Slave Hunts as “Normal Policing”
In May 1752 the French minister of the navy, Antoine de Rouillé, wrote to the governor of Saint-Domingue about the new problem of slaves in France. Slaves were “multiplying every day, more and more, in almost all the towns of the kingdom.” The minister’s disquiet followed a controversy that centered on an African man, age 22, whom I shall call Jean, though he also appears under other names (Charles-Auguste and Adonis) in the police archives. He was enslaved to Guy Coustard, a sugar planter in Saint-Domingue. Jean had the Coustard family’s monogram (CO) branded on his left breast.
Documents about Jean’s brief sojourn in France come from two slender files at the Bastille Archives, which contain letters to the lieutenant-general of police from the minister of the navy and from Jean’s would-be benefactor, the Dowager Princess of Nassau-Siegen, born Charlotte de Mailly de Nesle, who tried and failed to protect Jean from Coustard. Her staff and Coustard lodged in the same hotel, near the Luxembourg Palace. Through her servants, she learned of Jean’s physical abuse and despair.
From Mailly de Nesle we learn that Jean arrived in Paris during the spring of 1751 and fled from the city twice. On both occasions he tried to escape by joining the army. In March 1752 the French constabulary arrested him in Sedan, a frontier garrison town, and escorted him back to Paris in chains. He wound up in the dungeon of For l’Évêque, a former ecclesiastical prison. Many of the other inmates at that time were soldiers. Unlike Jean, who had hoped to become free by joining the army, those men were draftees, who had sought freedom from the army through desertion. On April 8, someone other than Coustard claimed Jean from prison. Port records in La Rochelle note that a slave named Jean sailed for Saint-Domingue in July.
The capture and imprisonment of Jean resulted from an order of the king, popularly known as a lettre de cachet. Masters paid a fee to police for these roundups and paid for the maintenance of their slaves in prison. In March 1752, Jean-Jacques Coustard, an elderly Parisian judge, lobbied the Crown to arrest Jean by royal writ. The judge did not own slaves himself and had probably never set foot in the colonies. He came from a clan of Angevine drapers who bought their way into the Paris legal establishment in the 17th century. The Paris Coustards abandoned trade for the law, to become a judging dynasty, just as a more intrepid, piratical sprig of the family settled in Saint-Domingue. The judge and Guy Coustard, Jean’s master, were cousins, not brothers. The capture of Jean resulted from the maneuvering of Crown officials to oblige both a sugar magnate and a member of the city’s judicial elite.
Jean’s failed bid for liberty offers a glimpse of how elusive freedom became for many slaves in Paris after the mid-18th century. His removal from the army and deportation back to Saint-Domingue resulted from new policing practices that crystallized around the time of his brief stay in France. Despite fleeing Paris, Jean became one of the first victims of an emerging system, based in France’s capital, by which slave owners, or their proxies, caused freedom-seeking domestics to disappear.
The rising importance of the slave trade, and of colonial slave plantations, to Parisian social and economic life led the city’s elites to adopt a new attitude toward people of African and South Asian descent, whom they increasingly viewed as potentially saleable belongings. Resplendent sojourners from Saint-Domingue played a role in diffusing new racial concepts in Paris, but their influence should not be overstated. Ideas of race did not waft into the capital as a foreign essence. By 1750, slave plantations and the slave trade out of East and West Africa had become economically vital to Parisian institutions, including the Company of the Indies, which enjoyed direct support from the Crown and strong ties to Parisian high finance. There was nothing distantly managerial about the activities of Paris-based officials in the Africa trade. Consider this document from 1750, written one year before Jean arrived in Paris. Signed by all directors of the Company of the Indies, it sets forth a new scale of value for slave sales in Senegal.
RÉGULATION DES NOIRS, NÉGRESSES, NÉGRILLONS ET NÉGRITTES
21. Every negro between 14 and 40 will be reputed as one Indian piece so long as he has none of the defects indicated below.
