French Emigrants In Revolutionised Europe: Connected Histories And Memories 3030274349, 9783030274344, 9783030274351

Table of contents :
Series Editors’ Preface......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
Notes on Contributors......Page 11
List of Figures......Page 15
Chapter 1: Introduction......Page 17
1 Historiographical and Epistemological Revolutions on the Topic of the French Emigration......Page 19
2 What Is Behind a Name?......Page 25
3 Connecting Global Histories and Memories of the French Emigration......Page 27
Bibliography......Page 37
Part I: The Regional and National Challenges of the Emigration......Page 43
Chapter 2: The Impossible Émigré: Moving People and Moving Borders in the Annexed Territories of Revolutionary France......Page 44
1 Emigration as an Act of Will......Page 46
2 The Law of 25 Brumaire......Page 50
Bibliography......Page 58
1 Emigration as a Mutual Challenge......Page 60
2 Émigré Itineraries and State Responses......Page 62
3 Interactions and Transfer......Page 69
4 Emigration and Integration......Page 72
Bibliography......Page 77
Chapter 4: The Jersey Émigrés: Community Coherence Amidst Diaspora......Page 81
French Archival Sources......Page 100
Secondary Sources......Page 101
Part II: Reading the Emigration, Learning in Emigration and the Émigré Theatre......Page 102
Chapter 5: Émigré Children and the French School at Penn (Buckinghamshire): 1796–1814......Page 103
Bibliography......Page 120
Chapter 6: Counter-Revolutionary Transfers? Émigré Literature and the Subject of the French Emigration in British Private Libraries (1790s–1830)......Page 122
1 Defining the Literature of Emigration......Page 125
2 Identifying Vehicles for the Transfer of Exilic and Counter-Revolutionary Ideas......Page 130
3 Literature of Emigration and the Fashioning of a Counter-Revolutionary Reader......Page 133
Appendix: List of Short Name References and Corresponding Catalogue Bibliographical Details......Page 137
Bibliography......Page 144
Chapter 7: The Trauma of the Emigration in the Novels of Three Women Émigrées in London......Page 146
1 The Crossing of the Channel: A Metaphorical Re-enactment of the Emigration in Madame de Boigne’s Memoirs and Une Passion dans le grand monde......Page 151
2 References to England as Forging Identity in Souza’s Adèle de Sénange......Page 153
3 The Émigrée Melancholia......Page 155
Bibliography......Page 164
Chapter 8: Playing the Nation? The Clash of French and German Theatrical Troupes in Hamburg and Mannheim......Page 166
1 Mannheim: An Émigré Audience......Page 169
2 Hamburg: A ‘French’ Theatre?......Page 172
3 The French Émigré Theatrical Sphere......Page 178
4 Conclusion......Page 180
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France:......Page 185
Printed Sources......Page 186
Part III: Global Entanglements of Exile......Page 189
Chapter 9: Émigrés and Transimperial Politics: Pierre Victor Malouet and the Fate of Saint Domingue......Page 190
Bibliography......Page 208
Chapter 10: The Age of Emigrations: French Émigrés and Global Entanglements of Political Exile......Page 213
1 Legacies of Migration: French Émigrés, Huguenots, and Jacobites......Page 215
2 Contemporaries of Revolution: French Émigrés and Revolutionary Exiles from America, Geneva, Saint-Domingue, and Malta......Page 221
3 Émigrés, Convicts, or Expatriates? Status Confusions Beyond the Revolutionary Atlantic......Page 226
4 Conclusion and Outlook: The Age of Emigrations and France’s Siècle des Exilés......Page 228
Bibliography......Page 234
Part IV: The Return......Page 240
Chapter 11: Healing the Republic’s ‘Great Wound’: Emigration Reform and the Path to a General Amnesty, 1799–1802......Page 241
1 Revolutionary Migration: An Enduring Conundrum......Page 242
2 Emigration Reform: A Consular Priority......Page 244
3 ‘Such a farce!’29 Navigating the Consular Commission des émigrés......Page 246
4 Building the Case for a Comprehensive Amnesty......Page 250
5 Conclusion: The Power of a Pardon......Page 252
Bibliography......Page 260
Chapter 12: The Last Ditch: The French Émigré Clergy in Britain and the Concordat of 1801......Page 262
Secondary Works......Page 278
Websites......Page 280
Chapter 13: The Return of the Emigrés: Bordeaux, 12 March 1814......Page 281
Bibliography......Page 298
Archival References......Page 300
Chapter 14: Postface: Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of Emigré Studies......Page 301
Bibliography......Page 320
Index......Page 324

Citation preview

WAR, CULTURE AND SOCIETY, 1750–1850

French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe Connected Histories and Memories Edited by Laure Philip · Juliette Reboul

War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850 Series Editors Rafe Blaufarb Florida State University Tallahassee, FL, USA Alan Forrest University of York York, UK Karen Hagemann University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC, USA

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14390

Laure Philip • Juliette Reboul Editors

French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe Connected Histories and Memories

Editors Laure Philip Independent Scholar Sydney, NSW, Australia

Juliette Reboul Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen Nijmegen, Gelderland, The Netherlands

