Parisians Bid Adieu to Street Name Not Desired

A bitter year-long battle that pitted a modern-day leftwing mayor against the die-hard defenders of France's imperial past ended yesterday when a short and otherwise unremarkable Paris street changed its name.

In a brief ceremony, the rue de Richepance, on the border of the chic 1st and 8th arrondissements, was officially renamed the rue du Chevalier de Saint-George.

Neither name means much to the average Briton, nor meant much to the average Frenchman. But after one of the more heated rows to have divided Paris in recent years, everyone in the capital now knows all about General Antoine Richepance and Joseph, Chevalier de Saint-George.

The former, it seems, was a famed Napoleonic commander who annihilated the Austrians at the battle of Hohenlinden and went on to put down a nasty rebellion on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. In honour of the first feat, his name is engraved on the Arc de Triomphe.

The problem, however, was the second. Since the Guadeloupe rebellion was led by unhappy former slaves, some 10,000 of whom were subsequently massacred, the general's repression of it was seen by more enlightened Parisians - the capital's Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, included - as something of a dubious accomplishment.

Hence the decision to rename the street after the Guadeloupe-born Joseph de Saint-George, the illegitimate son of a French planter fallen on hard times and his Senegalese slave. Defying his humble origins, he moved to France and went on to become the most celebrated fencer of the day and an accomplished violinist and composer.

Mr Delanoe had called the rue de Richepance "a permanent insult to the Afro-Caribbean population of Paris".

The rightwing mayors of the 1st and 8th arrondissements, Jean-François Legaret and François Lebel, backed by a powerful lobby of conservative historians and academics, did not see things that way.

"Antoine Richepance," said Mr Legaret, "was a hero of the Republic." Mr Lebel accused Mr Delanoe of "revisionism of the most worrying kind, worthy of the methods of totalitarian regimes".

At yesterday's ceremony - on the anniversary of the day in 1794 when post-revolutionary France outlawed slavery - Mr Delanoe said he was "delighted" that reason had prevailed. His joy may, however, be shortlived.

Over the weekend the furious residents of the rue took a spray-gun to the new street sign. All that could be read yesterday were the words: "formerly rue Richepance".