Slaves in Paris with Dr. Miranda Spieler
Dr. Miranda Spieler discusses the condition of 6 enslaved people in Paris. Was France the land of the free? How different was it from the colonies?
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Today’s special episode is an interview with Dr. Miranda Spieler. Spieler is an historian of France and the French colonial world. She received her PhD in European History from Columbia University. Her first book, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard University Press, 2012), received both the George Mosse Prize and the J. Russell Major Prize from the American Historical Association. In 2013 she left the United States to join the faculty of the American University of Paris, where she is now Professor of History and Politics.
Today we are talking about her new book, Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories (Harvard University Press, 2025). It’s a fascinating work that looks at the lives of five people of color in 18th century metropolitan France. While France practiced slavery in its colonies, there was an assumption that the French mainland was free soil. Even the word ‘France’ comes from ‘Frank’ which meant ‘free.’ Spieler contests the long-held view that France offered freedom to any who set foot on its soil. Even when judges and juries sided with enslaved peoples to grant them their freedom, they still faced significant challenges.
script forthcoming
Dr. Miranda Spieler
Miranda Spieler is an historian of France and the French colonial world. Her work explores themes relating to extra-legality and emergency power, slavery and its afterlives, legal space and legal personhood. She received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard College in History and Literature and worked as a travel writer (about Paris) during her undergraduate years. She received her PhD in European History from Columbia University, where her advisor was Simon Schama. Before and during her doctoral studies at Columbia, she worked as an assistant to the writer Susan Sontag. Her first book, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard University Press, 2012), received both the George Mosse Prize and the J. Russell Major Prize from the American Historical Association. In 2013 she left the United States with her daughter, then a toddler, to join the faculty of the American University of Paris, where she is now Professor of History and Politics. Her move to Paris would enable the archival research that informs her new book, Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories (Harvard University Press, 2025). She lives on Paris’s Canal Saint-Martin.