Madeleine's Children

Peabody has sifted the documentary record with exquisite care in order to portray the contradictory ties of intimacy, exploitation, solidarity and betrayal that characterized the extended families that bound masters and servants in slave societies.... Madeleine's Children...offers a quiet but necessary revision to much of the literature about slaves' search for freedom in the age of abolition. * Paul Cheney, French History *
As Sue Peabody shows in this impressive study of the family history of Madeleine, an enslaved woman from Bengal, the experiences of slaves in the Francophone world lacked for neither drama nor didactic imprint. Following Madeleine and her two children...Peabody delivers a tale of personal tragedy and salvation, set against a global backdrop of revolution, restoration, and imperial rivalry. The result is not only a compelling glimpse of figures marginally represented within the historical record, but also a provocative analysis of what it actually means to be free....Peabody has given us a readable, nuanced, and compelling piece of historical scholarship, one that is at once informative to specialists and accessible to a wider audience. * Gregory Mole, H-France *
A welcome addition to the historiography of French imperialism and slavery....French history does not have an equivalent of Equiano or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl....While this study is not autobiographical, as are some of the English-language accounts of slavery, Peabody does reconstruct Furcy's life and incorporates the testimony he gave in various court cases. This analysis sheds light on some of his experiences as an enslaved person as well as his sense of the true implications of his legal status. For scholars of slavery and the history of the family, Furcy's testimony also offers valuable insights into what it means to be a father when one is nominally free, but not free in a total sense. * Margaret Cook Andersen, English Historical Review *
Peabody seeks to deepen understandings of freedom and slavery by enlarging the focus to include the French empire as it reached beyond the Atlantic. Her attention to the slave smuggling triggered by the abolition of transoceanic slave trading reinforces studies of contraband in the late eighteenth century. And while Madeleine, Marie Anne and Eugénie all inhabited a reality far from the revolutionary feminists in mainland France, Peabody is deeply invested in understanding the experiences of women, including highlighting the entangling practices of employing enslaved women as midwives and wet-nurses. Focusing on one family's experiences reveals the complex and messy underbelly of an empire in the process of transformation and France's bumpy trajectory toward the promises of the 1789 revolution. * Isabelle Headrick, Not Even Past *
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 Empireshows 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 yearsand 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 Franceand 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 *