by Tom Reeves

On May 10, 2022, two elementary school girls stood before an assembly of dignitaries who had come to the Luxembourg Garden in Paris to commemorate the abolition of slavery in France.  The ceremony has been held on the 10^th of May every year since 2007.

Chirine (left) and Anaïs (right) of the Ferdinand Buisson Elementary School in Sotteville-lès-Rouen
Screenshot from Public Senat video

Chirine and Anaïs were students at the Ecole Ferdinand Buisson located in a town called Sotteville-lès-Rouen, about a two-hour drive to the northwest of Paris.  They represented their school, which had participated in and won a national competition in 2020 entitled La Flamme d’Égalité (The Flame of Equality). 

About 50 students from three classes at the school participated in the realization of the project, which was called Le Carnet de Ruby.

Students participating in the film project
Screenshot from Le Carnet de Ruby video

La Flamme d’Égalité is sponsored annually by the following institutions:

Ministry of National Education and Youth
Ministry of Citizenship
Ministry of the Overseas
Ministry of Agriculture
Interministerial Delegation for the Struggle against Racism, Antisemitism, and Anti-LGBT Hate
Foundation for the Memory of Slavery. 

The competition, held every year since 2014, challenges students to create an artistic project that exemplifies an assignment associated with the theme of the abolition of slavery.  At the national level, a jury selects an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school that has best incorporated the assigned theme into an original project.  For the year 2020, the theme “Devenir Libre” (Become Free) was assigned, and students vied to create imaginative projects that illustrated it.

The students at the Ecole Ferdinand Buisson were inspired to create a colorful hand-drawn notebook and present it as a short, animated film in which Anaïs portrays Ruby Bridges, the first African-American child to integrate William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960. 

In the film, "Ruby" tells viewers that for her birthday, her grandmother gave her a notebook (un carnet) filled with images of Black women like her.  She says she'd like to learn their stories.

"Ruby" examines her birthday notebook
Screenshot from "Le Carnet de Ruby"

The notebook illustrated the lives of six women, five of whom were Americans:

Nounou des Marrons, an 18^th-century leader of runaway slaves in Jamaica
Harriet Tubman, a 19^th-century leader of the Underground Railroad
Josephine Baker, a 20^th-century performer, WWII Resistance member, and civil rights activist
Rosa Parks, a 20^th-century civil rights activist
Katherine Johnson, a 20^th-century mathematician who worked in the NASA space program
Michelle Obama, First Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017.

As well as creating the notebook that illustrated the lives of these women, the students learned how to present the women’s stories in animated form, using multiple hand drawings, stop-action photography, and voice-over commentary.  Their film won the appreciation of the jury for the best project at the elementary school level for the year 2020.

Two years later, in 2022, Anaïs and Chirine presented the award-winning project at the national ceremony that was held in the Luxembourg Garden.  They spoke briefly, limiting their discourse to the life of Josephine Baker, who, they said, escaped segregation in the United States and flourished as a performer in France.

Josephine Baker as portrayed in Le Carnet de Ruby
Screenshot from Le Carnet de Ruby video

In the garden, behind the girls, 400 student invitees from various schools around the country sat under a large tent to witness the ceremony.  After the presentation, a student choir sang the French national anthem while the president of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, and the president of the French senate, Gérard Larcher, stood at attention.

To read additional ETBP articles about La Flamme de l'Égalité, click on the links below:

The Flame of Equality

La Flamme d'Égalité (The Flame of Equality)