In the late 1830s, Navarre, Osifekunde's enslaver, was the local agent of the Quesnel Brothers, a merchant family founded in the eighteenth century by Nicolas Louis Quesnel, a leading Rouen-based merchant family. Nicolas, Philippe Champy asserts, started the firm, L. Quesnel $\mathcal{E}$ Brothers, in the 1770s trading in textiles and wool between France, Spain, and Portugal. Later, his two sons, François and Edouard Prosper (Oct. 1781-1850) took over the family business, having managed the family wool business in Portugal. The business entered a new phase in the early nineteenth century when Edouard, called Le Roi Quesnel, took over the firm. In 1819, he opened a store in Le Havre which his sons Alfred (1807-64) and Gustave (1811-88) later developed into Maison Quesnel Frères et Cie, one of the leading firms in Le Havre with interests in cotton and shipping in Europe and the Americas. ${ }^{23}$  
As this background suggests, the French in Brazil were not unaccustomed to slavery and enslaved people. As shown above, many were emigrants from Saint  
[^0]
[^0]:    22 Jurgen Schneider, 1989, "Trade relations between France and Latin America, 1810-1850" in Reinhard Lieh (ed.), America Latina en la epoca de Simon Bolivar: La formacio de las economias nacionales y los intereses economicos europeos 1800-1850, Berlin, Colloquium Verlag, pp. 426-27 and Edouard Delobette, 2002, "Ces 'Messieurs du Havre': Negociants, Commissionnaires et Armateurs de 1680 à 1830," PhD thesis Université de Caen.