A young woman lay in a rubbish cart as it jostled down the cobbled streets of Montreal, where houses, shops, a convent, and a hospital stood in ashen ruins. They parked in front of the gallows and she was helped onto the scaffold. She wore a white chemise that hung loosely over her dark skin. The word incendiaire, meaning arsonist, was embroidered on the front and the back. She held a blazing torch, a symbol of the crime she was being executed for: setting a fire that burned down large swaths of Montreal.
The hangman, an enslaved Black person like her, placed a noose around her neck. The crowd watched in fascinated horror as she fell through the hatch and the rope tightened, strangling her.
The woman was Marie-Joseph Angélique. This scene is recounted in The Hanging of Angélique by Afua Cooper, a history professor at Canada’s Dalhousie University. As shefurther explains, the 1734 trial became one of the most spectacular events in the colony’s history. Centuries later, Angélique remains a symbol of resistance and a reminder of Canada’s history of slavery. And it remains unknown whether she actually started the fire that wreaked havoc in New France.
Marie-Joseph Angélique was born in approximately 1705 in Portugal. Very little is known about the first 20 years of her life. Enslaved, she was eventually brought to the United States, where, in 1725, she was purchased by a wealthy French lord, fur-trader, and merchant. According to Cooper’s research, he brought her home with him to the city of Montreal in the colony of New France (in modern-day Canada) to work as a domestic slave.
Contrary to popular conceptions of Canada as the nice Northern neighbour of slave-owning America, Canada, too, had a history of slavery. But it’s been erased and ignored. According to historian Dorothy Williams, an expert on Black Canadian history, this is all part of how we define ourselves as Canadians, vis-à-vis Americans. “We still use it to our advantage in terms of how we define ourselves…’Well, at least we didn’t have slavery,’” she tells Teen Vogue. “But in fact, we did, for 200 years or so."
Canada’s relationship to slavery is often mentioned only in terms of the Underground Railroad, and the heroic story of how, in the mid-nineteenth century, runaway slaves were brought north to freedom. “That makes us feel good as Canadians, right?” Williams says. “We rescued Blacks. We were the savior. We were the North Star. We were the haven… It’s all part of the narrative of who we are as a nation.”
But Angélique was one of several thousand people enslaved in the colony between 1671 and 1834, a third of whom were Black and the rest of which were Indigenous, according to a virtual exhibition on New France by Canada’s Museum of History. Historian Marcel Trudel’s ground-breaking scholarship brought awareness to the important story of Canadian slavery in 1960s. Trudel’s work was later translated into English and published in 2013 as Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Hundred Years of Bondage. In his work, he counts approximately 4,200 slaves in Canada over the two centuries. While this number pales in comparison to the estimated millions of people brought to the United States via the North Atlantic slave trade between 1525 and 1866, it’s a part of Canadian history all the same.
As a domestic slave for the Franchevilles, Angélique would have been engaged in the ceaseless work of cooking, cleaning, serving, washing, and other household chores, not to mention the added agricultural responsibilities of tending to their farm, according to Cooper’s book.
Five years after she was brought to Montreal, on June 28, 1730, her master baptized her and gave her the name Marie-Joseph Angélique. Unfortunately, her birth name is lost to history. By January 1731, Angélique became a mother. She gave birth to a son, Eustache, and named a fellow slave as the father. In May 1732, she gave birth to twins Louis and Marie-Françoise. Tragically, according to Merna Forster’s 100 Canadian Heroines: Famous and Forgotten Faces, all three babies died in infancy.
She also began an affair with a white indentured servant in the Francheville household named Thibault. Cooper’s book claims that they bonded over their shared longing for freedom and began plotting their escape together.
After her master died, his widow, Madame Francheville, became Angélique’s legal owner. She took the opportunity to request her freedom from her new mistress, but was denied.
To make matters worse, Madame Francheville was selling her to a new owner in Quebec City, who, it was rumored, would in turn sell her into enslavement in the West Indies. According to Cooper’s book, Angélique, outraged, said that she would burn the house down with her mistress in it.
A few months later, she ran away with her lover. On their way out, they set fire to Angélique’s bed; Cooper suggests they may have done so in an attempt to cover their tracks. But two weeks later, the police found them. Thibault was thrown in jail and Angélique sent back to her mistress .
Angélique continued to insist that she would burn down her mistress’s house.
A few months later, on the evening of April 10, 1734, a blazing fire spread across Montreal. At least 46 buildings — including peoples’ homes, businesses, the convent, and the hospital — were destroyed. The city was left in ashes, according to Cooper.
People were quick to point their fingers at Angélique.
“She had all these strikes against her,” Cooper tells Teen Vogue. “She was Black. She was marginalized. She was a slave. She was basically a social outcast.”
Angélique was dragged to court and charged with arson. More than 24 witnesses were called, 23 of whom said she was guilty. Their evidence? They all claimed they heard Angélique herself say that she would start a fire.
She was sentenced to death. Throughout the trial, Angélique insisted she was innocent. But on June 21, under torture, according to Cooper, she broke down and confessed Later that day, Angélique was executed in Montreal at the age of 25 years old
After all this time, her story remains steeped in rumor and hearsay.
“I believe she set the fire,” says Cooper, who spent 15 years studying Angélique’s life. She had the motive: she hated her mistress, and she wanted her freedom. “Throughout the Americas, you know, fire was a tool of outrage and a tool of resistance used by enslaved people.”
Cooper carefully scrutinized Angélique’s trial records and tried to piece together the young woman’s perspective from the documents left by white male officials. Recovering this story is part of the process of “unsilencing the past,” she writes, bringing to light the experiences of Black women.
Now, when people look back in Canadian history for Black people who fought against racial oppression, they often turn to Angélique. “She was enslaved. She resisted. She was executed,” says Cooper. Now, she stands out as a symbol of Black resistance. Forgotten for centuries, Angélique has now become an icon in popular culture — the star of novels, plays, a folk song, and a movie
“It is a story of sorrow,” concludes Cooper. “It is a story of resistance.”
And at last, that story is being told.
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