A Study of the Collective Memory and Public Memory of Slavery in France

This article aims to analyse the conditions of the institutionalisation and transformation of the official memory of slavery in contemporary France, and to theorise a new version of the memory which I will call public memory. This theorisation will be put to the test of an ethnographic study, which has been conducted over several years, on associations servicing people originating from the French Antilles, and spearheading the struggle for the remembrance of slavery.