Loose-Limbed

The Vichy regime had toppled the original statue erected in his honour, unable to come to terms with the fact that one of the nation’s military heroes was born a slave in Haiti, and chose to bear his black mother’s family name over that of his French-born father. The vanished statue had taken almost seventy years to replace, a new monument celebrating general Dumas having been inaugurated a month previously. It represented a massive pair of broken slave irons.