“They Are Proud to Wear the Chains”: Slavery in the Shaping of French Missions to the Mascarenes, 1712–89

What function did “slavery” fulfill in the missionary efforts of the Congrégation de la Mission in the Mascarene Islands of the Indian Ocean? In the collected reports of the company, the word “esclavage” denoted two very different systems. The priests and lay religious of the Congrégation de la Mission, or Lazarists, were the only French missionary congregation with active branches among both “Christian slaves” of the North African littoral and “black slaves” of the island colonies. In the corsair states of the Barbary Coast, missionaries who liked to think of themselves as “enchained” in solidarity, administered to the spiritual needs of captive Christians. In the Mascarenes, beginning in 1712, Lazarist missionaries worked among bondpeople and held many slaves themselves. Many historians insist that missionaries silently accepted the institution on the islands. This paper does not deny that contention, but it proposes that slavery did pose a moral dilemma for Lazarists, and that the congregation’s experience with slavery in North Africa informed their mission in the Mascarenes to a greater extent than scholars have acknowledged. Lazarist observers claimed that the institution of slavery drove Christian masters—whether renegade converts in North Africa, French planters, or indeed, their own confrères—into the sins of greed or libertinage. At the same time, some perceived captivity and bondage as catalysts of conversion as well as of apostasy. Slavery drew many neophytes into the purview of Muslim or Catholic evangelists—a danger in the North African case, and a potential boon in the Mascarenes.