Marie Rose Cavelan is not a convenient figure. Mixed-race, free, a slave owner, and co-instigator of an anti-British insurrection in Grenada in 1795, she embodies the complexity of the Caribbean colonial world. Long reduced to the silence of the archives, 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 lush heights of Belvidere in Grenada, a British governor, George Home, is held captive. Not by a regular army, but by Creole insurgents in revolt against the imperial order. Among the figures orchestrating this rebellion, a woman stands—armed, calm, supervising. Marie Rose Cavelan. This name evokes almost nothing today, and yet it alone sums up the 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, yet a slave owner. 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 the Caribbean margins. Cavelan is not an anomaly; she is the product of a system—and its subversion at the same time.
For to understand the eighteenth-century Caribbean, one must look where official history turns its eyes away. 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 leave binary narratives behind. She reminds us that insurrection, on islands subjected to imperial arbitrariness, is never a spontaneous gesture; it is a 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 the blur of the archives, between two statuses, two languages, two empires.
She is variously described as a “free mulatto woman” or a “mestive,” catch-all terms that say everything and nothing at once. What is known is that she was neither enslaved nor white, but that she grew up in a world where those categories determined the right to live, to own, to transmit. Being free did not mean being protected. Her condition was an unstable balance, always liable to be challenged by a judge, a planter, or a law from London.
Marie Rose Cavelan grew up in Saint Mark, in the Grenadian countryside, amid sugarcane and civil codes. She frequented Creole elites of French origin, some of whom retained a monarchist and Catholic nostalgia, on an island now under British rule. This linguistic, religious, and social in-between forged her consciousness. She learned to navigate the interstices, to read between the lines, to survive by adapting.
Toward the end of the 1770s, she married Julien Fédon, 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. Fédon had connections, capital, land. Together they formed a Creole couple on the path of social ascent, in a colony still marked by white domination, but where intelligent alliances made it possible (for a time) to push back imposed racial limits.
Marie Rose then became far more than a wife: she entered a dynamic of power. She learned management, commerce, exploitation. She did not watch History pass by; she began to inscribe her name in it, in her own way, in the shadow of the grand narratives.
The ambiguity of a rising class
In 1784, Marie Rose Cavelan officially became a landowner. She purchased the “Lancer” plantation, modest but strategic, covering nearly 40 acres and worked by about a dozen enslaved people. This was only the beginning. A few years later, with her husband Julien Fédon, she co-managed Belvidere, one of the largest estates in the region: 450 acres of fertile land and more than 80 enslaved people.
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. The reason: she could not provide legal proof of her freedom. This was not an administrative oversight; it was a political signal. Since the British reoccupation of Grenada in 1784, the regime had hardened its treatment of free people of color. The space this emerging class occupied—between white elites and servile masses—was rapidly shrinking.
Marie Rose’s case became emblematic. Her detention (unjustified in substance) revealed a new administrative strategy: tightening the racial vise, religiously and legally, to contain any Creole ascent. Free people of color, largely Catholic and often Francophone, were now perceived as potential threats, both social and ideological.
To get out of prison, Cavelan activated an unexpected lever: testimonies from white men attesting to her freedom and good reputation. A skillful strategy of temporary integration, of defense through the intermediaries of the dominant themselves. She understood that access to colonial justice sometimes passed through alliances of circumstance.
But this moment was also a turning point. The humiliation, the symbolic violence of the arrest, the uncertainty of her status (despite her properties, her enslaved people, her “respectability”) engraved a certainty: no success would ever be sufficient in a system founded on race. From then on, Marie Rose Cavelan would no longer think solely in terms of adaptation. She would contemplate rupture.
The matrix of an insurrection
The wind shifted across the Atlantic. From 1789 onward, the French Revolution sent shockwaves through the colonies. Ideas of equality, citizenship, and above all the abolition of slavery by the Convention in February 1794, reached the shores of Grenada. For the class of free people of color, this new situation was not merely a moral surge; it was a political opportunity.
The Fédon-Cavelan couple seized it with lucidity. They began to manumit some of their enslaved people, not out of philanthropic impulse, but to build a loyal, potentially armed network. The plantation became a laboratory. Servitude was redefined, negotiated, reconfigured around political alliances. Belvidere no longer cultivated only cane; it cultivated insurrection.
In the months preceding the revolt, witnesses would later speak of arms purchases, clandestine recruitment, nocturnal meetings. This was not a spontaneous peasant uprising. It was an organization, conceived in silence, on the margins, in contradictions. And Marie Rose was its discreet pivot.
On March 2, 1795, tension turned into explosion. Julien Fédon, at the head of a composite contingent (former enslaved people, free people of color, French republican militiamen), launched the assault on British strongholds. Saint George’s fell; Governor Ninian Home (1732–1795) was captured and taken to Belvidere, where he was held under insurgent guard.
