Madeleine's Children
Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France's Indian Ocean Colonies
Sue Peabody
Reviews and Awards
Winner of the David H. Pinkney Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies
Winner of the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize of the Western Association of Women Historians
Winner of the Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize of the French Colonial Historical Society
"A meticulous and insightful study of the life of a woman who, as a child, was sold into slavery in India, and it also chronicles the later struggles of her children to obtain freedom in the French Mascarenes in the first half of the nineteenth century ... Madeleine's Children, in the best tradition of microhistory, moves beyond this individual and exceptional story to provide insights into wider issues of race, abolitionism, and governance in the French colonial world of the period." -- Nigel Worden, American Historical Review
"This volume will be of particular interest to those who wish to better understand the work of historians, as well as for those studying the construction of race and indentity in relation to slavery and freedom." -- Virginie Ems-Bléneau, French Review
"[A]s a collective study of masters' and enslaved families, it is compelling. The book has surprising contemporary relevance. Close reading suggests how legal machinations and deceptive cloaking enable slaving practices to survive, even thrive, in today's globalized economy."--CHOICE
"What does it mean to be free? To be a slave? To belong to a family? In this remarkable book, historian Sue Peabody--one of the world's leading authorities on slavery in the French Empire--shows that these big questions are often intertwined. Through an intimate portrait of one enslaved man fighting for his dignity, Peabody shines a brilliant light on the worlds in which he and his forebears lived, stretching from India to the Mascarene Islands to the courts of Paris. This is both biography and global history at their very best."--Brett Rushforth, author of Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France
"This gripping family history of slavery and freedom in France and its Indian Ocean empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resurrects in inviting detail the lives of Madeleine--sold into slavery in India and freed on Bourbon Island, though not told of her manumission for nineteen years--and of her children. With help from family and friends, Furcy, one of those children held in slavery by ruse, vigorously pursued legal recognition of his free status in the Mascarene Islands of the Indian Ocean and in France--and won. Drawing on thousands of pages of archival and legal documents to reconstruct their lives with astonishing detail, Peabody presents us with the first autobiographical narrative of slaves held by French citizens and in the process illuminates the internal architectures of slavery and freedom in France's Indian Ocean colonies."--Pier M. Larson, The Johns Hopkins University
"'Madeleine's Children' is a detailed exposition of the lives of slaves in the Indian Ocean world in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Based on years of meticulous research, it brings vividly to life the tensions between slave-owners and slaves during a tumultuous period of shifting legal challenges to, and definitions of, slavery. Thoroughly recommended to scholars of the Indian Ocean world and of slavery."--Gwyn Campbell, Director, Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University