22. One négrillon (boy) of 14 equals one Indian piece.
23. Four négrillons (boys) or négrittes (girls) from the age of 8 to 13 equal three Indian pieces.
24. Six négrillons (boys) or négrittes (girls) from the age of 4 to the age of 8 equal three Indian pieces.
25. Four négrillons (boys) or négrittes (girls) who are 4 years of age or younger equal one Indian piece so long as they are not nursing.
26. One negress who is between 14 and 35 years of age equals one Indian piece.
27. One negress who is age 13 and 14 equals one Indian piece.
28. Men between 40 and 50 years of age, and women between 35 and 40 years of age, equal one-half Indian piece and cannot compose more than 3 percent of the cargo.
29. All nursing children will follow their mothers and not be counted.
30. All negroes, negresses, négrillons (boys), and négrittes (girls) will be considered valid Indian pieces so long as they are not epileptic, maimed, blind, or suffering from formal disease.
31. Some missing teeth, and negroes with enlarged testicles who do not have hernias, cannot be refused by captains and surgeons, or excepted from the above regulation.
32. Negroes with one bad eye who are not over 30 years, others of the same age who are missing one or two fingers, however robust their bodies, will only be counted as one-half an Indian piece.
33. A negro who is lacking two toes will be estimated as two-thirds of a piece; a negress in the same case will be evaluated similarly; and négrillons (boys) and négrittes (girls) by the same proportion.
To pin down the novelty of this document requires that we identify what is not new. At direct points of sale among slave buyers in Africa or the Americas, this meticulously commodified view of the human body was familiar. It was normal for company agents to haggle over people with missing toes and enlarged testicles. There is also nothing new about the term pièce d’Inde (Indian piece), from the Portuguese peça das Indias, which originally referred to the value of a piece of cloth exchanged for slaves in Africa by 15th-century traders. French merchants began to employ this term in the early 18th century.
What seems new is this bald enactment by Paris-based officials of a common system of meaning that binds together the capital and trading posts in Senegal in which Africans about 30 years old are whole units, Africans about 40 years old are half-units, and nursing babies, the blind, and ailing people literally have no value. This is not merely a blunt statement of adhesion to the language of the slave captain by the city’s most eminent merchants; it is the other way around. It is Paris scripting the dialogue at the point of sale.
Police sources about slaves in Paris might seem worlds away from plantation inventories, or Indies Company contracts, yet they convey the same matter-of-fact view of black people as property. Stakeouts and arrests could not have occurred otherwise. Urban slave hunts, far from chafing against local values, reaffirmed them. The property that officials in Paris were willing to defend changed in step with the kind of property that Parisians believed in. By the mid-century, policemen accepted that property could take the form of people.
Slave hunts brought the ideology of the slave owner into the streets of Paris, raising the question of what neighbors thought. At least for bystanders, the arrest of slaves looked just like regular police raids. The question is not how neighbors reacted to the spectacle of capture so much as how they understood the status of their neighbors’ domestics, whether they reported fugitives to the police, and whether they hid people. It is impossible to venture a single answer to this question. Police files offer many clues to friendship, love, and complicity between Parisians and enslaved people. There were, nonetheless, some residents of the city who described their neighbors’ domestics in the crudest possible terms. In 1751, la Dame Mallecot, the wife of an administrator in Cayenne, sought help from the police with the removal of Esther, an African (Igbo) domestic. Mallecot plotted the woman’s arrest, sent Esther to the home of an elderly neighbor, and left town. The neighbor’s son complained to the lieutenant-general of police. “I beg you sir to order that Mallecot come for her negress, whom I will return. It is her property, she will do with it what she wants.” Esther was “a deposit” (un dépôt) for his neighbor to reclaim.
There did not need to be a slave master in the picture. Police agents presumed black and brown people to be stolen goods even when no one reported them missing. The arrest of a man called Mustapha in 1755 offers a revealing instance of this. Mustapha, newly arrived from Marseille, was doubly jinxed. The police had doubts about the fancy napkins Mustapha was hawking on a bridge, and they were just as suspicious about the provenance of Mustapha himself. He deepened their concern by refusing to answer questions (although he was believed to know French) and spent four weeks in For l’Évêque. “We did not find anything in his pockets indicating to whom he belonged.”
