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

In this quest for the Truth, Sue Peabody attempts to piece together the life of a slave family who lived in the Indian Ocean French colonies from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Peabody faces many challenges beyond the simple passage of time: not only was the life of slaves rarely put onto paper during their lifetime (let alone in first-person narratives), in the case that she is trying to uncover, documents were falsified, stolen, lost or hidden by multiple parties, making her investigation all the more difficult. Despite its title, the book mainly focuses on one of Madeleine's children, Furcy, whose battle for emancipation, while being fairly well known by Indian Ocean and slavery historians, still remains a story half told because of all the elements missing from the written trail of evidence. While Peabody acknowledges the gaps in the story she is trying to tell, the interest of this book lies in both its portrayal of the intersection of justice and power throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (and the many political regimes of this period), but also in its depiction of the difficult work that historians undertake in a battle against scarce historical records, time, luck, and the will of those who hold the rare and fragile documents that could elucidate many mysteries. This book also highlights the singularity of slavery in the Indian Ocean, especially in comparison to that of the Atlantic Ocean. As such, 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 identity in relation to slavery and freedom. Indeed, the analysis of Furcy's struggle for freedom reveals that decisions regarding emancipation involved much more than a master's good will, especially when a case was brought in front of the justice system because of some disagreement between a slave and his or her master. Peabody brilliantly reveals that such decisions carried the heavy weight of political and philosophical debates taking place halfway across the world, in Paris and London. Readers also learn that the ideal of freedom itself had its own particular meaning in the Indian Ocean. If in Paris freedom meant owning land and the right to vote, for Furcy, freedom meant the right to a last name, a family, and a legacy. And yet, the same word, freedom, echoed all across the French and British Empires. Because of the inconsistent historical record, Peabody's work often relies on similar (auto)biographies of slaves and free men and women of color to reconstruct the life of Madeleine and her children. As such, rather than the life story of Madeleine's children, this book should be understood as a chronicle of colonial life in the Indian Ocean, with a particular focus on emancipation litigations.