{"id":38872,"date":"2018-09-17T13:05:28","date_gmt":"2018-09-17T11:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/38872-revising-the-past-a-swiss-response-to-a-global-debate.html"},"modified":"2018-09-17T13:05:28","modified_gmt":"2018-09-17T11:05:28","slug":"revising-the-past-a-swiss-response-to-a-global-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/en\/38872-revising-the-past-a-swiss-response-to-a-global-debate.html","title":{"rendered":"Revising the past: A Swiss response to a global debate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>To what extent should we take down statues, change the names of streets, towns and mountains when they bear the names of people who contributed to human misery? The spectacular removal in Charlottesville, US, of a statue of General Lee, a pro-slavery hero of the American South, is far from the only case. The debate is ongoing in several countries. But Switzerland has found its own, very Swiss response.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>How much should we wipe out the past according to the values of the present? The question is not new, but it has taken on a new resonance in Switzerland. Louis Agassiz was long a respected personality in the country. Born in canton Fribourg in 1807, he emigrated to the United States and was one of the fathers of the natural sciences in the 19th century. His reputation might have remained intact if Swiss historian Hans F\u00e4ssler had not in 2007 shed light on the openly racist theories of the scientist, who called Africans a \u201cdegenerate race\u201d, opposed mixed marriages and offered scientific support for the so-called Jim Crow laws which institutionalized anti-black racism in the southern United States. Hans F\u00e4ssler therefore decided to set up the \u201cTake down Louis Agassiz\u201d\u00a0committee, which proposed to get the scientist\u2019s name removed from prestigious places. It suggested changing the name of the\u00a0Agassiz peak, rising to 4,000 metres in the Bernese Alps, to Rentyhorn, after a slave that Agassiz photographed as a so-called demonstration of the inferiority of black people. The committee also suggested that Agassiz, who was one of the first glaciologists, be excluded from the Swiss Alpine Club, where his name figures as an honorary member.<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cTake down Louis Agassiz\u201d\u00a0committee failed almost everywhere. The Alpine club, for example, refused to \u201cfalsify history\u201d. But the University of Neuch\u00e2tel is an exception: since the beginning of September, the Espace Louis-Agassiz \u2013 a street on which the university\u2019s Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences is located \u2013 has been renamed Espace Tilo Frey, after one of the first women MPs in Switzerland whose mother was Cameroonian and who was a pioneer of women\u2019s and minority rights.<\/p>\n<h3>Swiss compromise<\/h3>\n<p>The Neuch\u00e2tel authorities explained that this \u201cexceptional\u201d name change was because the university\u2019s reputation could suffer, especially in the US where Agassiz developed the theories that were used to back racism and racial segregation. The bust of the botanist and glaciologist nevertheless remains at the university, as well as a big portrait at the museum of natural history.<\/p>\n<p>The merit of this typically Swiss compromise is that it does not wipe out the memory of Louis Agassiz, but recognizes in him both his qualities as a great scientist and the strength of the prejudices that inhabited him, helping to feed and back the disease of racism which our societies have not yet wiped out. It is to the \u201cTake down Louis Agassiz\u201d\u00a0committee\u2019s credit that it opened the debate. By failing almost everywhere, perhaps it even better fulfilled its goal, since what is important is not to eradicate the past but to learn from it. Can the Swiss compromise be applied elsewhere? Not necessarily. The crystallization of tensions between white supremacists and antiracists in Charlottesville over the statue of General Lee demonstrates this. Finding a balance between remembrance and eradication, between glorification and contextualization is all the more difficult in societies where symbols serve as identity markers for the battles of today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To what extent should we take down statues, change the names of streets, towns and mountains when they bear the names of people who contributed to human misery? The spectacular removal in Charlottesville, US, of a statue of General Lee, a pro-slavery hero of the American South, is far from the only case. The debate [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":61929,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[545],"tags":[],"ji_location":[2497],"class_list":["post-38872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-memory","ji_location-switzerland"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.3.1 (Yoast SEO v25.3.1) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Revising the past: A Swiss response to a global debate - JusticeInfo.net<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/en\/38872-revising-the-past-a-swiss-response-to-a-global-debate.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Revising the past: A Swiss response to a global debate\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"To what extent should we take down statues, change the names of streets, towns and mountains when they bear the names of people who contributed to human misery? 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