Madeleine's children : family, freedom, secrets, and lies in France's Indian Ocean colonies
著者
書誌事項
Madeleine's children : family, freedom, secrets, and lies in France's Indian Ocean colonies
Oxford University Press, c2017
大学図書館所蔵 全3件
  青森
  岩手
  宮城
  秋田
  山形
  福島
  茨城
  栃木
  群馬
  埼玉
  千葉
  東京
  神奈川
  新潟
  富山
  石川
  福井
  山梨
  長野
  岐阜
  静岡
  愛知
  三重
  滋賀
  京都
  大阪
  兵庫
  奈良
  和歌山
  鳥取
  島根
  岡山
  広島
  山口
  徳島
  香川
  愛媛
  高知
  福岡
  佐賀
  長崎
  熊本
  大分
  宮崎
  鹿児島
  沖縄
  韓国
  中国
  タイ
  イギリス
  ドイツ
  スイス
  フランス
  ベルギー
  オランダ
  スウェーデン
  ノルウェー
  アメリカ
注記
Includes index
内容説明・目次
内容説明
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.
目次
Introduction
1. Madeleine: A Child Slave in Pre-Colonial India
2. Crossings: Oceans, Islands, and Free Soil
3. Madeleine's Children: Family Secrets
4. The Revolution: Emancipation without Freedom
5. The Limits of Law: Madeleine's Betrayal
6. A Perfect Storm
7. Incendiary Arguments, Justice Suspended
8. English Liberties
9. Freedom Papers Hidden in His Shoe
10. Damages and Interest
Afterword
Appendices
Notes
Index
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