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When Mélie, an enslaved girl, was whipped, raped, and burned, the magistrates of Guadeloupe charged her master, the white François Rivière Sommabert, with murder. A central pillar of Sommabert’s defense strategy was that he was mad, and therefore could not be held responsible for his actions. In contrast, the prosecutors portrayed him as a cannibalistic monster in order to justify allowing the enslaved witnesses to testify against him and the conviction of a white planter for abusing his slaves. Though the claims of madness and monstrosity sought opposite ends for the defendant, both rested upon the premise of his abnormality, as well as a sharp distinction between him and the rest of the white slave-holding Creoles of Guadeloupe. In so doing, the two depictions of Sommabert worked together to absolve the enslavers and the slave system itself of the charge that his crime was in fact commonplace in the colony.

The madman and the monster: Individual and collective absolution in early nineteenth-century Guadeloupe