Although Victor Schoelcher as born on July 22, Schœlcher Day is celebrated in Martinique every July 21. I’m not sure why.
Victor Schoelcher was a French abolitionist writer in the 19th century. He was born in Paris in 1804 into a family of porcelain manufacturers and sent to the Americas in 1829-30 to work in the family business.
He visited Mexico, Cuba, and the southern United States where he witnessed the slave trade. This set him on a journalistic career to expose and eliminate this atrocity. Slavery officially ended in the French West Indies in 1848.
On the initiative of Victor Schoelcher an entire library of Caribbean documents was built for the 1889 Paris World Exhibition. It was then dismantled and shipped piece by piece to Martinique and reassembled. The library is an avant-garde building for its period, was designed by the French architect Henri Picq, and made of different materials, colors, designs, and styles. It’s free and open to the public in Fort-de-France, Martinique.
Learn more about this amazing building here.
