ABSTRACT
This chapter canvasses Parisian admiralty archives from the 1760s for “freedom stories”—narratives in which people of color born in Africa, Madagascar, India, and in New World staked a claim to liberty. Where past historians have read these sources in light of the “free-soil” maxim, a doctrine of French jurists, this chapter reads these documents for what they can tell us about the experience of slaves and former slaves during a time of global war and French imperial collapse. While recognizing the formulaic and mediated quality of French admiralty sources, this chapter, nonetheless, excavates several hitherto unnoticed, controversial legal claims that appear to originate with slaves themselves. It reads French freedom stories against Anglo-American slave narratives to identify common life patterns—and narrative structures—among enslaved people in the Atlantic World.
