Slaves in Paris

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 <i>They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence</i> 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 <i>Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All</i> 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 <i>Paris: The Biography of a City</i> 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 <i>Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution</i>