  The proclamation of Negritude would be done when the three friends founded the journal L’Etudiant noir, in 1934–1935 where the word was coined by Aimé Césaire. It was meant to be (and, above all, to sound like) a provocation. Nègre, derived from the Latin “niger”, meaning “black”, is used in French only in relation to black people as in “art nègre”. Applied to a black person it had come to be charged with all the weight of racism to the point that the insult “sale nègre” (dirty nègre) would be almost redundant, “sale” being somehow usually understood in “nègre”. So to coin and claim the word “Négritude” (Négrité, using the French suffix –ité instead of -itude was considered and dropped) as the expression of the value of “blackness” was a way for Césaire, Senghor and Damas of defiantly turning “nègre” against the white supremacists who used it as a slur. In sum the word was and has continued to be an irritant. Indeed the “fathers” of the movement themselves would often confess how irritated they were too by the word. Thus, Césaire declared at the beginning of a lecture he gave on February 26, 1987, at the International University of Florida in Miami: “…I confess that I do not always like the word Négritude even if I am the one, with the complicity of a few others, who contributed to its invention and its launching” adding that, still, “it corresponds to an evident reality and, in any case to a need that appears to be a deep one” (Césaire 2004, 80). “What is that reality?” Césaire proceeded then asking. That is indeed the question: is there a content and a substance of the concept of Négritude beyond the revolt and the proclamation? In other words, is Négritude mainly a posture of revolt against oppression the manifestation of which is primarily the poetry it produced, or is it a particular philosophy characteristic of a black worldview? One of the most eloquent expression of Négritude as a posture primarily is to be found in an Aimé Césaire’s address delivered in Geneva on June 2nd 1978 on the occasion of the creation by Robert Cornman of a cantata entitled Retour and inspired by the Notebooks of a Return to the Native Land. In that address reproduced in Aimé Césaire, pour regarder le siècle en face, the poet from Martinique declares: