Slavery & Freedom in the French Indian Ocean World with Dr. Sue Peabody

There’s no better way to learn history than to visit the sites where it all happened and there’s no better company to do it with than Explore Worldwide. Explore Worldwide offers unique small group travel adventures led by local tour leaders, for those looking for an immersive experience that takes full advantage of everything that the land of love has to offer. Check out their cycling tour of Provence. Explore the Alpine foothills of the Rhône Valley, tour the papal palace in Avignon and visit St. Rémy-de-Provence where famous Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh lived. Cycle through the French countryside as a real bon vivant. Don’t just travel, explore with Explore Worldwide. Visit exploreworldwide.com to learn more.

Sue Peabody is the Meyer Distinguished Professor of History and Liberal Arts at Washington State University Vancouver, and author of numerous books and articles on slavery, race and the law in France and its colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Her books and articles have shaped the field of French history over the last quarter century, beginning with “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford, 1996).  Today we’re here to discuss her most recent book, Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies (Oxford, 2017), the story of a family founded by an enslaved Bengali woman, Madeleine, in Isle Bourbon (Réunion) and Isle de France (Mauritius), during the Age of Revolution and Emancipation, from 1750 to 1850. Madeleine’s Children has won three prizes, including the French Historical Studies’ Pinckney Prize for the best book on French history. It has been translated into French by Pierre H. Boulle as, Les enfants de Madeleine, in the series, Centre International des Recherches sur l’ESClavage (CIRESC) (Karthala, 2019).

Thank you so much for being on the show, Doctor Peabody. Your book is a brilliant examination of an individual, a colony and an empire through the lens of legal history. So let's set the stage. Can you tell our listeners about French colonialism in the 18th century, particularly in the Indian Ocean world? I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar with colonization in the Atlantic, such as what would become Canada and Haiti. What was France doing in the Indian Ocean world?

Sue: Well, thank you so much, Gary. This is really a pleasure to talk to your listeners.  So, France got rather late into the game of the Indian Ocean trading networks. The Dutch and the British got there first in the early 1600s, and they were doing the same thing as the Dutch and the English basically. They were looking for trading routes for spices, but especially textiles in the South Asian subcontinent. And they didn't found their trading company until about 1664, and thereafter very rapidly they established six trading posts or comptoirs by the end of the 17th century. So, interestingly, people don't typically associate slavery with Asia, but in fact they encountered several kinds of slavery in South Asia.  First of all, is the debt peonage, which was important throughout the Indian Ocean world, including Africa.  What happened with debt peonage was that an individual or a family, who encountered hard times, a famine or just desperation of any kind might pawn themselves or a family member into slavery, with a wealthier person as security against a debt. And the idea was that they would continue to work off that debt and eventually redeem that person from their enslavement, often through agricultural labor, but also, of course, domestic service. That debt could be transferred over generations. And so eventually entire villages might be enslaved to landowners. So that was a very common practice in the Indian Ocean world. And we also have many of these folks were also involved in domestic servants through that slave system. Now, France, unlike England, was unusual because at least to the 16th century, France's legal system did not recognize slavery. In fact, the very word ‘Franc’ which is the root word of France was synonymous with freedom. And the word ‘affranchir’ which means to manumit or liberate an enslaved person. Also has at its root to make them French. So Franc and French are seen as kind of, core identities. And this goes way back into the Middle Ages.  In fact, France celebrated the kingdoms free soil with a maxim which said, basically that any slave who set foot on French soil becomes free, and this free soil maxim became foundational to the story that I was writing.

Gary: Let's start with Madeleine. Who is she? Where does she come from and how does she arrive in Isle Bourbon?

Sue: Well, with many folks that are coming out of illiteracy and poverty, we don't know much about her early life. We have kind of differing records. We know that she was born in or around Chandannagar in Bengal sometime between 1755 and 1759. Later, her master's will claim in court that she was sold to a single French colonist, a woman named Mademoiselle Despense, in 1768. So approximately when Madeleine was between the ages of nine and fourteen. Madeleine was first named in the historical record in 1771, following a severe and unprecedented drought which wiped out half of the crops in Bengal. It's likely that this crisis is what caused her family to sell her into slavery. Madeleine's mistress decided to leave for France, and she took Madeleine, along with two other enslaved servants, on the 18 month journey from the Indian Ocean through the Atlantic Ocean to France. On this passenger list, Madeleine is listed among the roles as a negresse or a woman of color, a black woman, and this term Negresse, which is impolite today we would not use it in France in present time. It refers to both her dark skin and also her likely slave status. When they arrived in France, Mademoiselle Despense should have followed French law and registered Madeleine's arrival with the port authorities there, but she did not. Instead, she gave or sold or traded Madeleine to another French colonial family, Charles and Marianne Gautier, who were in the port of 7:30 Lorient for a brief stay in France from their colonial home. This failure to, register her and also the transfer was explicitly illegal under French law. No way should the Mademoiselle response have been allowed to do this. And it opened the way for Madeleine later to claim her freedom on the grounds of her stay on free soil. So the Routiers took Madeleine with them as their enslaved servant on the return trip back to Isle Bourbon in the Indian Ocean, and it's likely that Madeleine assisted at the birth of Madame Routier's daughter Eugenie, which took place on this voyage in 1772.

Gary: You talk about the French and Creole elite on the island. What was society like on Isle Bourbon?

Sue:  Well the Routiers were among the wealthiest planters on the island, and they were related to many other wealthy families. Their story is fairly typical. Both Isle Bourbon and its neighbour Mauritius are located about 200 miles east of Madagascar. These islands were uninhabited until the Dutch tried to colonize Mauritius, and the French began to settle in Bourbon in the mid 17th century. Both operated as waste stations for ships traveling between the Cape of Good Hope and India. Today, Isle Bourbon is still part of the French Empire or we would say the French nation. But following the Revolution, it was renamed Réunion. So Madame Routier is the direct descendant of one of the first European women to arrive in Isle Bourbon. The earliest female settlers included women from Madagascar and India, some of them enslaved and some free. So Isle Bourbon has a heritage of mixed ancestry. And it's all of these ethnicities and identities are celebrated in reunion today. The French started to import enslaved laborers from India, Madagascar and the African mainland, with increasing numbers from the 1720s to grow export crops like coffee, but the majority of the workforce was also focusing on food like corn and rice, which they both used to feed themselves, but also sold to the ships that were passing through, and also to trading partners, for example, in Madagascar. So it's a staple crop producer at least until the early 19th century, when sugar becomes part of that export as well. So the Frenchman who fought for the French India Company, especially in its multiple wars with Britain in the 1740s and later were rewarded with land concessions in Isle Bourbon, which they then turned into plantations. As new colonists arrived, mostly men, they intermarried with the daughters of colonial planters and thereby became landowners themselves. Over the course of the 18th century, these became the two primary means for French men to acquire land, and they even invented titles, for example Charles Routier is enlisted in the French India Company as a young man. He rose through the ranks to major and eventually married this woman from a wealthy island family. He styled himself as the Sieur Routier du Grandval, Sir Routier of the Great Valley, which was a name that he invented, much like many of the other men, with a kind of noble sounding title to them. By the 1760s, when the colony transferred from company rule to direct royal oversight, a tightly knit group of wealthy families, most of them descended from a handful of French women, controlled the island's economy and local governance.

Gary: Now we come to the central character which is Furcy. Who was Furcy? How did he become enslaved and how did he fight against it?

