Essay:
Forget Me NotOn the politics of remembering figures hidden from history.
( 1 ) Research into Duval is recent and ongoing. Her name was confirmed as Florine Jeanne Gabrielle Prosper, and her place of birth as Port-au-Prince, by the historian Catherine Choupin in 2024. A year later, a photograph appeared on Duval’s Wikipedia page: a carte de visite from the studio of the photographer Nadar, a close friend of Baudelaire. Following this lead to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Professor Maria Scott located a second portrait taken on the same date. They are the only confirmed photographs of Duval.
( 2 ) The word “archive” comes from the Greek arkheion, meaning the house of the ruler. The philosopher Jacques Derrida argued that archives are never neutral—they are instruments of power, shaped by those who control what is preserved and what is discarded.
( 3 ) Saint-Georges’ regiment included Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the son of a French nobleman and an enslaved Haitian woman, who rose to become a general before being betrayed and imprisoned in Naples. His son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, drew on his father’s story when writing the classic French novel The Count of Monte Cristo.
There is a haunted painting hanging in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. L’Atelier du Peintre depicts the studio of the 19th-century realist painter Gustave Courbet: The artist at work is surrounded by his subjects—a mixture of working-class figures, female models and the Parisian cultural elite. On the far right of the monumental work is Charles Baudelaire, one of France’s most celebrated poets. He appears to be sitting alone, staring at a book, but look hard enough and you might make out a faint silhouette next to him.
The ghost in the painting is the actor Jeanne Duval, a biracial woman from Haiti and the poet’s longtime lover, who inspired some of his most famous verses. Until 2024, her origins, and even her full name remained largely a mystery—she was only remembered as “Jeanne” or “Black Venus” and described by racist critics of her time as rather unexceptional.1 Legend has it that Courbet covered her up at Baudelaire’s behest after their breakup. But over time, the fading paint has made her features reappear, as if the pigment itself rebelled against her erasure.
Jeanne Duval is just one example of an almost endless list of historical figures who were left out of the official record because they belonged to marginalized groups. Society’s prejudice deemed some unremarkable; others were simply forgotten. Many who gained celebrity status when they were alive were actively kept out of the archives by the chroniclers of modern history in the West—mostly, white men.2 “Many scholars and activists talk about these omissions from history as epistemic violence, the violence of what we’re allowed to know, the suppression of certain knowledge,” says Christy Pichichero, an associate professor of history, French, African, and African American studies at George Mason University. “Often, violence in the world, violence against enslaved women for example, is replicated in the archive, in the way that Black women are seen as fractured, trivialized or hypersexualized.”
( 1 ) Research into Duval is recent and ongoing. Her name was confirmed as Florine Jeanne Gabrielle Prosper, and her place of birth as Port-au-Prince, by the historian Catherine Choupin in 2024. A year later, a photograph appeared on Duval’s Wikipedia page: a carte de visite from the studio of the photographer Nadar, a close friend of Baudelaire. Following this lead to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Professor Maria Scott located a second portrait taken on the same date. They are the only confirmed photographs of Duval.
( 2 ) The word “archive” comes from the Greek arkheion, meaning the house of the ruler. The philosopher Jacques Derrida argued that archives are never neutral—they are instruments of power, shaped by those who control what is preserved and what is discarded.
( 3 ) Saint-Georges’ regiment included Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the son of a French nobleman and an enslaved Haitian woman, who rose to become a general before being betrayed and imprisoned in Naples. His son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, drew on his father’s story when writing the classic French novel The Count of Monte Cristo.
