A current wave of micro-biographies of enslaved individuals in the Francophone world (and beyond) marks a distinct historiographical turn. All of these studies address the historian’s dilemma of, on one hand, using the archives produced by enslavers, which inscribe people as property and are suffused with the denigrating attitudes of elites, and, on the other, the near absence of historical documents that record authentic, unmediated voices of the enslaved. Some historians seeking to recover the experiences and subjectivities of enslaved people scour legal records and newspapers for oral testimony, sometimes acknowledging the distorting influence of power on these transcriptions. ^{Footnote 1} Others—working, for the most part, outside the field of scholars who study the Francophone colonial world—offer nuanced theoretical meditations on how archival silences elide, and indeed reflect, the essential physical and epistemological violence inherent in modern slavery. Still others (myself included) have incorporated speculation—the “perhaps, might have, is it possible that?” – to consider possible motivations and perspectives in their lives.Footnote ²

Miranda Spieler’s Slaves in Paris offers a considered methodological stance to the historian’s dilemma, declaring that she will “not speculate about my subjects’ thoughts and feelings. Wary of ventriloquism, I leave the task of imagining who they really were to my readers…. [Instead,] I look at their actions, and at the things they touched, the places they visited, and the people they knew” (12–13). The result is an extraordinarily rich, nuanced, and vivid invocation of Ancien Régime Paris as it was inhabited by enslaved people, many of whom sought to flee their oppression. Drawing from police, judicial, and ministerial records, amply supplemented by private papers and other archives, Spieler critically reconstructs the lives of five enslaved people who lived in Paris during the second half of the eighteenth century: Jean, an African man who unsuccessfully fled a Saint-Domingue sugar planter twice in the capital; Pauline, of the Mascarenes, who was more successful in establishing her freedom with the assistance of other black domestics and noble benefactors; Lucidor, a dueling master, manumitted voluntarily, who eventually purchased a home and headed a household; Julien, arrested in the heart of Paris for solicitation; and the historical Ourika, inspiration for Claire de Duras eponymous novel. Through these individual stories, amplified by Spieler’s attention to place and space, we are immersed in a city of violence, profiteering, humiliation, and desperation. If the soil of Paris ever conferred “freedom,” Spieler makes it clear that, by the middle of the eighteenth century, this was no longer so.

Spieler’s most important finding is that, despite the Paris Admiralty Court’s repeated invocations of the legal maxim, “there are no slaves in France,” in more than 150 decisions rendering petitioners free, masters frequently (in at least 31 cases) interfered with or dodged these decisions by obtaining individual arrest warrants—known as ordres du roi or lettres de cachet—from the Ministry of the Navy, which had jurisdiction over colonial subjects, even in the metropole. Altogether, including actions initiated independent of the Admiralty freedom suits, enslavers obtained at least 125 arrest warrants for their slaves, many of whom were, as a result, imprisoned and sometimes deported to the colonies. Thus, in law—as well as in economics, culture, and political power—Spieler successfully demonstrates how thoroughly Paris was deeply implicated and integrated into the wider colonial empire predicated on plantation slavery in the decades before the Revolution.

As rich and stimulating as this study is, it has some limitations. First, while Spieler has extensively investigated and unearthed the social milieus of the select individuals in Paris, she has (no doubt for practical reasons), not (yet?) pursued any trajectories leading back to the colonies, which would require more extensive research in the passenger, plantation, and administrative records held in the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer and in the departmental or municipal archives of port and formerly colonial cities. As a result, we do not really know what proportion of those arrested by lettres de cachet were, in fact, deported to the colonies, nor the conditions they faced there upon their re-subjugation. This is an emphatically Parisian, not an “Atlantic” nor a “global” history.

Second, as Spieler notes, the police records after 1770 are “spotty,” so it is unclear whether the pattern of issuing royal arrest warrants to masters continued during and after the disbandment of the Admiralty Court (1771–1775) as a result of the Maupeou affair. Approximately two decades elapse between the events of Spieler’s first three chapters (1750s – 1760s) and the last two (ca. 1786 – 1799), during which the Admiralty Court issued almost half of its free soil rulings. This is not a criticism of Spieler’s method—incomplete archives are inevitable—only a caution against presuming continuity during such a period of judicial upheaval. Attention to the individual stories, and the decision to truncate the study with the Revolution (as viewed through Claire de Duras’ lens in the 1820s), means that Spieler overlooks French policy-makers’ ambivalent see-sawing between free soil and racial quarantine approaches to the incompatible colonial (slave-based) and metropolitan (putatively “free”) juridical regimes right up until the abolition of 1848.Footnote ³ There is a longer, more uneven story to tell.

Spieler is a trenchant stylist whose writing evokes the irony of Voltaire and the moral certitude of Robespierre. Her acerbic prose drily lacerates the hypocrisy and corruption of the aristocratic and merchant classes. At the same time, while she acknowledges that “police profiles offer many clues to friendship, love, and complicity between Parisians and enslaved people,” (24) the book does not delve into these affective relationships. Rather, Spieler’s extensive original research brings to light how Parisian elites profited from colonial slavery, infusing Enlightenment salon and administrative society with assumptions about racial hierarchies and policies of exclusion. It is an extraordinarily well-researched book, and a good read. It is also a cautionary tale to historians about drawing general conclusions from a limited source base. May the inquiry continue!