In the 10th century, the Norwegian navigator Erik Le Rouge discovered an immense space covered in ice where only the less cautious polar bears and polar foxes managed to survive. Never mind, he named it “Greenland”, in other words “green land”. Not that he forgot to put on his glasses. Simply, once he returns home, he has the firm intention of attracting settlers there. So he took care to choose a name likely to appeal to them…
This anecdote, reported by Xavier Greffe, president of Heritage Without Borders in a work on toponymy coordinated by Pierre Jaillard, shows it: men and women have long manipulated place names in their own interest. The great powers, in particular, used this means at will during their colonial enterprises, to clearly indicate who the new masters were. To take only examples located in the United Statesthe English thus gave to new towns created there terribly names british : Birmingham (Alabama), Manchester (New Hampshire, London and Glasgow (Kentucky). The Spanish were not left out with El Paso (Texas), San Francisco, Los Angeles (California) and the very symbolic Espanola (New Mexico). We have sometimes even witnessed battles between European powers: Nieuw-Amsterdam, created by the Dutch, thus became New York after its conquest by the British.
Predictably, an opposing movement arose when formerly dominated countries regained their independence. In Africa, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia, named in honor of the colonist Cecil Rhodes, became Zambia and Zimbabwe respectively; the Gold Coast gave way to Ghana and Upper Volta to Burkina Faso. Africa has by no means a monopoly on this type of approach. In 1919, newly independent Czechoslovakia renamed Bratislava the former Pressburg, a name used in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as Alessandro Michelucci recalls in the review The Breton people (November 2023).
Sometimes battles result from simple internal political changes. In 1923, Kemal Atatürk, anxious to erase the Ottoman past, named Istanbul the old Constantinople. In the USSR, Saint Petersburg was called Leningrad in 1924, the date of the dictator’s death, before returning to its old name in 1991, some time after the fall of the Soviet regime. As for Stalingrad, it became Volgograd in 1961 by the will of Khrushchev, keen to eliminate any reference to the so-called “little father of the people”.
These toponymic clashes continue today. China demands that Tibet be called Xizang and that the Uighurs’ East Turkestan be considered Xinjiang. In Indonesia, the former West Papua, annexed in 1969, was renamed Papua Barrat by the central government.
France is not spared from these debates. The Revolutionaries even played a pioneering role in this field by renaming places that could recall the Ancien Régime. In the 1790s, Mont-Saint-Michel became Mont-Libre; rue des Nobles, in Marseille, rue de l’Egalité; Place Louis XV, in Paris, Place de la Révolution and so on. They also eliminated the appellations such as “Basque Country”, “Béarn”, “Quercy” or “Artois”, too reminiscent in their eyes of monarchical provinces. Make way for departments named after rivers (Ain, Dordogne, etc.) or mountains (Puy-de-Dôme, Hautes-Pyrénées). The inspiration was more or less the same in 2015, during the creation of the large regions, where historical references were often erased (Picardie, Alsace, Limousin) in favor of titles without relief (Hauts-de-France , Great East…).
Rule ? You don’t need to have studied political science for a long time to know it: those who hold power impose their will. In the red suburbs, communist municipalities have long honored their heroes: from Jules Guesde to Maurice Thorez, including Karl Marx and Louise Michel. In 1997, when Catherine and Bruno Mégret, then number 2 of the National Front, took the town of Vitrolles, avenue François-Mitterrand became avenue de Marseille; Nelson Mandela gave way to Provence and Jean-Marie Tjibaou – murdered Kanak independence leader – to Jean-Pierre Stirbois, former right-hand man of Jean-Marie Le Pen… As for Jack Lang, in Blois, he was the only mayor to dare to dedicate an artery to François Mitterrand during his lifetime.
In this matter, not everyone has the lightness of the humorist Alphonse Allais, who said: “The English are strange people who give their streets names of defeat, like Trafalgar and Waterloo.”
(1) Place names, a heritage in motion. Under the direction of Pierre Jaillard. Editions Honoré Champion.
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