Moreover, Hemings, and later his sister, encountered Paris at a singular moment in its history. Much has been written about France on the eve of revolution—the extremes of wealth and poverty, the confused and deteriorating economic situation, its ultimately doomed political culture. During this same time, the society was heavily influenced by the intellectual and cultural ferment of the Enlightenment, a force that was in play in other parts of the world, but found its apotheosis in France. The country was still very hierarchical, and the labor force “corporate”3 in organization, but the hierarchies were fraying at the edges as progressive thinking about the rights of man, the benefits of science, progress, and reason, and the need for challenging orthodoxy filtered down to the masses. In ways impossible in previous generations, ordinary people found opportunities in Paris that heightened their expectations about what was possible in life.
The vast majority of the city’s residents had come from outlying towns and provinces in search of new lives and new futures, as people have done throughout the ages. Paris in the 1780s, however, offered its pilgrims even more chances to forge new identities and to reject the notion that the circumstances of one’s birth determined what one deserved in life. There was “a democratization and modification of elite culture” as ordinary people began to feel comfortable participating in activities that had long been the province of the upper classes. Poor people partook of high culture. Observers were “astonished, amused, or irritated at the number and variety of people who descended upon the Louvre, after the bienniel art salons were instituted there in 1737. Not only the educated and discerning came, but a ‘swarm of would-be connoisseurs,’ ‘people of every sort,’ ‘countless young clerks, merchants, and shop assistants.’” It was a place where servant girls and workingmen hired carriages, where public events and theater commingled the masses with the elite, and where even a seamstress hosted a literary salon that met on Sundays, the one day that she and her working-class guests had off and could get together.4 At all levels of French society there were people who were, as one historian put it, “living the Enlightenment.”5 While Jefferson consorted with the elites who were doing that, Hemings worked daily alongside their working-class counterparts who were doing the same thing in their own ways.
Hemings had free movement, as he did in Virginia, and was able to take part in Paris’ many public spectacles. Even before he began to receive a regular wage, Jefferson gave him money that allowed him to go about the city with some level of assurance. With Jefferson paying for necessities—clothes, a watch, shoes, and food—Hemings could use his money for his own purposes, but entertainment did not always require money.6 A host of “street performers, automatons, marionettes and shadow puppets, animal displays, scientific exhibits, acrobats, and—observed one English visitor, Arthur Young—‘filles’ without end,” were on display on Parisian streets.7 On a “fine day” Hemings and countless other residents of Paris could enjoy “the spectacle of the crowds themselves, the parade of jostling, laughing, humanity” that can be a form of entertainment itself. A number of theaters opened up in the 1780s, charging such low prices for admission that all but the completely destitute could attend.8 For people like Hemings, those at or near the bottom of the social scale, there was much more to do, many more ways for him to assert himself than existed back in Virginia.
As liberating as Paris could be to Hemings’s inner life, his enslavement was an important external reality, not the stuff of metaphor or psychology. This was a matter of American law and culture that he had lived since birth. But he was no longer in America. The country that Hemings was now in adhered to what has been called the “Freedom Principle,” which held that every slave who stepped onto French soil was free. There were, the saying went, “no slaves in France.”9 Although this idea was deeply embedded in the country’s collective psyche, the matter was more complicated than the aphorism suggested.
Slavery was not unknown to the French. It was, however, largely confined to the French colonies in the New World, Senegal, and on the Indian Ocean. Many features of American slavery that were familiar to Hemings—gangs of slaves in the fields, public auction blocks—did not exist in Paris. Slavery “came” to France proper whenever French colonial masters returned to the country and brought slaves as personal servants. Throughout the eighteenth century periodic crises arose as more masters arrived in France with their slaves, and some of those slaves, invoking the Freedom Principle, did not want to return home with their masters.10 What mechanism, if any, could make them go back if presence on French soil made the enslaved free?
