By Katlyn Carter

In Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories, Miranda Spieler questions the notion that there were no slaves in France.[1] She follows five individuals over the course of the eighteenth century through their struggles to secure freedom in Paris, finding that the gap between law and reality was wide and the very meaning of freedom was tenuous. What follows in an interview I conducted with Miranda Spieler about her book.

Katlyn Carter (KC): In the book’s introduction, you note that the idea for the book began in the police archives. Can you elaborate on how you decided to write this book and how you identified the five people you ended up structuring the book around?

Miranda Spieler (MS): The book grew out of an accidental discovery in the Arsenal Library years ago, while I was researching a different project—still incubating—about names (unnaming, renaming, usurping people’s names). I was looking in the paper index of the Archives de la Bastille to see if I could find any clues about Old Regime identity theft. One of my experimental key words was “escroc,” (crook) which was not in the index.

While scanning the page where escroc did not appear, I saw the word esclave—which (I thought) ought not to have been in that index: because there were not supposed to be slaves in Paris. I decided to examine the small number of slave files listed there. I found that these contained descriptions of slave hunts in Paris, which slave masters initiated. For a fee, police inspectors undertook to round up either enslaved fugitives—domestics on the lam, or enslaved litigants who were suing for freedom in Paris. The document that authorized these hunts was an extrajudicial warrant signed by the king, called a lettre de cachet. A cachet was a stamp or engraved bit of metal or stone that people then wore on watch chains, or as rings, and applied to wax when sealing a letter. The public’s name for these writs was an allusion to the royal insignia that sealed and authenticated them (or was imagined to).

At first, I regarded these documents as mere curiosities and remember thinking that I should submit a couple with a short introduction to The William and Mary Quarterly and be done with it. But I found a way of identifying more Bastille files about slaves and began to think that slave hunting in Paris could become the foundation, at least the point of departure, for a book. Slave files vary in length; none of them rival the files one often finds in the same archive about spies and regular crooks. Nonetheless, I liked the fact that these files were about specific freedom-seeking people, however elusive they will always remain, and despite the very fragmentary written record. While writing my first book, Empire and Underworld, about convicts and ex-convicts in French Guiana, I found the colonial archive’s suppression of individuality, subjectivity, specific human presence to be almost unbearable. To create my first book, I actually needed to invent the main character myself—who was the French legal subject undergoing dismantlement. I left that project intending that my next book would involve writing about specific people’s stories.

My choice of the five people who feature as main characters in the book—each the subject of a different chapter—was more or less artisanal—a consequence of writing through documents.

While collecting materials about individual people, I looked for framing principles to unify the study and eventually lit on a few themes, problems, and questions, which interested me. I wanted to understand how Paris was affected by the explosive growth of the French slave trade and French colonial plantation complex. I wondered how to describe Paris in a spatio-legal sense: was there a single law for the city? I also wondered whether colonial law mattered there. Finally, I wondered about the importance of racial ideas to my story, about what race meant and about how, when, why it mattered. As people who read my first book will recognize, I also have a longstanding interest in extra legality—structures of legal exception—which made lettres de cachet an intriguing topic of study. For the first four chapters, I chose to explore the lives of people who best enabled me to delve into these larger questions through the prism of biography.

The fifth and final chapter is about a young Senegalese person, Ourika, who was gifted to the Prince de Beauvau in 1786, and later inspired a work of historical fiction by the writer Claire de Duras. That chapter did not emerge quite the same way. I discovered the actual person Ourika through the novel about her. Ourika’s short life and her subsequent rebirth in fiction gnawed at me the whole time I was writing this book. I found everything about Ourika’s story destabilizing in an intellectual and moral sense. I began collecting documents about Ourika early in this project without knowing what would happen, what I would say, vexed about how I would handle this story. In the end, perhaps because I was thinking about her the whole time, all themes of the book, all methodological questions, seem to converge in that final chapter.

KC: A prominent theme across the book is the gap between the law and practice. Enslaved people were repeatedly able to secure their freedom through the courts, but the people claiming to own them were able to kidnap, imprison, or return them to colonial slavery by obtaining lettres de cachets or otherwise working with Paris police or the royal navy. Did this surprise you as you researched? What do you think this tells us about slavery in France, about imperial governance, and/or about the Old Regime administrative state?

