{"id":263142,"date":"2023-01-03T08:15:02","date_gmt":"2023-01-03T08:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=263142"},"modified":"2023-01-04T08:29:21","modified_gmt":"2023-01-04T08:29:21","slug":"nyt-why-are-the-french-so-racist-as-to-point-out-that-victor-hugo-wasnt-black","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=263142","title":{"rendered":"NYT: Why Are the French So Racist as to Point Out That Victor Hugo Wasn’t Black?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Sailer \u2013 The Unz Review Jan 1, 2023<\/strong><\/h1>\n

From the New York Times<\/em> news section:<\/p>\n

Victor Hugo Statue Takes a Prominent Place in France\u2019s Debate on Race<\/a><\/p>\n

After a restoration darkened the hue of a statue at the birthplace of the French writer, complaints ensued \u2014 then vandalism.<\/p>\n

By Catherine Porter
\nDec. 31, 2022<\/p>\n

BESAN\u00c7ON, France \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Over the years, the colored bronze began to fade, turning to brown and green, until the mayor\u2019s office recently hired an expert to do a restoration.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cwoke\u201d ideas about racial injustice \u2014 what the French call \u201cle wokisme.\u201d<\/p>\n

The city hall\u2019s 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 \u201csimple bronzes.\u201d The comments rolled in, some positive, others critical with one focus \u2014 the color of Hugo\u2019s skin.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve gone from Victor Hugo to Morgan Freeman,\u201d wrote one commentator.<\/p>\n

This being the New York Times<\/em>, 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<\/em> subscribers want their articles to be blandly reassuring.<\/p>\n

But I quickly found a picture and it\u2019s a doozy. From News in France<\/em><\/a>, here\u2019s the statue before and after its colorization:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But you can\u2019t show a picture like that in the NYT<\/em> because it would be counter-Narrative.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s the late sculptor with his original version:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But here\u2019s what it looked like after it was recently colorized:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Mr. Sow, who was often called the Auguste Rodin of Senegal, died in 2016. A reporter from the Besan\u00e7on newspaper called B\u00e9atrice Soul\u00e9, Mr. Sow\u2019s widowed partner in Dakar, Senegal\u2019s capital.<\/p>\n

She agreed that the restoration was flawed, saying that the statue \u201clooks like a Black Victor Hugo, which was never Ousmane\u2019s intention.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a later interview with The New York Times<\/em>, Ms. Soul\u00e9 said that perhaps she spoke too freely. \u201cIt was a sentence I should never have spoken,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd it let off a powder keg.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am fascinated by how the reporter from the New York Times<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

What did Victor Hugo actually look like? Did he have \u201clight-brown skin\u201d?<\/p>\n

\"\"Wasn\u2019t there a famous 19th French bestseller author who was part black from Haiti?<\/p>\n

Yes. Yes, there was.<\/p>\n

But \u2014 and follow me closely here \u2014 that writer wasn\u2019t, technically speaking, Victor Hugo, author of the The Hunchback of Notre Dame<\/em>. It was, instead, Hugo\u2019s friend and rival Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So, by process of association, that must mean Hugo was sort of a mulatto too.<\/p>\n

Except, he wasn\u2019t. In contrast to Dumas, here\u2019s an 1825 painting<\/a> of Hugo at age 23:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Am I accusing the New York Times<\/em> of having gotten Hugo and Dumas a little bit confused?<\/p>\n

Right-wing politicians accused the city\u2019s Green party mayor of literally trying to paint her politically correct views onto a French hero.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust how far will #wokisme and stupidity go?\u201d Max Brisson, a senator with the center-right party, Les R\u00e9publicains, wrote on Twitter.<\/p>\n

National radio and newspapers picked up the story.<\/p>\n

The town hall\u2019s switchboard was flooded by so many furious calls it was shut down.<\/p>\n

Two nights after the town hall\u2019s initial Facebook post, masked men vandalized the statue, repainting Victor Hugo\u2019s face \u201ca beautiful white color,\u201d as they called it online, adding that it was now \u201ctruly French, truly from Besan\u00e7on.\u201d On the photograph they took of their work, they added a Celtic cross and the words \u201cwhite power.\u201d<\/p>\n

In English. Even in France when it comes to a French literary titan, protesters write their slogans in English for the American news media\u2019s cameras.<\/p>\n

Unlike in the United States and other Western countries, statues in France were never toppled after George Floyd\u2019s 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 \u201clook at all of our history together with lucidity.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, many high-profile intellectuals, academics and members of Mr. Macron\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are in denial of our colonial history,\u201d said Fabrice Riceputi, a historian in Besan\u00e7on who specializes on the country\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

These rightwing racists are trying to cover up the fact that Hugo\u2019s grandparents were born in the colony of Haiti.<\/p>\n

Oh, wait, let me check Wikipedia first. Huh, what do you know? That was Dumas, not Hugo.<\/p>\n

Never mind.<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At what point does wokeism devolve into sheer stupidity and dishonesty?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":263148,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[38,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-263142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Race","category-The_Media"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=263142"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":263151,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263142\/revisions\/263151"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/263148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=263142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=263142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=263142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}