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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 Julie Hardwick, University of Texas at Austin
The View from Nantes
Miranda Spieler’s brilliant, innovative, field-changing book is an instant classic. The extraordinary archival research, analytical originality, and methodological creativity combine to make a critical intervention in French history, urban history, the history of Black Europe, Atlantic history, and other fields. She transforms our understanding of slavery and the lives of enslaved people in eighteenth-century France, and centers Paris as a city transformed by the profits and politics of slavery to become an imperial metropolis at the epicenter of transformations in the practices and culture around the issue of slavery.
One of Spieler’s most distinctive choices was to use a very contemporary vocabulary from the start. In describing what happened in terms like “urban slave hunt” (p. 2), “travelling toolkit of an intrepid youngster” (p. 3), “freedom legend” (p. 2), or “Nonwhite people lived near the ministers” (p. 3), she perfectly captures the intensity of the very fraught and often dangerous situations in which enslaved or nominally free people of color found themselves. Paris appears as “a refuge” (p. 1) or “a haven of liberty” that was a site of “dangerous allurement and precarious liberation” (p. 9).
She lays out an important methodological template to navigate the difficulties of centering the experiences of enslaved people in a country where direct archival evidence is thin. While Sophie White’s essential work has emphasized focusing on the voices of the enslaved in the French Atlantic, the kinds of materials she has do not exist in archives for the histories of metropolitan France. Spieler explicitly rejects critical fabulation, a method articulated by Saidiya Hartman and many other very influential methodological approaches to Atlantic slavery in recent years, although she does share with that approach a commitment to centering the experiences of the enslaved.[1] She refuses to ventriloquize her subjects or to imagine their emotions. Spieler’s discussion of the problems of the French archive in razor-sharp language echoes many of the discussions of historians of marginalized people across the early modern world and, for instance, in the problematics of seemingly beguiling Inquisition records.[2] She frames judicial records as concealing and distorting and makes visible “the quiet perversities of archival research” (p. 10) on slavery. She notes that as “a consequence of social injustice, the pathology of the written record cannot be fixed,” contending that the documentary record can “at best, yield a shattered version of reality” (p. 13).
Yet Spieler’s work also sounds an alarm to this reader about what we do not see when we are in the archives because it is not what we are looking for and points to some of the opportunities that do exist. Many historians have used her primary set of source material, the records of the Bastille and the lettres de cachet in particular—most famously Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault in Le désordre des familles. Spieler notes that almost nobody who has looked at these documents has mentioned their use to recapture enslaved people. Our archival blindness (and I have noticed this myself when I returned years later to material) can be so potent. Readers of H-France, of course, know Sue Peabody’s pathbreaking work on the free-soil principle, which has opened up so many fruitful avenues of research on slavery and slaves in France as part of the foundational work she, Pierre Boulle, Erick Noël, and others did to establish the field a generation ago. Spieler’s wider archival lens, in fact, is key in her leading a new generation of scholars working on race and slavery in eighteenth-century France with a new paradigm for thinking about bondage and freedom.
Spieler chooses a biographical approach, structuring each of the five chapters around one person, and she focuses on where enslaved people moved. Her methodological choices align here, in many ways, with another fabulous new book on the early modern history of Black Europe, Chloe Ireton’s book about enslaved people in Seville and other parts of the Spanish Atlantic. Ireton also rejects critical fabulation and emphasizes space and movement as methodological keys.[3] Although Ireton benefits from the rich archive of Spanish law created for enslaved people with extant petitions and letters, they both, in essence, weave together fragments of evidence. Spieler’s method focuses on the actions of enslaved people, especially their movements and interactions with the world around them—within households, neighborhoods, and legal and institutional structures.
Alongside the major interpretative interventions, Slaves in Paris provides suggestive guideposts into issues that have been challenging for historians of many fields. For historians of sexuality, for example, Lucidor, the central character in chapter 3, provides a window into racialized sexuality as a part of the Black history of Europe based on police records of his making a living as a sex worker (p. 85-88). Other historians may take up some of these archival leads.
The story of slaves in Paris was, of course, integrally part of a global history. In a very clever final chapter, unpacking the lived experience and fictional representation of Ourika, an enslaved girl from Senegal who became – in Spieler’s words – an avatar in Claire de Duras’s 1823 novel of the same name, the lives of the many French men who pursued careers as colonial military officials are inextricably intertwined with the arrival of enslaved children in France, especially after 1777. The emphasis on this youthful cohort as keys to the history of Atlantic slavery, race, and empire is part of a new wave of work that foregrounds children as critical actors and subjects.[4] Spieler again catches our attention by squarely highlighting the wider telling resonance of their experiences: “Bodysnatching and orphanhood were the primal scene of the slave trade” (p. 177).