MS: Your question gets to the heart of this book’s relationship to “free soil”—to the legal maxim “there are no slaves in France.”

It seems clear that the king and the king’s men understood royal power— sovereign legitimacy—to hinge on the state’s unflinching defense of private property. The Code Noir—which emanated from the sovereign at Versailles—was a body of statutes that included a definition of slaves as property in civil law. Slave owners who sojourned in France insisted that their property in French colonies—in the form of people—should remain property in metropolitan France. They argued that, as colonials, they lived under the sovereignty of France and that the Code Noir—decreed by the king of France—could not be invalid in France.

The lettre de cachet that I describe in this book preempted and circumvented the justice of French courts but did so for the purpose of enforcing the law that defined colonial property.

How did I find out about this? I looked at the admiralty files that are the focus of Sue Peabody’s pioneering work and made a list of all the people who sought freedom before the Admiralty Court under the Old Regime.[2] Then, I looked for those names in the Archives of the Bastille. This method enabled me to enlarge my corpus of documents considerably. The police were hunting people who sued for freedom.

KC: Speaking of empire, you trace tightening ties between colonies and metropolitan France over the course of the eighteenth century. I wonder: how do you think this intensifying intertwining should change our understanding of the final decades of the Old Regime and the outbreak of the French Revolution (if you think it should)?

MS: Let me first decode the metaphor “tightening bonds” so that readers know what this means concretely. In the book, I am interested in: (1) the reach of colonial law into France and Paris in particular as this affected slaves; (2) the significance of racial categories, and hierarchies, in Paris that had developed meanings in French overseas slave societies; (3) backing and forthing between the colonies and France’s capital by a variety of actors—soldiers, administrators, planters, merchants—including the physical presence of colonial elites and their absorption by the upper echelon of Parisian society through marriage; (4) the capacity and speed of coordinated action by Parisian and imperial officials at the instance of the Navy, which oversaw colonial administration in this period; and (5) the role of Parisians in overseeing and funding colonial ventures. Tracking these various themes led me to venture a claim about tightening bonds in the book.

Coincident with the burgeoning of France’s slave economy, the monarchy fashioned a new racialized legal regime; In 1777, the monarchy banned “blacks, mulattoes, and other people of color” from entering the realm. The law forbade non-whites from entering the country and also banned interracial marriage.

Scholars such as Pierre Boulle and Andrew Curran have analyzed the construction of race in French legal, philosophical, scientific texts; while exploring those texts, they offer different chronologies and conceptual narratives about the development of racial ideas.[3] They have also depicted racist laws from the late 1770s—banning the entry of Black people into France, forbidding racial intermarriage—as transformative moments that marked a rupture with the past. My book suggests that racial prejudice became manifest in the everyday lives of Black people in Paris rather earlier than previous scholars have supposed. We find, for instance, that Parisian policemen treated Black people as things—as legitimate forms of property by the early 1750s (and hunted Black people as lost property).

I researched the book by building out from individual stories and not by trying to fit stories into preconceived theoretical models. Ultimately, however, individual cases do reveal more general problems. My fourth chapter, set on the eve of the French Revolution, focuses on Julien, a very light-skinned man who lost his freedom suit in 1787. As I suggest in the chapter, whiteness became important to publicity around his case and to argument during his trial. Through Julien’s case, read in light of other contemporaneous examples, we learn that whiteness became important to French notions of rights at the end of the Old Regime. Some people understood whiteness to be a pre-condition for the enjoyment of rights in the kingdom. (Note that, as Marie Houllemare has shown, colonial administrators regularly deported déclassé white people from the colonies to France for crime, madness, misconduct.)[4]

Slaves in Paris is a book about the Old Regime with a few excursions into the New Regime. But it does return to themes that I analyzed earlier in my career relating to Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary France. Before writing this book, I had written about the overseas empire’s status as a domain of legal exception during the 1790s and later. I described the colonies in the 1790s as enveloped by French Revolutionary law, yet designated as other, hollowed out, beyond reach of rights and laws that defined metropolitan society.

