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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).
Review Essay by Sasha Turner, Johns Hopkins University
Miranda Spieler’s book Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories challenges prevailing notions about slavery and freedom in Paris. The work is a poignant reminder that we do not see the past as it was, but through the archival traces it leaves behind. In Spieler’s case, it is not the archives writ large but the Archive in the specificity of a repository and the documents housed. We can arrive at strikingly different conclusions about a place and the people who inhabited and traveled through it by looking at a distinctive set of documents. In the blunt terms Spieler offers, overreliance on the legal archives has produced a misguided view of slavery in France. She issues a direct corrective to the classic work of Sue Peabody, which echoes the contemporaneous claims in its title, There Are No Slaves in France.[1] Spieler denounces, “many tales of liberation in Peabody’s book were not the judicial triumph she suggests” (p. 5).
By writing about the people who populated the private papers of families connected to slavery, as well as notarial documents, Spieler narrates a complicated story of freedom as a constantly moving target. After enslaved people were judicially free, their lives remained precarious, and the threat of re-enslavement loomed. Reading across a wide range of repositories both within France and its colonial outposts in Réunion, Martinique, and Mauritius, Spieler’s book offers a caution on the uses and limits of judicial records and the urgency of a dynamic methodology that is attentive to the variability of evidence. In looking at alternate sources and documents, a variegated view of Paris emerges. Spieler tells us, “The city was a site of dangerous allurement and precarious liberation for slaves. It was also a place of resistance, complicity, fugitive solidarity…and a theatre of contested legal meaning, institutional conflict, and unwritten rules” (p. 9).
Adopting a “biographical approach to the history of slaves in Paris,” Spieler presents what she describes as a “counternarrative” to the liberationist tradition that has dominated historiographies of the French Atlantic (p. 12). This methodology, she once more cautions, diverges from traditional biographies because much of the lives of the individuals she studies are fragmented and unknowable. Echoing the works of critical archival theorists from the English Atlantic, the tradition from which I write, Spieler further warns that the conditions in which splinters of slave life appear are moments of extreme vulnerability and pathologization. These accounts are, for example, police and property records whose sole purpose was to capture the social and civil death of persons, thingified and criminalized. Thus, the biographies that Spieler writes are not of “interior lives,” thoughts and feelings of individuals. She offers a reconstruction of exteriority mapped through the analysis of “their actions and…the things they touched, places they visited, and the people they knew” (p. 13).
Through this emplotment, Spieler delivers a richly textured history that connects the rise of anti-Black racism to Black freedom struggles, which in turn redefined the boundaries of the (French) nation; notions of freedoms and rights; and the bodies to which they adhered. Take the story of Julien, for example, one of the five biographies Spieler narrates. Like countless others, Julien had sued for his freedom through the Paris Court of Admiralty on the maxim, “there are no slaves in France.” Julien’s case, as Spieler tells it, hinged less on his slave status and more on whether he was Black or white and enslaveable in the first place. Julien’s white-looking body, owed to him being fathered by a white man, became the subject of dispute after his white aunt, from whom he had obtained his freedom through his court appeal, plotted with her lover, a banker and slave trader, to capture and transport Julien from Paris to Martinique.
Like many other people of color in Paris who were freed by appeals to the Court of Admiralty, Julien’s status remained insecure. Many members of France’s judiciary, including the police and magistrates, whom Spieler hilariously calls the “toadies of the colonial lobby,” conspired with proslavery forces to arrest and forcibly transport freed people to the colonies (p. 107). Julien’s case provoked a fuss, however. Parlement summoned Julien’s abductee “on the grounds that ‘it was a white and not a mulatto’” (p. 108). Parlement’s actions, along with popular discussions in the press around Julien’s presumed race (white) and his immunity to enslavement, made “whiteness a necessary condition for acceding to the basic legal protections in France” (p. 109). Unlike countless other Black and Brown people whose freedom suits were overturned on account of their racial features, Julien was spared re-enslavement. Spieler explains, Julien’s “skin tone, hair texture, and facial morphology met the standard [of whiteness] required for [French] citizenship” (p. 109).
