‘Négresse’ neighbourhood chains Biarritz to France’s colonial past

The n-word is alive and well-loved in Biarritz, reports Rory Mulholland from the south of France

La Negresse is a suburb of Biarritz, close to the French/Spanish border (Rory Mulholland)

The women in the Pharmacie de la Négresse find it hilarious that anyone could be offended by the name. The shop lies at a roundabout in a suburb of Biarritz that bears the same name, La Négresse, a word which in today’s France is as offensive and taboo as the n-word in English.

“There’s nothing racist about it all!” said one woman working there who said she was a manager but who declined to give her name.  

“It’s named after a black woman who ran an inn near here in the 19th century. It’s just history. It’s not racist,” she said.

“And we are never going to change the name!” an elderly customer, sitting on a chair as she waited for her turn to be served, chimed in with a laugh.

But a few minutes later a very different answer came from a man walking past the pharmacy, which lies in the shadow of a huge flyover whose official name is the Viaduc de la Négresse.

“There is no doubt whatsoever that it is racist,” Abdoulay Ba, a 37-year-old chef from Senegal, told The Independent. “I walk by here all the time but I will never buy anything in that place.”

And 15-year-old Myriam, a black teenager attending a local school, said the name made her ill at ease.

“Négresse is not a word that is nice to hear, and having a whole district called that is even worse,” she said as she waited for her bus.

In addition to such local discontent, pressure to get rid of the n-word in Biarritz is coming from the outside, in particular from Karfa Diallo, a man campaigning to force France to confront its colonial and slave-trading past. He is taking the town council to court. He is also being prosecuted for events related to his renaming efforts.

Yet most locals – and the mayor of Biarritz – steadfastly refuse all attempts to ditch the word Négresse, which France’s Larousse dictionary defines as “an offensive and racist term for a person of black colour”.

It doesn’t bother them that there is a pharmacy, a flyover, a street name, sporting and leisure facilities, a business park, and a distribution company – La Négresse Distribution – all bearing a word that these days only the foul-mouthed will use.

The main train station in Biarritz, a proud Basque town just a short drive from the Spanish border, lies in the heart of the district. “We all still call it Biarritz-la-Négresse,” a station worker there said with a smile.

Most of those questioned on the local streets rejected the idea that the name had any racist connotations. Many recounted the story of the 19th-century innkeeper, saying that the area was named to honour a woman who was black and an entrepreneur.

Two centuries ago the nondescript district, which lies a few kilometres inland from the chic centre of Biarritz and its sandy Atlantic beach, had a Basque name, Harausta. But then along came a black woman, whose name has been lost and for whose very existence the evidence is scant, who set up an auberge there in Napoleonic times.

She was supposedly from Haiti or elsewhere in the Caribbean and her inn attracted many soldiers, who came to eat and drink and allegedly engage in immoral activities.

Nobody has been able to find the woman’s name, and using the word Négresse is no way to honour her if she ever existed, argues Karfa Diallo, who ironically asks why not just call the area La Femelle (The Female)?

Négresse is not a word that is nice to hear, and having a whole district called that is even worse

Myriam, Biarritz resident

Diallo runs a Bordeaux-based association, Mémoires et Partages, that organises walking tours in Bordeaux, La Rochelle, and Le Havre to highlight the slave-trading pasts of these port cities. Slave-trading ships also left from the port of Bayonne, the town adjoining Biarritz.

Last summer, as the statue-toppling craze gripped Britain and the US, but not France, he won a minor victory when Bordeaux attached explanatory plaques to street names of city bigwigs who had grown rich on the slave trade.

He is not the first to have fought to get rid of La Négresse. Various calls for a name change over the years have been rejected after consultations with the local community, a large majority of whom repeatedly said they wanted to keep it.

In 2015, when a local festival was organised, its roadside banner, featuring a caricature of a black woman’s head alongside the words “Fêtes de la Négresse” written in giant letters, caused outrage and became a national news story.

The then mayor dismissed calls for a name change as “ridiculous”, arguing that people were judging something from the past with the values of the present.

Diallo, who originally hails from Senegal in west Africa, is the latest hopeful to try his luck where others have failed.

“Can we continue to have such a name for an area in France when we know what violence black women have suffered in crimes such as ... slavery and racism?” he told The Independent.

“This daily aggression against the memory of the struggles for human dignity must stop.” 

If he does somehow succeed in changing the name of the drab Biarritz suburb, he might be tempted to take on several other place names in France that many deem offensive.  

Among them might be Cap Nègre, the Riviera resort where ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy regularly stays in the family holiday home of his wife Carla Bruni.

He might even want to campaign against the use of the word nègre in French, which is the commonly used term for a ghostwriter.  

(When Roman Polanski's 2010 film The Ghost Writer went on release in France it kept its English title, perhaps to avoid having the title Le Nègre plastered on posters across the country.)

Or what to do about perceived general racism in a 21st-century French republic that is officially colourblind, to the extent that the state is legally forbidden from collecting data on citizens’ ethnicity?

But for the moment, Diallo has more immediate concerns.  A verdict is due later this month after he went on trial over a protest against the name La Négresse he and a handful of others held at Biarritz station when world leaders congregated in the town in 2019 to attend a G7 summit. He was accused of resisting arrest,  which he denies.

But the mayor, Maider Arosteguy, is having none of it. When The Independent called in to the town hall, in the upmarket beachfront district, far from the dreary La Négresse suburb, she was not in her office.

One of her aides emerged to say there were no plans to change the name, but that the local history museum had been tasked with finding the name of the black woman said to have run the famous inn.

One solution broached has been to use this, if it is ever found, as the area’s new name.  

The mayor later followed up with a statement by email that clearly said that change was not imminent.

“Biarrots [as residents of Biarritz are known] are very attached to this district, a working class area which has often felt neglected and is now stigmatised by this controversy,” she wrote.

“It is up to the Biarrots and to them alone to determine if the name of the district should be changed.”