Marie Rose Cavelan is not an easy figure. Mixed-race, free, a slaveowner, co-instigator of an anti-British insurrection in Grenada in 1795, she embodies the complexity of the Caribbean colonial world. Long confined to archival silence, this woman of power and fire resurfaces today as a strategic enigma in the history of forgotten revolts. A memory to be rehabilitated, between planted shadows and armed uprisings.
On March 2, 1795, in the green heights of Belvidere in Grenada, a British governor, George Home, is being held captive. Not by a regular army, but by Creole insurgents in revolt against the imperial order. Among the figures orchestrating this rebellion stands a woman, upright, armed, calm, supervising. Marie Rose Cavelan. This name evokes nothing today, or very little. And yet, it embodies the very complexity of a colonial world that escapes any simple framework.
Marie Rose Cavelan is neither a pure abolitionist nor a greedy planter. She is free, but not white. Mixed-race, but a slaveowner. Married to an influential man, yet fully aware of the precariousness of her status. She lives at the crossroads of several worlds: empires at war, fractured social classes, and rigid racial identities imposed on Caribbean margins. Cavelan is not an anomaly: she is both a product of the system and its subversion.
For to understand the Caribbean in the eighteenth century, one must look where official history averts its gaze. Where women of color are neither heroines nor traitors, but often both, depending on who holds the pen. Marie Rose Cavelan, in her assumed complexity, forces us to abandon binary narratives. She reminds us that insurrection, in these islands subjected to imperial arbitrariness, is never spontaneous; it is strategy. A wager. A calculated cry.
The Creole youth of a free woman
We do not know exactly where Marie Rose Cavelan was born; somewhere between the shores of Martinique and the agricultural lands of Grenada, around 1752. Like so many women in Caribbean colonial societies, her existence begins in archival blur, between two statuses, two languages, two empires.
She is described sometimes as a “free mulatto woman,” sometimes as “mestive,” catch-all terms that say everything and nothing at once. What is known is that she was neither enslaved nor white, but grew up in a world where these categories determined the right to live, to own, to inherit. To be free did not mean to be protected. Her condition was an unstable balance, always vulnerable to challenge by a judge, a planter, or a decree from London.
Marie Rose Cavelan grew up in Saint Mark, in the Grenadian countryside, between sugarcane fields and civil codes. She moved among French-origin Creole elites, some still nostalgic for monarchy and Catholicism, in an island now under British domination. This linguistic, religious and social in-betweenness shaped her consciousness. She learned to navigate interstices, to read between lines, to survive by adaptation.
Toward the late 1770s, she married Julien FĂ©don, a free man of color like herself, Catholic, a merchant, influential. It was not simply a marriage of love: it was also a strategic pact. FĂ©don had connections, capital, land. Together, they formed a socially ascendant Creole couple in a colony still marked by white domination, but where intelligent alliances could, for a time, push back imposed racial limits.
Marie Rose thus became far more than a wife: she entered a dynamic of power. She learned management, commerce, exploitation. She did not watch History pass; she began to inscribe her name in it, in her own way, in the shadows of grand narratives.
The ambiguity of an ascending class
In 1784, Marie Rose Cavelan officially became a landowner. She purchased the plantation “Lancer,” modest but strategic, covering nearly 40 acres and worked by about ten enslaved people. This was only the beginning. A few years later, with her husband Julien Fédon, she co-directed Belvidere, one of the largest estates in the region, 450 fertile acres and more than 80 enslaved laborers.
Cavelan was not a marginal figure: she was known in Saint George’s, the island’s nerve center. A businesswoman in a world of white men, she signed contracts, hired notaries, oversaw production. She fully participated in the colonial sugar economy, in all its brutality.
But this success did not protect her. In 1787, colonial authorities arrested her. Reason: she could not provide legal proof of her freedom. This was not an administrative oversight: it was a political signal. Since Britain’s takeover of Grenada in 1784, the regime had tightened its treatment of free people of color. The space this emerging class occupied, between white elites and the enslaved masses, was shrinking rapidly.
Marie Rose’s case became emblematic. Her detention (unjustified in substance) revealed a new administrative strategy: tightening the racial and religious noose to contain Creole ascension. Free people of color, mostly Catholic and often French-speaking, were now perceived as potential threats—social and ideological.
To secure her release, Cavelan activated an unexpected lever: testimonies from white men attesting to her freedom and good reputation. A clever temporary integration strategy: defending oneself through the dominants themselves. She understood that access to colonial justice sometimes required strategic alliances.
But this moment marked a turning point. The humiliation, the symbolic violence of the arrest, the fragility of her status (despite property, enslaved laborers, “respectability”) carved a certainty: no success would ever be enough in a system built on race. From that point on, Marie Rose Cavelan no longer thought only in terms of adaptation. She began to consider rupture.
The matrix of an insurrection
The winds were shifting across the Atlantic. From 1789 onward, the French Revolution sent shockwaves through the colonies. The ideas of equality, citizenship, and especially the abolition of slavery by the Convention in February 1794 reached Grenadian shores. For the class of free people of color, this new context was not simply moral inspiration: it was a political opportunity.
