Slaves in Paris
Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
A pioneering biographical study of enslaved people and their struggle for freedom in prerevolutionary Paris, by an award-winning historian of France and the French Empire.
In the decades leading up to the French Revolution, when Paris was celebrated as an oasis of liberty, slaves fled there, hoping to be freed. They pictured Paris as a refuge from France’s notorious slave-trading ports.
The French were late to the slave trade, but they dominated the global market in enslaved people by the late 1780s. This explosive growth transformed Paris, the cultural capital of the Enlightenment, into a dangerous place for people in bondage. Those seeking freedom in Paris faced manhunts, arrest, and deportation. Some put their faith in lawyers, believing the city’s courts would free them. Examining the lives of those whose dashed hopes and creative persistence capture the spirit of the era, Miranda Spieler brings to light a hidden story of slavery and the struggle for freedom.
Fugitive slaves collided with spying networks, nosy neighbors, and overlapping judicial authorities. Their clandestine lives left a paper trail. In a feat of historical detective work, Spieler retraces their steps and brings to light the new racialized legal culture that permeated every aspect of everyday life. She pieces together vivid, granular portraits of men, women, and children who came from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. We learn of their strategies and hiding places, their family histories and relationships to well-known Enlightenment figures. Slaves in Paris is a history of hunted people. It is also a tribute to their resilience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Spieler (Empire and Underworld) takes an illuminating look at the experiences of enslaved people in 18th-century Paris. Challenging the view of the city as "a refuge from slave colonies and slave-trading ports," Spieler depicts how freedom was fleeting and precarious as fugitives were subject to manhunts, imprisonment, and deportation. The bulk of her narrative revolves around piecing together the life stories of five enslaved people who made bids for escape from the city—among them Jean, who failed in his attempt to gain liberty through enlisting in the military; Julien, whose capture caught the attention of the Parisian press because he appeared white; and Pauline, a tradeswoman whose "path to freedom hinged on the assistance she received both from black domestics and from nobles whose fortunes depended on slavery." Along the way, she excavates a treasure trove of glimpses of little-recognized and forgotten lives—such as freed slave working as a "dueling master" who managed to acquire "a three-story villa"—while also shedding light on the tense and complicit relationship between liberal Paris and the far-flung colonial slave plantations that accounted for the capital city's significant wealth. At times, Spieler's narrative becomes insurmountably dense as she incorporates an excess of background detail to add texture to the almost wholly undocumented lives of her subjects. Still, it's a valuable scholarly contribution to the study of enslaved lives.
