OLD COURTHOUSE
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Large 650 m² courthouse built in 1911 to emphasize the importance and power of justice.
Built in 1911 and characteristic of the reinforced concrete architecture developed from the 1910s onwards, the Court of First Instance, with its 650 m², is considered the largest building in the France district. Once the colony's main center for the administration of justice, its imposing dimensions (41.30 m long by 15.60 m wide and almost 9 m high), classical-looking masonry columns and majestic covered perron forming a balcony on the upper floor were intended to underline the importance and power of justice. It was here, in 1949, that the anti-colonial activists of the Rassemblement démocratique africain, including Bernard Dadié, Mathieu Ekra and Jean-Baptiste Mockey, former mayor of Grand-Bassam, secretary general of the PDCI-RDA, ambassador and minister of Côte d'Ivoire, were tried. Antechamber to the prison, the courthouse was abandoned in 1954 in favor of the Abidjan court, and over time became "in a perfect state of disrepair".
A pathetic carcass overgrown with epiphytic plants and graffiti, with a front-row seat to the destructive caress of the sea spray, its south-facing facade exposed to the sea winds and its rusted iron frames having shattered the concrete and caused irreparable damage, it still seems to be fighting with the energy of despair against the assaults of erosion and the invading sea of vegetation that were gradually reducing it to nothing.
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