Marie Josephe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie was born on June 23, 1763, at the family sugar plantation in Trois-Ilets, a village across the bay from Fort-de-France. The plantation, like all sugar estates in the French Caribbean, ran on the labor of enslaved Africans. She left Martinique at sixteen, married into Parisian society, survived the Revolution, and in 1796 married Napoleon Bonaparte. She became Empress of France in 1804. Her grandson Napoleon III commissioned the statue in 1858, and it was installed the following year in La Savane, the central park of Fort-de-France. For the colonial administration, it was a point of pride: Martinique's most famous daughter, elevated to the highest position in France. For many Martiniquais -- particularly the descendants of the enslaved people who had worked the Tascher de La Pagerie plantation -- the statue represented something very different.

France's revolutionary government had abolished slavery in the colonies in 1794. For eight years, the enslaved people of the French Caribbean were legally free. Then, on May 20, 1802, Napoleon signed a decree reinstating slavery. The law restored the entire apparatus of forced labor, the whip, and the slave trade to France's Caribbean possessions. In Martinique, thousands of people who had lived as free men and women were re-enslaved. The reasons for Napoleon's decision were complex -- strategic, economic, driven by pressure from colonial plantation owners -- but Josephine's family connections to Martinique's planter class have led many historians and Martiniquais to associate her with the decree. Whether she personally lobbied Napoleon to reinstate slavery is debated. What is not debated is that her family's wealth depended on it, that the decree devastated the lives of tens of thousands of people, and that a statue honoring her on the island where those people suffered was always going to carry that weight.

The beheading in 1991 was not an act of vandalism. It was an act of protest with a clear political vocabulary: the revolutionaries who had executed the king and queen of France used the same method, and the gesture applied that logic to a woman whose husband had reversed the revolution's promise of liberty for enslaved people. The missing head became as much a part of the monument as the marble itself. Each year, red paint was applied to the decapitated statue -- the color of blood, of revolution, of the suffering that the plantation system inflicted on generations of Black Martiniquais. The authorities' decision not to restore the head acknowledged, tacitly, that the statue could never again be what Napoleon III intended. It had become a site of contested memory, a place where the colonial narrative and the counter-narrative occupied the same physical space.

On July 26, 2020, during protests following the murder of George Floyd in the United States, activists in Fort-de-France pulled the headless statue from its pedestal. A police source told the press that officers had received orders not to interfere. Around the same time, protesters also toppled a nearby statue of Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc, the founder of the French colony in Martinique, which had stood since 1935. Months earlier, in April, two statues of Victor Schoelcher -- the French abolitionist who authored the 1848 decree that permanently ended slavery in the French colonies -- had also been destroyed. Protesters argued that even Schoelcher's statues centered a white savior in a story that belonged to the enslaved people who resisted, rebelled, and ultimately won their own freedom. The empty pedestal in La Savane remains. What should stand on it -- or whether anything should -- is a question Martinique continues to answer.