The French History Podcast · Evergreen Podcasts

Slaves in Paris with Dr. Miranda Spieler

·41 min·2 clips

Pauline was declared free, then stayed in hiding while a round-the-clock manhunt continued.

1. The French History Podcast episode centers on Slaves in Paris, Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories by Dr. Miranda Spieler. 2. Host Gary speaks with Spieler, a historian of France and the French colonial world, about five named people in 18th-century Paris. 3. The episode asks what Paris really meant for enslaved and free Black people when French law claimed mainland France was free soil. 4. Spieler says the French slave trade was minimal at the start of the 18th century but near its apex by 1790. 5. She argues that race became a separate legal question from status in the second half of the century. 6. She also says that by the 1770s France imposed a racial ban on “blacks, mulattoes, and other people of color.” 7. Spieler describes police reports from the 1740s and 1750s that treated dark-skinned people as presumed slaves or property. 8. She says that by 1760 free people of color had to register with the Admiralty Court. 9. She frames that change as a formal racialization of French law. 10. On abolition, Spieler says Britain’s movement emerges in the 1770s and 1780s, while France had no simultaneous abolitionist movement. 11. She argues that Parisian elites were entangled with the slave trade and plantations, especially Saint-Domingue. 12. Spieler rejects the older reading that Admiralty Archives alone prove Paris was a place where enslaved people easily won liberty. 13. She says police archives instead reveal slave hunts organized with extrajudicial warrants from slave owners. 14. She explains that people suing for freedom could be arrested during, before, or after a freedom judgment. 15. Jean’s chapter follows a young African-born man enslaved in Saint-Domingue who is abused in Paris and seized in chains. 16. Pauline’s chapter follows a former slave from Mauritius who hides near the Bank of France and later gains freedom through a judge’s purchase with her own money. 17. Lucidor’s chapter follows a man who becomes a master of arms, marries, has two children, and later lives in an abbey where work laws do not apply. 18. Julien’s chapter centers on a 1787 freedom suit that fails before the French Revolution frees him. 19. Spieler’s tone is archival and cautious, and she says she stays “close to the ground” while reconstructing bodies, spaces, and institutions around each person. 20. People interested in French colonial law and Black life in Paris will likely want it; listeners wanting a brisk general overview may skip it.

As heard by us

Parisian freedom changes shape when the archives trace enslaved lives through the city's legal order.

Dr. Miranda Spieler turns Paris into a place where freedom is debated, enforced, and repeatedly withheld. Her book on five people of color in eighteenth-century metropolitan France tests the old claim that the mainland was free soil, and the episode gives that argument real…

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a Paris case study that tests the idea of free soil against colonial slavery.

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