# CHAPTER 5  
## NOTICES FOR FUGITIVE SLAVES IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD ${ }^{1}$  
Life Stories and 'Little[s] Pace[s] of Narrative' Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec  
Fugitive slave notices have fascinated historians (especially in the United States) at least since the 1960s. There are articles, books, doctoral theses, anthologies of notices and now online databases: while some sources are no longer of interest to the specialists, fugitive slave notices continue to arouse curiosity. The reason for this is simple. By contrast with other sources available to historians of slavery, notices describing fugitive slaves are easy to find (they appear in all the newspapers of all the slave-owning societies, from Brazil to Canada, via Cuba and Barbados, not forgetting London or Bristol) and to interpret (notices are short and do not require training in palaeology). They offer countless sources that adapt to all historiographic shifts, whether it be the recent trend to merge Atlantic and biographical history, or the advent of digitization that has prompted many historians to explore the possibilities of interpretation offered by the world of computer programming.  
Fugitive slave notices fascinate us, but the opinion I want to put forward in this chapter is that they are probably largely misunderstood. Was their main purpose really to give readers objective information that would lead to the capture of these runaway women and men? The answer to that question is obvious (I could add 'of course') if one relies on the historiography. And the implications of that answer are the following: fugitive slave notices are said to be predictable sources that offer no surprises. They are all said to be drafted in the  
[^0]
[^0]:    1 'Petite[s] allure[s] de récit', Farge, 2005, p. 15.