← New Books Network
New Books Network
Miranda Spieler, "Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories" (Harvard UP, 2025)
00:53:33
Loading summary
Transcript47 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Miranda Spieler about her book titled Slaves in Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories, which was published by Harvard University Press in 2025. Now, this book is interesting for a number of reasons, perhaps primarily. As a fellow historian, I'm fascinated by this idea of fugitive histories because lives of people who are enslaved are kind of, by definition, not the sorts of things that we usually hear about, and especially not when people who were trying to get out of being enslaved were trying to get around the laws and institutions that were trying to keep them there. There's a whole bunch of secrecy involved here. I mean, as the subtitle suggests, hidden lives and fugitive histories. This is a really important subject to figure out, but a really tricky one to investigate, too. And yet this book has done it. We can actually find some things out about what it was like to be enslaved in Paris in the sort of late 1700s. And that's very much what we're going to talk about today. To understand how the city that we probably don't often think about in terms of a place where enslaved people lived, we think of, associate the city with many other things. Has this part of its history, too. So I think we've got rather a lot to talk about, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. Thank you so much, fellow Miranda, for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:30]
C
Thank you. Yes. And it gives me great pleasure to say thanks for having me, Miranda.
- [02:35]
B
A very fun place to start. And in fact, on the subject of names, if you could please introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book.
- [02:44]
C
Sure. My name is Miranda Spieler, and I'm a professor of history and politics at the American University of Paris. And I've lived in Paris for more than a decade, a big piece of which involved writing this book. The idea for this book began with a research accident, a kind of fortuitous discovery. I was working in an archive depository that is called the Archives of the Bastille, named after the famous fortress. This archival depository contains the police files of virtually everyone in the old regime who was arrested extra judicially. And I was looking through the paper index of this archive, you know, and just three cheers for paper indexes while I'm at it, and stumbled upon an entry for slaves that really surprised me, Isclav. And it surprised me because there is a received wisdom that there were no slaves in France, and in Paris particularly. And to the degree that historians have tried to nuance that story, they have focused on the port cities like Nantes or Bordeaux, which had a close relationship to the slave trade and to slave colonies. So Paris, on the other hand, as we know, has the reputation for being the center of the European Enlightenment or the global Enlightenment, in a sense. It was also the seat of the country, country's highest court, and some of the country's most renowned intellectuals. So I was curious about these slave entries, imagining this to be a kind of small project called up these dossiers and discovered files recounting slave hunts unfolding in 18th century Paris at the demand of slave owners who requested that people be hunted down who were freedom seekers. Some of those freedom seekers were just fugitives, ran away, sometimes because their lives were at stake. Sometimes they were endangered by the violence of their masters. And some of those people were seeking freedom by legal means by using Parisian courts. So I soon developed a research strategy for finding more files and eventually found about125 cases. I see this as evolving of people who were hunted as freedom seekers in 18th century Paris. So my main goal in writing the book was to explain why and how Paris became a site of slave hunting in the second half of the 18th century. At the height of the Enlightenment and in the years leading up to the revolution. But my own research background definitely shaped the way the project evolved, because, well before I started this, I had spent my research life exploring two overlapping themes, the first of which is unusual legal mechanisms that unleash state violence. And the other theme was the people who were the object of those mechanisms, who are marginal, poor, and endangered, who are people like convicts and ex convicts or workers, socialists, non European immigrants. So I guess many of the things that I'd worked on before I recognized in this project that brings together so.
- [06:36]
B
Many fascinating strands to explain this project and agree total shout out on the indexes and archives and archival work generally. One can come across so many cool surprises when investigating. And often they do seem at first like quite a small thing. And obviously we're now talking about a whole book. So it clearly spiraled from those initial moments and discoveries. Are there any further details you want to tell us about in terms of the kind of questions you began to develop as you got further into these documents and sort of realized, as you said, the scale was not just one or two people?
