Political Engagement
Beyond his football career, Lilian Thuram has always shown political engagement. In such, during the French riots in November 2005, Thuram took a position against Nicolas Sarkozy, the head of the conservative political party UMP and then Minister of the Interior. Thuram was opposed to the verbal attacks against young people that the then-Minister made when he talked about the "scum", and he said that Nicolas Sarkozy never lived in a suburban estate.
On 6 September 2006, Thuram sparked controversy when he invited 80 people, who were expelled by French Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy from a flat where they lived illegally, to the football match between France and Italy. He has also engaged in campaigns that favour the Catalan language and that favour the independence of Roussillon (Northern Catalonia) from France.
In November 2011 Thuram curated an exhibition at the Musée du quai Branly entitled Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage. It examined the human zoos that traced the practice of using colonial subjects as exhibits in zoos and freak shows. The material in the exhibition runs from the parade of Brazil's Tupinamba 'savages' for the royal entrance of King Henry II of France in 1550 in Rouen, to the last "living spectacle" of Congo villagers exhibited in Brussels in 1958.
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