PARIS, Feb 5: Bertrand Delanoe had announced a year ago that his first order of business, upon becoming the new Mayor of Paris, would be to see to it that the city’s streets get some more appropriate names.

Already Place de Stalingrad has been renamed Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad, to remove the Stalinist sting of the previous ambiguously-worded monicker, the carefully-worded reference to the battle that saw the defeat of Adolf Hitler being considered as more politically correct.

Perhaps more typical of the tendency to rebaptize streets with names more politically acceptable has been the decision by the City of Paris to give Rue Richepance a more appropriate name, that of the Chevalier Saint-George.

New plaques designating the change are to go up this week. A special ceremony marking the occasion, over which Delanoe officiated, took place on Monday (Feb 4) in the presence of French minister for overseas affairs Christian Paul.

Rue Richepance is located on the frontier of two of the city’s more upscale arrondissements, the 1st and the 8th, measures only 113 metres long. But it is named for a man whom Delanoe and many residents of Paris would prefer to forget. As it happens, Antoine Richepance has been associated, perhaps unjustly so, with France’s colonial past and its trading in slaves, that is until the abolition of slavery in 1794.

As for the Chevalier Saint-George, he was born in 1739, the child, out of wedlock, of a slave and a plantation owner, who went on to play a significant role in the French Revolution, during which he became a military hero for the way his — Treizieme regiment de chasseurs — (13th infantry regiment) fought back the advances of the Austrian-backed royalist troops of Charles-Francois Dumouriez, also for his prowess as a master — escrimeur, among whose fencing victims he counted the celebrated hermaphrodite the Chevalier d’Eon.

Saint-George was also the first Black French freemason, the lover of a great many celebrated women, among them Madame Vigee- Lebrun.

Last but not least, he was also the first African composer, known as the “Voltaire of the music world,” and considered in his day as more important than another contemporary figure, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

At the time of his death in 1799, Saint-George was eulogized as the author of 215 major works, among them six full-scale operas, one of them penned in collaboration with the celebrated novelist Choderlos de Laclos.