Marie-Joseph Angélique

Marie-Joseph Angélique was born around 1705 to 1709 in Madeira, and was described in colonial records as a Portuguese-born Black woman. She was sold into slavery and arrived in New France in 1725. In Montreal she was enslaved in the household of Thérèse de Couagne, a widow from a prominent merchant family, and served there as a domestic.

By 1734 Angélique had decided to escape. According to accounts of the case, she plotted her flight with her lover, Claude Thibault, a white indentured servant who worked in the same household, and Thibault left for New England as events unfolded.

On 10 April 1734 a fire broke out in the house of her mistress in Montreal. It spread through the city's merchant quarter and destroyed 46 buildings, burning down much of the town. Angélique had fled and was soon recaptured, and suspicion quickly fell on her as the person who had set the fire, allegedly as a diversion for her escape.

She was tried on circumstantial evidence and is reported to have confessed only after being tortured. Whether she really set the fire has never been proved. She was sentenced to death and hanged in Montreal on 21 June 1734. An enslaved man, possibly Mathieu Léveillé, who served as the colony's executioner, may have carried out the sentence.

Her story remained alive in oral tradition, and in recent decades historians such as Afua Cooper have reexamined the case, arguing that it reveals the reality of slavery in New France, a part of Canadian history often overlooked. Angélique's story has come to symbolise Black resistance and the desire for freedom, and she is remembered as an early heroine in Canada's long struggle against slavery.