Slaves in Paris with Dr. Miranda Spieler

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.

Gary:

Thank you very much for being on the show, Dr. Miranda Spieler. Your book is a highly detailed history of five different black people in Paris and their experiences in the 18th century. Before we dive in, I think we need to lay a foundation, as not everyone understands the politics of the time. First, what were the racial politics like in metropolitan France versus colonial France? How connected were these two? Was there a free France and unfree colonies, or was it more complex?

Miranda:

Thanks, Gary. Well, first, before going into the racial politics, I do want to say something about the relationship between my story or the stories I tell and the development of the French colonial empire in the 18th century.

The transformation of France's relationship to slavery and the slave trade is a vital piece of the backdrop to my story because at the very beginning of the 18th century, the French slave trade is really minimal compared to that of Great Britain, whereas by 1790, the apex of the French slave trade, is acting as at top the French slave trade France has is at the top of slave trading powers. So this very dramatic change happens in the course of the 18th century, which transforms the relationship between domestic France and Africa, and also to the slave plantations in the West Indies and also in the Indian Ocean colonies. So, one of the questions that inspired this book was this, when you have a country that undergoes this kind of transformation, what sorts of reverberations are there in the home country?

And so that was a vital piece of my story. The question of race really emerges as a specific question distinct from status. In the second half of the 18th century, but let me say that there was a legend of sorts with a legal or supposedly legal basis that defined domestic France as a free area with respect to the colonies. And this was articulated on multiple occasions, but particularly at the beginning of the 18th century.

And one of the features of French legislation in the early 18th century was to make a space of sorts for enslaved people to ah live for periods on French soil in violation of the supposedly hallowed principle. The supposedly hallowed principle that there are no slaves in France.

The question of race becomes more important as the century wears on. And by the 1770s, France will impose a racial ban. That is to say, there is legislation excluding and here I'm using quotations, blacks, mulattos, and other people of color from the realm. And other people of color, I think, covers South Asians, who remained an ambiguous category in French race laws until that period.

Gary:

Another important part of the book is the relationship between race and legal status. how did race affects one's legal status, including for supposedly free black people?

Miranda:

Well, my book explores race in relation to legal status principally in a chapter about a freedman who had found it unable to work independently in 18th century Paris, despite having exited slavery.  We do find through the police reports that were the inspiration to some degree of the book, that people who have dark skin, no matter what their status, are being picked up or presumed to be slaves or someone's property by the police beginning in the 1740s and 1750s. So, there does seem to be clear shift, in the racial politics of the country.

It's also true that by the 1760s, and here my book is about Paris, but by the 1760s, it becomes necessary for even free people of color to register with the government, with the branch of government, which was then called the Admiralty. In the book, I argue this is a moment of for the racialization of French law.

Gary:

One last bit of background information we need to talk about is the difference between slavery in the Anglosphere and the French Empire. In the British Empire, there was a widespread trade and use of slaves, but at the same time, there was an active abolitionist movement, famously with William Wilberforce and others. How did France differ from this?

Miranda:

Well, I think it's worth noting that the abolitionist movement develops quite late, even in the British context. And it's not really until the 1770s and especially the 1780s that you can really speak of an abolitionist movement.

There are certainly elements of anti-slavery, but the movement is late. That said, there are major source differences that I think enable enslaved people to have more of an archival trace in the British context than in the French context. But as for the question of the abolitionist movement, I've just noted that the British movement dates from the 1770s and especially the 1780s. There is no French abolitionist movement simultaneous to that.

And in the book, I do evoke multiple efforts that I consider to be noble forms of benevolence that are, I argue, unconnected to any kind of general ethical commitment to a broader abolition of either the slave trade or slavery itself.

The French public sphere just did not have space for an abolitionist movement before the revolution.  And I do suggest in the book that at least among enlightened elites of Paris, the level of entanglement with the slave trade and slave plantations in the colonies, especially Saint-Domingue, meant that the abolition of slavery or the slave trade were just not up for discussion.

Gary:

One major contention of your book is your disagreement with Dr. Sue Peabody. You argue that this idea that everyone in France is free is actually a gross mischaracterization of what was happening.  Can you explain the older historiographical view of France as a place of guaranteed freedom as compared to your new interpretation?

Miranda:

Okay, well, I just do want to say that gross misinterpretation is not my words, and I do want to situate Sue Peabody's work in relation to my own and in a slightly different vocabulary.

So when Sue Peabody researched her book, she relied on a particular set of documents, which are known as the Admiralty Archives.  Now, the Admiralty Archives provide evidence of freedom trials for most of the 18th century in Paris. And based on those archives, it looks like slaves easily petitioned to exit enslavement in Paris, that they received the support of the legal establishment.  And through those judgments wound up free, or at least that's the way it mainly looks from those records. The problem for ah this subject is that there is a distortion of reality caused in this instance by looking at only one set of documents.

