[by Jean GIOT (professor emeritus, University of Namur)]

He sometimes spoke to her about the Archives Commission and the shameless falsifications that were being perpetrated there […] She did not feel the abyss opening up beneath her feet at the thought that lies were becoming truths.

G. Orwell, 1984

Anecdote? No. Symptom. Or revealing.
The memory is recent: in 2021, at the Villa Medici, censors demanded the removal of the XNUMXth century “Indian tapestries,” which offer an exotic image of the often imaginary fauna and flora of South America, as well as an African diplomatic mission in Brazil. “No racism, no caricature: it is an amazed description of the beauty of an unknown world, and “a magnificent testimony to the participation of the black continent in the beginnings of the globalization of the world,” writes J. Delaplanche ^{[1]Cancel culture infiltrates the Villa Medici, La Tribune de l’art, 3/11/2021.}. The alleged motive for carrying out the expurgation was that they bore the stigmata of a colonial imagination, to be eradicated. This circumstance had a prelude. You will read the detailed chronology, commented on by Didier Rykner, in La Tribune de l'art ^{[2]"Au Nègre Joyeux" is not a racist sign, 18/11/2017; "Au Nègre Joyeux" sign: Paris City Hall rearranges history in its own way, 7/1/2020. Below, the expert quotes, the municipal administration and D. Ryckner are taken from the second article.}.
A sign, "Au Nègre Joyeux", was located in Paris, on the Place de la Contrescarpe, affixed to the facade of a building. E. Atget (1857-1927) photographed it (ill.1).

His photograph shows the melancholy trembling of a female figure at the first-floor window, awnings, the sign and panels bearing the words "Au Nègre Joyeux" and "cafés": the composition of a finery on the white façade. These wall tapestries signify a property and an address to the passer-by in the city. Five generations knew them. In our turn, let us look at the sign (ill. 2).

Projections of dirt (ill.3), as heroic as they were anonymous, were inflicted on him. 

It was demanded that it be removed on the alleged grounds that it depicted a black man, a servant or slave, serving a woman of the upper middle class (otherwise Madame du Barry). It was given to the Carnavalet Museum in exchange for its restoration.
The report of a historical expert commissioned by the City confirmed in 2018 the true data. The woman in the image, wearing a headdress and apron (waitress's outfit), brings a coffee pot, sugar bowl and cakes on a tray. The black man wears:

the attire of the aristocrats of the old regime […] This representation of a black gentleman belongs to the iconography of free blacks in the colonies of the Antilles […] Created in 1897, 50 years after the abolition of slavery, the sign of the “Joyful Negro” thus represents a free black according to codes of representation belonging to the era of slavery. A white napkin is tied around the neck of the black gentleman, highlighting his laughing face, as well as his gaze coming out of the field of the painting in order to directly challenge the passer-by […He] brandishes a glass carafe containing a yellow alcohol and points with his hand to the cup. He thus clears the table of this carafe in order to allow the tray to be placed […] the waitress |…] sketches a smile.

The expert concludes: 

This historic piece of furniture has a strong heritage interest. Its exhibition in public spaces must be accompanied by mediation aimed at passers-by

and to recall that there has been an evolution in the use of the word negro since that time. On this point, a brief survey in the Frantext database reveals that its use from 1832 to 1921 was descriptive (color) or technical (geography)^{[3]except, perhaps, the expression "speak Negro", which is not relevant here.}In short, a scene of conviviality and urbanity in a place of passage.

In 2019, the administration concluded that, "not being in line with the anti-racist values ​​upheld by our times and our city", this sign, "with a shocking and undeniably racist title", "could not remain in the public space". A plaque would be affixed to the building, which would mention its existence in particular in these terms:

Here, the man dressed in a suit dating from the 18th century^th century, who is about to serve himself "joyfully", is a parodic representation inverting this common image of a black servant. Such iconography testifies to the racist clichés and stereotypes prevalent at the end of the 19th century

Assuming that this were the case, why should a testimony of a past social state be banished from current intelligence? But, as we have seen by comparing the extracts from the historian's report and the administrative glosses, this case is not proven, in any case. Certainly, it is frequent that misinterpretations occur in the understanding of old documents, but here, after expertise, there is no excuse. For walkers, such misinterpretations could even be prevented, by means of the affixing of an explanatory note: one would thus have honored a civic public with the level of compulsory education.

