Musée d'Aquitaine
Former science and letters faculty housing galleries on the Atlantic slave trade and colonial sugar economy.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Musee d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux starts with a line from Voltaire's Candide about the price paid for sugar, and traces what that price actually was in this city: by the late seventeen hundreds, Bordeaux refined most of the raw sugar entering France, grown by enslaved Africans in the Antilles and shipped straight up the Garonne. It follows that sugar into the cannele sold on the city's corners today, and into the galleries upstairs, where a model slave ship, cowrie shells once used to buy people, and a merchant's portrait sit together. The portrait shows a man rich enough to be carried through these streets in his own sedan chair.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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