Sue: In Bourbon Madeleine gave birth to three children a boy named Maurice, a girl named Constance, and her youngest son Percy in 1786. In my book, I say that in all likelihood. Percy and his sister Constance were sired by either Charles Routier or one of his teenage sons. Since the book was published, I've actually heard from one of her descendants who tells me that DNA evidence proves that his father was one of the Routier sons, and I suspect this was the oldest one. Augusta. Within a couple of years, Charles Routier died, leaving his widow to manage the plantation and the family townhouse in the capital city of Saint Denis. Constance, the daughter who was freed by the Routier family as an infant, which I believe is evidence that she's the illegitimate child of one of the Routier men. Anyway, Constance and her mother, Madeline moved with the widow to the city of Saint Denis, and in 1789 the widow Routier filed manumission papers to free Madeline as well, but according to later testimony, she never told Madeline that she was free. And I like to kind of think about what that means to be a free person and yet have no knowledge that you're free.  It's a kind of a strange in-between space, and we can explore later if you want. Why that might have been the case, but Madeleine continued to serve the widow throughout the revolutionary period. So first, he disappeared from the Routier family's census returns between his mother's manumission in 1789 and 1804. We don't know whether he continued to live with his mother in Saint-Denis, or whether he stayed in one of the plantations. And it's not until the aging widow son in law began to manage her affairs, that Furcy is re inscribed on the census as one of her slaves. I hypothesize in the book that this is because the family really did not consider Percy as a slave during this period. When they freed his mother, they assumed that he was freed as well.  But Lory, the son in law, is doing everything he can to re inscribe power over Fursy and his family, and therefore takes advantage of these census records to reclaim him as a slave. So Lory was an aggressive entrepreneur from Mauritius who married Eugenie, the daughter who was born at sea and who likely cared for Madeleine. I have other records later that show that he was involved in smuggling slaves into Bourbon. During the period after the abolition of the slave trade. So he was a slave smuggler as well. The crucial event took place in 1808. The widow died and all of her property was distributed to her children. Furcy now became the property of Eugenie and her husband Joseph Lory. However, the will revealed a big surprise. Madeleine had been freed 19 years earlier, and the estate owed her 19 years and back wages about $40,000 in today's money. This would have been enough for Madeleine to purchase both the freedom of Furcy and her older son Maurice, who was still alive at this period. And I believe this is exactly why the widow did this. She deliberately set the manumission up without telling Madeleine for 19 years, so that she would have this nest egg to pass to her, because it was, in fact illegal for white people to pass property to people of color. And she got around this by freeing her early and creating this clause in her will. But the son in law, Lory swindled Madeleine, who was illiterate out of this money, he had her sign a receipt in front of witnesses or authorize a receipt in front of witnesses, but without actually giving her the cash. So she claimed she the records show that she had received the money, but she had not, in fact, actually done so. We know that Madeleine repeatedly tried to negotiate Furcy’s freedom with authority, and in 1811 she went to him saying, you have promised to give freedom to my son within six months, to a year. But after two years of delays, I'm going to attempt to execute our agreement again. And Lory responded, everything that has been done has been done correctly. To undo it is impossible. And if you have the money, we will spend it. In other words, the receipt was proof that Madeline had received the money and if she couldn't come up with a purchase price for Furcy he would remain enslaved. Which is exactly what happened. So Madeleine died a year or two after that exchange. She was in her mid 50s. She was free, but without the support of her son or the widow to care for her, she would have had little means of support. Reportedly, she died of chagrin or grief.

Gary: Furcy’s life takes many twists and turns in his two decades long struggle for freedom. Can you detail the various trials that took place over this period? What were the main arguments each side used to push their claims?

Sue: So a few years later, in 1817, the ministry in Paris sent a new Attorney General to Isle Bourbon to clean up corruption in the local judiciary, which was largely staffed by members of the same elite planter family and their allies. Furcy aided by his big sister Constance, who had been recently widowed herself, saw an opportunity to confront Lory for his trickery. Constance approached the Attorney General, who agreed to help Furcy sue his freedom in court. While Furcy and Constance saw Lory’s cheating their mother as the grounds for his freedom. The attorney didn't think this argument would hold up in court. So in Furcy’s initial petition for freedom, his legal team threw out several arguments. The ones that really carried through to the end of all of the appeals was that Madeleine's brief residence in France in 1772 was sufficient to free her due to France's free soil principle. So when the legal team drafted Furcy’s petition, they offered a number of arguments for why he should be free, the ones that really stuck, then held through and carried through to the appeals were, first of all, the Free Soil argument that because Madeleine had set foot on French soil in 1772, she had been a free woman since then, and given birth to Furcy as a free woman, and therefore Furcy was free. The second argument was a racial one that because Madeleine was Indian and not African, she was born into a free people and therefore she was free herself. Again, this would have given Furcy’s freedom through his birth to a free mother. So a large part of my book traces these arguments over a quarter of a century. Furcy tried repeatedly to get first the French and then the English authorities to recognize his freedom from birth. Ironically, Furcy’s legal freedom was first recognized by English authorities in Mauritius on completely different grounds. To punish Furcy for his impudence, Lory left Furcy in Isle Bourbon in prison for almost a year, where he became very ill and nearly died. Then Lory arranged for Furcy to be transferred to his nephew's sugar plantation in Mauritius. There, Furcy did manual labor for a couple of years before returning to duties as a domestic servant to the Lory family. When the English government, prompted by the British anti-slavery movement, sent a commission on inquiry to look into slavery conditions in Mauritius. Furcy he saw his chance again and, with the assistance of allies there, petitioned the English government for his freedom. British authorities discovered that he had arrived illegally in the colony in violation of the slave trade ban, and they dismissed the Lory family's authority over Furcy. He was considered libre du fait, that is free, in fact. But he still lacked official freedom papers that would make him libre de doit free in law. This distinction, free in fact, was increasingly important in French slave law at this point and it simply meant that the person was considered free, but they didn't have the papers to prove it if they were demanded.

