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Miranda Spieler, Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025. 256 pp. $39.95 (hb) ISBN 9-78-0674986541. $39.95 (eb) ISBN 9-78-0674300781 (eb).
Author’s Response by Miranda Spieler, American University of Paris
Let me begin by expressing my sincere gratitude to the editors of H-France for creating this forum, and to all four contributors for their rich commentary. Reading their texts gave me a chance to step back from the book and consider the larger context from which it sprang. Slaves in Paris extends from the scholarly project, begun decades ago, of integrating colonial and metropolitan history into a single historical narrative for the purpose of learning how the metropole and periphery shaped one another. I made my first modest contribution to this field of inquiry in an earlier book, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (2012), which examined the way domestic French law moved overseas and mutated to produce monstrous configurations of human suffering in South America. Where my first book looked at the way France replicated itself in the colonial hinterland, Slaves in Paris considers how colonial slave plantations and the slave trade transformed French domestic society – institutions, attitudes, racial ideas, notions of rights – with a focus on the capital.
I became convinced during the writing process that only a very thick sense of place would allow me to decipher fragmentary archives about slaves who resided or sojourned in Paris. In Sasha Turner’s reading, “Paris is the center of the story.” I intended for people, especially the book’s five protagonists, to stand at its center. But I relied on textured spatial narratives to access what my protagonists were seeing and, to some extent, experiencing. This spatial emphasis also helped me to understand how site-specific opportunities and constraints shaped people’s actions.
Slaves in Paris seeks to dispel the notion that slavery and the slave trade mattered little to domestic France beyond the geographical margins of the country, outside provincial port cities. One consequence of emphasizing Paris is that port cities are comparatively invisible in the book. I might and probably ought to have spent more time connecting Paris to the rest of France and to reconstructing the trajectories, fugitive or otherwise, of enslaved people in and out of the capital—as Julie Duprat does in her new book about the African-born cook and hotelier Casimir Fidèle, which shuttles between Paris and Bordeaux.[1]
Julie Hardwick offers keen reflections about Antoine and Louis, youngsters mentioned in my introduction, who began in Nantes, were arrested in Paris, and forcibly returned to Nantes. Hardwick’s observations about the boys’ earlier lives, and about their Nantes masters, are humbling reminders of what I might have learned by spending more time in the records of Nantes. My first outline of the book, in my original book proposal, included a first chapter about sea travel and the disembarkation of enslaved people in eighteenth-century Atlantic ports. But my effort to understand Paris, and to write about it convincingly, required more work than I had foreseen. To reconstruct the city as it was experienced by slaves meant excavating forgotten neighborhoods, bouncing between different strata of society, piercing unfamiliar apertures into places I thought I knew. It proved difficult to constitute the depth of description I felt to be intellectually, morally, and aesthetically necessary. This was mainly because of the status of the people I was writing about, but also because of the nineteenth-century incineration of Parisian archives. Intermittently, I took soundings in the records of French maritime ports. And I felt each time that I had stepped through the looking glass into an unfamiliar archival ecology, which would have required many months—possibly years—of study and experimentation to understand. I agree with Julie Hardwick that I could have done a better job contextualizing Paris in relation to other cities. I hope one day to develop a similarly thick narrative of place that reaches beyond the capital so I can trace the movement of freedom-seekers around the country and better understand how contingency and different spatio-legal frameworks shaped their lives.
Sasha Turner and Julie Hardwick note that I adopt a “biographical approach” in the book. I confess to wincing when I saw the quotation marks, which seemed to flag both imposture and incompleteness (a “biographical approach” is not the same as a biographical approach). While working on this book, I spent a lot of time facing archival dead ends and imagining new research schemes for tunneling under or floating over them (not all these schemes worked). I did not, however, allow myself to imagine everything. I did not, as reviewers note, fill holes in the documentary record with my own speculations about the emotions and thoughts or destinies of my subjects. During the research and writing process, it was natural to wonder what people were thinking and feeling, about their experiences of love and remembrances of home, hopes, hardships, maladies, tastes in music, clothes, senses of humor, even the sound of their voices—everything I could not learn about.
And yet whenever I ventured speculations, aiming to fill some gaps, I found myself resorting to specious reasoning. I was obliged to reason from type, to recast individuals as the kind of person who, and dissolve flesh-and-blood people into genera. And later, whenever I didmanage to shake loose a few crumbs of new information about someone, what I learned was surprising. (Take, for instance, my unexpected discovery that Pauline, the subject of chapter two, returned to Mauritius as a stowaway.) I became leery of flattening individuals into types. Leaving gaps unfilled was an expression of deference to the elusiveness of individuality and to the silence of injustice. My handling of this problem was also influenced by Michel de Certeau’s critique of “l’érosion et dérision du singulier”—and deconstruction of “l’homme ordinaire,” in the writings of authors including Freud.[2] Refusing to speculate about inner thoughts or feelings kept me from scattering the book with various embodiments of a fictitious Everyman who masqueraded as real people.
