Remembering

Throughout Paris and I'd imagine France, too, there are monuments everywhere.  Clearly, there's a real emphasis on remembering the past.  Like, even in one site, like the Luxembourg Gardens, there are numerous statues - not just busts, but full on, life-sized statues.  Monuments and statues can be a form of hero worship, which I and many of my peers are trained to resist.  It's reflexive.  But, really, doesn't it depend on who the heroes are?  I don't know any of my folks who'd be like, "That Malcolm X statute... Whatever..."  Nope. 

Recently monuments to the Confederacy have come under renewed scrutiny from a range of parties.  Not just civil rights advocates, but the likes of New Orleans' Mayor Mitch Landrieu, among others.  It's easy for us to be complacent about all this, I think there are lot of people who realize, hey, the window could be closing on our opportunity to beat back these most overt methods of normalizing of white supremacy.  Check out Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny  for a sober, well-reasoned argument for why this country (I mean America) could very much move in the completely opposite trajectory from the wave we thought we were riding upon the election of Barack Obama, even if assertions of a post-racial society were very wrong.

So, here are just a few pictures of various monuments around Paris.

Joan of Arc

 

 

Saint Sulpice

Alexander Dumas, writer of over 250 novels, including Three Musketeers and the Count of Monte Cristo, both greatly inspired by his father

Pope Jean Paul II, outside of Notre Dame Cathedral

Random and unnamed to me, but probably important to many.  

Luxembourg Gardens

The Abolition of Slavery in France (twice!), adjacent to the statue of Alexander Dumas and fils.  A statute to the the father of Alexander Dumas is proposed for the site as well.

The Pantheon.  Word has it that France sought exhume Josephine Baker from her grave in Morocco and inter her here, making her I believe the only foreigner to be interred in the Pantheon.

The Arc De Triomphe