With vivid and lively prose, Spieler offers a riveting account of what happened to free people of color, like Julien; what they lived through; and its consequences for how we understand eighteenth-century Paris. Neither Julien nor Jean, Pauline, Lucidor, and Ourika, the other people of color whose (slave) status remained in flux and whose lives anchor Spieler’s book, propel the narrative. Paris is the center of the story. What rings truest for the reader is the biography of a changing city, transformed by the political upheavals of the revolutionary era as well as by unexpected sojourners. What mattered to Jean, Pauline, Lucidor, Julien, and Ourika calcify as symbols of the new picture of Paris that Spieler paints—an increasingly racist metropolis where corporality was constantly surveilled for traces of blackness, to which slavery gradually inhered, and French citizenship was denied.
Still, by attending to the experiences of these individuals and what they revealed about the hitherto hidden and fleeting workings of slavery and the construction of anti-Black racism in Paris, Spieler raises important questions of broad significance for Atlantic scholars beyond the francophone world. For example, in the story of a child renamed Ourika by her captors, we are confronted with the meanings of commodification and the transformative effects of such emotions as love on the market for humans. In 1786, at age two or three, Ourika was forcibly removed from her home in Senegal and trafficked into Paris. Contrasting with the predominant fate of captive Africans who were sold, Ourika was gifted to an abolitionist. Even so, Spieler emphasizes, Ourika’s fate echoed the broader patterns of African captivity and enslavement. Whether sold or gifted, African captives all suffered natal alienation and social death. As Spieler explains, “Bodysnatching and orphanhood were the primal scene of the slave trade…the experience of falling outside everything in an instant, was central to Black experience in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World” (p. 131).
Spieler’s emphasis on the theft and trading of bodies as the primary sites of African people’s alienation and commodification excludes Ourika’s experiences as a child-gift from the predominant ways in which scholars have articulated the practice of turning humans into property. In all the writings in which Ourika appears, including an inventory of animal gifts, her initial purchaser, Stanislas de Boufflers, the governor of Senegal, referred to her as une jeune captive. “A parrot for the queen, a horse for Maréchal de Castries, a small captive for Monsieur de Beauvau, a sultan chicken for the Duc de Laon, an ostrich for Monsieur de Nivernais” (p. 136). Through such method of accounting, Spieler explains, Ourika vanishes as a person who could possibly be understood in social terms as ward, adoptive daughter, or simply a particularized individual. Elsewhere, Boufflers portrayed Ourika in terms he used to describe other objects he fetishized. From strands of hair to portraits, token exchanges between Boufflers and his relatives sought to capture the essence of himself and his loved ones. Ourika was such a token to his uncle, the Maréchal Prince Charles-Juste de Beauvau, the abolitionist. 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.
Spieler’s writing is deliberative and cautious. In the book’s introduction, she warns, “Traditional biographies explore people’s interior lives and depend on sources like letters and journals – textual emanations of the self. For a host of obvious reasons, I do not speculate about my subjects’ thoughts and feelings. Wary of ventriloquism, I leave the task of imagining who they really were to my readers” (p. 12). Spieler leaves many things to her readers. The book gestures toward child gifting as another dimension of commodification, though the reader must decode such workings. Commodification implies the market and relations of labor. The reader must decide whether to include the affective realm in which Ourika became enveloped as a gift of love. For this reader, the common denominator between the affective and the economic was the thingification and racialization of Afrodescendant people. They were neither understood nor treated as autonomous beings with social lives and connections beyond those claiming them as property or otherwise. Their lives, their bodies, and their stories became assets that could be capitalized in ways that were simultaneously material and symbolic. Spieler’s open-ended approach that follows the lives of various individuals permits the unfolding of slavery and freedom as paradoxical and deeply fraught processes that made diverse claims on the lives and bodies of people racialized as Black.
Sasha Turner
Johns Hopkins University
sturner@jhu.edu
Notes
[1] Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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H-France Forum
Volume 21 (2026), Issue 1, #2