- [07:10]
C
Well, the questions that I ask in this book really evolved as I worked through documents about individual people and their efforts to become free. So all of the big questions took shape through the act of piecing together individual experiences. And perhaps before I continue, it might be useful to think about who those people are. And then I think listeners will understand the kinds of questions that I pose a little better. Most of the people that I consider in this book are enslaved domestics who live in Paris and work for extremely elite people. Many were born in Africa, but came there via the colonies. And they were often adolescent boys. A few of them were women. I devote a couple of chapters to women, so I think that the story of adolescence is kind of interwoven with the book, Although I didn't really flag that as a major thing theme. So the experience of researching these people led me to ask questions of maybe of a couple of different categories. The most obvious ones were related to the particular details of Slave roundup and concerned the mechanisms that ensnared individual people. So I asked questions like how, if at all a slave could become free in 18th century Paris. And I tried to understand why the Crown supported these slave hunting efforts. And I also wanted to know what ordinary folks thought about slaves in their midst and whether they were helpers or enemies. Did they help fugitives? Did they regard people as property? But the book then sort of began to grapple with other questions, Partly because I needed to develop a really granular understanding of Paris to track mobility of fugitives in the city. And as I was developing a more granular understanding of Paris, I started to ask questions about the nature of Paris itself in this period, particularly in relation to the colonial world. And so I was interested in how the colonial empire changed Paris. And the period that I'm focusing on in the book, which is the second half of the 18th century, was a period marked by the explosive growth of the French sugar complex in Saint Domingue, or what we now call Haiti, and also by the explosive growth of the French slave trade. So I wanted to know how those changes reverberated in the capital of the Enlightenment. And ultimately I was led to make an argument about Paris becoming an imperial capital. So there were really sort of narrow questions related to the lives of folks who I was studying, and then a set of bigger questions related to the city in which they lived.
- [10:42]
B
That's a useful two sets of categories to think about as we continue with our discussion. Thank you. And thank you for sharing as well, the sort of behind the scenes aspect of how a project evolves. Right. We often start with one interest area, but it never usually stays there. So that's definitely helpful to understand. But to come back to the point we mentioned at the beginning about archives, obviously none of this would be possible without any archival material. But the questions you've just laid out there, some of which are tricky to answer. I mean, as you said, kind of becoming very, very aware of, like, which street went where and how did people move around, but also, of course, figuring out the specifics of any one of these people's individual lives and then kind of connecting them all up. What were some of the particular challenges you came across in answering these questions? And how did you navigate what was and wasn't in the archive?
- [11:33]
C
Okay, so there are specific challenges to researching slaves as individual people in any context, because we are obliged to use the archives created by institutions and individuals who dehumanize them. So there's something fundamentally challenging about a biographical approach to enslaved people. But there are particular challenges in the French context. One of those challenges results from the real lack of institutions on the ground in French slave colonies. The French colonial empire developed in the era of absolutism, which meant there is a dearth of courts, assemblies, justices of the peace, there's no vocal and independent clergy, and all of those things might otherwise have generated a useful archive. So there is a shortage of archival material in which to fish for people when you are in colonial spaces. A second Major challenge for people interested in developing a biographical approach has to do with the absence, in the French context of anything like a slave narrative. This was a genre that never developed in France. There are complicated reasons for that, but the most important one has to do with the real absence of a dynamic abolitionist movement that could support the collecting and publication of those stories. So anyone who's developing a biographical approach to enslaved people has to grapple with, really, a set of very significant obstacles. So I think those problems draw attention to the interest of researching enslaved people on European soil, and in Paris in particular. Why? Because Paris was an exceptionally dense space from an institutional perspective and a legal perspective. There are courts everywhere. There's also something that makes Paris different from other places, which is the effectiveness of its remarkable 18th century police force. And so any historian benefits from the existence of people watching all the time. So one of the advantages of researching slaves on a domestic soil, and particularly in Paris, is that they will traverse, as they move through the city, different legal spaces. They will encounter nosy neighbors. They will get mixed up in spying networks. They will find helpers or enemies in famous people who publish books who you can learn about easily and who, in fact, show up in the book, sometimes as foes, sometimes as advocates. So I think that the project was helped considerably by the kind of institutional ecology of Paris. The point of departure. These Bastille archives were not the end of my research. And what began then was an attempt to figure out how to think about locating people and learning about the spaces they inhabited, the texture of their lives, the people they knew, often by following very carefully their movement around the city. So probably the most remarkable archival discovery, it's a discovery from either, maybe people who knew about it, but not many, was the discovery of exceptional legal spaces within the city of Paris, where marginal and endangered people could live and work with a safety that was not possible everywhere. And in one of my chapters, the one that's devoted to Lycidor, I describe the life of an African man who lived inside one of those places and worked there as a dueling instructor. So I think thinking spatially was a really important part of this project. And thinking about mobility was another really helpful way of framing the people who became the protagonists of this book.
