In Montreal, New France, a slave known by the French name of Marie-Joseph Angélique is put to death, having been convicted of setting the fire that destroyed much of the city.

Montreal is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest in Canada, and the ninth-largest in North America. It was founded in 1642 as Ville-Marie, or "City of Mary", and is now named after Mount Royal, the triple-peaked mountain around which the early settlement was built. The city is centred on the Island of Montreal and a few, much smaller, peripheral islands, the largest of which is Île Bizard. The city is 196 km (122 mi) east of the national capital, Ottawa, and 258 km (160 mi) southwest of the provincial capital, Quebec City.

New France was the territory colonized by France in North America, beginning with the exploration of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence by Jacques Cartier in 1534 and ending with the cession of New France to Great Britain and Spain in 1763 under the Treaty of Paris.

Marie-Josèphe dite Angélique was the name given to a Portuguese-born black slave in New France by her last owners. She was tried and convicted of setting fire to her owner's home, burning much of what is now referred to as Old Montreal. It had been generally accepted that Angélique was guilty, but it has recently been argued that she was innocent of the crime and was convicted more on the basis of her reputation as a rebellious runaway slave than on the basis of factual evidence. A competing theory is that she was guilty of the crime but was acting in rebellion against slavery. No consensus has been reached by historians regarding Angélique's actual guilt or innocence.