Gary: What did Furcy do with his freedom?

Sue: Well, his freedom was only valid in British territories. So Furcy he could not leave Mauritius to return to his sister in Bourbon without being arrested and returned to Lory as a slave. So he made do in Mauritius. He learned the art of candy making, and as a pastry chef he set up a shop in downtown San Luis, selling confections to people who attended the theater there. He was tapping into the growth of the sugar industry. And this is the surprise I never saw coming with his profits from the candy store. First he bought two slaves. One was Victor Théophile, which is described as an inferior tradesman, and the other, Chouchou Ladérouille, was his female servant and cook. When I began the project, I had imagined Furcy as an abolitionist opposed to all slavery and moral grounds. But instead I discovered he was a pragmatist. He made use of the social structure around him by investing in these two workers. He built his capital and expanded production in his shop. Ironically, a few years later, when the British government abolished slavery in Mauritius in 1835, Furcy he actually received government compensation as a slaveholder for the loss of his two slaves, worth about $12,000 in today's money. He then used that money to travel to Paris to appeal the earlier colonial court decisions that had kept him Lory’s slave under French law. His lawsuit coincided with the aims of the liberal July Monarchy to firm up the legal boundary between colonial slavery and France's free soil. Not only did he win his freedom under French law in 1843, but he also won reparations with the Routier family for the years that he had been illegally detained as their slave. By now, Joseph Lory was dead, but his widow Eugenie paid Furcy about $350,000 in damages and interest, and the lawyers cleaned up with another 150,000 or so. Furcy used this money to buy a farm in Mauritius, where he settled down with his wife, who eventually bore him five children. They're known descendants live in London and Mauritius today, and we think there may be further descendants alive and well in the United States as well.

Sue: What impact did Furcy’s eventual legal victory have on France and its empire?

Sue: Furcy’s case led to a new act of legislation, the 1836 ordinance, which formalizes France's Free Soil principle into positive law. Thereafter, all masters who wanted to bring their slaves to the Metropol were required to manumit them or free them before leaving the colony. If they fail to do so, authorities in France and the colonies recognize these men and women as free and issued them freedom papers. But here's another irony. By formalizing the metropole as free soil, the 1836 law also implicitly secured the colonies as legal spaces of slavery. During the early years of the July Monarchy, from about 1830. It had appeared that France might follow Britain to abolish slavery throughout its empire. However, by the time Furcy’s case arrived in Paris, the colonial lobby was beginning to override France's most progressive anti-slavery voices. It would take another revolution in 1848 to abolish slavery throughout the Empire.

Gary: You mentioned that Furcy was forgotten for over a century, until historians revived this figure from obscurity, at which point he becomes a symbol for activists in Réunion How did he come to be rediscovered, and why now?

