Madeleine's Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France's Indian Ocean Colonies by Sue Peabody (review)

This historical study of the slave trade and emancipation in the islands of Réunion and Mauritius is a monument of painstaking archival research, conducted by a researcher based at the opposite end of the planet — on the north-west coast of America. This is in itself something of an achievement, given the difficulty of access to the relevant documentation in libraries and archives in France and in the islands of the Indian Ocean. The book's narrative centres on a family of slaves who eventually progress towards liberation in the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the abolition of slavery in France's Indian Ocean colony of Réunion in 1848. The eponymous heroine of the story was purchased as a slave in Bengal by a French woman, and transported with her mistress to France. There she was granted her freedom under the Revolution but was illegally sold to a family from what was then the Isle Bourbon and taken there as a domestic servant. There she gave birth to three children, and her family was subsequently inherited by a plantation owner. Her youngest child, a boy named Furcy, took the unprecedented step in 1817 of declaring himself free, on the grounds that his mother's legal freedom had been denied her, and took his suit as far as the Royal Court of Paris, where he was opposed by his former master, who employed numerous legal subterfuges to retain him as a slave. The saga of his long campaign to achieve freedom in France made Furcy a folk-hero in Réunion, but for a long period he was obliged to reside in Mauritius, by then under British rule, where he prospered as an entrepreneur and small businessman. Recognition of his free status in France was only granted in 1843, a mere five years before slavery was finally abolished, and several years after the death of his former plantation-owning master. The complicated and shifting legal situation of slaves and their masters during this period is meticulously elucidated by Sue Peabody, who paints an unflattering picture of devious plantation owners, determined to maintain their economic advantage by any legal or illegal means. The story of Madeleine and Furcy is a fascinating one despite the complexity of the evolving legal and social context, and Peabody maintains the reader's interest with an economical and lucid style. The weight of the documentation that underpins her narrative is revealed by the fact that over a hundred of the book's three hundred pages are taken up with endnotes and references. This is a rewarding study that sheds new light on the often obscure tractations of the slave trade and the events leading up to its eventual abolition.