The Placing of Angélique

I turn the corner on Rue Saint-François Xavier after the Notre-Dame Basilica on Place d’Armes. It’s a cold Friday night in Old Montreal. I keep walking towards the river. To my left, on a blind wall facing an empty parking lot, one of the twenty-seven “tableaux” from Cité Mémoire is playing, the world’s largest video projection installation. A woman is running in a street, away from flames surrounding buildings in the background. She falls onto the pavement as she runs away, and a small girl points an accusatory index finger at her. The hands and people multiply as the flames disappear. We hear her pleading innocence, then we see her in a prison cell next to a noose, declaring her imminent hanging. A moment later, the video shows a close-up of the woman’s face, now engulfed in the flames she was running away from. The figure in the video represents Marie-Joseph Angélique, a Portuguese-born Black enslaved woman who was accused of arson for setting a fire to escape bondage on April 10, 1734. The fire spread to forty-six buildings in Old Montreal, destroying a part of the Hôtel Dieu neighborhood. After her arrest, Angélique stood a trial that lasted for two months, throughout which she maintained her innocence. She was found guilty, to be tortured, and burned alive. When her sentence was appealed in the Conseil Supérieur, it was modified to torture and hanging. Before her hanging on June 21, 1734, the judge and an executioner, who was brought for her case to New France from Martinique, tortured her to get a forced confession.[1]

Today Angélique is a symbol of Black resistance and liberation, but her legacy is quite invisible in Montreal. In a city obsessed with its own history and “heroes,” no plaques or statues commemorate her. Few official accounts of the city include her story. In this article I look at Marie-Joseph Angélique’s present placing: where and how is she located in the city’s streets, institutions, stories, and collective memory?

Angélique in Old Montreal

Figure 1: Cité Mémoire, From Marie-Josèphe to Jackie Robinson / 1734–1946, 2017-ongoing, video projection, 408 Saint-François-Xavier St, Montreal, Montréal en Histoires.

Figure 2: Cité Mémoire, From Marie-Josèphe to Jackie Robinson / 1734–1946, 2017-ongoing, video projection, 408 Saint-François-Xavier St, Montreal, Montréal en Histoires.

When I first saw the Cité Mémoire video installation on Angélique in 2017, during Montreal’s 375^th anniversary, I had been living here for two years and had not yet read Afua Cooper’s monumental book The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal published in 2006. In her book, Cooper works with trial records to reconstruct Angélique’s life and experience – these trial records, currently held at the Bibliothèques et Archives Nationales du Québec,[2] are one of the rare instances that extensively record a Black enslaved person in Montreal. Angélique was owned by Thérèse de Couagne de Francheville, the widow of merchant Francois Poulin de Francheville. She was enslaved in Canada for nine years. Cooper uncovers Angélique’s oral narrative of resistance through the trial records: before the fire of April 10, 1734, Angélique had started a fire in another house, trying to escape and telling her mistress she would “roast” her.[3] In revealing Angélique’s story, Cooper also reframes the history of Old Montreal. The story of the 1734 fire is therefore also an architectural history – not only one of urban heritage or the destruction of the colonial compound’s houses, shops, and hospital but one about how architecture bears witness and is complicit in slavery. Cooper calls her book “part slave narrative, part historical analysis, part biography, part historical archeology:” “a female narrative of what is called the Black Atlantic.”[4] She frequently uses architectural and spatial descriptions to qualify the work of historical imagination. She sees arson as a tool of resistance and notes in her introduction:

Did Angélique set the fire? Your guess is as good as mine. No one saw her light the spark that started the blaze. All the evidence was circumstantial. But I believe she did set it. She had motive enough. She hated her mistress; she wanted to run away from slavery; and she wanted to leave the American continent altogether. […] Perhaps she set the fire to cover her tracks while fleeing and wreak vengeance upon Montréal as a bonus.[5]

