Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies

340 Pages·2017·7.934 MB·English

by  Sue Peabody

Madeleine’s Children

MADELEINE’S
CHILDREN
Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in
France’s Indian Ocean Colonies
z
SUE PEABODY
1
1
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Note on Currency, Measurements, and Place Names xiii
Introduction: I Am Furcy 1
1 Madeleine: A Child Slave in Precolonial India 11
2 Crossings: Oceans, Islands, Race, and Free Soil 27
3 Family Secrets: Maurice, Constance, and Furcy 49
4 The Revolution: Emancipation without Freedom 66
5 The Limits of Law: Madeleine’s Betrayal 87
6 A Perfect Storm 101
7 Incendiary Arguments, Justice Suspended 118
8 English Liberties 136
9 Freedom Papers Hidden in His Shoe 157
10 Damages and Interest 175
Afterword: Remembering Furcy 195
Abbreviations 201
Notes 203
Index 309

Acknowledgments
Historians have a strange relationship with the truth. We try to
tease it out of scraps of paper, landscapes, tombstones, and the stories that
were produced at particular moments in the past. Each carries testimony
forward from generation to generation, but all are shaped by the embellish-
ments or omissions crafted for a particular audience’s needs.
Paper is especially seductive to historians. Imprinted at a unique moment
in time, its words remain more or less unchanging— confined to a folder, box,
or a register, preserved in an attic, cabinet or archive— until discovered or
called upon to divulge its story at a later date. We search for these papers,
with the assistance of the often tedious and uncelebrated labors of librarians,
archivists, and catalogers, and today code programmers and photographers.
We interrogate the documents, reading them for what their authors intended
for us to know, but also against the grain and between the lines, for what the
words unintentionally reveal or what the original writer never realized.
This project has taught me more deeply than I ever realized before how
vast is the slippage between written evidence and historical truth. So many
things have happened that were never recorded on paper. So many written
records bend the truth for posterity.
a book so many years in the writing depends a great deal on the kindness
of strangers, friends, and strangers who become friends. From the kernel of
an idea to its final realization, it has been both an intellectual and a personal
adventure. I am inexpressibly grateful to those who have shared their exper-
tise, their time, and their hard- won documents with me.
My own travel to the archives and the opportunity to present my work was
greatly facilitated by numerous institutions and individuals over the course
of a decade, and it is a great pleasure to recognize them here. At the begin-
ning, when the book was just a new idea, Évelyne Combeau- Mari dared to
express encouragement and invited me, with the support of Prosper Ève, then
viii Acknowledgments
president of the Association Historique Internationale de l’Océan Indien
(AHIOI) and Yvan Combeau, director of the the Centre de Recherches
sur les Societes de l’Océan Indien (CRESOI), to begin my archival research
at the Archives départementales de La Réunion. Subsequent archival research
was funded by Washington State University Vancouver, a Washington State
University Edward G. Meyer Professorship, and an American Council of
Learned Societies Fellowship.
Fellow researchers have been incredibly generous, pointing me toward
sources overlooked and sharing photographs or transcriptions of sources that
might shed light on the lives of Madeleine and her children and the broader
history of Réunion, Mauritius, and France. I am deeply indebted to Danna
Agmon, Richard B. Allen, Jean- Michel André, Annie Blayo, Pierre H. Boulle,
Jérémy Boutier, Patrick Boutier, Marina Carter, Adrian Carton, Amitava
Chowdhury, Gwyn Campbell, Patrick Drack, Nicholas Draper, Edward
Duyker, Gilles Gérard, Hubert Gerbeau, Mélanie Lamotte, Nathan Marvin,
Chantal Plévert, Lorelle Semley, and Elke E. Stockreiter. Researchers took
valuable time away from their own projects to help me fill the gaps at a dis-
tance, including John Boonstra, Dwight Carey, Arad Gigi, Miles Hewitt,
Mélanie Mezzapesa, Raphael Mezzapesa, Preston Perluss, and Rob Shafer.
I especially wish to thank Les Amis du Service Historique de la Défense à