Reading this book as someone currently working on a project about enslaved people in Nantes made me wonder to what extent Spieler is telling a Parisian story.[5] This is not to diminish the power and importance of her Paris. She persuasively repositions Paris as central to the Atlantic slavery story, outshining the Atlantic ports that have received so much attention. Her brilliant portrayal of Paris as the imperial capital, complete with what she calls, again in striking vocabulary, displaced “sugar millionaires” (p. 14) who lived with the enslaved people they had moved there infabulously wealthy neighborhoods and transformed the place and its politics.
The Paris dynamic seems to be distinct in at least three important ways. Lettre de cachets were, as Spieler says, primarily a “weapon of Parisian police” rather than a provincial tool. The Paris guilds played a critical part in her reading of exclusion and vulnerability of enslaved people, whereas, as many archival records show, the Nantes guilds were seemingly quite accepting of enslaved apprentices and free Black workers, so long as they were not illicit producers, that is, working outside of the guilds. Guild tolerance gave enslaved or free Black people an opportunity to find a niche where they could make a meager living, like a Black tailor claiming to be free who, for years, made clothes for the Black population in his neighborhood, or a Black lingère who took in enslaved girls as apprentices. Many enslaved and free people of color in Nantes did not live in elite households, as Spieler argues most enslaved people in Paris did. Free people of color in Nantes often experienced extreme financial precarity, another tempering of “freedom,” but the risk of their legal status being challenged seems to have been much less than in Spieler’s Paris, although violence was always baked into the dynamics of slavery.
Using information from a lettre de cachet, Spieler starts her book with two teenage fugitives who had traveled from Nantes to Paris. Their journey illustrates the allure of Paris as a site of possible freedom as well as the unlikeliness and precariousness of their project. The record reads intensely with a midnight door-to-door search of households by police officers, which she frames as a true urban slave hunt. The pair were imprisoned and then returned to Nantes after a family bank with operations in both cities paid the fee on behalf of their enslavers.
I wondered what the backstories of these freedom seekers, Victor Baltahazar and Antoine Lafleuer, and their Nantes households might suggest about the fugitives and their enslavers.[6] They were some of the thousands of enslaved teens who arrived in Nantes after 1716, when a new law allowed enslavers to hold people in slavery in France as long as they were registered on arrival, instructed as Catholics, and trained in an occupation. As was common, neither seems to have been registered on arrival despite the requirements of the new law. The lettre de cachet identified both enslavers (Patrick Archer and Martin Linssens) as négociants, the usual Nantes term for merchants involved in the Atlantic slave trade. Antoine was baptized in 1748 in the parish church of Saint-Nicolas as Jean-Baptiste-Augustin on a day when the same priest baptized two other enslaved teens. His baptism record noted that Archer owned him, and Archer’s son and sister were godparents. The priest added that Antoine had come from “the coast of Angola” and estimated his age at about sixteen. He had perhaps arrived on the Neptune which returned in 1745 from a twenty-six-month voyage to the Angola coast, where its crew purchased 205 enslaved people. More than twenty died before the ship arrived in Guadeloupe, where they were sold. That would mean he had endured the Middle Passage plus all the uncertainties of a voyage to Nantes with the same crew. Antoine joined a household that included Archer, Marie White, his second wife, their four very young children, and a daughter from his first marriage. They surely had a female servant or two and perhaps another enslaved person, as was common in Nantes households with Atlantic connections. Linssens skipped the baptism for Victor. He and his wife, Anne Taverne, had a child before Victor departed.