But administrative prose passes of its own accord to the admission of what it does by projecting it onto the sign: it attributes to the latter the fact of being a racist "inversion", when it is this very prose which inverts the scene and the brief account of the "services" which is there. To this end, the mental contortion is even more singular than the denial of history: since the fact is that the image is not what one would have wanted it to be, a public display will mean seeing in it the pejoration, by the opposite, of what one would have wanted it to be. "Undeniably" racist, all contradictory reality ousted. Thus are made alternative realities.

In the service of a reversal of the aggressor (the iconoclast whose impulse has foolishly soiled) into the attacked (the soiling is given as the ulcer of a retrospective anti-racism): let us erase the violence of vandalism and impute the responsibility for it to the "parodic" vileness of a happy image. Claiming to be in search of harmony in urban space, we thus maintain uncivil divisions.

And we are relentlessly attacking, in detail, "Paris, capital of the 19th century^th century" (W. Benjamin): eliminate 

from the Parisian streets everything that can in one way or another recall the second half of the 19th century, which we see daily in the disappearance of street furniture

observes D. Rykner. Even if one had to disguise with pernicious scenarios this past which had managed to embellish the city, and, locking oneself in a mental prison which one colors with moral grandeur, one becomes infatuated with rectifying imaginary eras.

So many erasures, long and variously persistent, arouse suspicion. For finally if a Negro, in the imagery, can be given as a connoisseur of coffee and rum, happy says something other than gourmet: the administration sees there a "shocking title". Would this brandished carafe pass for bacchic and would the housemaid become a putative maenad? Would some anxiety of miscegenation haunt a racialist policy? ^{[4]This remark owes a lot to Fr. Rastier, whose rereading was invaluable to us.}

The story has an additional episode, at the level of professional education. Because, in times of epidemic, the Faculty experiences contagion. On 22/1/2022, we read in the FigaroVox ^{[5]See source} This example of a subject supposed to assess whether students “have the skills necessary to access medical training”:

In a museum, we see a sign of an old 18th century chocolate factory with a black servant serving his white mistress. The name of the chocolate factory is " the happy negro". What do you think about it?

https://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/la-nouvelle-reforme-des-etudes-de-medecine-est-elle-une-catastrophe-pour-toute-une-generation-d-etudiants-20220122

Let's assume that this is not an 18th century chocolate shop, but a 19th century coffee shop.^th : a concern for an exact anamnesis is not in season everywhere. Let us also allow that the inversion of the scenario illustrated by the image does not testify to the acuity of a clinical examination. It rather attests to the effect of a projective test. Starting with the ignorance of "the other in time" (Marc Bloch), to the point of making the original image its opposite. However, let us leave it, since the test refrains from presenting this original document. 

Sticking to the substitute artifact submitted to the candidates' imagination, let us only consider the biases exposed by this "test", which affect its nature.

And let us examine the relationship established with the student subjected to the test: the question carries (anti)racist connotations inducing a moral obligation to consent or not – which is undoubtedly not conducive to alleviating the suffering of the candidates.^{[6]See source}. There is a contradiction here between the statement (the question evokes a sensitivity, to be tested, to racism or anti-racism) and the exercise (the question practices the ignorance of otherness). Because the question has something threatening, to verify that the candidate today reaches the level of right-thinking required to access, years later, a judicious professional exercise. How would a candidate be received who is capable of evoking the difference of times in current cultural dissensions? In short, a candidate able to interpret (assuming that he is given the leisure to do so). Therefore, to analyze the question itself.

Because the question exposes narrative and descriptive data (distribution of the roles of servant and mistress, and skin colors, in a fiction that typifies them) that induce and even prescribe a conformity of response behaviors. This question exposes at the very least a risk of only putting ideological attitudes into interactions, that is, an arbitrariness and a bilateral distrust likely to pervert the test. From such distorted maps, what can we hope for?
Let us hope with Freud that, however extensive it may prove to be, a delusion is also a healing process.^{[7]Photo credits: ill.1 (Atget): La Tribune de l'art, 7/1/2020; ill. 2 and 3 (sign and dirt): La Tribune de l'art, 18/11/2017.}.