The book uncovers in great detail the unjust trial, cruel treatment, and extreme torture Angélique was submitted to. In Policing Black Lives, Robyn Maynard similarly argues for histories that consider “Black women’s experiences at the hands of the police as part of a larger Canadian history of state-sanctioned punishment of Black women who fail to be subordinate and docile. This is evidenced most notably,” she says, “in the hanging of the eighteenth-century enslaved woman Marie-Joseph Angélique.”[6] Maynard notes that Angélique “set the terms of Black resistance and refusal.”[7] Are these acts of resistance and refusal apparent in the Cité Mémoire video installation, currently the only tangential trace of Angélique in Old Montreal? Yes and no. The video itself is a poetic tribute, dramatically re-enacted and it shows her story in pieces, flashes of very short scenes. The website of the project, however, exhibits disparities between the tone of the video and her placement in the present day. In a section called “375 Montreal Moments,” in the “1734” segment, the title identifies Marie-Joseph Angélique as “slave and arsonist” and the end of the text reads: “Under torture, Marie-Joseph-Angélique eventually confessed to having started the fire and was sentenced to death. This is one of the few testaments to the presence of Black slaves in New France.”[8] The text makes it sound as if the death sentence was given after Angélique confessed to having started the fire (a forced confession obtained under horrendous torture). This is not the case, as the verdict that she was guilty and to be tortured and hanged was given at the end of the trial. The semantic manipulation of the website’s description takes the blame away from the state and judge who tortured her for a coerced confession and shifts it to Angélique as the recipient of the punishment.

Figure 3: MissMe, Marie-Joseph Angélique, 2018, mural, Montreal.

Figure 4: Kit Lang, Incendiary: Marie-Joseph Angélique, 2012 Mixed media, private collection.

Angélique in the streets, fictions, stories

Tributes to Marie-Joseph Angélique exist across multiple media. Besides Cooper’s book, perhaps the most comprehensive account available is on the website of the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History.[9]Extensive information on the context before, during, and after the trial is given, along with 3D reconstructions of the city at the time and a long list of additional resources and archives.[10] However, Angélique’s presence resonates beyond the internet: In Mile-End, a stunning piece of street art by MissMe depicts Angélique, right next to a mural drawing of Leonard Cohen, by the same artist. These are represented like a diptych, perhaps the vicinity of Angélique to the most celebrated Montrealer personality, not a coincidence. Across Angélique’s portrait, the date of the fire, 1734, is written in a large font. Below 1734, is a ubiquitous Québec phrase reframed by its immediate context: “Je me souviens.” Another visual artwork (in a private collection now), “Incendiary: Marie-Joseph Angélique” by the artist Kit Lang centers Angélique in front of a night sky, with Old Montreal buildings in a small row below and behind her. Small flames rest on her shoulder and head like a halo against the starry sky. Fire and Fury: The Story of Marie-Joseph Angélique is a short film from 2008 and recounts Angélique’s trial through the perspective of three people who knew her. Another short film, Howard J. Davis’s 2017 C’est Moi sets Angélique, played by Jenny Brizzard, in modern-day Montreal and asks, “how much of our past is erased in the restoration of history?”[11] Brizzard would go on to perform Angélique again in the eponymous play by the late actress, director, and playwright Lorena Gale. In this play Angélique is presented as innocent, framed by her White lover Claude Thibault, an indentured servant. Black Hands, a docu-film directed by Tetchena Bellange, blends dramatic re-enactments with interviews by historians in an investigative manner. Writer Kaie Kellough reimagines Angélique and Montreal in his short story collection Dominoes at the Crossroads. “La question ordinaire et extraordinaire,”[12] considers Black experience in the city and an alternate future where Montreal’s new name is Milieu and Angélique is named as an ancestor. The narrator notes “the future is encoded in the past” and that the fire Angélique lit “destroyed the city, but her act forced the citizens to reimagine and rebuild. That history-altering act was carried out by a member of a population that was consistently marginalized.”[13] This first story in the collection takes its title from “the ordinary and extraordinary questions” that are the torture afflicted on Angélique, dating back to the Middle Ages in France. In The Hanging of Angélique, Afua Cooper reveals in great detail how Angélique was tortured and “submitted to the question.” These are only a few of Angélique’s echoes, her places in contemporary Montreal. The first place I had looked for her, however, was naturally the library at my own institution.