French kings and the parlements (the supreme courts in all the provinces of France, not to be confused with legislative bodies) and the admiralty courts, which had primary jurisdiction over transactions involving the seas, were often at odds about the correct answer to that question. The kings—Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI—periodically issued edicts and declarations about the status of slaves brought into the country. These rulings most often gave a safe harbor to visiting colonial masters, who were allowed to keep their slaves so long as they followed certain specified procedures. In the earlier regulations, masters were to register incoming slaves and assert that they had a plan to have them taught a trade or undergo religious instruction—not particularly onerous burdens. After the colonial masters began bringing in their slaves and letting them stay long past the time they would be receiving any kind of training, regulations were promulgated that put a three-year limit on slave apprenticeships, after which time all slaves were to be returned to the colonies.11
These deviations from the Freedom Principle, which in regulating slavery implicitly recognized its existence, were prompted, in part, by concerns that an influx of people of African origin into the country would lead to the “tainting” of French blood. When the actual numbers are considered, the charge—carried forward most energetically by Guillaume Poncet de la Grave, attorney general to the Admiralty Court—that a “deluge” of black people was inundating France was mere hyperbole. Perhaps for Poncet de la Grave even a handful of black persons might have constituted a deluge, but, then, the entirety of his career suggests that he was something of a crank.12 For example, there never were as many blacks in France during the eighteenth century as there were in England. In the latter half of the century, France had a population of over 20 million people. Historians put the number of blacks in the country at any one time between 4,000 and 5,000, with the largest concentration of them—hovering around 1,000—in Paris. At the same time England had a population of around 9 million people. Estimates of the number of blacks living there range from a minimum of 10,000 to as high as 30,000.13
Poncet de la Grave and other officials were determined to make sure that the black population in France did not grow, and their agitation led to the appointment of a commission (with Poncet de la Grave as an adviser), charged with solving what they perceived to be a great problem.14 At least two great interests were at play: Poncet de le Grave’s and others’ racist hysteria over the prospect of mixed blood and the concerns of powerful French colonials upset by the effect that the liberalizing influence of France and the Freedom Principle had upon black people who came to the country. The drafters of the declaration that would be called the Police des Noirs took special note of “l’espirit d’indépendance et d’indocilité” that blacks in France displayed, and they attributed it to their residence in the country.15 This phrase, written into the law’s preamble, addressed what was thought to be a serious problem: life in France changed black slaves, not only while they lived there; it made them a threat upon their return home, where they would be more likely to press for changes in the social structure of colonial societies. Whether they went home to become agitators or not, just hearing that there were slaves who had been emancipated in France would have influenced enslaved people back in the colonies.
While Ponce de la Grave fixated on racial intermixture, French colonists considered interracial mixing a fact of human life and not a g
alvanizing problem—they had found ways to deal with that. Indeed, by the time the Hemingses were in Paris, many free, property-owning, and tax-paying French colonists were products of liaisons between white males and black females. Dangerous political ideas that threatened their way of life in the colonies were another matter. As the commission members contemplated its parade of horribles, they even expressed the fear that blacks in their own colonies would be further radicalized by the words and actions of the thirteen colonies on the nearby North American continent, which threw off their colonial masters in 1776.16
There was, however, a conflict. Residing in France altered a slave’s sense of self and threatened the foundations of slavery in the colonies, but colonial property owners generally had the right to use their property as they saw fit—including to bring their black servants to France if they wanted to. As in Virginia, successfully maintaining a slave society often required interfering with slave owners’ absolute property rights, and for the commission members and their white colonial supporters, slaveholders’ personal whims meant little when measured against the overall well-being of France’s enormously profitable slave colonies. The solution was clear: to close the loopholes in earlier declarations that had allowed the supposed excess of blacks to come and then remain in the country, the Police des Noirs, declared in 1777, forbade the entry of blacks, mulattoes, or any “people of color” into France altogether—not just slaves, any black people. Those who were there before the date when the law took effect were supposed to register themselves, or be registered by their masters if they were slaves, with local authorities. They were allowed to stay. Those who arrived after that date were to be taken into custody, registered, and held in a dépôt des noirs set up in France’s port cities for that purpose. They were then to be put on the first ship back to the French colonies.17
Although the law was designed with French colonials in mind, its first article said that its provisions applied “meme à tous étrangers.” Jefferson was not supposed to bring Hemings into France. His status as a foreign diplomat gave him no immunity from this, as one of the principal shapers of the declaration made clear. The law was supposed to be the definitive word on the subject, its last article stating emphatically that its provisions replaced all previous declarations and superseded any law that contradicted its provisions.18 If things had proceeded according to the Police des Noirs, Hemings would have been detained at La Havre, placed in the dépôt there, and then sent back to Virginia. Jefferson, like all other masters, was also supposed to register Hemings’s name with local authorities so that they could keep track of which blacks were in the country, where they were, and, if they came into the country after 1777, when they had been deported. Noncompliance with the law brought a fine of 3,000 livres or more. One section provided that masters holding slaves at the time of the law’s declaration would lose their right to keep their slaves in bondage if they did not register them within one month after the law took effect, a serious penalty designed to encourage the simple act of registration.19
Jefferson never registered James Hemings. Nor did he register Sally Hemings when she arrived in France a little over two years after her brother.20 That neither sibling was arrested and held in custody is not surprising. The system of policing blacks had broken down considerably by the time the two arrived. The captains of ships who were supposed to keep track of people of color often did not bother to do that. Many masters did not register their slaves and generally suffered no penalty for it. Blacks sometimes defied the registration requirements and were not sent out of the country. Compliance with the law was especially lax in Paris.21