Sue: Let me back up for a little bit and tell you how I came to Furcy's story.  I started being interested in the subject of race and slavery in France in a roundabout way, from my own childhood. I grew up in Washington, D.C., during the era of desegregation in the late 60s, and 70s and I witnessed firsthand the city's efforts to undo generations of discrimination and violence against black people even in the history curriculum. The D.C. public schools also taught me the French language from about the third grade. So when I got to graduate school, I was struck by the rich historiography on the presence of black people in Britain. But there really wasn't anything for France. In my research, I stumbled across a 1778 law banning marriages between blacks and whites in Paris, and I was puzzled and also curious. This flew completely in the face of my preconceptions of France as a place without racism or prejudice, which was the sort of, impression that we had. And we knew this because of the experience of American GI’s during the First and Second World Wars. Moreover, I had thought that France, in contrast to the United States, welcomed interracial marriages. So this law banning interracial marriages was very odd and caused me to do further research. It was in the course of this dissertation research on blacks in France that I came across Furcy’s this lawsuit in 1990, but I set it aside initially because it concerned the 19th century, and it seemed way out of the scope of my pre-revolutionary interests at the time. In 2007, I returned to the file in my drawers and I thought, Furcy that's odd. I googled his name and discovered a French Wikipedia article which showed that a huge cache of archival documents concerning his lawsuits had just been purchased by the departmental archives in Lorient. Also, the Wikipedia contributor said that Furcy he had died a slave. Now, I knew this was wrong based on my own research. So I reached out to the historians in Réunion who invited me to come there and read the archival collection. Meanwhile, in 2001, the French National Assembly passed the Taubira Law, which recognizes the historical wrongs of slavery and the slave trade is crimes against humanity. The Taubira law mandates new research into the history of France's participation in slavery and the teaching of the subject in France's schools, so French interest in the history of slavery and abolition has expanded dramatically in the last couple of decades.

Gary: I hear that Furcy has taken on quite a life beyond your book. There is a recent novel, some plays, some documentaries, a museum exhibit, and at least one film underway. Why do you think Furcy's story is getting so much attention, particularly in France?

Sue: Well, in 2010, a French journalist at Le Monde, Mohamed Ozzine published a historical novel based on some of the same archival papers that inform my book, L'Affaire de l’Esclave Furcy, or the Lawsuit of the Slave Furcy won several prizes which garnered the attention of playwrights, activists, a songwriter, and filmmakers. And we know that a French feature film is due to open next year in 2025. Meanwhile, I continued to collect hundreds of pages of additional research in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, London and Mauritius. So my research filled out Furcy’s story considerably, including his purchase of two slaves and also the women in his life, especially Madeleine and Constance. Before I could publish my work, however, local activists got wind that a historian from Vancouver, which is the name of the city where I live in Washington state, they got the wind that this, historian from Vancouver was holding back her work. So I'm afraid that I became immortalized in the lyrics. Furcy he came from Reunion Island and not from Canada, confessed to us that you like that we do not know our history. You've been playing hide and seek, whereas we did not know this game. You have allowed yourself to play with our memory. In other words, they assumed that I was from Vancouver, Canada, not the other Vancouver in Washington state where I live and work. Thankfully, I was able to meet with these activists during my next research trip in 2015, and I made sure to invite them to my public lectures and once my book was translated into French. We've made up, everybody's Good now. Towards the end, I began to collaborate with a local historian in Gilles Gérard who found additional notarial records that fleshed out Furcy's life in Bourbon and Mauritius, including the discovery of two free women of color who had children with him. Together with Dr. Gérard, I've been working as a historical consultant on a French documentary and a major French museum exhibit, which I helped to translate and is now touring several United States Universities, including Duke, the University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech.

Gary: Your book is a micro history. How do you balance the large scale global changes occurring with the French Revolution and other major events, with the small scale story of an individual?

Sue: Well, I've been a major fan of the microhistory since I read · I’ve been a major fan of the microhistory since I read Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Robert Darnton in in grad school. There's something really beautiful about taking an exceptionally rich personal story, particularly of an undocumented class of people such as peasants, workers, children, women and slaves, and bringing it to life through a rare cache of documents. Legal records, in particular, lend themselves to drama, with their protagonists, antagonists, conflict and resolution all baked into the story. But it's not enough to tell just a small story. The best micro histories use these individuals to tell us important stories about the wider historical context, often from a new perspective. So that's what I've tried to do here, to take readers through France's history of slavery and abolition, through the experiences of one family.

Gary: The book is Madeleine's Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France's Indian Ocean Colonies. Thank you very much for being on the show, Doctor Peabody.

Sue: Thank you so much, Gary. I really look forward to hearing from your listeners.

Gary: As always, donations keep the podcast going. So if you would like to make a one time donation or become a patron, please consider doing so. Thank you very much for your continued support.