Memory of Slavery: the Marcel Chatillon Legacy
Marcel Chatillon (1925-2003), a surgeon of Lyon origin, practised in French Guiana and Guadeloupe for about forty years. His collection is a direct and indirect account of the Atlantic trade and slavery on the islands of America.
Credits: this content was originally published on the Mona Lisa website. It was created in 2015 by Marie-Christine Hervé of the Aquitaine Museum in Bordeaux and Sophie Daënens of the French Museum Service. The museum’s records are online on POP, an open heritage platform. The content was reviewed in November 2022 by Elsa Tilly, in charge of computerizing the collections at the Aquitaine Museum.
Looking at the West Indies
Dr Marcel Chatillon (1925-2003) is a surgeon of Lyon origin who has practiced in French Guiana and Guadeloupe for about forty years. His collection was presented in 1999 at the Aquitaine Museum as part of a Exhibition: «Perspectives on the Caribbean».
Discover the Chatillon collection on Mona Lisa
Cartography
Many cards of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is an original part of this ensemble in which is one of the first known from Guadeloupe to 1643.
Botany
Botany also holds a special place in the form of The Flora of America (1834-1837) by Etienne Denisse (1785-1861).
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery
The Chatillon collection is above all a direct and indirect testimony of what contributed to the prosperity of the city of Bordeaux in the eighteenth century: the Atlantic trade and theslavery on the islands of America. Views of plantations show the work of people enslaved, engaged in the culture and transformation of the sugar cane.
An attenuated reality
The scenes of dance and music, the Shimmering costumes and madras fabrics to alleviate the violence of everyday life.
Landscapes
Les landscapes offer the vision of an idyllic climate, offset by the image of a hostile nature: hurricane, earthquake of Guadeloupe in 1843.
A strategic location
Many documents illustrate the Franco-English military rivalries for the possession of colonies as the series of picturesque views of the diamond rock, a strategic rock coveted by the English and French (1804).
Portraits
Finally, a dozen painted portraits take up the iconography of the servants African and Afro-descendants seen alone or accompanying their owners.
Also included are progressive characters involved in the Friends of the Blacks Society or second abolition of slavery in 1848.
The haitian revolution (1791-1804) and its great historical figures such as Toussaint Louverture are also mentioned.
