A Tale of Three Cities: Deconstructing the Cross of Gastines in Paris, 1571

Abstract

Today’s debates surrounding the preservation of monuments to Confederate generals and slave-owning merchants bear witness to the attempts of one era to grapple with the ethics of another. Proponents of removing these monuments insist that the past they commemorate is distant and, for that reason, wholly out of keeping with the present. Well over a hundred years––many of them steeped in the thinking of postmodernity––lay between the erection of the statue of Edward Colston in the British city of Bristol and its toppling during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020. Yet the distance between ‘then’ and ‘now’ has not always been measured in decades.