A traveling version of an exhibition originally organized by the Villèle Historical Museum, in partnership with the Departmental Archives of Reunion Island, retracing the unique history of an enslaved man from Réunion named Furcy. Based on research by historian Sue Peabody (Washington State University), Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies (Oxford University Press, 2017).

In 1817, on Bourbon Island (Reunion Island), thirty-one year-old slave Furcy brought legal proceedings against his master Joseph Lory before the Saint-Denis District Court, contesting his status as a slave and claiming his ‘ingenuity,’ or rather his freedom of birth. With the help of his free sister Constance Jean-Baptiste, Louis Gilbert-Boucher, public prosecutor at the Royal Court of Bourbon in 1817, and Jacques Sully-Brunet, a young lawyer and hearing officer at the Royal Court of Bourbon, Furcy embarked on a long fight against colonial justice that would lead him to imprisonment on Bourbon Island, exile in Mauritius as a slave, then freedom and legal proceedings in the highest courts of France. Furcy’s fight was based on the following arguments: his mother was of Indian rather than African origin; having spent time in France, she should no longer have been a slave and so Furcy himself should therefore have been a free citizen at birth. The trial lasted twenty-seven years, ending on December 23rd 1843 in the Royal Court of Paris with the following decision: “Furcy was born in a state of freedom.” 

Forgotten for almost two centuries, the Furcy case is now visible in French popular culture thanks to an award-winning novel, L’Affaire Furcy (2010), by Mohammed Aissaoui, which inspired several plays and a musical recording, “L’Or de Furcy” (2014) by the Réunionais singer Kaf Malbar, as well as a graphic history for young readers(Citoyen junior, no. 25, 2012), an animated documentary film, Furcy, le procès de la liberté/Furcy, Fighting for Freedom (Pierre Lane, 2021), and a recently completed live-action film, L’affaire de l’esclave Furcy (dir. Abd Al Malek, opening in France 2025).