My approach in the book is based on the accidental discovery of slave files in the archives of the French police that described slave hunts unfolding in Paris at the demand of slave owners who managed to secure extrajudicial warrants for the roundup of their slaves from the government.

So, when I discovered this, an initial group of files of this sort, I created the hypothesis because there were echoes of this in the documents themselves, that people who were suing for freedom were indeed among those who were being rounded up.

And once I sort of aligned the two archives, one another, it became relatively clear that slaves who sued for freedom were arrested either during, right before, or after their freedom judgment, when their master disagreed and was willing to pay the bounty that the police received for undertaking these kinds of hunts.

It is still true that slaves who sued for freedom without any resistance from their masters or whose masters had died did not actually encounter this sort of resistance. But it is at least clear from my analysis of multiple sets of documents that Paris was a place of allurement and danger for enslaved people because it seemed to promise liberty.

And then people who thought they were free found themselves rounded up by the police and then deported overseas to be, in many cases, resold.

Gary:

Let's dive in to the characters themselves. Tell us about Jean, Pauline, Lucidor, Julien, and Ourika.

Miranda:

So the book is constructed so that the different chapters engage with broader, otherwise abstract concepts through individual lives.

The first chapter, which is entitled 'Jean,' is about a man about whom I probably have the least information of all of the people in the book, but whose story is moving and troubling. This is a young man born in Africa who was enslaved in Saint-Domingue to a member of the plantation planter elite, a planter who was notoriously violent. Jean came to Paris. ah with his master in the 1750s and was observed to be abused by servants, an innkeeper, and eventually a noble woman who attempts unsuccessfully to save him, as do, it seems, a bunch of of Black domestics in the city.

So, Jean is someone who seeks freedom by running away, and he's coaxed to run away and join the army because in previous years, as I argue in this chapter, that had been a method by which enslaved people found asylum, shelter of a kind in France.

In this case, however, that is no longer true. And he is forced to leave his regiment and is taken back to Paris by gendarmes or the Marie-Chaussée in chains and then locked up in in a dungeon in the city to then be deported back to the island.

So, in the course of analyzing Jean's life, I try to think about other instances of enslaved people enrolling in the army and what their experiences were like. I think about the magnitude of the violence or the particular violence that seemed to be endured by people enslaved to colonial masters because he was not alone in seeming to be the victim of a degree of violence that shocked people when they, they saw this relative to the treatment that people received as servants in Paris, right?

His level of abuse was, was shocking to observers at the time in an already very violent society.  I also, ah in this chapter, lay bare the system that I was just describing about the way slaves were hunted down by the police in the 1750s. So that chapter sets forth those kinds of mechanisms and explores the predicament of physically abused people seeking freedom unsuccessfully in the country.

The second chapter of the book, entitled 'Pauline' is a kind of riveting adventure story that I piece together using a variety of sources, including not only Parisian sources, but also materials that I managed to gather both in Reunion and Mauritius.

And this is the story of a former slave of the governor of Mauritius who comes to Paris and through a variety of, of events manages to evade, deportation, seeks shelter in a building that is now the Bank of France, eventually finds deliverance through the help of of unlikely people who belong to the French elite and are in fact slave owners.

And then I managed to trace her back to Mauritius because I found her on a list of stowaways  returning to that island. The larger point of that chapter, apart from this remarkable woman's  kind of ingenuity and pluck is that her master, who this former governor named Bouvet, Bouvet de Lausier, was trying to apply code noir and clauses of the French slave code relevant to people who run away from their masters to a person who was living in Paris. And some of the controversy that I try to trace in that chapter. has to do with how far colonial law can reach. 

Chapter three, called ‘Lucidor,’ is about a man who came to France as a young African in his early teens or possibly before. He is a slave in Paris who shows up in the archives of sodomy at the age of 15. And then I find him later acting as a master of arms, a dueling instructor, a married man, a man with two children.  And I show through the prism of his life that France, though it was a place for the struggle of freedom, and Paris particularly, though Paris was a place for the struggle for freedom, when it came to people who had become free, seemed to have no social and professional space available to those people. And this man ultimately lives as an outcast and a hunted person, despite having obtained freedom and find shelter in a kind of unusual area, a strange patch of earth, which happens to be inside an abbey where the normal work laws do not apply.

And he dies in in upsetting penury and is the victim of racial taunting at the very end of his life, which I found ah very upsetting, as were his daughters and wife.  So that's the Lucidor chapter, which is about the elusiveness of freedom for people who had exited slavery.

After that, the Julian chapter is about a young man who sues for freedom  during what we call the pre-revolution, 1787 and loses. He sues his owner or alleged owner who happens to be his own aunt, ah and her slave trading boyfriend. And in that chapter, I'm interested in the degree to which French law was racialized on the eve of the French Revolution, and not just French law, but conceptions of rights were racialized on the eve of the French Revolution.