- [16:21]
D
This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights from backyard jams to sold out arenas There's a song in every toast Please drink responsibly responsibility.org, jackdaniels and old number seven on registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey 40% alcohol by volume Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee it's okay not.
- [16:47]
E
To be perfect with finances. Experian is your big financial friend and here to help. Did you know you can get matched with credit cards on the app? Some cards are labeled no Ding decline, which means if you're not approved, they won't hurt your credit scores. Download the Experian app for free today. Applying for no Ding Decline cards won't hurt your credit scores. If you you aren't initially approved. Initial approval will result in a hard inquiry which may impact your credit scores experience.
- [17:16]
B
That's really helpful to have you talk through. Thank you very much for that because of course it's never just one archive, but it is also about how we approach the information. So I'm glad you talked about the kind of thinking that went into it as well. But I think the thread I most want to pick up from that answer is the policing aspect, because I'm glad you flagged them. There's a lot of of intensive policing going on at this point. So can you tell us more about sort of what kind of policing is prevalent in Paris and this moment? What are the sort of concepts underlying it? Practically? What are they doing? Tell us more about the police.
- [17:51]
C
So in the late 17th century, under the reign of Louis XIV, historians have noted for some time the emergence of notions of policing as a kind of alternative mechanism of government. And the word policing in this sense covered everything from hygiene to the suppression of worker descent. So this robust understanding of police as a new form of government developed in the late 17th century, as Michel Foucault, among others, have noted. So as a consequence of that, in the city of Paris, there arose a remarkable system of police surveillance in the 18th century that had a couple of different components. One was just the fact that the city is divided into many sectors. There are 48 commissioners who run those sectors, and those commissioners engage in activities related to everything from quarrels among neighbors to the unlocking of suitcases to handling pickpockets, suicides, all kinds of things. And so they all have archives. And then on top of that, and this is particularly important for this book, there are 20 police inspectors, inspectors who are kind of more roving figures, and they have robust spying networks and agents that they draw upon in their activities. It's the inspectors in this book who are charged with slave arrests. So the slave arrests that these inspectors attempt are activities for which they are paid. I should make clear but it is really not on their own authority that they are hunting down slaves in the city. They are armed when they work with writs that are signed by the king and which enable extrajudicial arrest of people in the city. These things are used for many other forms of arrest than slaves. But I focused obviously on the ones that pertain to enslaved fugitives.
- [20:12]
B
Yeah, no, of course. That makes sense. Can you tell us more about these writs? Like, what did they actually say in them? Was that the only sort of legal or procedural rule that the police needed to justify going around trying to catch enslaved people?
- [20:26]
C
Okay. So the writs are known colloquially as lettres de cachet. A cachet refers to a kind of seal with an insignia. And in this case, the insignia seal was imagined to be that of the king. These were known officially, however, as audre du roi. Orders of the king. And in fact, audre du roi were used very frequently in the old regime because they enabled anything to happen one time without explaining why. Okay. And so we're used for all kinds of things. This instrument was very frequently used in policing. And they worked in a couple of different ways with respect to the subjects in this book. On the one hand, some slave masters appealed directly to the police and framed the flight of their slaves as a kind of ordinary criminality in a knowing way. And the police understood. They called the flight of their slaves a libertinage. But there was another way in which these lettres de cachet intervened in the lives of people, which is a bit structurally complicated to understand. So all of the people in this book, these enslaved domestic, appear to be inhabiting and mixing with a very dynamic city. But from the vantage point of the slave masters and the government, they are not of Paris, but rather of the colonial empire. And so when they fled for freedom and sought the support of Parisian institutions, masters appealed to the part of the state that dealt with colonial administration. That part of the state was the Department of the Navy in the old regime. So the kind of procedural system that enabled slave arrest might have involved an extralegal document produced by the police themselves to suppress kind of garden variety disorder. Or it might have come from Versailles at the demand of a master, to enable much more robust forms of repression.
- [23:01]
B
Were there any other ways that the French Navy was involved? I admit, when I started reading the book about, obviously it's focused on Paris, I was not expecting the French Navy to turn up at all.
