Must the Duc d’Orléans Fall? The Mysterious Survival of French Imperial Monuments in the Age of Rhodes Must Fall

This paper tries to answer a negative: Given France’s long and distinguished history of political iconoclasm, why has there been so little enthusiasm in metropolitan France for removing statues commemorating enslavers and imperialists since the Rhodes Must Fall movement sparked a now decade-long, global wave of statue-toppling in 2015? While activists in overseas departments and territories, as well as in former French colonies, did take on colonial monuments, the few militant groups that sought to challenge monuments in the metropole failed to gain traction. The example of Carlo Marochetti’s equestrian statue of the Duc d’Orléans, which originally stood in the center of colonial Algiers and is now located in the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, suggests some of the factors at work.

Jennifer Sessions is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She is a historian of modern France and its colonial empire, with an emphasis on settler colonialism and colonial cultures in French Algeria. Her first book, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Cornell, 2011), was awarded the French Colonial Historical Society’s Boucher Prize. She is currently researching two books about French settler colonialism in Algeria: a microhistory of a 1901 revolt by Muslim Algerian colonial subjects in the colonial village of Margueritte and a study of the French equestrian statue that stood in the center of Algiers from 1845 to the end of the colonial period.