Pave invites its French correspondents to share their special thoughts from yesterday's first-ever Remember French Slavery Day. Here are Jack's special thoughts.

Of course, if you are not a besieged politician looking for a safe headline, you may not have had too many thoughts as the French slave trade remains largely unknown to the average French person.

Do not despair. Even now your government is busy making the history of French slavery into an Internet crafts project. Unfortunately this "national celebration" site won't go live till the end of the year, not in time to offer helpful tips with your present meditations.

Perhaps the thought -- or the more injurious extended meditation -- of France trafficking in human beings for hundreds of years is too much to bear. Again your governement has anticipated the dangers to the fainting franchouille and is sponsoring a very pretty installation at the Jardin de Luxembourg that has something to do with "la transplantation", which is a very nice way to say slavery. This oblique approach to French slavery through gauzy symbolism in a very nice garden is just the place -- the shallow end of the pool, so to speak -- to get your feet wet.

Remember French Slavery Day is really "Remember Another French First Day". Yes, France is the first nation on the face of the earth to have passed a law (la loi Taubira) unilaterally recognizing slavery as a crime against humanity. What does that mean? Well, nothing really. France does not use this law to decisively intervene anywhere to end slavery. The law does not exact an extraordinary measure of justice. It's just a nice law to show around at summits during the bragging sessions.

LEGACY REMAINS AS FRANCE COMMEMORATES END OF SLAVERY

GOREE ISLAND, Senegal May 9, 2006 (Reuters) - More than 150 years after the last shackled slave passed through the "door of no return" on Senegal's island of Goree, some Africans wonder how much the colonial balance of power has really changed. ... [For] the thousands of young Africans who risk death each year in rickety boats for a life of hard labor on foreign shores, the wrongs of the colonial period have simply given way to a modern-day form of enslavement.

With unemployment topping 50 percent in parts of West Africa, young men with no hope of finding work at home are often galled that their former colonial power refuses them visas having reaped the benefit of immigrant labor in the past.

"We have to be pleased France has recognized slavery as a crime against humanity ... but there are still a lot of paradoxes and an insufficient knowledge of history," said Alioune Tine, secretary-general of African rights group RADDHO [Rencontre Africaine Pour la Défense des Droits de l'Homme]. "The law on the positive side of colonization profoundly shocked francophone countries in Africa. ... There is a form of amnesia and injustice when it comes to all the profit that France has drawn from slavery and from colonization."

158 YEARS LATER, FRANCE RECALLS END OF SLAVERY

PARIS May 10, 2006 (IHT) - Opening a new chapter in what some are calling a "battle of memories" over France's colonial past, the country on Wednesday for the first time commemorated its abolition of slavery 158 years ago.

Cities held concerts, readings and performances to honor those taken from Africa to be sold as slaves in French colonies in the Caribbean. But even as the country looked backward, there was no escaping the frustrations of the present experienced by many in France's black community: discrimination, poverty, and a lack of representation in the media, politics and business. Indeed, for some, the poor immigrant suburbs on the periphery of wealthy city centers are reminiscent of a colonial world in which whites held sway over blacks

In mainland France, May 10 was chosen as the national day because it marks the date in 2001 when a law was passed that officially declared slavery a "crime against humanity." But in a measure of how the issue still rouses passions, a group of 40 lawmakers of the governing center-right party [l'UMP, scil., Jack's party] last week urged Chirac to scrap a reference from the 2001 law stipulating that schoolbooks should "accord the slave trade and slavery the place they deserved." The controversy comes five months after legislators were battling over a passage in another law highlighting the need to recognize the "positive role of the French presence abroad," a reference that was eliminated in December.

Divisions could even be seen among organizers and campaigners ahead of the celebrations on Wednesday. Some sought to rally people of all colors together with large-scale concerts and performances. Others sharply criticized what they called a carnival-like way of dealing with the memory of the slave trade.

"How can you commemorate a tragedy by wiggling your hips?" asked Serge Bilé, a writer and filmmaker, according to Le Monde.

You can't. Or don't. No more so than planting an arborway of bamboo trees presents the facts of French slavery.

PFFT (What is this?): Faint memory 4 | Rayonnement français 0