In Nantes, France’s largest slave port, the descendant of a slave-trading family has joined forces with a man whose ancestors were enslaved to help repair the enduring legacy of slavery from the grassroots up.
It’s late morning on a windy day in early May on the quayside in Nantes, western France. Cloudy skies promise rain. But an 18-metre high wooden mast, overlooking the Loire river, stands out like a beacon.
Known as the Mast of Fraternity and Memory, it’s a memorial to the estimated 550,00 enslaved Africans who were shipped from Nantes to the Americas and the Caribbean as part of the transatlantic slave trade between the 17th and 19th centuries.
Dieudonné Boutrin, a 61-year-old activist whose ancestors were enslaved on the overseas French territory of Martinique, and Pierre Guillon de Princé, a descendant of Nantes slave traders, call it their “baby”.
“We chose a ship’s mast because without ships, no one would have been transported… and crushed by colonial slavery,” says Boutrin, tapping the sturdy pole like an old friend.
The mast doesn’t just look to the past. “It’s a symbol of the fraternity we still need to build,” says 86-year-old Guillon de Princé.
Both men insist they’re “not responsible for the past”, but faced with the legacy of slavery in France – namely growing racism – they do feel a “responsibility for the present and the future”.
The project was also nourished by the vision of US rights activist and preacher Martin Luther King Jr.
“He dreamed that the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners would be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” Guillon de Princé says.
“Someone has to finish that dream.”
Listen to this story on the Spotlight on France podcast:
‘I’m not asking for forgiveness’
Near the river, thousands of metal plaques set into the ground at the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery list the names of the many ships that transported Africans into slavery.
One of them is Guillon.
Guillon de Princé knew from childhood that his family had profited from slavery. They organised voyages to Saint-Domingue – modern-day Haiti – transporting enslaved Africans across the Atlantic during the late 18th century.
“It wasn’t kept secret. At the time I thought it was a thing of the past, just a quirk in my family tree,” he says.
But four decades of activism with a Catholic development charity and human rights groups made him more aware.
“I felt that a flagrant injustice was being committed against these people of colour, and couldn’t help but draw a parallel between the rise in racism and the increasing visibility of foreigners in our society. So I felt a need to act, but I didn’t know how to go about it.”
He began looking deeper into the family archives. One of their six ships, L’Espérance, left Nantes on 24 March 1769. Records show that of the 370 Africans aboard, 58 died during the crossing, either through illness or because they threw themselves overboard.
During 18 campaigns between 1766 and 1788, around 4,500 Africans were transported on his family’s ships. But Guillon de Princé says he doesn’t feel a sense of shame.
“I’m not asking for forgiveness. I have no reason to. I’m not guilty of anything, but I’m apologising because I feel a moral responsibility for belonging to a family that engaged in this activity. That’s all.”
Pressure to forget
Boutrin’s route to the subject couldn’t be more different.
When he arrived in Nantes from Martinique four decades ago, aged 18, he knew nothing of his heritage.
“Back in the Caribbean, nobody talked about slavery. There was unease. I was taught at school that our ancestors were the Gauls. Frankly, do I look like a Gaul?”
Once in Nantes, he began to fully understand the scale of France’s role in slavery: 1,381,404 African people were forcibly transported on French-flagged ships to the Americas and Caribbean between 1551 and 1875, making France the third-largest slave-trading nation after Portugal and Britain.
He remembers being told repeatedly to let it go.
“People said, ‘forget it, it’s the past’. I was angry, but I turned that into something – working towards living well together, towards sharing our interconnected history.”
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Unlikely partners
The two men met in 2021 and began leading public tours together at Nantes’ slavery memorial, their unusual team drawing in the crowds.
Boutrin had set up an association in 2016, Coque Nomade, to “break the silence” around slavery through cultural projects on the themes of memory, history of the slave trade and its legacies. With Guillon de Princé, the group decided to make the mast a centrepiece and encourage other cities around the world to build their own.
The project took five years and faced numerous hurdles. Boutrin says the concept had support, but local political figures questioned whether he was the man to lead it.
“I was asked to hand the project to a white person,” he says. “As if a black person wasn’t capable of thinking and organising a project.” But Boutrin, a former trade union rep, says he “already knew that a black person has to do two, four, six times more to be respected”.
Guillon de Princé also faced criticism for teaming up with Boutrin. “People tried to separate us,” he says with a grin.
They doubled down, more determined than ever to make the project happen. Frustrated with delays in securing financing, they each contributed €30,000 of their own money.
Then, when the mast was inaugurated on 18 April, Guillon de Princé made history with a speech no one had dared to give in public before.
