Intimate Enemies: the Enslavement of Children During the French Regime
Judicial, notarial and parish archives reveal the extent and durability of child slavery in New France. Indeed, traces of the lives of enslaved children, mostly natives, appear constantly in documents from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. How may we explain this almost pedophilic attraction for slaves under the age of 12 ? What role did the masters expect such young slaves to play ? Who “managed” them on a daily basis ? What is the place and function of these enslaved young slaves in the families ? And finally, how has this repeated violence of child enslavement been justified ? Thus, through all the questions that it raises, this true blind spot of research that is child slavery, sheds, on the one hand, a raw light on the power relations at work in colonial society, where hierarchical and patriarchal foundations are irradiated by a bundle of servitudes and, on the other hand, the socio-economic history of New France, knowing that during the French Regime the majority of households, who today would own their own car, owned at least one slave.