In the final chapter, 'Ourika,' I do two things. The first part of the chapter is about a very young girl who comes to Paris from Africa at the age of three or so, dies just before the coup d'etat of Napoleon and arrives to Paris as a gift, a gift to a prince known as the Constable de Beauvau and lived in a building that happens now to be the headquarters of the French Ministry of the Interior.

I trace the patterns of gift giving that emerged at the end of the old regime among apparently enlightened liberal nobles. And the second part of the chapter looks at a story written about Ourika during the restoration by a salon hostess who um has been touted by literary critics as a progressive anti-racist writer and whose book I show to be quite the opposite.

Gary:

Each of these people had very different lives, with some achieving a measure of freedom in Paris, others having it taken from them. Why did some succeed in achieving emancipation and others did not?

Miranda:

Well, of these people, the first person who I was talking about the subject of the first chapter, Jean, is deported. He's deported because he simply lacks the network of powerful patrons and confederates that hiding would have required or fighting his master would have required.

In the second chapter, I argue that there are particularities to the story of Pauline that make her  someone who is whose struggle for freedom does not actually offend or challenge the presumptions of slave-owning nobles and makes her and a relatively easy object of benevolence.  She does not actually win freedom in court, however, and her story with respect to the courts is important, especially in view of the way this book varies from conventional wisdom on the freedom principle in Paris.

Pauline is declared free by the Admiralty Court of Paris, but remains in hiding because she's at that time, while declared free, the subject of what appears to be around the clock, manhunt and stick out. And she only becomes free because a liberal minded judge who happens to have inherited his judgeship at the age of 16, but is probably more accurately described as a Parisian playboy, buys her.  He buys her curiously enough with her own money, which she had  been saving up and giving to her own master who then confiscated her fortune and through a set of negotiations, gives a portion of it back enough so that she can buy her liberty.

In the case of Lucidor, His story is really about how his early arrival in Paris and how his own master's relatively weak relationship to the overseas colonial world made it possible for him to experience ah freedom in fact, and then eventually find freedom in law.

Things could have gone a very different way because after all, he's locked up on a morals charge and might have wound up deported. But at this early moment, when this is unfolding in the 1730s, the kind of mechanism of the vanishing mechanism that would scoop up slaves later in the century just hadn't developed yet. So he's a beneficiary in the sense of early arrival, early arrival, and of his of the family that owned him or, or claimed to own him and having a relatively weak connection to the empire.

In the case of Julien, he isn't freed by a law court, he's freed by the French Revolution. And in the case of Ourika, who is gifted at this tiny age, to the Prince de Beauvais, she happens to be a gift to a man who has endorsed anti-slavery opinions, who's one of the few people in France who does so and is one of the founding members of the Society of Friends of the Blacks, which is ah the founded in 1788 as France's new abolitionist society in the right before the French Revolution.

So these people are not freed by the courts. And I think that's the most important message relative to earlier scholarship. None of these people are beneficiaries of the freedom principle.

Gary:

You mention how major world events impacted the nature of race relations and the law in France. How did events like the Seven Years War and the Revolution change living conditions for black people in Paris?

Miranda Spieler:

So, the book has essentially two ways of explaining the way  colonial legal concepts, racialized legal concepts from the colonies make their way into France.

One of those mechanisms is simply the flourishing of overseas colonies in the slave trade, which means that more and more people are invested in this practice. and this set of practices,  including bankers in Paris, as well as colonists who enjoy sojourning in the capital to flaunt their wealth.

So, one mechanism by which Paris becomes imbued with racial colonial notions is imperial success.The other way that Paris becomes imbued with racialized colonial culture is by total imperial failure, which is to say that the Seven Years War through ah the loss of overseas colonies causes a major influx of soldiers, defrocked administrators to France and then to the capital. And many of these elites are accompanied by one or more enslaved domestic.

And so imperial failure plays a role in making the empire come home. And I argue that while I have established at the very beginning of the book that Parisians themselves are invested in the slave trade and in colonial plantations without requiring foreign and influences,

It's still true that the arrival of more and more colonial people with an experience and investment in slavery to Paris does change the culture. With respect to the French Revolution, there does seem to be a very remarkable shift. And you see this in so many ways, but there's a discursive opening, a space for a black public sphere, that really happens with the French Revolution that that just didn't exist before.

And surprisingly enough, you know, was looking through ah materials in the British Admiralty documents known as the Prize Papers and came across a note that was a white man complaining that black people in London who were connected to France were leaving for Paris when they learned about the French Revolution. So there was actually a general enthusiasm. I think it's a remarkable moment for change. It doesn't mean that all of their aspirations would be realized, I would add, but it does mean that there was an energy an enthusiasm at the beginning of the French Revolution that it sort of doesn't exist at any other moment.

