integrated program for emancipation that he had envisioned for the Antil- les. During the Second Empire, while regressive policies were applied in these colonies, Schoelcher lived in exile in London, where he was a vocal critic of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. After returning to France, he represented Martinique under the Third Republic, first in the National Assembly and then in the Senate. Within parliament and the administration, where he served on the Commission du Travail Colonial, he struggled fruitlessly to persuade the French state that legal abolition had to be accompanied by full citizenship, socioeconomic equality, and proper integration into the republic.17 But despite this failure of abolition to truly emancipate Antilleans, Césaire declared Schoelcher a “clairvoyant” figure and “great initiator” whose “audacious act” remained immediately relevant to contemporary colonial politics.18 According to Césaire, Schoelcher anticipated the French state’s attempt in the postwar period to maintain a formal tie with colonized peoples by restructuring the imperial rela- tionship. He wrote: “To evoke Schoelcher is not to invoke an empty ghost [vain fantome]. It is to recall . . . a man whose every word remains an explosive bullet. That his project is incomplete is only too evident.”19 Césaire regularly declared 16. Myriam Cottias, “ ‘L’oubli du passé’ contre la ‘citoyenneté’: Troc et ressentiment à la Marti- nique (1848 – 1946)” (“ ‘Forgetting the Past’ for ‘Citizenship’: Barter and Resentment in Martinique [1848 – 1946]”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 293 – 313; Mickaëlla Perina, Citoyenneté et sujetion aux Antilles francophones (Citizenship and Subjection in the French-Speaking Antilles) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 16 – 28. 17. See Victor Schoelcher, Polémique coloniale (1882 – 1886) (Colonial Polemic [1882 – 1886]) (Fort-de-France: Désormeaux, 1979). On the specificity of “colonial democracy” in Martinique under the Third Republic, see Fred Constant, La retraite aux flambeaux: Société et politique en Martinique (Paris: Éditions Caribéennes, 1988), 27 – 66. Note that Schoelcher also supported Victor Hugo’s federalist vision of an “États-Unis d’Europe.” 18. Césaire, “Hommage à Victor Schoelcher,” 233 – 34. 19. Césaire, “Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition,” 27. Césaire referred to Schoelcher as the figure whom Grégoire had prophetically called forth to continue the still incomplete work of abolition