- [23:09]
C
Yes, I was also surprised by the importance of the navy. So the navy is responsible for colonial administration in the old regime. And so it is to the Navy that the slave masters appeal. And it is the Navy who are Secretaries of State of the Navy, okay, who obtain from Versailles a special kind of audre du roi, which is more potent than the kind of thing that police can produce. These orders issued at the demand of the Navy, which is an extremely powerful institution, an old regime France, have the capacity to break, circumvent, ignore any kind of judicial decision in the name of the king. And it's armed with those kinds of writs that police inspectors targeted people who their supposed masters called slaves, but who might in fact, have won their freedom suits and thought they were free and had freedom papers in their pockets. So it didn't matter, however, because according to the master, according to the administrators of the colonies, those people remained property.
- [24:30]
B
Okay, so this speaks to the point you were making earlier about how the French Empire starts to come into Paris in a bunch of ways. Before we get to sort of assuming that this is exactly what always happens, though, even if that's what the system is sort of designed to make sense of, how often did these writs, did these different methods of the police being authorized to go after enslaved people, did they always actually result in capture? Was it possible, if the police were after you with one of these, to evade them?
- [25:01]
C
So these writs were remarkably effective. Even very powerful Parisians, including people like the Archbishop of Paris, failed to protect fugitives from being arrested. And neighborhood spying networks made non white fugitives easy to find. I do devote a chapter of the book to a woman whom we know as Pauline, who did manage to elude a very aggressive slave hunt. She did so by hiding for months inside a massive, luxurious compound belonging to the Admiral of France. She found an advocate in one of the most powerful slave heiresses in the kingdom, and eventually one of her allies bought her from her master. So there's only one other example of a person in the book who eluded capture from one of these slave hunts, and that is someone who equally found support by an insider to slavery who knew people inside the Department of the Navy and who organized a payoff. So those are the two instances, I think it was exceptionally difficult to elude capture once you became a target of one of these.
- [26:15]
B
Got it. Okay. Definitely interesting to understand just how effective they were in achieving their ends. What then happened? Presumably, you were not one of these very few people able to pay off within the Navy, what happened to people who were captured?
- [26:30]
C
So one of two things tended to happen. One of those things would simply be the return of that person. To his master or imagined master, while remaining inside France. Another outcome, however, would have been the transfer of that person to a port prison, typically in the city of Le Havre, to await deportation to the colonies. And so, and with deportation to the colonies came the possibility of resale or punishment according to colonial law. Really, draconian colonial law. So those were the possible outcomes.
- [27:20]
B
Draconian colonial law. So that's saying that the Code Noir applied in Paris.
- [27:26]
C
The Code Noir. First of all, I should say something about what the Code Noir is. The Code Noir, first issued by the king in 1685, was a colonial legal code that included articles relating to both criminal and civil law. And so it was not written to take effect on domestic soil at all. It was written for the colonial world. And the Code authorized extremely brutal punishments, notably for the punishment of flight. So fugitives in the colonies, when caught, were punished with things like branding, the slicing of Achilles tendons, and death. Those practices were never accepted in domestic France. But when you ask the question, did the Code Noir apply in France? We need to recognize that there was another one crucial respect in which it did. How did it apply? The Code Noir, in its capacity as a code of civil law, defined what a slave was. It made it possible, in a sense, to treat humans as goods who could be bought, sold, rented, inherited, and gifted. Right. The Code Noir was a legal instrument that turned people, in a way, into property and legalized that. And so the whole point of the slave hunts that I recount in this book was to make sure that this element of the Code Noir remained valid in France, slave owners, or alleged ones, because there are plenty of people who had relatively really dubious claims to the people they sought to recapture. Slave owners unleashed these slave hunts for the purpose of recovering people whom they recovered, regarded as extremely valuable, lost property. And so this question of whether the Code Noir applied or didn't apply in France, and in Paris in particular, is kind of vital to the whole slave arrest system that I describe. So, as I've noted, there's another way in which we can think about the Code Noir in relation to domestic soil. So, as I noted, the brutal punishments described in that document do not apply on domestic soil. But slave roundups, by enabling people to ship out their slaves to the colonies, would also enable the people thus shipped out to be punished according to another law. And in one of the cases that I consider in the book, someone's master threatens her with deportation to the colony precisely so that she can be punished as a fugitive according to the Code Noir. So the question is a Complex one. And I guess I would say it is partially the case that the Code Noir applied in France, or at least there was a struggle over that point that was important to the second half of the 18th century and kind of underlies my whole book.
