Steve Sailer – The Unz Review Jan 1, 2023
From the New York Times news section:
Victor Hugo Statue Takes a Prominent Place in France’s Debate on Race
After a restoration darkened the hue of a statue at the birthplace of the French writer, complaints ensued — then vandalism.
By Catherine Porter
Dec. 31, 2022
BESANÇON, France — The statue of Victor Hugo has loomed outside the city hall of his birthplace, situated on the Esplanade for Human Rights, since 2003, his white beard knotty, his black suit rumpled, his face cast down at his pocket watch.
Over the years, the colored bronze began to fade, turning to brown and green, until the mayor’s office recently hired an expert to do a restoration.
And that is when the seemingly unremarkable refurbishment of a statue turned into another controversy in France about race, identity and the importation of American “woke” ideas about racial injustice — what the French call “le wokisme.”
The city hall’s Facebook site announced the statue had been restored to reflect the original work by the celebrated Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow, who, it said, liked color and was not keen on “simple bronzes.” The comments rolled in, some positive, others critical with one focus — the color of Hugo’s skin.
“We’ve gone from Victor Hugo to Morgan Freeman,” wrote one commentator.
This being the New York Times, none of the nine photos accompanying the article show what the recent colorization that so many Frenchmen objected to looked like. That would be too interesting. Instead, NYT subscribers want their articles to be blandly reassuring.
But I quickly found a picture and it’s a doozy. From News in France, here’s the statue before and after its colorization:
But you can’t show a picture like that in the NYT because it would be counter-Narrative.
It appears that the foundry (or somebody) decided to colorize the two-decade old statue of Hugo to make it look like the African sculptor. Here’s the late sculptor with his original version:
But here’s what it looked like after it was recently colorized:
Mr. Sow, who was often called the Auguste Rodin of Senegal, died in 2016. A reporter from the Besançon newspaper called Béatrice Soulé, Mr. Sow’s widowed partner in Dakar, Senegal’s capital.
She agreed that the restoration was flawed, saying that the statue “looks like a Black Victor Hugo, which was never Ousmane’s intention.”
In a later interview with The New York Times, Ms. Soulé said that perhaps she spoke too freely. “It was a sentence I should never have spoken,” she said. “And it let off a powder keg.”
I am fascinated by how the reporter from the New York Times evidently chastised the widow for having previously given a clear, honest quote instead of appropriately obfuscated wokeness. Traditionally, reporters try to get interview subjects to give them truthful and vivid quotes. But in 2022, the NYT prefers that the people they interview try to walk back their truthful and vivid quotes when what they said undermines The Narrative.
What did Victor Hugo actually look like? Did he have “light-brown skin”?
Wasn’t there a famous 19th French bestseller author who was part black from Haiti?
Yes. Yes, there was.
But — and follow me closely here — that writer wasn’t, technically speaking, Victor Hugo, author of the The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It was, instead, Hugo’s friend and rival Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers.
So, by process of association, that must mean Hugo was sort of a mulatto too.
Except, he wasn’t. In contrast to Dumas, here’s an 1825 painting of Hugo at age 23:
Am I accusing the New York Times of having gotten Hugo and Dumas a little bit confused?
Right-wing politicians accused the city’s Green party mayor of literally trying to paint her politically correct views onto a French hero.
“Just how far will #wokisme and stupidity go?” Max Brisson, a senator with the center-right party, Les Républicains, wrote on Twitter.
National radio and newspapers picked up the story.
The town hall’s switchboard was flooded by so many furious calls it was shut down.
Two nights after the town hall’s initial Facebook post, masked men vandalized the statue, repainting Victor Hugo’s face “a beautiful white color,” as they called it online, adding that it was now “truly French, truly from Besançon.” On the photograph they took of their work, they added a Celtic cross and the words “white power.”
In English. Even in France when it comes to a French literary titan, protesters write their slogans in English for the American news media’s cameras.
Unlike in the United States and other Western countries, statues in France were never toppled after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 in Minneapolis and the global Black Lives Matter protests that ensued. President Emmanuel Macron of France rejected the idea, stating instead that the country would “look at all of our history together with lucidity.”
However, many high-profile intellectuals, academics and members of Mr. Macron’s government have viscerally rejected the progressive systemic theories on race, gender and post-colonialism as American imports that undermine French society, which considers itself colorblind.
“We are in denial of our colonial history,” said Fabrice Riceputi, a historian in Besançon who specializes on the country’s troubled colonial history in Algeria, which ended 60 years ago after a brutal war of independence that left 500,000 dead by French estimates, and 1.5 million by Algerian ones.
These rightwing racists are trying to cover up the fact that Hugo’s grandparents were born in the colony of Haiti.
Oh, wait, let me check Wikipedia first. Huh, what do you know? That was Dumas, not Hugo.
Never mind.
It’s neat if you say “wokisme” slow, in English, it comes out WOKE IS ME.
Okay, Antifa folks — WOKE IS ME! Might even look good on a poster.
Gods, that is stupid. The original is a real work of art – very expressively done, and tastefully coloured. The “restoration” is a grotesque.
I’d say that this is *past* that point of dishonesty and stupidity you ask about on the main page link of this article, Rixon.
Well – it’s quite a revealing spectacle, at least!
Hahahaha Did they actually expect competent work when they were stupid enough to commission a worthless African monkey?