It is here that the figure of Marie Rose Cavelan reappears—armed, present, active. Colonial documents mention her participation, as well as that of her daughters, in controlling the revolutionary camp. She did not merely support; she embodied authority in a space of war. She advised, managed prisoners, supervised activities—a true co-commander in the shadows.
Far from being a simple “wife of,” she became, in the organized chaos of the insurrection, a full political actor. And above all, she proved one thing: that in colonial societies, the boundary between masters and insurgents can be reversed the instant order wavers.
A mixed-race and anti-colonial insurrection
What unfolded in Grenada in 1795 was neither a simple slave rebellion nor a riot of aggrieved planters. It was a composite, heterogeneous revolution, where contradictory trajectories converged: maroons seeking land, freed people hungry for recognition, frustrated free people of color, French republicans imbued with Jacobin ideals.
At the head, the Fédon-Cavelan couple embodied this political hybridity. The insurgents waved the tricolor flag and proclaimed their attachment to revolutionary principles, but adapted the project to their own context: it was as much about racial equality as about Creole sovereignty. The enemy was not abstract: it was British authority—its Protestant religion, its institutional racism, its contempt for mixed-race and Catholic populations.
The revolt even adopted methods of the French Revolution: popular tribunals, confiscations, political terror against loyalists. Blood flowed, sometimes without distinction. The old order was symbolically decapitated, as in Paris, but here in the name of a freedom tinged with sugarcane, Creole, and resentment.
Between March and June 1795, a kind of parallel state took shape, with Belvidere as its nerve center. Land was redistributed, prisoners judged, proclamations issued. This was not disorder; it was an attempt at sovereignty, an embryonic black and mixed-race governance, outside any imperial tutelage.
Marie Rose, without any official title, played a fundamental role. She coordinated discreetly, acted as intermediary and moral guarantor. She was consulted; she decided. In a world where women of color were generally relegated to men’s shadows or reduced to symbols, she exercised real power—informal, but recognized.
This moment of reversal—when descendants of enslaved and freed people took control of a territory, armed with a foreign ideology adapted to their reality—constituted a radical precedent in Caribbean history. A broken attempt at sovereignty, but one that revealed what those confined to racial categories could dare.
After the fall
As often in the history of colonial revolts, the dream of sovereignty was short-lived. In June 1796, reinforced and ruthless British troops crushed the rebellion. Insurgents were hunted down, executed, deported. Villages suspected of complicity were burned. Imperial vengeance was cold, methodical, exemplary.
Julien Fédon disappeared in the debacle. Some believe he took refuge in Cuba or elsewhere in the Americas. There is no certainty. As for Marie Rose Cavelan, her trace dissolves after April 1795. No official document mentions her again. Was she killed? Did she flee? Was she deported under another name? Silence is her tomb.
Like so many non-white, non-male, non-official insurgents, she vanished into the interstices of the colonial archive, where bodies become absent and voices inaudible. Her disappearance is both physical and symbolic: it signals the desire to erase the female and mixed-race share of subversion.
In the decades that followed, the Fédon revolt was labeled “treason,” relegated to the status of a criminal uprising. Colonial textbooks passed over it in silence or caricatured it. The leaders’ names, when they survived, were stripped of substance. That of Marie Rose Cavelan was simply erased. Too complex. Too embarrassing.
Even in postcolonial narratives, she remained marginal. Caribbean historiography, long centered on great male and heroic figures of resistance (Louverture, Dessalines, Delgrès), took time to rediscover profiles like hers—ambiguous, strategic, unruly in the face of simple categories.
Only recently, thanks to the work of historians such as Kit Candlin, Curtis Jacobs, and Cassandra Pybus, has her name resurfaced. Not as a smooth heroine, but as a real, elusive woman, the symbol of an unfulfilled possibility. Through these efforts at rehabilitation, another reading of the Caribbean past takes shape—one in which revolution is no longer written solely in black and white, but in all the shades of maroon.
A woman, a revolt, a complexity
Marie Rose Cavelan fits no comfortable heroic mold. She does not wave the banner of universal justice, nor does she lead the masses to freedom in a flash of moral purity. What she does is far more unsettling: she acts within a system she ultimately defies. Planter, strategist, slave owner, emancipator, conspirator, and combatant, she embodies the permanent tension between domination and insubordination.
Her path is anything but linear; it is a series of turns, tactical choices, and risk-taking in a colonial world where every position is both privilege and threat. Marie Rose Cavelan was neither saint nor traitor: she was political, in the rawest sense of the term.
That is why her name deserves to be spoken alongside those of Toussaint Louverture, Sanité Bélair, or Solitude. Not because she embodies a fixed ideal, but because her very existence forces us to rethink categories of race, gender, power, and revolt in Caribbean worlds.
In an empire where memories are hierarchized like skins, restoring her place is to open a breach in the dominant narrative. It is to recognize that, sometimes, great ruptures are born on 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.
Contents
The Creole youth of a free woman
The ambiguity of a rising class
The matrix of an insurrection
A mixed-race and anti-colonial insurrection
After the fall
