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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Public Culture 112 that Schoelcher’s act of emancipation was “at once immense and insufficient” — revolutionary but ever unrealized.20 He emphasized the immensity of a single act that suddenly transformed a population with the legal status of animals into humans, which allowed them to burst onto the world stage as historical actors.21 But he also cautioned that abstract formal legal liberty without economic security could not ground real freedom. According to Césaire, these newly enfranchised subjects quickly learned that “true emancipation is not that which is decreed, but that which man conquers for himself, that it is not behind them, but before them, and that it is up to them to prepare for it, in communion with the people of France, in the luminous wake of 1848.”22 Césaire here seeks not to domesticate the memory but to mobilize the legacy of 1848. His claim that abolition was limited and incomplete was not a criticism of Schoelcher but a critique of current conditions from the standpoint of his pre- decessor’s unrealized program for revolutionary social transformation and human emancipation. The 1848 abolition act, according to Césaire, “repaired the past and prepared the future.”23 For Césaire, Schoelcher remained a “present man” who possessed all of the “qualities required by the seriousness of this moment,” one in which “the colonial problem has been posed” but “remains to be resolved.”24 On the eve of decolonization, Schoelcher’s legacy was especially charged as the prospect of colonial overcoming and political emancipation by restructuring the imperial relation again presented itself. At a “moment when throughout the world the [colonial] question is no longer posed in academic terms, but with . . . machine gun fire . . . the great merit of Victor Schoelcher is . . . the present relevance [actu- alité] of Victor Schoelcher.”25 Seeking to transform Schoelcher from a national fetish into a vital force, Césaire reminded a Parisian audience gathered to cel- ebrate the hundredth anniversary of slave abolition that “it would be useless [vain] to commemorate [Schoelcher] if we had not decided to imitate his politics.”26 We that Grégoire had initiated during the French Revolution. Aimé Césaire, “Discours d’inauguration de la place de l’abbé Grégoire, Fort-de-France, 28 décembre 1950” (“Speech at the Place de l’abbé Grégoire, Fort-de-France, December 28, 1950”), in Oeuvre historique et politique (Historical and Political Work), vol. 3 of Oeuvres complètes (Complete Works) (Fort-de-France: Desormeaux, 1976), 429. 20. Césaire, “Discours prononcé,” 415. 21. Césaire, “Discours prononcé,” 413 – 15; Césaire, “Hommage à Victor Schoelcher,” 233. 22. Césaire, “Discours prononcé,” 415. 23. Césaire, “Discours prononcé,” 413 – 14. 24. Césaire, “Hommage à Victor Schoelcher,” 235; Césaire, “Discours prononcé,” 411. 25. Césaire, “Discours prononcé,” 411. 26. Césaire, “Discours prononcé,” 411.