In 1990, American historian Sue Peabody was researching her dissertation on enslaved peoples’ pre-revolutionary freedom lawsuits in France when she came upon an intriguing story. In 1817 on Île Bourbon (now Réunion), a French-colonized island in the Indian Ocean, a 31-year-old enslaved man named Furcy Madeleine brought legal proceedings before the Saint-Denis District Court against his master Joseph Lory. Furcy’s suit contested his status as a slave and claimed his “ingenuity” — his freedom of birth.
Peabody, now a Distinguished Professor of History at Washington State University, set the history aside at the time because the trial’s ruling did not take place until half a century after the French Revolution. But in 2007, her interest in the case was reignited when she saw that a set of documents concerning the lawsuit had been purchased at auction in 2005 by the Departmental Archives of Réunion. Intrigued, she contacted a historian at the Université de La Réunion, who invited her to attend a colloquium for historians of the Indian Ocean in 2008. At that conference, she met French legal historian Jérémy Boutier.
Momentum builds, and exhibition is born
Over the next decade, both historians researched and wrote about Furcy; Peabody’s prize-winning book “Madeleine's Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France's Indian Ocean Colonies” was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. At the same time, Furcy’s previously little-known story began appearing in French popular culture through novels, plays, musical recordings, and films. In 2019-20, the Musée de Villèle in Réunion presented an exhibition, “L’étrange histoire de Furcy Madeleine, 1786-1856,” curated by historian Gilles Gérard, which Peabody and Boutier consulted on as historians.
Peabody and Boutier then created a traveling version of this exhibition, translating it into English as “The Surprising Story of Furcy Madeleine.” It made its North American debut at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, in 2024.
Exhibition at the University of Virginia
The exhibition is now on display in Shannon Library’s Third Floor Gallery through May 2026. Peabody will speak at the exhibition’s opening reception on Sept. 16 at 5:30 p.m. in Shannon Library, Room 330.
“We are especially excited to be opening the exhibit at the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, who, in turn, represented the United States as ambassador to France (1785-1789), at the exact era when Furcy was born in Réunion,” Peabody said. “The exhibit gives viewers the chance to reflect on the particularly American experiences of slavery and freedom in comparison to the French and Indian Ocean worlds. The ‘surprises’ in the exhibit title reflect the ways that Furcy Madeleine challenges our own expectations and preconceptions about this critical period in history.”
“Ingenuity,” and an unforgettable story
Furcy based his “ingenuity” claim on the fact that his mother was of Indian rather than African descent and that having spent time in France, she should no longer have been a slave, therefore Furcy himself should have been a free citizen at birth. Furcy was supported by his free sister Constance Jean-Baptiste; Louis Gilbert-Boucher, a public prosecutor at the Royal Court of Bourbon; and Jacques Sully-Brunet, a lawyer and hearing officer at the Royal Court of Bourbon. The case lasted 27 years, during which Furcy was imprisoned on Bourbon Island and exiled in Mauritius as a slave. The trial finally ended on Dec. 23 1843, in the Royal Court of Paris with the following decision: “Furcy was born in a state of freedom.”
Peabody described Furcy’s story as “extraordinarily rich” in an interview with Imaginaries (a publication on French history and culture). “There is probably no other life of an enslaved person that is as well-documented for the Francophone world (with the exception, of course, of Toussaint Louverture, who began his life in slavery). Furcy’s lawsuit generated hundreds of pages of evidence — hand-written notes, newspaper articles in French and English, legal pamphlets, and so on — and his life was also recorded in sources like baptismal registers and census returns.” Many reproductions of these records are on display in the exhibition.
Peabody and Boutier also emphasized that Furcy’s life contained many surprises and complexities and that translating it wasn’t as simple as finding the right words. “Translation involves considering different audiences’ expectations,” Peabody said. “For example, people in Réunion today are familiar with their own multi-ethnic heritage and history, but Americans and even French people in Europe tend to have a more simplistic association, where slavery means ‘African.’ Furcy’s story complicates that simple Black/white binary.”
“We tried to rebuild this singular story to as close as what really happened,” Boutier said. “One objective was to explain to people that Furcy (despite that fact that he was illegally enslaved) became a slave owner himself.”
Furcy Madeleine’s lasting impact
Meg Kennedy, the Library’s Curator of Material Culture and co-chair of the Art in Library Spaces committee, said that Furcy’s story “raises important questions about freedom, equality, and the power of law in the age of revolution and abolition. The year-long installation will allow for broad engagement with the Furcy exhibition by UVA faculty and students, K-12 educators and students, and community members.”
“The Surprising Story of Furcy Madeleine” exhibition is a partnership between the Library and its Art in Library Spaces committee; faculty in the College of Arts & Sciences including Associate Professor of History Jennifer Sessions and Professor of History and Distinguished Chair on Democracy and the History of South Asia Indrani Chatterjee, who will incorporate the exhibition into their classes; the UVA Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, which provided grant funding for Sessions’ two-year project, “Telling Stories about Law, Race, and Rights in the Indian Ocean and Francophone World”; the UVA Center for Liberal Arts; and the Villèle Historical Museum in Réunion.
The exhibition’s opening lecture and reception on Sept. 16 is free and open to the public.