black france

Rachida Dati


For the first time in French history, the cabinet includes almost as many women as men. Seven of the 15 ministers are women, among them Rachida Dati, a young lawyer and the daughter of North African immigrants, who will head the Justice Ministry.

Commentators said that Sarkozy, the son of an Hungarian immigrant, had made an important move in appointing Dati to the Justice Ministry.

“This is not an Arab in charge of Arabs, it’s a woman of North African descent running one of the most important ministries in the government,” said Yves Michaud, a French philosopher.

Source

Rama Yade, une jeune etoile montante dans l’equipe de Sarkozy


Femme, jeune et noire: 30 ans, la secretaire nationale de l’UMP charge de la francophonie Rama Yade est l’une des figures montantes de l’equipe de campagne de Nicolas Sarkozy, charg??e de porter haut les couleurs de la diversite.

Beau visage et grande allure, la jeune femme d’originie senegalaise, diplome de Sciences-Po et administratrice au Senat, vice-presidente du club XXIe siecle qui milite en faveur de la diversite, fait partie des douze femmes promues dans les instances du parti le 6 mars 2006. Read more.

Slaver voyages

Here are some brutal facts about the French slavers:
– Slaver voyages: France, 4,200; British North America/United States, 1,500.
– Slaves transported: France 1,250,000, British North America/United States,
300,000.
– Slaves delivered to: French West Indies: 1,600,000, British North America/United
States, 500,000.

In the history of the Atlantic slave trade, the French turned four times as many Africans into slaves as the Americans did, they used them far more brutally, and French slavers not only got a head-start on Americans, they continued the slave trade — legally — until 1830, long after the rest of Europe had given it up. And they kept at it clandestinely until after the U.S. Civil War. France officially abolished slavery in its colonies only 14 years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and then only under pressure from slave uprisings. Get the facts

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L’ AURORE was built in 1784 in France by the shipbuilder H. Penevert. The length amounted to 31 m, the width to 8.7 m, the displacement to 500 tons at 4 m draught. From France ships of this kind sailed to the coast of Angola, in order to take over 600 slaves for the journey to Haiti, at that time French colony Saint Domingue. From there colonial goods were bought, usually sugar, and transported to France.

Taking Care of Business in France part 2 – Sandrine Joseph – Arts & Talents

Sandrine Joseph supports the arts in France:

En cr??ant @rts & Talents en 2000, j???ai r??alis?? un r??ve, celui de pouvoir r??unir deux domaines contemporains : les technologies du web et les cr??ations de mes amis artistes. Aujourd???hui la floraison de sites, de blogs, de portails artisitiques et culturels montre la force incroyable que peut d??gager l???union des arts plastiques et num??riques. Visit the Arts & Talents website today.

Guillaume Guillon Lethiere – Black French painter

In 1980, an unsigned painting acquired by the Rhode Island School of Design a few years earlier, was identified as the work of the once-popular French artist, Guillaume Guillon Lethiere who was born in 1760. Although such attributions are rarely newsworthy, what should have made this one more interesting to us as Americans than even the French themselves is information concerning Lethiere’s ancestry that has only recently come to light.

Like Alexandre Dumas, the author of Man In The Iron Mask, Lethiere was a man of color. (I am hoping that the presence of this painting in Rhode Island will prove providential. For, RISD was founded by Providence’s art community to celebrate the prize which one of their members – the African American Edward Bannister – won for landscape painting at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876.)

Biographical material on Lethiere always mention he was the illegitimate son of a colonial official from the French West Indian island of Guadalupe. However, it was not until 1977, in a five-volume work on Ingres (who had been a student of his) that Lethiere’s mother was described as a mulatto. Judging from the portraits Ingres did of him, however, she was probably more Caucasian – no doubt, a quadroon like so many of the mixed blood women of the French colonies whether here in New Orleans or des Antilles, whose sway over their white masters had almost become legendary by the end of the 18th century. Read about his life here.