- [30:49]
B
Yeah, no, that's definitely worth highlighting very clearly, as you've done, because that is such a key point that obviously impacts individual people, but has these wider legal and political ramifications of kind of what is happening with France's empire. And what does that mean in Paris? So, talking then, about some other big events that are changing things in the empire and in Paris, can we talk a little bit about the Seven Years War and how this changed perceptions around race and slavery in the city?
- [31:19]
C
Sure. Just for context. So in the book, I trace the way several different kinds of stories of colonial change resonated in Paris and mattered to the lives of individual people. The first of those colonial stories has to do with extraordinary success. It's about the shocking rise, the explosive burst of the sugar plantation complex. Right. And with that explosive rise came the arrival of these very wealthy heiresses who began to marry into the nobility. And so that is a part of the narrative of this book. But another way in story of colonial change that was vital to this, to the experience of enslaved people in Paris, is a story of total, explosive, catastrophic failure. And that is the case with the Seven Years War, during which France lost nearly the whole colonial empire to Great Britain. France lost Canada, was driven out of India, and trading posts in Africa, lost several Caribbean islands, some of which, like Martinique in Guadalupe, she would recover at the peace. So all of those disasters, alongside the mere fact of the war itself, meant that colonial administrators, soldiers, planters, poured into France from the empire. And many of those people came accompanied with enslaved domestics. People from the colonies then converged on Paris, which was the seat of the French Company of the Indies. And Paris was also the place you went to network for new jobs and preferment, new patrons. So what does this mean for people of color? On the one hand, there was a remarkably diverse cosmopolitan population that took place, took shape in the capital as a consequence of the Seven Years War. But on the other hand, slave owners were also there in new numbers, bringing the habits of mind they had developed abroad into the city. It seems clear that racism became a lot worse in the aftermath of the Seven Years War. And many of the colonial officials, planters and the like who converged on the city had also lost a lot of money because of the war and pictured their domestics as their most valuable. Saleable asset.
- [33:53]
B
Okay, so what does that mean then? About what ideas of race are kind of now part of economic and social conversation?
- [34:02]
C
Yeah, so I think the story of race in the book is not about how the Seven Years War invented racism. I just want to make that really clear because I can show from at least 1750 that the police are discussing people of color as property. Right. It just seems clear that we can't really speak of racism arriving in the 1760s. But it does seem true that. And as I try to show in one of the later chapters of the book, concepts of right became racialized in the course of the 18th century. So that a white person who's, you know, grabbed by the police and mishandled is going to outrage people while a black person who undergoes the same treatment, you know, is sort of like, oh, okay, well, that's normal, because, you know, that's a. That's a person who's a slave. Right. So it does seem clear that there's a racialization of understandings of right. And I also think that the story of race in France in general has focused on really elite texts. You know, we read about philosophers and stuff like that, theories of race that have emerged, that emerged in the later period of the Enlightenment, and that's been a very common approach to the race question. One of my goals in this book was to not take that approach, to look for practice at the everyday street level that would allow one to glimpse the way race worked. And so I do that in the book by looking at the discourse around the arrest of black people. And I do that in the book because one of the people who I describe complains to the police because he is the object of extraordinary racial taunting that originates with the working class. So I hope the book contributes a more nuanced approach to the race question in 18th century Paris, and also takes a perspective that perhaps others haven't adopted on the question.
- [36:45]
B
We always like adding nuance. Thank you for making sure that that comes through very clearly in our discussion and of course in the book too. And in fact, it's on that topic of nuance that I'd like to continue discussing these questions. Because, of course, one overgeneralization we could perhaps fall into without nuance is assuming that all of this could be solved if one had papers of freedom.
- [37:07]
C
Right.
- [37:08]
B
That's the sort of idea that the police can go after someone because they've got a writ that allows them to. So we've got papers there, and that this whole thing is sort of legalised with which law Gets applied where? So surely having a piece of paper saying, no, you're not an enslaved person. You're free either from your former enslaver or from a court, that would be sort of solves the problem. The police, therefore, couldn't have bits of paper to come after you.
