Just one stop from the terminus of line 12, in the direction of Mairie d'Aubervilliers, Aimé Césaire station is one of the last two to go into service on the capital's metro network. Inaugurated on May 31, 2022, at the same time as the line's new terminus - Mairie d'Aubervilliers, as you may have guessed - the station is located at Place Henri-Rol-Tanguy in Aubervilliers, not far from the Saint-Denis canal. It became the 307th station on the Paris metro and was built as part of the extension of line 12, which at the time had Front Populaire as its terminus.
Originally, the station was to have been called Pont de Stains (according to Wikipedia), but in the end it was named Aimé Césaire, in reference to the eponymous square located not far from the station. Aimé Césaire was a Martinican poet, writer and politician who was born in 1913 and died in 2008. Alongside Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas, he was one of the leading exponents of the negritude literary movement, and a lifelong campaigner against colonialism. He came to France after high school and studied at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the Sorbonne and the École normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris, where he took a stand against the racism of colonial ideology and founded a newspaper, l'Étudiant Noir. A little later, he founded the literary movement known as négritude, again with the aim of denouncing colonialist ideology.
For more than 47 years, he was a member of the French parliament, and for more than 55 years, mayor of Fort-de-France, Martinique. He died in 2008 after suffering serious heart problems, and a tribute was paid in his memory at the Panthéon, where an inscription is dedicated to him. In Aubervilliers, a square is named in his honor, followed by the metro station on line 12, when it opens in May 2022. The exterior façade of the metro station, made of glass, features excerpts from the poet's work.
Location
Aimé Césaire metro
w95g+2x aubervilliers
93300 Aubervilliers
