Le Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale de Nogent-sur-Marne as a Lieu de Mémoire

On the outskirts of the Bois de Vincennes lies the overgrown Jardin d’Agronomie tropicale, the last unrestored and undestroyed trace of Paris’ Expositions coloniales internationales. Despite the city’s tendency to reinvent rather than memorialize many former colonial sites, no such transformation has occurred at the 1907 Exhibition’s headquarters, whose original structures have been left to decay for most of their history. Intermittent calls for restoration or transformation have brought government officials, civil society organisations, and veterans’ associations into conversation and conflict as they grapple with the ambivalent history of the Jardin.
This chapter focuses on two recent changes to the site. First, it examines the 2015 destruction of the Paris street sculpture, le Monument à la gloire de l’expansion coloniale française, and the scattering of its remains in the Jardin. Second, it considers the 2020 restoration of the Pavillon de la Tunisie, affirmed as a symbol of Franco-Tunisian friendship, as a cafeteria serving the environmental laboratory still on the premises. The chapter reads the Jardin as a shifting lieu de mémoire suspended between ruin and repair. It examines these recent changes to critique how postcolonial Parisian patrimoine can betray both a will to remember and a desire to forget.