I do insist in the book that there is no general desire to abolish slavery in the slave trade at the beginning during the French Revolution.

And you can see that this is really not on the agenda for the overwhelming majority of of revolutionaries, including people that we picture as being on the far left. ah So the French Revolution is a moment for the opening of a black public sphere. It's the moment in which people see hope.  But it's also not a moment in which French people in general imagine that the declaration of the rights of man and citizen should include the abolition of the slave trade or of slavery itself.

Gary:

What do these individual stories tell us about black people in France during this period?

Miranda:

Well, I wanted to capture the sense of fragility that was imbued in black life in the Capitol. I wanted to capture a story about liberty that was a lot more troubled, fragile, textured  than stories that were available to us by other by other authors. And I should say something about the person-centered structure of the book. We who work in French colonial contexts work in a set of documents that is really difficult for people who are seeking black voices.

That is partly because of the generally under-institutionalized character of French colonies, which were ah created in the era of absolutism. So there is really and a lack of courts, a lack of assemblies, there's no municipal government, right? So the lack of all of these institutions makes it difficult to find voices of enslaved people, ah evidence of resistance. These are the kinds of things that historians look for now and French sources are less rich in this respect than the sources from the Iberian empires or the British empire. One of the remarkable things about not just France, but Paris in general is that it's a heavily institutionalized, densely institutionalized space with a very active press with articulate elites. And because of the denseness of institutions and the kind of literary culture of the period  and the power wielded  by nobles who are able to or try to manipulate things and and provide counter narratives, I found that 

I could develop a richer portrait of enslaved people's lives using these Parisian sources than would ever have been possible using colonial sources. And I speak as someone whose earlier scholarship was written using almost exclusively colonial sources. So I've looked to this book as a place to explore struggles and experiences that are just invisible or very hard to access in colonial documents.

Gary:

How did these figures and their legal struggles change France?

Miranda:

Well, I think it's important not to think of France as a transhistorical and anthropomorphic entity.  These struggles probably changed people's lives in different ways. I can say there is no one answer to that question. 

My book is about the fact that you can’t answer that question easily.  What I tried to show in each of the chapters were the various ways that individuals, neighbors, lovers, a whole variety of agents, became involved in the story of enslaved people in Paris and that there is no formula for knowing exactly how they would behave. Some people were manifestly vulgar racists from a relatively early date.

Some people were engaged to enslaved people. Some people turned in the fiance of their French daughter who was a slave. So there's a whole range of behaviors. We cannot say from the evidence that I looked at in preparing this book, which was considerable, that there was a general racism in Paris or conversely, ah that that Paris was an asylum city in which people generally endorsed the notion of human equality. So neither of those stories is true. 

And I was particularly eager in this book to show the variety of human experiences. That said, the story of Lucidor and the shocking experience that his family endured of racial taunting which probably precipitated the nervous breakdown of his daughter, does suggest that from the late 1760s forward, there is a new race culture. And it's a race culture that was not just an elite matter, but that it reached into the lower orders of society.

But I am very reluctant to make a general blanket statement about the racial ideas of pre-revolutionary French people.

Gary:

Finally, because you looked at people in a state of unfreedom, there is a significant lack of records on their lives and from these people themselves.

What survives are mostly court and police documents on them. How do you reconstruct the stories of these individuals in a way that doesn't simply repeat the narratives made about them by white French lawyers, judges, police, and other figures around them?

Miranda:

The approach that I adopted in this book hinged on thinking of each person was a protagonist as, kind of body in space or a, moving body in space around whom, there existed a city, textures, objects, people,  institutions, ruins, furniture. And I basically invested myself in the reconstruction of everything that surrounded each person with the idea that through the recovery of this texture, I could recover some degree of subjectivity while recognizing the limits ah of what is possible. What I do not do in this book is allow myself to speculate about the emotions of any of the people that I talk about. And I made an early decision to leave that to the reader.

Whether I managed to break past the limits of the sources that you very aptly described it will be determined by readers of the book. What I can only describe my aspirations and my working methods. But in doing this, I was attentive both to the necessity of crossing as many sources as possible, and also to the need to get sort of texture of life ah in the book that would  bring people to life.  When I was a graduate student, and I had a sort of senior mentor who told me to keep close to the ground And for a historian, that has a particular meaning for people who work with archives. And so my working method in writing this book was to try to stay close to the ground um and to be able to depict everyday life with the greatest ah texture as possible while recognizing the limits of what I could know and not overstepping them.

Gary:

The book is Slaves in Paris, Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories. Thank you very much for being on the show, Dr. Spieler.

Miranda:

Thanks, Gary.