Oh, this was a doozy, “Mr. Sow, who was often called the Auguste Rodin of Senegal”. I have seen some of Rodin’s work up close and bipedal street ape Ousmane Sow, who looks like a retarded cast member of Planet of the Apes and appears to be about half a generation away from the missing link, certainly wasn’t fit to eve scrub bird shit off Rodin’s work, so it is laughable snivelry to tout that buffoon as a great artist. The monkey should have been charged with vandalism for what he did to the Hugo statue.
Blacks are very unrealistic about their achievements; they even claim Blake, Beethoven and Shakespeare
Its all about phasing out whites with nonwhites. Thus history & culture must reflect & support that end. The yids & Commies want to abolish a white future, so naturally they will erase your white past as well. Diversity, Equality, Inclusion–code words for Nonwhite Supremacy. Innocent & innocuous sounding words that mask anti-white resentment, hate & genocide.
It seems less likely to me that the New York Times could have so crudely mistaken two such distinctive writers as Hugo and Dumas, than it was, a deliberately deceitful conflation on the journalist’s part, editorially sponsored and/ or approved.
Equally, the town council of Besancon in France, has engaged in a wilful provocation. It is inconceivable that elected officials there would not have been shown, at least, a digital projection of the statue’s intended colourization.
Statuary is now clearly integrated into the globalist strategy for cultural subversion in the West, via the commandeering of national identities. The dark masters seem to take particular delight in derogating the endurance of marble and bronze. History is bequeathed of art and bones. If you curate the art and finance the genetic research, history is yours to appropriate.
Large-scale public sculpture, is as a rule, very expensive to commission. Civic administration has been poisoned, over a decade and more, by Common Purpose entryism. Its functional apparatus has been restructured and its standing practices redefined. Expect to see an accelerating trend of local government financed art projects, celebrating the achievements of anyone but those native to the vicinity.
My home town was historically built around a fishing community. Our fisherman have toiled and died working the blue-green waters of the awkward tempered English Channel, since before the time of the Romans. From boyhood, I delighted in the pungent smells and in all of the odd-looking fishes, adorning the icy slabs at the local harbour when a fresh catch comes in. Yet, just a few years ago, the town council here commissioned a major sculpture, made from a crystalline stone, which stands at 23 foot tall, the majority of which is its stand but upon which, is perched, a figure of an Inuit warrior, holding a spear, with a dead seal at his feet. This statue is now on permanent display just a ten minute walk away from the traditional fishermen’s cottages and the centuries old fish markets. When the fisherman work the strait, the gigantic statue of the elevated eskimo stares at them in mockery.
It’s not even that the eskimo is an unattractive piece of art. It’s just in wholly the wrong place.
When I lived in Scotland, I used to enjoy watching the seals sunning themselves at low tide but there are no seals off the south east coast of England and of all the many different nationalities I’ve met here over the years, I have never yet met an itinerant eskimo.
@Umbra Bellator
You should read the article more carefully.
Ousmane Sow made the original – he was not in charge of the recent “restoration”; as his widowed partner also made clear.
The original is a (very) fine piece of work – and I don’t think it is unreasonably compared with Rodins.
Another thing that popped into my head:
This whole thing shows how hypocritical is the usual NYT claim that the achievements of blacks should be celebrated.
When someone literally mars an actual black achievement, a fine piece of high artistic merit, by colouring it in a hideous way; that’s apparently not a problem.
As Nico states it’s about getting rid of Europeans, they’re culture and their civilization. They will soon be teaching the generation after the moronic ‘Z’ that whites stole Europe from blacks. They’ll then go onto say that all people of light skin, in European history, were actually black. So expect in 20 years time that Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror etc were all negroes.
Just as they say Europeans deliberately damaged the faces of Sphinxes, to hide the black features account with the utterly insane Black Hebrews access Black Israelites thinking they’re of they’re who they say they are, they will probably Europeans again, to hate themselves, attach one another and prostate themselves in front of blacks begging forgiveness, wait….
Cultural Marxism, aka ideological subversion, has been on going in the West since they fled Germany in 1933. The first graduates of their ideology, of our if American universities at the end the 1930’s. This has been ongoing since.
There was a reason Stalin sent death squads out to remove them. And the answer is all one has to do is look at the insanity going on within the West today. Take control of the youngest generation and you win. How many generations, since they took control now, have they subverted?
You can’t change them. They’re unable to be reprogrammed.
Genocide is the only way to get European civilization back on it’s feet again. So essentially, what’s happened over the last 3 years has been a bit of an own goal by TPTB.
accidently heard a peice on the bbc a few days ago about Leeds, and its unoficial “capital of culture” bash.
the official bid lost
so how is the thing going to kick off? why with soca and calyposo plus no doubt twerking to boot!
to celebrate the “culture” of a city in northern Englansd surrounded by hills and dales
excuse the typos no time to edit!
Are they going to put a monkey-nose and juju lips on Michelangelo’s David next? Don’t be surprised…..
Well, you can’t deny that Socrates, the Brazilian soccer player was black.
Therefore the same goes for Plato, Aristoteles, Solon, Achilles and the rest of the pantheon teammates.
In fact, Zeus could easily be repainted to resemble nigga Victa Hugga booga presented in pictures here.
Europe will end like she started in the original Greek myth.