Lorient (ASHDL), under the direction of René Estienne, for helping me to
locate key documents concerning Madeleine’s early life.
Opportunities to present my work in progress helped to sustain and
sharpen my project. These were supported by (in chronological order): Centre
d’Études nord- américaines, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales;
Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, Yale
University; Association des Historiens de l’Océan Indien (AHIOI), Centre de
Recherches sur les Sociétes de l’Océan Indien (CRESOI); Universidade Federal
do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and Universidade Severino Sombra (Vassouras),
Brazil; University of Pittsburgh, Department of History Colloquium;
Faculdade de Direito, Universidade Nova de Lisboa; Black Atlantic Seminar
of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Vanderbilt University;
French Atlantic History Group, McGill University; McNeill Center for
Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania; Obermann Center for
Advanced Studies, University of Iowa; Queens University Department of
History; Paul E. Beik Memorial Lecture, Swarthmore College; Indian Ocean
World Centre, McGill University; Centre d’Histoire de l’Université des
Sciences Politiques; Asia Research Centre, Australia Research Council Linkage
Grant, Murdoch University, and the Indian Ocean World Centre, Major
Collaborative Research Initiative, McGill University; Eurasia in the Modern
Acknowledgments ix
Period: Towards a New World History and the Institute for Advanced Studies
on Asia, Tokyo University; L’Institut d’Histoire de la Révolution Française,
Université de Paris I– Sorbonne; University of California, Berkeley; Le Morne
Heritage Trust Fund, the Ministry of Arts and Culture Centre for Research
on Slavery and Indenture, University of Mauritius, Le Centre Nelson Mandela
pour la Culture Africaine, IMAF; Omohundro Institute; Institut national de
recherches archéologiques préventives, and the French Colonial Historical
Society.
Writing is hard; revision is much more pleasurable, especially thanks to
these historians who invited me to attend their workshops or generously took
time to read and comment on emerging chapters: Ned Alpers, Gwyn Campbell,
Amitava Chowdhury, Jennifer N.  Heuer, Mélanie Lamotte, Colette Le
Chartier, Nathan Marvin, Joseph C. Miller, Vickram Mugon, Jennifer Palmer,
Rebecca Rogers, Dominique Rogers, Brett Rushforth, Rebecca Hartkopf
Schloss, Aditi Sen, Alyssa Sepinwall, Jennifer Sessions, Jeyaseela Stephen, Vijaya
Teelock, Thomas Vernet, Cécile Vidale, François Weil, and Sophie White.
Students in my classes enthusiastically dug into each chapter and helped me to
see the story from their point of view. Likewise, the camaraderie and insights
of the Portland French History Research Group both improved the work and
made it a lot more fun: Mary Ashburn Miller (Reed College), Michael Breen
(Reed College), Thomas Luckett (Portland State University), Barbara Traver
(Washington State University Vancouver), Patricia Goldsworthy Bishop
(Western Oregon University), Edward Timke (University of Michigan), Kate
Bredeson (Reed College), and John Ott (Portland State University). In the
camaraderie department, I’d also like to thank my dear friends and colleagues
in the Washington State University Libraries, the history and English depart-
ments, and the Collective for Social and Environmental Justice for making
daily life bearable— you know who you are!
I’m especially grateful to the five colleagues who patiently read and com-
mented upon the full manuscript in one of its drafts from beginning to end.
Their suggestions were invaluable in tightening and polishing the final ver-
sion. Terisa J. Rond was the first person to read the entire manuscript from
cover to cover; her readerly observations vastly improved the story’s liveliness
and flow. Mid- project, Pierre H. Boulle, fellow traveler and co- conspirator,
invited me to join him in researching the nineteenth- century evolution of
the Free Soil principle— I’m so glad that he did! Later he read the manuscript
cover to cover; the book would be significantly less accurate and less consist-
ent in style without his eagle eye. Sophie White has shared with me many an
adventure in her homeland and abroad; her generous reading helped keep the
wind in my sails when the coastline seemed very far away. Brett Rushforth saw