During the reign of Louis XIV, royal officials began to theorize policing as a vast, tentacular cleansing project by an all-knowing state. As Michel Foucault observes, the rise of new policing ideas would change the structure of government as people began to reimagine its purpose. Policing became a boom topic for publishers and Crown officials, especially after the death of Louis XIV in 1715. The end of Louis’s long reign heightened the reforming zeal of police enthusiasts, to inspire dictionaries, treatises, proclamations, and experiments in repression and surveillance. In Paris, the word police encompassed just about everything. It meant ridding the city of moral filth, actual filth, crime and delinquency, crooked houses, illegal workers, badly lighted streets, family embarrassments, and riotous effervescence among the laboring poor. In the service of this billowing project, the lieutenant-general of police in Paris could issue his own royal writs for the arrest of undesirables, who entered dungeons without passing through the courts.
The practical ability of municipal authorities in Paris to police evolved over time. The invention of inspectors in 1708, with an amplified role after 1740, altered the relationship between police and city dwellers. Through their webs of spies and informants, twenty police inspectors maintained an unrelenting, round-the-clock surveillance of lodging houses and rented rooms frequented by étrangers (strangers). The French word étranger, imbued with a sense of danger and suspicion, referred to outsiders in general, including people from elsewhere in France.
Changes to the policing of Paris responded to dearth, social unrest, and an increase in human mobility. Migration expanded both the city, as a physical space, and its population. The new brutal efficacy of police inspectors around the mid-century also came on the heels of war — the War of the Austrian Succession — and should be read in light of that conflict. As Arlette Farge notes, resistance to troop levies, together with mass desertion, spurred social upheaval in Paris. This may help to account for the menacing force of police in Paris after the war in confrontations with strangers and crowds.
Once agents of the Paris police put themselves in the service of slave owners, it became perilous for fugitives to hide in the city. Jean needed to escape from Paris and not into it. Enslaved domestics who accompanied masters to Paris in the 1740s tended to disappear after a couple of weeks.
Admiralty records provide numerous examples of flight by teenage Africans between 1742 and 1747. The police did not catch these people and there is no evidence they tried to. (They may have been focusing on deserters.) On the rare, documented occasions before 1750 when masters sought help from the police to recover enslaved domestics, nothing happened. In 1742 Anne-Marie-Josephe de Sorel, from Léogane, reported the flight of her slave Pierrot to the Admiralty. To find the boy, she summoned “Sir Genesty, exempt, and she charged him with conducting searches for the said negro, which he assures her of having done for several days and nights” to no effect. In August 1749 a Parisian solicitor reported the flight of his slave Jeanne, who remained at large despite “investigations and house searches that her master caused to be done” — which suggests another failed police hunt.
Masters in the 1750s who appealed to the police framed their demands by emphasizing the moral threat posed by escapees. At the time, the police and most of French society viewed the whole serving class as degenerate scoundrels. Through their depiction of runaways as urban contaminants, masters recast slave hunts as normal policing. In 1751 the Portuguese bishop of Noronha, governor of Sao Tomé, reported the flight of Figueret, “about 4 foot 3, black, dressed in black, in a curly wig gathered at the back, age 16 or 17, from Goa in the Indies.” Figueret was known to be spending his days at the Saint-Germain fair. Noronha explained that the boy “who belonged to him, has been extremely deranged for five or six months, since arrivingin Paris, and it being important to oversee his conduct, to prevent him from committing some disorder, he would be very grateful for him to be put in the prison of For l’Évêque until he departs Paris for the Orient.” When informing the police about the flight of his slave, Louis Aubin, the Chevalier de Nolivos noted “how much pleasure (his arrest) would give me, because, independent of the real loss caused by this domestic, he swindled me.” Masters in the 1750s emphasized the resemblance between runaways and other delinquents. They did so to enable the extrajudicial arrest of people they regarded as valuable assets.
Excerpted from Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories by Miranda Spieler, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2025 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