During every incarnation of the laws designed to control the black population in the country, the Parisian courts, as opposed to their counterparts in other jurisdictions, zealously upheld the Freedom Principle. By tradition, the parlements in France had the duty to review each law the king proposed to see whether it accorded with legal tradition. One of the ways they could signal their displeasure with a law was to refuse to register it, which is exactly what the Parlement of Paris, the oldest parlement and the one with the largest jurisdiction in the country, did with respect to most of the edicts and declarations that weakened the Freedom Principle. The king could override the effect of a parlement’s nonregistration by holding a lit de justice, at which the king could force a registration, though the powerful Parlement of Paris sometimes refused to recognize forced registrations.22 No French kings took this route in defense of their edicts designed to help French colonial slave masters. There was a question whether the Parlement of Paris would register the king’s declaration of 1777, given its position on slavery. In a way that anticipated the early American states’ struggles with how to portray slavery in its Constitution, the commission that drafted the Police des Noirs found a way to get around the Parlement of Paris’ likely refusal to register the new rules: it took out the word esclave. After “slaves” were turned into “servants,” the parlement agreed to register the declaration.23 Although registering it, the parlement had no intention of seriously implementing it. The Parisian Admiralty Court, under the Parlement of Paris’ jurisdiction, simply ignored its provisions, in keeping with what had been both bodies’ long-standing commitment to the Freedom Principle. Slaves in the city who wanted their freedom could make the request to their master, and the master would grant it if so inclined. If the master refused, the slave could go to the Admiralty Court and file a petition for freedom, and many did, sometimes asking for back wages. Over the entire course of the eighteenth century, the Parisian Admiralty Court granted every such petition filed, almost two hundred, and it continued to do so even after the Police des Noirs had been declared and registered.24
The Admiralty Court’s position was well known among slave owners and slaves, and the tribunal’s view of the law affected the balance of power between them, giving slaves greater leverage in their dealings with their masters. During the decade before the French Revolution, the Admiralty Court, for the first time, received more filings from slave owners to voluntarily manumit their slaves than petitions from enslaved people to obtain their freedom.25 These records do not show, of course, how many masters simply freed their slaves without following the formalities. The historian Sue Peabody has suggested that slave owners often thought it better to come to their own private arrangements with their slaves, freeing them and turning them into their paid servants if they were willing.26
The history of the Police des Noirs presents a clear example of just how dangerous it is to look at laws on the books of a society and assume they precisely reflect its day-to-day life. Some laws gain widespread acceptance and become part of the bedrock basis of a community’s view of itself. Others fall by the wayside. Laws can be passed and declared, but it is up to the people at every level below the lawgivers—bureaucrats, judges, police, and the ordinary members of the community—to decide when and how they will abide by them unless whatever government in power is willing to use force to make them fall into line. Apparently the French government did not think the Police des Noirs worth that effort. It was willing to have the law declared, as a statement of principle, but not to expend too much effort to enforce it. There were many other, more important things to worry about during the 1780s than chasing down the few blacks in their midst. With few aggrieved parties to bring claims against violators of the rules, the draconian law remained on the books until the Revolution, invoked on a number of occasions, but widely flouted in James Hemings’s Paris, the most populous and powerful jurisdiction in the country.
We do not know when or how Hemings learned about the Freedom Principle, but there were many ways for him to have found out, and by the end of his five-year stay in the country he knew that he could become a free man. The most likely sources were members of the black community in Paris who made and kept contact with one another. They were well situated to do this. Although prosperous gens de couleur from the colonies visited and lived in France, many of the one thousand or so blacks in Pa
ris were the servants (the majority of them free) of whites and were generally concentrated in the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.27 The progress of freedom suits during the eighteenth century shows that some form of a network existed among them. Newly arrived blacks from the colonies learned from black veterans of Parisian society what French law had to say about the rules governing their lives. Their white masters certainly had no interest in telling them about the law, unless they were prepared to set them free. The neighborhoods where Hemings first lived with Jefferson in Paris had among the highest concentrations of blacks. It was not the “deluge” that Poncet de la Grave spoke of, but their visibility—their physical difference—heightened the power of their presence in the predominately white environment. Fewer blacks were living in the relatively new neighborhood of the Hôtel de Langeac, where Hemings and Jefferson eventually settled, but it still bordered neighborhoods with larger numbers of blacks.28 By the time they moved to the Hôtel de Langeac, Hemings had undoubtedly encountered other people of color in his first neighborhood, and in adjacent ones, as he went about his business. In time his increasing familiarity with the French language made it easier for him to speak with them.
Slaves in America effectively communicated information between and among slave communities as they moved about doing the work of their masters. People of color in Paris saw one another on the streets or while attending their masters and mistresses as they visited the homes of their friends, and they conversed with and supported one another. Indeed, the historians Pierre Boulle and Sue Peabody have both suggested that it was the concentration of blacks in the more affluent areas that led Poncet de la Grave and other French officials to form a distorted view of the number of people of color in Paris.29 They saw black servants walking along the streets of their own fashionable neighborhoods, saw them in the homes of their friends, and wrongly assumed that these numbers could be extrapolated out to the whole of the city. That they suspected (with good reason) widespread noncompliance with the registration requirements only fueled their paranoia.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 20