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Public Reading & Discussion
Sex, Power and Slavery:The Dynamics of Carnal Relations under Enslavement
Montreal, 19-21 April 2007
Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University
Denyse Beaugrand-Champagne
Quebec historian Denyse Beaugrand- Champagne is the author of Le Procès de Marie-Josèphe-Angélique, the first full- length treatment of the Angelique story, published in 2004 by Libre Expression. An archivist as well as historian, Beaugrand-Champagne has been working on Angelique for several years. She has organized and participated in a long list of public events and exhibitions which have succeeded in firmly establishing the story in the public consciousness of French Quebec.
Her book formed the basis for an episode of the Great Unsolved Mysteries of Canadian History, produced by University of Victoria, Université de Sherbrooke and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, with a large part of the funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
She is co-director of the internet site Torture and the Truth. Angélique and the Burning of Montreal.
She contributed to documentary film. Le Rouge et le Noir … au service du Blanc. L’esclavage en Nouvelle-France, directed by Marquise Lepage and released in 2005. She was principal researcher in the writing of Angelique, an award-winning play by Lorena Gale.
She is the curator of the currently-running exhibition at the Centre d’histoire de Montreal, entitled Who set fire to Montreal, 1734? The Trial of Angélique. As part of the Centre’s educational activities, she helped organize a project in collaboration with the Quebec Ministry of Education last February, in which some 400 grade four students presented the results of their research before the Quebec Court of Appeal. The students demanded Chief Justice J.J. Michel Robert declare Angélique innocent of having set fire to Montreal in 1734.
A descendent of one of Quebec’s founding families, Mme Beaugrand-Champagne is a widely-published historian whose many accomplishments include working as a member of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Montreal Research Group, where she was in charge of archival research for the period 1642 to 1805. She is currently a reference archivist at the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec, in Montreal.
