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The transatlantic paradigm and the definition of French kingdom as a “land of freedom” have contributed to the assumption that slavery is, by nature, exogenous on the metropolitan territory. Focusing on the specific case of Louis XIV’s galleys, this article intends to demonstrate that servitude was a massive phenomenon in the homeports of the prison ships. First, it considers the legal and spatial circumstances allowing this Marine Corps to produce the forfeiture of its oarsmen, reduced to a common condition of servitude. Refusing a universal definition of slavery, it then seeks to describe how the galley slaves mobilized various ranges of practice in order to claim rights (including rights to work and to a better treatment), and in particular to bequeath goods. “Civilly dead”, galley slaves are, indeed, deprived of this fundamental citizens’ right in the Old Regime, and therefore theoretically unable to draft a will and to bequeath the money and goods they sometimes accumulated. However, it happens in some cases that both effective bequests and negotiations with royal administration are able to obtain legitimacy, thus changing the rules and the hierarchies governing the galleys.