Marthe-Rose (also known as Rose-Toto) was a Saint Lucian woman who fought in Louis Delgrès's 1802 resistance against Napoleon's restoration of slavery in Guadeloupe.
Moitt records that she had been at Fort Saint-Charles, suffered a broken leg during the evacuation, and still appeared before the French tribunal on a stretcher — and that she was accused of having influenced Delgrès to continue resistance and incited slave soldiers to kill white prisoners. The accusation itself reveals that colonial authorities perceived women as active political and military agents rather than passive companions. Her reported last words — 'Having killed their king and left their country, these men have come to ours to bring trouble and confusion. May God judge them! ' — give the archive a rare line of female anti-colonial accusation from the Guadeloupe theater of struggle.
In the ScholarshipHow historians have read this figure.
How historians and scholars have interpreted this figure across different analytical traditions.
Dubois's Avengers of the New World situates Marthe-Rose within the comparative history of Caribbean revolutionary women — figures whose resistance to reenslavement under Napoleon's restoration project paralleled the Haitian resistance and demonstrated the Caribbean-wide reach of the revolutionary tradition. Marthe-Rose's association with resistance to reenslavement in Guadeloupe places her within the broader pattern that Dubois traces: an Atlantic revolutionary movement that connected the struggles of the formerly enslaved across colonial boundaries, producing women fighters who appear in the historical record in fragments but whose actions demonstrate the depth of the revolution's popular commitment.
Marthe-Rose's resistance places her within the Atlantic revolutionary movement's Caribbean reach — women fighters who appear in fragments of the historical record but whose actions demonstrate the depth of the formerly enslaved's commitment to freedom across colonial boundaries.
RelationshipsPeople connected to this life.
- Allied withLouis Delgrès
Associated closely with Delgrès's resistance at Fort Saint-Charles; accused by the tribunal of having influenced Delgrès to continue resistance.