In the case of slaves in Old Regime Paris, the Crown treated these freedom-seeking people as colonial excrescences­—bodies to be counted as things, bound by a different law than the people of metropolitan France. They carried the Code Noir on their backs. They were walking legal exceptions. The very capacity of the French Navy (which oversaw colonial administration) to make slaves vanish—entailing police stake outs, roundup and capture, transfer to some colonial port, eventual dispatch overseas—illustrated circuitry, efficient wiring, concerted action by a trans-oceanic administrative behemoth.

KC: This is certainly beyond the purview of the book, but as I was reading, I kept thinking about the early United States and how, in a country split between states with slavery and states without, African Americans were never truly free because they could not escape the threat of being kidnapped into the institution. Was imperial France in the eighteenth century similar in this respect? The story of André Lucidor in particular explores this dynamic. I wonder: how do you think this changes, if you think it should, the way we think about freedom? About empire?

MS: This is an important comparison. The book can be read in dialogue with the American story. At stake is how, and whether, laws relating to slave societies reached into places under the same sovereign where slavery was illegal or not on the books. The story of James Somerset might also fruitfully be brought into this story. His habeas case before the Court of King’s Bench in 1771 was about the introduction of a colonial slave into England, whose master attempted to abduct him, remove him from the country, and sell him in a British colony.

Beyond the specifics of France, Britain, or the United States, it seems clear that Black freedom in European colonial slave societies was an extremely unstable molecule. The threat of being reenslaved—or abducted despite being born free—loomed over the lives of Black people throughout the Atlantic World. The questions remains—and here lies the importance of your question—to what degree, and how were those reversals systematized? Was this legal? Who conducted these kidnappings?

In the United States, slave hunting and the extradition of slaves from free states was sanctioned by a clause of the United States Constitution, rulings of the Supreme Court, and congressional law.

How did this work in France? The high court known as the Paris Parlement did not sanction the roundup and removal of freedom-seeking slaves until the final years of the Old Regime. But from about 1740, colonial masters insisted that slaves were inviolable property in Paris worthy of royal protection. The Crown agreed with them. But, in order to oblige planters’ demands, and give force to the law—the Code Noir— that defined people as property, Crown officials needed to resort to extrajudicial instruments. Unlike the United States, it wasn’t the founding law of the kingdom, legislation, or judicial rulings that enabled these abductions. Instead, prerogative power—the ordre du roi or lettre de cachet—enabled the government to enforce colonial property claims in Paris.

The story of André Lucidor (born c. 1718, d. 1771) in chapter three is illustrative of a distinct but related problem. Born in Africa, possibly Ashanti (Asante), Lucidor lived as a free man before exiting slavery in the 1740s without any apparent resistance from the family that had owned him. He later plied the trade of maître d’armes (duelling instructor). But, as we know, “freedom” did not exist as a legal category in Old Regime society. You needed to be part of some corporate body and Lucidor did not belong to—and could not gain membership in—the guild for maîtres d’armes. His problem as a freed slave was not unique. Other people in Paris, especially foreigners, could not gain admittance to the city’s guilds, which were notoriously closed and nepotistic. The fact of exiting slavery, and leaving domestic service, turned Lucidor into an outlaw who risked arrest for violating the city’s work laws. He dealt with this problem by huddling in a protected pocket of the city where the city’s work laws were not supposed to reach.

KC: Another point that you make very compellingly across all these cases, is that, often, enslaved people were able to attain and/or maintain their freedom with the help of prominent French people who were themselves enmeshed in the slave trade and colonial slave economies. You probe this paradox throughout the book, leading you to state in the epilogue that “helping slaves did not arise from, or stimulate, opposition to slavery as an institution; nor did helping slaves entail a repudiation of racial concepts in a categorical way.” (166) At what point in your research did you notice this pattern and come to this conclusion? Why do you think it is important to highlight?

