When does a society tear down its statues?
There is something irrepressible in the human spirit that can be captured in moments of destruction. Throughout human history great acts of cultural effacement, whether it is the bringing down of religious idols or the toppling statues, seem to satisfy a visceral human need. Perhaps we often fool ourselves that in destroying something that is so physical an embodiment of our fears and anxieties, we are also banishing it from the moral world. There is a cleansing and even a peace, however illusory or transient, to be found even in destroying things.
The iconoclasts of Germany’s 16th century religious wars took to the Cathedrals to destroy statues of Mary, Mother of God, much as the foot soldiers of the Islamic State, five centuries later, wrought destruction upon the sculptures of Palmyra. The French revolution ignited with the destruction of the embodiment of the ancien régime, the Bastille, where political prisoners were held by France’s kings. The Bolsheviks in October 1917 carefully stage-managed a ritual ransacking of the Tsars’ Winter Palace in Moscow.
Perhaps we feel that such objects and places really can wound us, not only with what they represent but also because of the history with which they are bound. This might be why there has, throughout human history, been a particular ire reserved for statues. Perhaps no monument or building so vividly recalls and celebrates the past as a human form cast in bronze or carved in stone and set before our eyes. A statue is the sum of a life, with all its actions, elevated in a public place. More than a neutral testament to history, it is a celebration, and even a veneration, of a particular person within it.
This may be why the French revolutionaries who, along with their Haitian contemporaries, mounted one of the world’s first modern movements for political transformation, eventually directed their anger at Paris’s many statues of its Bourbon kings. The rank-and-file of the revolution in particular believed that hauling down royal sculptures across the city would provide the occasion for a kind of creative cultural destruction. A tabula rasa would be left behind, a clean canvass on which the revolution could reinvent the history of France and cast her people in its own mould.
We know of one Arthur, who served as the president of the local government in the Vendôme section of Paris and called for the destruction of the statues of Bourbons Henri IV and Louis XIV. He did so, he wrote, because “these are no longer only names and simple effigies which are to be veiled from the gaze of a free people which opposes royalty; down with them; the statues must disappear.”
The very acts of desecration offered possibilities for forging new revolutionary pasts and futures as the radicalisation of the revolution went hand in hand with ever more sporadic acts of destruction. To steal a line from Heinrich Heine, where they began destroying statues, they ended with destroying people.
The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, seeing themselves as an elite vanguard, glorified the idea mob violence but remained anxious of it in practice. They had no desire to lose control of the reins like their Jacobin predecessors. Once they closed their grip on the command of Russia’s revolution during 1918, they also took measures to guard against sporadic acts of iconoclasm. In that year, Lenin passed a decree on monuments requiring that statues of the Romanovs be removed by the authorities of the state in an orderly way. Many were later put into museums where the Bolsheviks believed that their political power would be anaesthetised.
The ways in which statues are felled tells us much about the political circumstances in which they were first built – and those who destroy them can do so as a part of a powerful act of liberation from the past. In one of the poetic ironies of history, Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries themselves eventually became the objects of the very iconoclastic urges they so carefully tried to control. Once the Berlin wall came crashing down, so did their statues.
Over the last three decades, in the wake of Eastern Europe’s revolutions of 1989, which precipitated the fall of the Soviet Union, thousands of statues of Lenin have been demolished in the countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain.
Iconoclasm has also more recently been viewed as a vehicle for democracy and regime change. In April 2003, in Baghdad’s Fidros Square, a grand edifice of Saddam Hussein was brought tumbling down less than a month after the allied invasion in Iraq had begun.
Now, after events of the weekend, we find ourselves asking the question: why shouldn’t the statue of a 17th century Bristolian slave trader, one who was responsible for the misery of tens of thousands of black slaves, also be brought down? Should not the bronze statue of Edward Colston, a man whose philanthropy was built upon human suffering, also be worthy of such an ignominious and violent end?
The brilliant historian of the British Empire, David Olusoga, who is also a Bristolian, has penned an opinion piece in The Guardian today in which he eloquently defends the toppling of the city’s Colston statue. As he writes, the historical symmetry of the moment is poetic – Colston has been thrown into the same harbour in which he built up his wealth trading in human beings’ lives. It is also a moment of celebration for many black and brown Bristolians who had grown tired of frustrated campaigns to remove the statue, or at least to change the plaque that it bears to inform passers-by of Colston’s role in the slave trade.
It is easy to understand Olusoga’s justified frustration at the insult that this statue posed to him and his fellow Bristolians who walked beneath it. A civilised society shouldn’t elevate figures who humiliate its fellow citizens. This is particularly so when the statue itself was a late nineteenth century invention, a monument erected in 1895 by Bristolians seeking to re-create Colston as a model for civic virtue, one combining the ideals of private industry with public philanthropy. Its construction, like its destruction, was a political act.
Any backlash against those who toppled the statue should be tempered by such considerations of the circumstances. Yet at the same time it is hard not to believe that yesterday’s events represent a failure of civil society.
Nimco Ali, a social activist and Bristolian, fears that the symbolic hauling down the statue will do little to provide solutions to address the real racial inequalities that exist in the city. And the Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, has said that while the presence of the statue was a “personal affront” to him as the son of a Jamaican migrant, he “cannot condone criminal damage” as being the rightful means by which to rectify that affront.
