Être esclave chez Madame Desbassayns (Being a slave on the property of Madame Desbassayns)

By Alexis Miranville

For fifty years or so, popular opinion on the island has held that Madame Desbassayns’ slaves underwent daily corporal punishment and ill-treatment from their cruel authoritarian mistress. This opinion is mainly based on the accounts of a few former slaves and their descendants, handed down orally from generation to generation and made popular by storytellers and artists.

On the basis of public and private archive documents, Alexis Miranville here presents a more mitigated version of the person in question, which remains, nevertheless, far from idyllic: the slaves were subject to extremely tough discipline, were forbidden from leaving the slave camp, underwent constant mutual surveillance and repeated random controls and if caught disobeying were whipped, locked in prison or chained up.

For the author, these repressive practices were inherent to the system of slavery itself, but also linked to the high number of slaves and their owners wishing to fully take advantage of them for economic reasons. Madame Desbassayns’ estate was thus not totally representative of all the slave-owning properties on Reunion island.

 Les éditions Villèle, 2019
Co-edited by: Association Kan Villèle - Le cercle des muséophiles
Texts in French
Price: 10 €

Patrimoines en résonance, le carré historique de Saint-Paul (Heritage in resonance, the historical centre of Saint-Paul)

By Alexis MIRANVILLE

The centre of Saint-Paul presents a number of remarkable edifices that contribute to the wealth of the town’s cultural heritage: public buildings, some of which are listed as historical monuments and traditional Creole mansions, some of which clearly show the wear and tear undergone through time and others which have been restored.

As a result of the changes brought on through the administrative orientation of the town centre, it has become difficult to appreciate the patrimonial importance of these buildings bearing witness to the past, memories buried long ago and worthy of being brought out of oblivion and enhanced.

Retrieving the history of these edifices gives us a better understanding of the evolution of the town itself. The social origin and the function of the successive owners of these former residences also throws unexpected light on the urban society of the period.

Co-edited by the Villèle museum and Le Cercle des muséophiles, 2017
Texts in French
Price: 8 €

Guy LEFEVRE, maître verrier à La Réunion (master glass-maker in Reunion)

Under the direction of Camille Divilly
Texts: Yves-Michel Bernard
Photos: Hervé Douris

One of the specific characteristics of the work of Guy Lefèvre, who initially worked in Madagascar before settling in Reunion, resides in his abstract forms, born out of the juxtaposition of hammered plates, with the aim of capturing the vibration of light, deviating it and reflecting it depending on the exact position occupied by the visitor or the worshipper inside the space.
The book gives homage to a craftsman who became an artist and is an invitation to visit the island, discovering or rediscovering its artistic and monumental heritage in an original manner.

 Co-edited by Ter’la and the Villèle museum, 2016
160 pages, coloured illustrations, texts in French
Price: 30 €

Charles Marie Leconte de Lisle, Bourbon et Marie-Elixène  

By Henri Cornu

Marie-Elixène is a first name resounding with romantic charm and which inspired one of the island’s greatest poets. Through his essay, Henri Cornu, an erudite writer, wished to describe in detail, with passion and great interest, all the elements leading us to understand the role and influence of this young woman in the poetic works and the emotional and romantic life of Charles-Marie Leconte Delisle.

 Co-edited by Villèle museum - Azalées, 1995
1 vol. (78 p.) : ill.
15 x 21 cm
Texts in French
Prix : 8 €

Histoire d’une Révolution, La Réunion (1789-1803). (History of a Revolution, Reunion 1789-1803)

By Claude WANQUET

Volume 1: Bourbon à la fin de l'ancien régime
Volume 2: De l'enthousiasme au désenchantement
Volume 3: Le temps des orages
Doctoral thesis presented at the University of Provence on 28th May 1978

Published by: Editions Jeanne Laffitte, 1980-84
Format of each volume: 22 cm x 15 cm
Vol. 1 : 779 pp - vol. 2 ; 574 pp - vol. 3 : 622 pp
Texts in French