MS: Early in my research, I saw that people were helping slaves, often very elite people. This raised the question of why. Was this helpfulness inspired by antislavery sentiment? Did chance encounters with slaves lead elite people to become abolitionists? In the cases I know about, the answer was no. I found scarce evidence of antislavery opinion among the elite in Old Regime Paris. Which does not mean it never happened—I do note a few exceptions in the book. But, in general, the upper reaches of French society, the world of the salon, grew more dependent on slavery as the century wore on, which impeded the development of abolitionism without cancelling selective benevolence. Benevolence toward the poor and needy was common—encouraged— among French seigneurs. But seigneurial benevolence did not express a general interest in diagnosing and stamping out the causes of poverty and neediness.

Similarly, the benevolence I describe did not express a disposition toward social change. This sort of problem is still with us. An elite person in our own world may fight to protect his own gardener or housekeeper. This form of sincere helpfulness should not be mistaken, however, for a sign of solidarity with the people of Guatemala or expression of opposition to the mass arrest of other local undocumented workers. Whether in the period I talk about or in the present, selective benevolence helps needy people whom their benefactors view as special rather than typical. Benevolent people have, historically, invested themselves in the wellbeing of one person or a small number of people from ill-treated, marginal, even despised categories—whether orphan, slave, battered wife, addict vagrant, Jew in Nazi Europe—without needing to grapple with underlying causes, social justice, broad questions of moral duty, or wishing to think about most orphans, slaves, vagrants, battered women, immigrants, Jews in Nazi Europe. I see no reason to discourage or condemn these rescue efforts for being inconsistent. But I do not consider selective benevolence to be a political statement or politically consequential in any way.

KC: I’d like to ask about your methodology and, specifically about some of the choices you made in working with such a limited and challenging archive. In the introduction, you acknowledge the lack of “textual emanations of the self” for the enslaved and freed people you are writing about. You go on to explain that you chose “not to fill those gaps,” noting that you did not “speculate about [your] subjects’ thoughts and feelings. Wary of ventriloquism, [you] leave the task of imagining who they really were to [your]readers.” (12) Can you talk about how you made this decision? Were there points where it was particularly challenging to stick to?

MS: This felt basic and instinctive. I could not have done otherwise. This came from a feeling of humility and reverence when confronted with painful silence. And from a desire to respect, to honor, individual distinctiveness.

During the research process, I did wonder about what a subject did, thought, or planned. To answer those questions, I found myself obliged to picture that person as the type of man who might X—fill in blank. I was obliged, in other words, to recast people speciously as a certain category of man, a generic sort of being. And often, when I later found out more about my subjects’ lives and choices, I discovered very surprising and untypical things, which bore the mark of an individual, not of a category.

KC: In the epilogue, you reflect on how, out of necessity, “what [you] did learn about [your] subjects came from examining their encircling stuff of life.” What I found interesting is that the lack of written sources from the perspective of the enslaved obviously poses a massive challenge for historians. While you certainly acknowledge this, you also seem to suggest that it also presents an opportunity to maybe rethink how we write about people in the past and their interiority. Did writing this book change how you think about this is a broader sense?

MS: Everything that happened methodologically in this book began as an attempt to solve the same problem: how to deal with fragmentary sources. I deal with this problem in the book by focusing on space and related encircling detail. I follow people around and try to understand their trajectories—where they lived, moved, fled. I drew a frame around sites they inhabited. I zoom in to examine what else, who else, is in the picture. I consider how and why my subjects got there in the first place (with a focus on hiding places). This spatial method became more self-conscious during the writing process, and I got better at it. Some chapters and parts of chapters employ this method more obviously than others. In my first book, I wrote somewhat abstractly about the legal construction of colonial spaces. My method in this new book builds on and concretizes methods I employed in that earlier study. Spatial thinking has always been central to my work.

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Miranda Spieler is Professor of History and Politics at the American University of Paris. Her previous book, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard 2012) won the George Mosse Prize and the J. Russell Major Prize from the American Historical Association.  She has lived in Paris since 2013.

Katlyn Marie Carter is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and author of Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (Yale University Press, 2023).

Title Image: A Statue in Paris commemorating Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, who was born into slavery.

Endnotes:

[1] Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford University Press, 1996).

[2] Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France.”

[3] Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Pierre H. Boulle, Race et esclavage dans la France de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Perrin, 2006).

[4] Marie Houllemare, Justices d’empire: La répression dans les colonies françaises au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: PUF, 2024).