Living with these unfillable gaps proved especially painful as I researched the final chapter, Ourika—the stolen child who arrived as a gift to the Prince of Beauvau in 1786. Sasha Turner suggests that “in Spieler’s account, Ourika, the token of love symbolically turned the commodification of humans on its head. As a love token, Ourika was priceless.” I did not intend to make the argument that Turner seems to ascribe to me here. Under no circumstances could Boufflers—the voluntary governor of a slave colony, a serial buyer of inexpensive toddlers, who also scored cheap African captives for his friends on the sly—undo or transcend his role in the commodification of African people by gifting a three-year-old girl to his uncle as a message of love. I apologize most sincerely for any lack of clarity on this point. In the chapter, I intended to argue that the Chevalier de Boufflers, a nobleman and an aesthete, deludedly imagined that buying up extremely affordable tiny children, and thingifying them in apparently non-commercial transactions, would enable him to escape the moral vulgarity of governing a marketplace for humans—an activity he elected to perform, because he thought it would make him rich. The fact that Boufflers, governor of Senegal at the acme of the French slave trade, could picture Ourika as “a love letter” to his uncle did not“tur(n) the commodification of humans on its head.” The gifting of Ourika was an act of moral perversity and deluded fetishism.
Antoine Lilti observes that social and familial ties linking Parisian elites to plantations and slave ships did not invariably mean that “leurs visions du monde, leurs choix culturels et politiques soient profondément déterminés par ses liens.” This is a salutary caution against cartoonish exaggeration. I did not mean to reduce the worldview of Parisian elites to esclavagisme. Everyone did not have the same level or form of involvement in plantations and slave ships. I also grant that a person’s soul is not necessarily beholden to the way he gets his money. Every era has its Engels. And yet, for the sake of argument, let us imagine making precisely the opposite claim to what Lilti gently ascribes to me. Might one plausibly say that elite people’s worldviews, together with their cultural and political choices, were unaffected by their material dependency on sugar plantations and slave ships? Or by their friends’ material dependency on plantations and slave ships? While considering this point, my mind turns to Annette Gordon-Reed’s new essay about Thomas Jefferson.[3] And to Montesquieu’s Uzbek in Lettres persanes (1721).[4] In the novel, Uzbek’s reflections about natural law and liberty are never mixed up with his instructions to black eunuchs about the seraglio. But the consciousness of Uzbek is disclosed through his talent for compartmentalizing, which enables his cruelty and sustains his lack of self-knowledge. I am still considering the problem that Lilti raises here—to be continued—because I am researching Carloman Félix Renouard de Sainte-Croix, who married into a plantation and later became a vocal opponent of slavery.[5] And yet, even in the example of Sainte-Croix, the plantation remade the man.
I agree with Lilti that I might have better acquainted the reader with my sources by laying out the study’s archival base more systematically (“on peut regretter d’ailleurs que ceux-ci ne soient pas présentés de façon plus systématique”). When I submitted the book for publication, it included a chart as an annex that listed lettres de cachet relating to slaves chronologically with full archival references. My editors did not want me to include this chart. Now I think I should have insisted. I yielded, because I thought I would be able to share this information by putting the book’s materials online to make them available to the general public. That project is still in its infancy. Nonetheless, at least there is now a website (www.slavesinparis.org), created with generous assistance from Meredith Martin and Hannah Williams, which describes the book’s main characters, maps them in the city, and contains folders with key documents for each figure.
When I set out to write Slaves in Paris, I meant to contribute a work of legal history. I am gratified that Marie Houllemare reads this study as “une histoire juridique centrée sur la diversité des expériences individuelles du droit.” It is true that law in relation to “la mobilité géographique” is a subject of enduring curiosity and interest to me. Despite differences in subject matter, there is quite a lot of my first book about French Guiana in this book about Paris. In Empire and Underworld, I wrote about a place that French people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries pictured as diametrically opposite to their home society. I then tried to show how domestic French legal structures replicated and reconfigured themselves in the colony to lethal effect. In this new study, I show how Paris, a place seemingly untouched by the colonial world of slavery and slave trading, was transformed by those realities. Both books investigate how law moves around on the backs of people, molds space, and shapes experience. Both books examine spatial and conceptual domains of extra-legality. One major difference between these projects lies in the centrality, in Slaves in Paris, of specific individuals who struggled for freedom and were often made to disappear. Because this is a book about endangered people, it stays close to the ground when exploring law in action—as revealed, often, through life-destroying clashes over legal meaning.
Miranda Spieler
American University of Paris
mspieler@aup.edu
Notes
[1] Julie Duprat, Casimir Fidèle 1748-1796: parcours d’un affranchi (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2025).
[2] Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, vol. 1, Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 13.
[3] Annette Gordon-Reed, “Jefferson Divided,” New York Review of Books 72, no. 20 (18 December 2025).
[4] Montesquieu, Lettres persanes, ed. Jean Starobinski (Paris: Gallimard, 1st ed. 1973; 2003).
[5] Carloman Félix de Renouard de Sainte-Croix, Statistique de la Martinique, vol. 1 (Paris: Chaumerot, 1822); Marquis de Sainte-Croix, Pétition à la Chambre des députés, sur le régime intérieur des esclaves aux Antilles françaises, avec la demande d’une autorité spéciale et protectrice; chargée de surveiller l’exécution des lois et des ordonnances en vigueur, concernant la nourriture, les travaux et traitements des nègres esclaves (Paris: Imprimerie de Lottin de Saint-Germain, 1829); and Émancipation des esclaves aux colonies françaises: mémoire présenté par Monsieur le Marquis de Sainte-Croix (Paris: Louis Rosier, 1835).
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H-France Forum
Volume 21 (2026), Issue 1, #5