The Fédon-Cavelan couple seized it with clarity. They began to free some of their enslaved people—not from philanthropy, but to build a loyal, potentially armed network. The plantation became a laboratory. Servitude was renegotiated, reconfigured around political alliances. Belvidere no longer cultivated only sugar: it cultivated insurrection.
Witnesses would later speak of weapons purchases, clandestine recruitment, night meetings. This was no spontaneous uprising. It was organization, thought out in silence, in margins, in contradictions. And Marie Rose was its discreet pivot.
On March 2, 1795, tension ignited. Julien Fédon, at the head of a composite contingent (former slaves, free people of color, French republican militia), launched an assault on British strongholds. Saint George’s fell, Governor Ninian Home (1732–1795) was captured. He was taken to Belvidere, where insurgents guarded him.
Here, Marie Rose Cavelan appears again, armed, present, active. Colonial documents mention her involvement, as well as that of her daughters, in controlling the revolutionary camp. She did not merely support: she commanded in the shadows.
She managed logistics, prisoners, discipline. A co-commander.
In the organized chaos of insurrection, she became a full political actor.
She proved one thing: in colonial societies, the line between masters and insurgents could invert the instant the order trembled.
A mixed-race and anticolonial insurrection
What unfolded in Grenada in 1795 was neither a mere slave rebellion nor a planter revolt. It was a composite revolution, where contradictory trajectories converged: maroons seeking land, freed people seeking recognition, free people of color frustrated by racial limits, French republicans carrying Jacobin ideals.
At its head, the Fédon-Cavelan couple embodied this political hybridization. The insurgents raised the French tricolor, claimed revolutionary principles, but adapted them: the struggle was as much about racial equality as about Creole sovereignty. The enemy was not abstract: it was British authority—its Protestant religion, its racial hierarchy, its contempt for mixed-race and Catholic populations.
The revolt adopted methods of the French Revolution: popular tribunals, confiscations, political terror against loyalists. Blood flowed, sometimes indiscriminately.
Between March and June 1795, a kind of parallel government emerged, with Belvidere as its nerve center. Land was redistributed; proclamations issued. This was not chaos—it was a sovereign attempt. An embryonic Black and mixed-race governance, outside any imperial control.
Marie Rose, without official title, played a foundational role. She coordinated quietly, mediated disputes, exercised moral authority. She was consulted. She decided.
After the fall
As in many colonial rebellions, the dream of sovereignty was short-lived. In June 1796, British troops, reinforced and merciless, crushed the uprising. Insurgents were hunted, executed, deported. Villages suspected of sympathy were burned. Imperial vengeance was cold, methodical, exemplary.
Julien FĂ©don disappeared in the collapse. Some believe he fled to Cuba or elsewhere. Nothing is certain. As for Marie Rose Cavelan, her trace dissolves after April 1795. No document mentions her again. Was she killed? Did she flee? Was she deported under another name? Silence is her tomb.
Her erasure was both physical and symbolic: it ensured the disappearance of the female and mixed-race dimension of subversion.
The Fédon Rebellion was later depicted as treason, criminal revolt. Schoolbooks ignored or caricatured it. Names of leaders survived as shadows. Marie Rose Cavelan’s name disappeared entirely. Too complex. Too inconvenient.
Only recently has she resurfaced, thanks to historians such as Kit Candlin, Curtis Jacobs, and Cassandra Pybus. Not as a simplified heroine, but as a real, elusive woman — symbol of an unresolved possibility. Through her, a new reading of Caribbean history emerges: one that is no longer written only in black and white, but in the full spectrum of brown.
A woman, a revolt, a complexity
Marie Rose Cavelan fits no comfortable heroic mold. She did not wield the banner of universal justice, nor lead masses to freedom in a blaze of moral purity. What she did is far more unsettling: she acted from within the very system she would later defy. Planter, strategist, slaveowner, emancipator, conspirator, and fighter, she embodied the constant tension between domination and insubordination.
Her life was not linear; it was a series of strategic turns, risks taken in a colonial world where every position was both privilege and danger. She was neither saint nor traitor: she was political, in the rawest sense.
That is why her name deserves to stand alongside Toussaint Louverture, Sanité Bélair, or Solitude. Not because she embodies a fixed ideal, but because her existence forces us to rethink race, gender, power, and revolt in Caribbean worlds.
In an empire where memory was stratified like skin, restoring her place opens a breach in the dominant narrative. It reminds us that sometimes, the great breaks are born in the margins, carried by women armed with silence and fire.
Notes and references
Candlin, Kit. The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795–1815. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Pybus, Cassandra. Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty. Beacon Press, 2006.
Jacobs, Curtis. “The Fédon Rebellion,” Grenada National Archives Journal, vol. 6, 2005.
Higman, B.W. Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834. University of the West Indies Press, 1995.
Gaspar, David Barry & Geggus, David Patrick. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean. Indiana University Press, 1997.
Summary
- The Creole youth of a free woman
- The ambiguity of an ascending class
- The matrix of an insurrection
- A mixed-race and anticolonial insurrection
- After the fall