“It’s a relief for me, as a descendant of a family of slave traders, to be able to apologise for the acts of my ancestors – Daniel Jean Guillon, 1720-1729, and Jean-Baptiste Christophe Guillon, 1745-1811 – in front of a representative of the Haitian people, Louino Volcy, Haiti’s ambassador to France.”
Reflecting weeks later, he says: “If communities are to come together, then it’s for the descendants of the executioners to make the first gesture, not the descendants of the victims.”
Towards a kind of justice
The two men are working to get those two sides around the “table of brotherhood”, like MLK envisaged, through their recently launched International Federation of Descendants of the History of Slavery.
The idea is to move on from the symbolic gestures France has made – recognising slavery as a crime against humanity via the 2001 Taubira Law, voting to officially repeal the 17th-century Code Noir that regulated slavery, opening memorials – in favour of concrete actions that will directly benefit communities.
Pushing for reparations is part of that, but Boutrin recognises the financial route is paved with complications.
“The Taubira Law was hollowed out precisely so that there would be no reparations,” he says, adding that previous attempts by descendants’ groups to pursue compensation in France have largely failed due to the country’s laws on statutes of limitation.
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So they’re taking a different route – reparatory justice.
But rather than following the usual process – recognition and apology followed by reparations and ultimately reconciliation – they’re turning it on its head and taking reconciliation as the starting point.
“We’re going to open a dialogue, sit down with the families who’ve inherited this history, because whether you’re white or black, we’ve all inherited a history we bear no personal responsibility for today,” says Boutrin.
The discussion is less about direct compensation and more about building and financing long-term projects. “Giving billions won’t solve the problem,” Boutrin says. But what can work is “putting programmes into place… to look at the cultural, social, economic and health consequences of slavery”.
He suggests scholarships, research funding and investment in France’s overseas territories – particularly Martinique and Guadeloupe, where he insists racial and economic inequalities rooted in the colonial period still shape everyday life.
“Békés” – descendants of white plantation-owning families in the French Caribbean – still wield much of the islands’ economic power today, he says. “You go to the petrol stations, it’s Békés. The banks, Békés. Supermarkets, Békés.”
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Anger over inequality and the cost of living in Martinique and Guadeloupe has grown in recent years, and Boutrin worries about where that resentment could lead.
“We see the rise of the extremes,” he said. “But these people have to know that France will never be majority white again – it’s finished. The younger generations are creating a new identity whether people want it or not.
“So it’s in all our interests to move towards living well together. Everyone can be part of the change that’s coming.”
Guillon de Princé and Boutrin addressed an open letter to President Emmanuel Macron last month, asking him “to initiate a discussion on reparatory justice in order to support the movement that we have set in motion”.
In a speech marking the 25th anniversary of the Taubira Law on 21 May, Macron said the “immense issue” of reparations had to be addressed, breaking decades of taboo on the subject at the official level – a small, but not insignificant, victory for the Nantes brothers in arms.
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A light around the world
Their efforts form part of a global movement to confront slavery’s many legacies.
Guillon de Princé was spurred on to make his apology after meeting members of the Trevelyan family from the UK, who co-created the lobbying group Heirs of Slavery after discovering their ancestors had owned enslaved people in Grenada.
John Dower, a film director descended from the Trevelyans, only became aware of his family history in 2016 through University College London’s research into the government compensation paid to British slave owners upon abolition.
In 2023, after wrangling within the family, he and his cousin Laura Trevelyan presented a letter of apology to the people of Grenada. The family also donated £100,000 (€116,000) to an educational fund.
Dower is active in the federation and describes Boutrin and Guillon de Princé as “very brave people… because it takes a lot of persistence and belief and guts to do what they’re doing”.
“There are some bumpy seas ahead,” he told RFI during the inauguration, citing potentially difficult discussions with the descendants of planters – some of whom were present. “But we will not progress if we don’t listen to each other.”
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Guillon de Princé is proud of what they’ve already achieved. Descendants of several other slave-trading families have recently contacted him, even if they’re still reluctant to go public.
“It’s not just two, but eight families who’ve reached out to us. There are already more of us. It’s more reassuring for them,” he says. “That’s what I’m counting on to bring them out of the woodwork.”
Back on the quayside, Boutrin points to the four lamps at the base of the mast. At night, they change colour every few minutes from one flag to another – France, Haiti, Senegal, Benin…
“The idea is that whenever human rights are violated around the world, or something bad happens, we’ll light up the mast in the colours of that country’s flag, in agreement with other participating countries,” he says.
Boutrin says 70 cities around the world are interested in mounting similar masts, including Bristol, Liverpool, Boston and Hanover.
“We want to light up the world in fraternity.”
This subject first appeared on the Spotlight on France podcast, episode 145.