Five years after Antoine’s baptism, he and Victor decided to seek freedom. How might these teens have decided to go to Paris? Many enslaved people lived in Saint-Nicolas in households of artisans and of merchants, as did free people of color. Antoine and Victor both lived on the same street on the west side of the city, the Quai de la fosse, the main arrival quay for Atlantic ships. Its multi-story terraced houses with many interior apartments looked straight across the quay to the arriving and departing ships, the loading and unloading of cargoes, and the arrival and departure of crews, passengers, and slaves. Free people of color lived there too, and both notarial and admiralty court records reveal their legal and spatial journeys. Conversations surely took place about escaping chattel slavery in an information economy that extended west across the Atlantic and east to Paris.[7]
When Antoine and Victor chose to pursue freedom in Paris (an action their enslavers described as “having escaped their masters’ households”), they chose new names for their new status, a frequent practice among free people of color in Nantes. They piled on clothes and left in the middle of the night, hoping to get a head start, no doubt, before anyone missed them. They left on the night of May 5. On May 10, their enslavers wrote to request an order to find and return them. They knew the names the fugitives were using and their plan to go to Paris, knowledge that suggests acquaintances of the teens had shared information, whether willingly or under coercion. On the night of May 16, someone gave Paris police commissioners information about their whereabouts. For the second time, someone had betrayed them. Police hunted for them at night and found them asleep in the same bed in a cellar. By May 24, their enslavers had organized a payment to have them transported back to Nantes. Their “freedom” consisted of ten days on the run.
What might have made their two enslavers decide to take an entirely unusual step in their community and get a lettre de cachet? Both négociants had deep ties to the slave trade. Archer was an armateur who outfitted three voyages for the slave trade in the 1740s, and the entire cargo (human and commodity) of his third voyage was lost after a revolt of the enslaved passengers who had seized the crew’s guns and killed several crew members. Might Archer’s financially catastrophic close encounter with the rebellious slaves who captured his ship have made him more of a hardliner than other Nantais enslavers about the pursuit of fugitives? Linssens was a member of a multi-generational family of Saint-Nicolas négociants, and eventually moved to Saint-Domingue, a decision that marked a full commitment to chattel slavery as profit. Archer, as a member of the Irish immigrant community who had married into some of the wealthiest Nantes slave-trading families, might have had the connections in Paris to make him think of seeking a lettre de cachet.
Slaves in Paris provided me with a new way of thinking about Nantes adolescents like Victor and Antoine, and a different way of reading, for example, the sparse entry of a young, enslaved woman who was “brought in” to the Nantes prison in 1780 in the wake of an order from the Admiralty court. Certainly, enslaved people in Nantes were sometimes captured and held in the city prison until their owners claimed them, as the records show. The frequency of this practice increased after 1777 when a new law introduced several new conditions: it banned the entry of people of color into France, it allowed enslavers to bring only a single enslaved person who had to stay in a special depot in the arrival port city, and it required that every person of color already in France, free or enslaved, had to register. I had assumed people of color were picked up, sometimes after being reported absent, rather than specifically pursued. I might be wrong. Was the admiralty court filling the gap left by no Paris-style police or lettres de cachet in a kind of institutional and proslavery investment that allied judges and slaveowners to protect slaveowners’ property?
I wonder if Spieler’s early career experience as a historian of colonial slavery has provided a powerful, different perspective on the realities of slavery as an inherently violent institution.[8] That has been more difficult for most metropolitan historians to grasp, as our extant records rarely explicitly mark the violence of slavery in France, and our historiography even less so, especially in the face of the seemingly softer version of slavery, like portraits and freedom suits, most easily evident in the sources. With slaves as her guides, Spieler’s landmark book firmly centers the harshness, vulnerability, and precariousness that marked the experience of free and enslaved people in eighteenth-century Paris.
Julie Hardwick
University of Texas at Austin
jhardwick@austin.utexas.edu
Notes
[1] Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021). See also White and Trevor Burnard, eds, Hearing Enslaved Voices: African and Indian Slave Testimony in British and French America, 1700-1848 (Routledge, 2021). For critical fabulation, see Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12/2 (2008):1-14.
[2] For debate, see Ananya Chakravarti, “Mapping ‘Gabriel’: Space, Identity, and Slavery in the Late Sixteenth-Century Indian Ocean,” Past and Present 243/1 (2019): 5-34. Chakravarti, like Spieler, favors identifying movement as key.
[3] Chloe Ireton, Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025). Ireton has much denser archival evidence due to differences between Spanish and French law for free Black and enslaved people of African descent.
[4] See, for example, the recent CFP for a special issue of French Historical Studies about children, race, and empire.
[5] My subsequent reflections about Nantes, are drawn from work for my book in progress, Labor, Liberty, and Living Racial Capitalism in an Eighteenth-Century French Slave Port City.
[6] My thanks to Miranda Spieler for generously sharing her photographs of the lettre de cachet and to Ella Bynane, my undergraduate research assistant, for her valuable help with sorting out the Nantes backstory.
[7] The historiography about the sharing of information about ideas on freedom and possible pathways to it is well established. Ireton, Black Thought is an excellent introduction.
[8] Miranda Spieler, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
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Volume 21 (2026), Issue 1, #4