Barbary Captivity and the French Idea of Freedom Gillian Weiss On April 10, 1679, Pierre Choland of La Ciotat, a coastal town in Pro- vence whose shipyards made inhabitants a favorite target for North African corsairs, posted a letter from Algiers. ‘‘My dear father,’’ it began in unschooled but fairly standard French, tinged with Provençal, ‘‘I am extremely afflicted, apart from the miseries I suffer, by receiving no word from you.’’ He pleaded for news and three hundred piastres to release him from slavery, or, in Provençal, ‘‘esclavitude,’’ and described his daily struggle to avoid converting to Islam. ‘‘My master tries inces- santly to persuade me with threats and flattery,’’ he explained, ‘‘and though I have resolved to die rather than consent to his evil designs, I fear that time and the punishments . . . he inflicts on me . . . will in the end lead me to desperation.’’ 1 Like tens of thousands of French sailors, fishermen, merchants, and naval construction workers carried off to Barbary—the Ottoman regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli and the independent kingdom of Morocco—during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cho- land did not bear his condition in silence. 2 His plea for deliverance is one of scores of such missives scattered in French archives and ad- dressed to relatives, civic leaders, church authorities, and government Gillian Weiss is assistant professor of history at Case Western Reserve University. She is completing a manuscript on the captivity of French subjects in North Africa during the early modern period. The author thanks Keith Baker, Paula Findlen, Dena Goodman, Aron Rodrigue, Jonathan Sadowsky, Peter Sahlins, Judith Surkis, Angela Woollacott, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article, a portion of which was published in Les tyrans de la mer: Pirates, corsaires et flibustiers, ed. Sophie Linon-Chipon and Sylvie Requemora (Paris, 2002), 71–81. 1 Pierre Choland to his father in La Ciotat, Algiers, Apr. 10, 1679, Archives de la Chambre de Commerce de Marseille (hereafter ACCM), G40. 2 For a fuller analysis of the number of French captives in North Africa from about 1550 to 1830, see Gillian Weiss, ‘‘Back from Barbary: Captivity, Redemption, and French Identity in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Mediterranean’’ (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2002), chap. 1 and app. 1. For an estimate of the overall number of Christian slaves across the region, see Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slaves in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (New York, 2003), chap. 1. French Historical Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Spring 2005) Copyright © 2005 by the Society for French Historical Studies