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Untimely Vision 109 In its final issue Césaire invokes future historians who, he predicts, will criticize contemporary French democracy for having disavowed its radical Jacobin legacy and Antillean democracy for having disavowed the radical legacy of abolitionism. As a corrective Césaire conjures the spirit of his radical predecessor: “Perhaps the Martinican people of the future will say . . . it was these men then who through force of recognition veritably rediscovered the spirit of Victor Schoelcher.”13 Looking simultaneously backward and forward, Césaire seeks not simply to remember Schoelcher but to vitalize his project — to recognize it as still present and to make it so through such recognition. This also meant rescuing Schoelcher’s radical legacy from the recuperating effects of national commemoration. In 1948, soon after a law was passed that would transfer Schoelcher’s ashes to the Panthéon, Césaire was invited to join Léopold Sédar Senghor and Monner ville in a centennial celebration of the abolition of slavery. But his public interven- tion at the Sorbonne disrupted this official affirmation of enlightened republican tolerance. Rather than allow Schoelcher to be subsumed within the procedural tradition of parliamentary republicanism, Césaire identified him with a discred- ited tradition of revolutionary republicanism — with popular subaltern forces, including the metropolitan proletariat and the Antillean peasantry, whose insur- rections in 1848 ensured the abolition of slavery.14 Just as the social objectives of the 1848 Revolution in France were crushed by the republican bourgeoisie, the far-reaching sociopolitical possibilities opened by slave emancipation in the Antilles were obstructed by abolition as instituted. In each of these interrelated cases, radical emancipatory projects were foreclosed by more limited forms of republican liberty. Césaire sought to awaken his contempo- raries to these forgotten legacies. He was particularly concerned with redeeming 13. Aimé Césaire, “Hommage à Victor Schoelcher” (“Homage to Victor Schoelcher”), in Tropiques, nos. 13 – 14 (1945), reprinted in Tropiques, 1941 – 1945: Collection complète (Tropiques, 1941 – 1945: Complete Collection) (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1994), 230. 14. Césaire was referring to the popular unrest that compelled administrators in Martinique to abolish slavery before the formal emancipation decree had arrived from Paris. “Discours pro- noncé par M. Aimé Césaire” (“Speech Made by Aimé Césaire”), in Gaston Monnerville, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire, Commémoration du centenaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage: Discours prononcés à la Sorbonne le 27 avril 1948 (Commemoration of the Centenary of the Aboli- tion of Slavery: Speeches Made in the Sorbonne on April 27, 1948) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), 23 – 33. For a closer reading of this intervention, see Gary Wilder, “Race, Rea- son, Impasse: Césaire, Fanon, and the Legacy of Emancipation,” Radical History Review, no. 90 (2004): 31 – 58. Césaire also develops this argument in “Hommage à Victor Schoelcher” and “Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition de l’esclavage” (“Victor Schoelcher and the Abolition of Slavery”), in Victor Schoelcher, Esclavage et colonisation (Slavery and Colonization) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), 1 – 28.