Angélique at the McGill Library

After the first time I read Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angélique, I went to the library to browse the shelf the book was placed in, to see if there were any other books nearby on histories of marginalized populations in Montreal, histories of slavery in Montreal, or other biographies that uncovered Black enslaved women in Canada. But The Hanging of Angélique was not placed among other books about urban histories of Montreal, histories of the African and Caribbean diaspora or histories of slavery in Canada. It was among books about criminals and autobiographies of murderers. Cooper explicitly notes in her book that her work is part of the history of slavery, race studies, and Canadian history. Further, the book’s subject guides, both those given by the Library of Congress/Library and Archives Canada in the book’s front matter and the ones on McGill Library’s website did not have keywords like “trial” or “criminal studies.” The subject guides of the book are listed as follows:

1. Angélique, Marie-Joseph. 2. Slaves-Québec (Province)-Montréal-Biography. 3. Fires-Québec (Province) -Montréal-History-18^th century. 4.Montréal (Québec)-History-18^th century. 5. Black Canadian women-Québec (Province) -Montréal-Biography. 6. Montréal (Québec) -Biography. 7. Slavery-Canada-History-18^th century.[14]

Was this data bias, or an individual’s choice to place it there? Indexing of a book does not always happen on-site at an institution and is sometimes outsourced. Nonetheless, the metadata and indexing of the book had nothing suggesting that its place should be this one. When I asked the library’s architecture liaison librarian, David Green, how the physical placement (despite the subject guides) of a book gets decided, he kindly offered to ask the library’s collections team. The library let us know that the institution and cataloguer who had originally assigned the call number for the book likely thought they were classifying it under “trials,” perhaps based on the chapter titles of the book. The McGill Library then changed the book’s classification to “Biography of slaves” and moved it to another section. The book now shares a shelf with (auto)biographies and travel accounts of Olaudah Equiano, the 18^th-century writer and abolitionist also known as Gustavus Vassa, who wrote The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African in 1791 and abolitionist Mary Prince, who wrote The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave in 1831.

The Displacing of Angélique

I go back to the blind wall on Rue Saint-François Xavier. It’s another cold Friday night. A shortened version of the initial video installation is playing now. We see only glimpses of Angélique’s story in this version: she appears momentarily, then the child who accuses her. We see Angélique running, escaping. While she runs, her body morphs into the running figure of Jackie Robinson, the first Black baseball player to play in Major League Baseball in the United States in 1947 and who played for the Montreal Royals in 1946. The Cité Mémoire video thus historically links two black people who inhabited Montreal, as if interchangeable. Angélique’s escape becomes Robinson’s homerun. In the collective memory of the city, in its archives, its institutions, its stories, the placing of Marie-Joseph Angélique is ongoing, as is her displacement.

References:

“1734 – Marie-Joseph Angélique, slave and arsonist.” 375 Montreal Moments. Montréal en Histoires. https://www.montrealenhistoires.com/archives_en/

“Procédures criminelles contre Marie-Joseph Angélique, négresse (femme de race noire) esclave appartenant à la demoiselle Thérèse de Couagne, veuve de François Poulin, sieur de Francheville, accusée d'avoir allumé le grand incendie qui dévasta une partie de cette ville en 1734.” Collection Pièces judiciaires et notariales, TL5,D1036. Bibliothèques et Archives Nationales du Québec. https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/3347595

“Torture and Truth: Angélique and the Burning of Montreal.” Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History. https://www.canadianmysteries.ca/sites/angelique/accueil/indexen.html

Cooper, Afua. The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal. Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007.

Kellough, Kaie. Dominoes at the Crossroads: Stories. Edited by Dimitri Nasrallah. Montréal, Québec, Canada: Esplanade Books, the fiction imprint at Véhicule Press, 2020.

Maynard, Robyn. Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2017.