- [37:32]
C
You.
- [37:32]
B
Is that true?
- [37:35]
C
Well, as we learn from the modern period, it really hinges on what kinds of papers you're holding and not the fact of the papers in the first place. Right. The people known as sons papier in France have loads of papers. Those are immigrants who are struggling to obtain status in the country. They always have a lot of papers, just the wrong paper. And that's pretty much the case in 18th century Paris. There were different kinds of freedom papers that you might have, and your capacity to remain free hinged on which kind you happen to be carrying. Some people obtained manumission papers before a Paris notary. And those documents were very similar to the kind of. They were in all respects identical, except for having the authority of the colonial governor. They are the kind of document that would be recognized as valid in French colonial societies and would thus enable those people perhaps to return to their families or their loved ones overseas and retain the status of a free person in the colonies. So manumission papers before Parisian notaries gave people mobility and protection. There were other kinds of freedom papers that people held. The Paris Court of Admiralty issued freedom papers usually, but not always as a consequence of freedom suits, so people could obtain papers from that court. And yet the court's decisions were not recognized as valid by slave masters, nor were they recognized to be valid by the Department of the Navy. So whenever a slave master complained about someone obtaining freedom papers of this sort or seeking to obtain them, the Navy could issue a lettre de cachet ordering that person's arrest. So I guess the story about papers here is that if they were the kind of papers that. That indicated that freedom had been granted with the assent of the master, the person was safe. If they were the kind of freedom papers that indicated that the person had been freed by a court in Paris, they were not at all safe.
- [40:11]
B
So the specifics of the paper really do matter. And again, it's that nuance happening there. So thank you for making sure we don't fall into the overgeneralization trap. If we're thinking, though, about other big historical events and what they have to do with this history you're telling us about. Obviously I asked you about the Seven Years War, but really, if we're talking about French history, we probably should mention the French Revolution at some point. So I wonder if you can tell us a bit about how you are looking at the French Revolution in the book, and especially perhaps with the story of Julianne.
- [40:43]
C
Sure. So in the fourth chapter of the book, I work through the story of Julien Bodel, who was a young man from Martinique who sued for freedom in 1787, that is to say, during a period that historians regard as the pre Revolution. At the time of his freedom suit, he was enslaved to his own aunt. He was the child of a planter and an enslaved woman. So France's highest court, the Parlement de Paris, would eventually consider his case, and he would lose. Okay, so Julien's story is a particularly haunting one with respect to what it tells us about familial disavowal. But bigger, I think, was the story it tells us about race. On the eve of the French Revolution, during the freedom trial, the body and hair of Julien became part of his own lawyer's case for freedom. And so whiteness of skin and hair texture were part of the argument for recognizing him as a person with rights and. And a right to freedom. So in that chapter, I look at race, legislation and Julien's story and make a general argument that ideas of rights became racialized on the eve of the French Revolution. Now, I don't want to make the claim that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was written for white people. That is not a claim that I make in this book. That document certainly did not, however, apply to slaves in the colonies. And it certainly did not have anything to do with the rights of men of color who lived in the colonial empire. There were also plenty of people who conceptualized the revolutionary project as a narrow one that was an exclusively metropolitan story. So as I followed the story of Julien into the Revolution, I discovered that central figures in his trial would later assume prominent roles in French politics or in French administration after 1789. One of those people who belonged to the Committee of Public Safety would later refuse to join the Society of Friends of the Blacks. And another of those people who was a slave trader before the Revolution, goes on to become a powerful industrialist and technocrat specializing in arms manufacture, who is employed by the Committee of Public Safety. So looking at these individual paths through the revolutionary years really was a way of exploding myths of the period and making it possible to see the 1790s with a new nuance.
- [43:46]
B
Again, that word that we love, nuance, showing up there too.
- [43:49]
C
Maybe it should be retired for the rest of this conversation. Perhaps no longer use the word nuance.
- [43:55]
B
Yeah, we can just take it as red from now on. That's generally what the goal is here. I do have one other person in the book that I'd love to ask you a bit about. And in fact, calling her a person is kind of part of the question.
- [44:09]
C
Ulrika.
- [44:10]
B
I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce her name, but this subject you have in one chapter of the book is a person, maybe is a story, is a sort of popular mass media personality. I mean, can you tell us about the subject of this chapter and sort of who is she and why? That's a tricky question.
