Canada Post Releases Black History Month Stamp of Enslaved Woman, Marie-Joseph Angélique

What do you know about slavery? Perhaps you’ve seen a film like 12 Years a Slave (2013) or Amistad (1997). Now, what do you know about Canadian Slavery? Nothing? Well, you’re not to blame. Most Canadians have never had the opportunity to learn about this foundational history because the two-hundred years of British and French colonization and slaving in the regions that eventually became Canada have been excluded from our national curricula (think elementary school, high school, colleges, and universities and you’ll get the picture). Indeed, when our fearless leader, Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson, left Canada for her current position south of the border, she was one of a handful of university professors who taught and produced research on Canadian Slavery. We’re not exaggerating! Indeed, the professors employed at Canadian universities who are experts in histories of Transatlantic Slavery in tropical or semi-tropical regions – plantation sites like Jamaica, Barbados, Brazil, and the US South – far outnumber those who are expert in Canadian Slavery.

By the way, Transatlantic Slavery was legally practised over a large swath of Canadian territory including Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia (including Cape Breton), Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland. However, Canadian teachers and professors have been teaching the thirty-one-year history of the Underground Railroad (1834-1865) which has become enshrined in national curriculum, seamlessly helping to produce our national rhetoric of racial innocence based upon the falsehood that we were only ever a nation of abolitionists. But it’s not their fault because you can’t teach what you have never been taught.

Well, thankfully times are a changing’ and Canadian institutions have begun to follow the lead of prolific scholars like Dr. Nelson who has been producing groundbreaking research on Canadian Slavery for over twenty-five years. What does this look like? Well, in 2022, Historica Canada produced its first Heritage Minute about Canadian Slavery narrating the life of the enslaved woman Chloe Cooley. This breakthrough moment was in sharp contrast to its 1992 vignette about the Underground Railroad in which a white female abolitionist is seen comforting a distraught newly freed African American woman who awaits news of her father who is being secretly transported to freedom from the USA to Canada. In 2023, Canada Post also honoured Cooley with a Black History Month stamp. (By the way, Dr. Nelson was an advisor on both projects.)

This year (with the help of advisors like Dr. Nelson, again), Canada Post has produced a stamp featuring the hypothetical likeness of the enslaved black woman Marie-Joseph Angélique. We say hypothetical given that “high” art portraiture of enslaved people (think oil paintings, and marble and bronze busts) was historically rare and almost non-existent in eighteenth-century New France (except for François Malepart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Haitian Woman [1786]), and nobody knows what Angélique actually looked like. Born in Madeira, Portugal around 1705, Angélique was likely taken to New England via Belgium (Flanders) before being forcibly  relocated yet again to New France. Her tragic biography takes the histories of slavery in Canada back to eighteenth-century Montreal when, as a woman enslaved in the white Francheville household, she was accused of an arson which supposedly started with misplaced coals and later destroyed a sizeable portion of the French settlement. Prior to this event she had suffered greatly losing three children in infancy after likely being forcibly impregnated by an enslaved Madagascar-born man named Jacques César. (Enslaved people, as legal chattel, of course had no control or ownership over their bodies, families, labour, mobility, activities, and sexuality, all of which were subject to the dictates of their enslavers.) But powerfully, it also appears that Angélique sought pleasure and comfort for herself by taking a white French lover, the indentured servant Claude Thibault. But in 1734, with the threat of her impending sale by the widow Francheville to François-Étienne Cugnet and yet another forced relocation, this time to Quebec City, Angélique fled with Thibault. Captured and returned to her enslaver’s household, the fire broke out soon after on 10 April 1734, destroying over forty buildings, a convent, and the hospital, Hôtel-Dieu (see: Black Maple Magazine’s  Slavery Tour of Montreal).

It must be said that there is evidence that Angélique, like most enslaved females, suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her white enslavers. The matrilineal organization of slavery through which any child born to an enslaved female was at birth a “slave” and owned by the person who enslaved the mother, made sexual violence an economic imperative. Put simply, the rape of enslaved females (we say females because many were not women by historical or contemporary standards) was incentivized by this organization which allowed white enslavers to produce more wealth for themselves (in the form of slave chattel/children) by “breeding” enslaved females.

Angelique’s abuse becomes important as we think about her documented resistance and the possibility of her guilt in the arson. Enslaved black people resisted their bondage in a myriad of ways. As our fearless leader has detailed in her recently published eighth book, The Precariousness of Freedom: Slave Resistance as Experience, Process, and Representation (2024), resistance could mean (among other things) running or sailing away from your enslaver, retaining your African name and language, learning to read in a world where the enslaved were prevented from gaining literacy, caring for, adorning, and nurturing your body in defiance of one’s animalization, and stealing the time to make instruments with which to create music, dance, and song in a world in which enslavers sought to break the enslaved from their African cultures.

Accused of arson, Angélique (then twenty-nine-years old) was arrested and subjected to an inquisition headed by representatives of the French King Louis XIV. Although she denied setting the fire she was pronounced guilty and sentenced to death. It was only under torture that she finally confessed, but even still, she refused to name Claude as a co-conspirator. Driven to the façade of Notre Dame Basilica in a garbage cart, Angélique was then hanged by an enslaved black man named Mathieu Léveillé upon whom the job of royal executioner had been forced. As a final afront to her dignity and spirit, her body was then burnt and her ashes scattered to the wind.

For Angélique, did resistance to the catastrophic brutality of enslavement result in arson? We will likely never know. But what we do know is that the prolific criminalization of black people within legal and civic discourses made any black person (especially an enslaved one) an obvious suspect whether the fire was arson or accident. Furthermore, Angélique’s arrest was orchestrated through the biased testimony of white people who had a social and psychic investment in seeing a black person punished regardless of their guilt or innocence.

The move to honour Marie-Joseph Angélique is a powerful acknowledgement of Canadian Slavery, the unique suffering of enslaved black females, and her brave resistance. Perhaps like former US President Joe Biden’s posthumous 2025 pardon of the Jamaican, Pan-African leader and activist Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940), it’s time for Canada to follow suit and finally pardon the woman who has become Canada’s symbol of slave resistance, Marie-Joseph Angélique.