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Miranda Spieler, in conversation with Madeleine Dobie and Christy Pichichero
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. In Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories, she examines the lives of those whose dashed hopes and creative persistence capture the spirit of the era, and she 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.
Miranda Spieler is a historian of France and the French overseas empire whose areas of expertise include European legal history, slavery and emancipation, the history of French Guiana and the Caribbean, policing and carceral systems, and the history of Paris. Spieler's first book, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard, 2012), was awarded the George Mosse Prize and the J. Russell Major Prize by the American Historical Association. She is Professor of History and Politics at the American University of Paris.
Madeleine Dobie is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her books include Relire Mayotte Capécia: une femme des Antilles dans l'espace colonial français (with Myriam Cottias); and Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in 18th-Century French Culture. She is also a co-editor of A Comparative Literary History of Slavery and the editor of Vol. 1: Slavery, Literature & the Emotions, which was published in January 2025 by John Benjamins under the auspices of the ICLA’s Comparative Literary Histories in European Languages book series.
Christy Pichichero is an Associate Professor of French, History, and African and African American Studies at George Mason University. She is the author of The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Cornell, 2017; Kenshur Prize finalist) and her articles on have appeared in PMLA, French Historical Studies, Modern Language Notes, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and other journals. She is the Vice President of the International Commission on the History of the French Revolution and serves on the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review. Dr. Pichichero’s scholarly research and leadership expertise have been featured by the National Science Foundation, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Google, Phi Beta Kappa, the IGEN Bridge Network, and major news outlets such as the BBC, NPR, NBC News, Forbes, C-SPAN, and The Hill.
This event is co-sponsored by the Maison Française and the Department of History.
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