There is clearly a distinction to be drawn, in a liberal democracy, between our personal convictions, however noble, and the processes through which we must seek to realise them. Modern Britons do not live under the stifling strictures of a Soviet empire or the repression of a Baathist dictatorship. We cannot lose faith in the channels that are available for civil activism.
The campaigns to alter or remove the statue of Colston had stalled, but this does not make direct action the right way. We live in a democracy where we govern and decide by consultation and by consent. We may find our fellow citizens’ defence of such a statue to be foolish, even morally reprehensible, but we must persuade them why this is the case. We owe one another the chance to see our flaws and learn of our errors through reasoned debate.
The frustration of the available modes of civil campaigning should spur renewed and reinvigorated efforts to win over our fellow citizens. It should not lead to a mob taking the law into its own hands. That is poor civic hygiene and it is more likely to create polarisation than build consensus over important and challenging questions of history, race, and colour prejudice.
In a broader sense, the question is not so much about the righteousness of toppling a figure who deserves no sympathy. The danger of this situation is more about the precedent that it creates. What message does it send to groups with less noble intentions than some of our Bristolian protestors, for instance, that a mob will be permitted by the police to haul down a statue that represents a particular affront to them?
Today it is the statues of slave traders who are the objects of indignation, but there is no guarantee that it will stop there. Iconoclasm is the mode of revolution, not the craft of civic society. By the logic of the law of unintended consequences, we, as a society, are in danger of unleashing forces that we cannot control. It is naïve to think otherwise.
Then there is the thorny question of precisely where this movement to remove statues stops. Will Winston Churchill, Britain’s great wartime Prime Minister and the vanquisher of fascism on the continent, who was vandalised yesterday by protestors as “a racist” be the next target? Will the revolution eventually devour itself and remove the dedications to Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, also in parliament square, for their human imperfections?
Or perhaps it will be David Hume, the flawed but brilliant Scots philosopher, who crumbles below the dictates of our new age. Over the weekend Hume’s statue in Edinburgh was superimposed with a cardboard sign, on which was written a line taken from his 1753 essay, “Of National Characters”: “I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites”.
Should we condemn such figures because of their words that offend our modern sensibilities, or should we celebrate their more noble achievements as the heritage of all mankind? Hume today is more remembered for his penetrating insights into moral philosophy, his examinations of how human societies are shaped by custom, and the wry irony that pervades his prose, rather than for his bigotry. The more generous spirit of his wider philosophy can be championed even while we remain aware of his shortcomings on race.
Human beings are rarely evil or good without qualification. They are more often bundles of contradictions The torturous lines of morality cut through any given person’s nature in complex ways – sometimes even the bad can be uplifted, just as those with noble intentions can commit wicked acts. An awareness of these contradictions can be as humbling as it is instructive. And we can ruminate on the ways in which we may ourselves fall short of the moral standards by which later generations will judge us. Let us hope they are generous.
There are positive consequences that can now emerge from the removal of Colston’s statue, however. Once salvaged from Bristol’s port, it can be placed within a museum, where its story can be told as a part of the history of the city. A civic assembly can now discuss who should replace him. This could be an opportunity to rediscover Bristol’s own past not only of slave trading, but of vocal and impassioned abolitionism. After all, it was in Bristol, in 1788, that the first committee for the abolition of the slave trade outside of London was established.
Writers and poets from Bristol, such as Robert Southey and Hannah More raged against the injustices of colonial slavery, combining evangelical fervour with humanitarian activism. And it was in the New Room Church in Broadmead, Bristol, that the founder of the Methodist Church, John Wesley, delivered a famous 1774 sermon denouncing the institution of colonial slavery as a moral abomination.
“Liberty”, Wesley declared sonorously, “is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air; and no human law can deprive him of that right which he derives from the law of nature.”
These are the real virtuous sons and daughters of Bristol – and the city should be proud to elevate them as more fitting reflections of its civic values.
Out of the shock, dismay and euphoria at yesterday’s dramatic toppling of Edward Colston from his haughty perch, there emerges a chance to reshape a better, more just, Britain. But it is up to us to build it.
Even destruction can have a creative character. But our civil society must equally guard against the unbridled, mindless urge towards iconoclasm. That which appears to be an act of liberation can easily blur into one of vengeance. And rather than further direct action, what we need now is a calm and clear-headed discussion about how monuments shape our relationship with the past. We should aspire to live in a country where history is not simply erased, but evaluated and appreciated in all its myriad complexities. Our urban landscapes should be built out of the layers that have shaped our past and with it our present.
These layers and complexities are born out of our own nature – and they will always be there, whether we acknowledge them or not, or whether we wish to hide them from our sight or embrace them. Perhaps what we need, therefore, is not the belief that destroying monuments alone provides an act of liberation. The true act of liberation will come not with erasing but burying the past.
The crucial question is this: whether we, in a multi-racial democracy, can bury the painful ghosts of the past or whether they must always haunt our society?
The answer may eventually come not just from taking down those statues that no longer reflect our values from the places of public veneration, but also from a quieter journey of reflection. What if all our endeavours must ultimately amount not to a quest to cleanse ourselves from the sins of history, but to come to terms with a painful past that we cannot change? Can we distance ourselves from the troubles of history without destroying them?
Perhaps once we can do this we will finally have civil peace.