- [44:29]
C
So this is a chapter that was very important to me, and there are certain ways in which I feel like I failed. In the chapter, Eureka was very much a real person. She was a child of three who came to Paris in 1786 after being purchased by the colonial governor of Senegal, along with equally young children whom he brought to Paris as gifts for loved ones and patrons. So this is a real person who had a complicated life, who had real parents, and who. Whose life is exceptionally difficult to reconstruct once she enters Paris because she was never hunted by the police. She lives in the home of the Prince de Beauvo, to whom the governor gives her as a present. And luckily, the Prince de Beauvo was an anti slavery figure. But in any case, Arica lives in this splendor as a kind of outsider. She's not a family member, she's not exactly a domestic. She lives in this unusual way, and she dies in 1799. Now, I really still feel like this is a work in progress in the sense that I still want to think about how to develop her story on the Senegal end. And I'm still thinking that maybe someday I'll figure out how to capture her life during the period between 1786 and 1799 with more vividness than I manage in the chapter. But in any case, it was very important to me that this is a real person and that I engaged with the question in this chapter of gifting of slaves at the very end of the old regime in Paris among the high nobility. Okay, so she was a person who had to endure that and lived with all of the complexity that that entailed afterward and died early. I'm still not sure why. I think I've learned how to find out. Many years later, she became the protagonist of a short story or historical fiction by a prominent society hostess during the Bourbon Restoration. So she is a protagonist in this story. The society hostess liked not only to write about her, but also to perform the story she wrote in the first person, thus speaking as though she were Arika. So the chapter adopts a kind of historical approach to interpreting that novel and aspires to understand the social and psychological and political conditions that shaped its writing. And then I explore its reception in modern France. It's vital to my approach in that story that the person in question is not just a society hostess in Paris, but the proprietor of a couple of slave plantations. And the proceeds from those slave plantations will enable her to purchase the Chateau d', Su, which your listeners may better know as the Sleeping Beauty's castle. So the story of Arica is a story of a real girl and the story of the invention of a very different figure by a society hostess and slave owner for complex reasons. And one of the ways I manage my way through the story is by playing the real life of the girl off the modifications to her life that were made in the. In the story and thinking about the meaning of those modifications with respect to the complex position of this slave owning society hostess. Also, just to add one last thing, Ulrike in the chapter is also a problem of reception. And so I try in the chapter also to think about the way people understood the novel, read the novel, and then responded to a rash of theater productions themed around Eureka, right around the time of the story's publication. So I guess I thought about in that chapter the way in which black people were represented on the 19th century stage, as well as the way black people were represented in fiction. And then of course, at the beginning of the chapter, I also deal with what it meant to be a Rika in real life.
- [49:44]
B
Yeah, lots going on in that chapter. I'm not surprised it's one that you're still thinking about. And you mentioned that kind of. You think you figured out how to continue with that work. So is that where you're going next? Now that this book is done, is that the next project?
- [49:56]
C
So I think that will always be my other project in the sense that I feel really dogged by what I couldn't learn in her story. But that is not what I'm working on now in the sense that that's not the project that I'm imagining as what I'll produce as my next book. But I do think that eventually I'm going to return to her story. Right now I'm trying to develop a revisionist approach to the story of abolition in France. And to accomplish this, I'm examining the family stories of mixed race families in France in the colonial empire during the late 18th and 19th century. And so I'm experimenting with a modified version of the biographical approach that I adopt in Slaves in Paris because the new project focuses on family clusters rather than single individuals. But this is a complicated research project. I'm thinking that that family history may provide a useful way of reperiodizing and rethinking the way we represent the age of abolition.
- [51:08]
B
Hmm. Well, that certainly sounds very interesting as a next project. Good luck with it.
- [51:12]
C
Oh, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure talking to you, Miranda.
- [51:17]
B
It likewise has been a pleasure hearing about the book. And for listeners who want more, of course they can go read it. Titled Slaves in Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories, published by Harvard University Press Press in 2025. Miranda, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [51:31]
C
It was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. And Doug Limu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual, but now we want you to feel it. Cue the emu music. Limu. Save yourself money today. Increase your wealth. Customize and save. We say that may have been too much feeling. Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com Savings very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.