Books > Biography > Historical, political & military
|
Buy Now
Madeleine's Children - Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France's Indian Ocean Colonies (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,530
Discovery Miles 15 300
|
|
Madeleine's Children - Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France's Indian Ocean Colonies (Hardcover)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
|
In 1759 a baby girl was born to an impoverished family on the
Indian subcontinent. Her parents pawned her into bondage as a way
to survive famine. A Portuguese slaver sold the girl to a pious
French spinster in Bengal, where she was baptized as Madeleine.
Eventually she was taken to France by way of Ile de France
(Mauritius), and from there to Ile Bourbon (Reunion), where she
worked on the plantation of the Routier family and gave birth to
three children: Maurice, Constance, and Furcy. Following the
master's death in 1787, Madame Routier registered Madeleine's
manumission, making her free on paper and thus exempting the
Routiers from paying the annual head tax on slaves. However,
according to Madeleine's children, she was never told that she was
free. She continued to serve the widow Routier for another nineteen
years, through the Revolution, France's general emancipation of
1794 (which the colonists of the Indian Ocean successfully
repelled), the Napoleonic restoration of slavery, and British
occupation of France's Indian Ocean colonies. Not until the widow
Routier died in 1808 did Madeleine learn of her freedom and that
the Routier estate owed her nineteen years of back wages. Madeleine
tried to use the Routiers' debt to negotiate for her son Furcy's
freedom from Joseph Lory, the Routiers' son-in-law and heir, but
Lory tricked the illiterate Madeleine into signing papers that, in
essence, consigned Furcy to Lory as his slave for life. While Lory
invested in slave smuggling and helped introduce sugar cultivation
to Ile Bourbon, Furcy spent the next quarter century trying to
obtain legal recognition of his free status as he moved from French
Ile Bourbon to British Mauritius and then to Paris. His legal
actions produced hundreds of pages that permit reconstruction of
the lives of Furcy and his family in astonishing detail. The Cour
Royale de Paris, France's highest court of appeal, finally ruled
Furcy ne libre (freeborn) in 1843. Eight rare extant letters signed
by Furcy over two decades tell in his own words how he understood
his enslavement and freedom within these multiple legal
jurisdictions and societies. France's general emancipation of 1848
erased the distinction between slavery and freedom for all former
slaves but the reaction of 1851 excluded them from citizenship. The
struggle for justice, respect, and equality for former slaves and
their descendants would not be realized within Furcy's lifetime.
The life stories of Madeleine and her three children are especially
precious because, unlike scores of slave narratives published in
the United States and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, no autobiographical narrative of a slave held by
French-published or unpublished-exists. This will be one of only a
handful of modern biographies of enslaved people within France's
empire, in French or in English, and the only one to explore
transformations in slavery and freedom in French colonies of the
Indian Ocean. This story is also significant because of the legal
arguments advanced in Furcy's freedom suits between 1817 and 1843.
Furcy's lawyers argued that he was free by race (as the descendent
of an Indian rather than an African mother) and also by Free Soil
(the legal principle whereby any slave setting foot on French soil
thereby became free, since Madeleine resided in France before Furcy
was born). Parallel debates surround the American case of Dred
Scott, who began his long and unsuccessful bid for freedom in 1846
in the former French colonial city of St. Louis, Missouri, just
three years after the French Cour Royale de Paris upheld Furcy's
freedom on the basis of Free Soil. However, the French ruling that
Furcy was free by Free Soil and the rejection of the racial
argument offer a historical counterpoint to the infamous Taney
opinion of 1857. The gripping story of Madeleine and her children
is especially well-suited to exploring the developments of French
colonization, plantation slavery, race, sugar cultivation, and
abolitionism. A fluid narrative, it should have appeal for readers
of the history of slavery, world history, Indian Ocean history, and
French colonial history.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
|