Jean Amilcar

Common card · No. 215159

Jean Amilcar (c. 1781–1796) was the adopted son (foster child) of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette of France. Jean Amilcar was from French Senegal. He was enslaved as a child and then bought from local slavers by the French official Chevalier de Boufflers, who wished to spare him the deadly transatlantic crossing. When Chevalier de Boufflers returned to France in 1787, he brought with him Amilcar, and presented him to the Queen, Marie Antoinette, as a 'gift'. The Queen had him manumitted, baptised and adopted; that is, he became her foster child. He was not the first child taken in as a foster child by Marie Antoinette. In contrast to the Queen's other foster children Armand Gagné, Ernestine Lambriquet, and 'Zoë' Jeanne Louise Victoire, he was not kept at court. The Queen, at her own expense, had him placed in a boarding school at Saint-Cloud. Marie Antoinette kept paying for him even after the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1789, and he remained at the boarding school....

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