Slaves in Paris

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.

Moving and deeply researched…An insightful examination of the legacy of racial inequality in France. -- Mitzi Mack Library Journal
Miranda Spieler, a superlative writer as well as a brilliantly penetrating historian, has turned the treasures of the archive into the resurrection of an entire world: that of the slave population in eighteenth-century Paris. The immediacy of that world, seen through the eyes of slaves, but also of slave owners, slave hunters, and the courts, is so richly documented, and the book's protagonists so vividly drawn, that anyone immersed in the pages of this instant classic will feel part of the world it describes and is unlikely ever to forget it. An astonishing achievement and a very beautiful, often moving work of historical literature. -- Simon Schama, author of Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
Spieler’s moving and deeply researched history captures the relationship between elite Parisian society, the French imperial project, and the fates of enslaved people. An insightful examination of the legacy of racial inequality in France. Library Journal
In this careful, elegant, and meticulously researched book, Miranda Spieler manages not only to overturn conventional thinking about slavery in France, but also to reconstruct an unknown story about its capital. Slavery and its companion anti-Black racism have long been facets of Paris's past. Through vivid narratives, Spieler permits us to understand the roots of the city's present. Slaves in Paris is a must-read. -- Martha S. Jones, author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All
Drawing on scattered and fragmentary archives from across France’s colonies as well as Paris to reconstruct how five black lives were lived, Slaves in Paris is a brilliant work of historical detection, literary imagination, and humane insight. Miranda Spieler changes at a stroke the way we think about Enlightenment Paris, French colonialism, and the condition of slavery. -- Colin Jones, author of Paris: The Biography of a City
With dazzling archival research and subtle analysis, Miranda Spieler takes us on an eye-opening tour of Paris as the capital of a vast slaveholding empire. By showing how captives angled for advantage and elites worked to keep them at the threshold of liberty, Slaves in Paris transforms our understanding of slavery and freedom in French history. -- Lauren Benton, author of They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence
Miranda Spieler’s eloquent and meticulously researched Slaves in Paris illuminates the precariousness of freedom in the heart of the Enlightenment. Spieler unearths the stories of Black men and women who lived on the margins of the Parisian landscape—individuals left largely uncounted within the eighteenth-century imperial archive and often misrepresented in scholarship since. This groundbreaking work compels us to reconsider the foundations of liberty in a world built on its opposite, offering a sobering and deeply human perspective on the complexities of Black French metropolitan and colonial history. Slaves in Paris attends to the darker truths of France’s past with insight and rigor, urging readers to confront the lingering shadows of oppression within the City of Lights. -- Kaiama Glover, author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being

Miranda Spieler is the author of Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana. She is Professor of History and Politics at the American University of Paris.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.