War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850 ISBN 978-3-030-27434-4    ISBN 978-3-030-27435-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Artokoloro Quint Lox Limited / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editors’ Preface

The century from 1750 to 1850 was a seminal period of change, not just in Europe but across the globe. The political landscape was transformed by a series of revolutions fought in the name of liberty—most notably in the Americas and France, of course, but elsewhere, too: in Holland and Geneva during the eighteenth century and across much of mainland Europe by 1848. Nor was change confined to the European world. New ideas of freedom, equality and human rights were carried to the furthest outposts of empire, to Egypt, India and the Caribbean, which saw the creation in 1801 of the first black republic in Haiti, the former French colony of Saint-Domingue. And in the early part of the nineteenth century, they continued to inspire anti-colonial and liberation movements throughout Central and Latin America. If political and social institutions were transformed by revolution in these years, so, too, was warfare. During the quarter-century of the French Revolutionary Wars, in particular, Europe was faced with the prospect of ‘total’ war, on a scale unprecedented before the twentieth century. Military hardware, it is true, evolved only gradually, and battles were not necessarily any bloodier than they had been during the Seven Years War. But in other ways, these can legitimately be described as the first modern wars, fought by mass armies mobilized by national and patriotic propaganda, leading to the displacement of millions of people throughout Europe and beyond, as soldiers, prisoners of war, civilians and refugees. For those who lived through the period, these wars would be a formative experience that shaped the ambitions and the identities of a generation. v

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The aims of the series are necessarily ambitious. In its various volumes, whether single-authored monographs or themed collections, it seeks to extend the scope of more traditional historiography. It will study warfare during this formative century not just in Europe, but in the Americas, in colonial societies and across the world. It will analyse the construction of identities and power relations by integrating the principal categories of difference, most notably class and religion, generation and gender, race and ethnicity. It will adopt a multi-faceted approach to the period, and turn to methods of political, cultural, social, military and gender history, in order to develop a challenging and multidisciplinary analysis. Finally, it will examine elements of comparison and transfer and so tease out the complexities of regional, national and global history.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Laure Philip and Juliette Reboul

Part I The Regional and National Challenges of the Emigration  27 2 The Impossible Émigré: Moving People and Moving Borders in the Annexed Territories of Revolutionary France 29 Mary Ashburn Miller 3 Interaction and Interrelation in Exile: French Émigrés, Legislation, and Everyday Life in the Habsburg Monarchy 45 Matthias Winkler 4 The Jersey Émigrés: Community Coherence Amidst Diaspora 67 Sydney Watts

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Contents

Part II Reading the Emigration, Learning in Emigration and the Émigré Theatre  89 5 Émigré Children and the French School at Penn (Buckinghamshire): 1796–1814  91 Kirsty Carpenter 6 Counter-Revolutionary Transfers? Émigré Literature and the Subject of the French Emigration in British Private Libraries (1790s–1830)111 Juliette Reboul 7 The Trauma of the Emigration in the Novels of Three Women Émigrées in London135 Laure Philip 8 Playing the Nation? The Clash of French and German Theatrical Troupes in Hamburg and Mannheim155 Clare Siviter

Part III Global Entanglements of Exile 179 9 Émigrés and Transimperial Politics: Pierre Victor Malouet and the Fate of Saint Domingue181 Patrick Harris 10 The Age of Emigrations: French Émigrés and Global Entanglements of Political Exile205 Friedemann Pestel

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Part IV The Return 233 11 Healing the Republic’s ‘Great Wound’: Emigration Reform and the Path to a General Amnesty, 1799–1802235 Kelly Summers 12 The Last Ditch: The French Émigré Clergy in Britain and the Concordat of 1801257 Dominic Aidan Bellenger 13 The Return of the Emigrés: Bordeaux, 12 March 1814277 Philip Mansel 14 Postface: Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of Emigré Studies297 Simon Burrows Index321

Notes on Contributors

Dominic  Aidan  Bellenger  has been a senior research associate at the Von Hugel Institute at the University of Cambridge, UK, since 2014. He is the author of some twenty books on ecclesiastical history and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Historical Society. Born in London, his PhD thesis awarded in 1978 explored the ecclesiastical exiles of the French Revolution in the British Isles. Dominic has contributed to many conferences and books on this subject in which he was a pioneer. A Benedictine monk from 1982, he was Abbot of Downside from 2006 to 2014. Simon  Burrows is Professor of Digital Humanities and Professor of History at Western Sydney University, Australia. His academic work has focused on the ideas and activities of French exile writers and journalists in Britain and more recently on the circulation of books in the enlightenment era. He is working on the digital project ‘Mapping Print, Charting Enlightenment’, which is funded by the Australian Research Council. He is the author of French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814 (2000) and has co-edited Press Politics and the Public Sphere (2002) and Cultural Transfers (2010). Kirsty  Carpenter Associate Professor of History, Massey University, New Zealand, is a specialist of the French Revolution and the émigrés who left France during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. She is the author of ‘Eugénie et Mathilde’ by Madame de Souza’ MHRA: Critical Texts, Vol. 26  in 2014; The Novels of Madame de Souza in Social and Political Perspective, (2007); Refugees of the French Revolution, Émigrés in xi

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London 1789–1802 (1999); and she co-edited, The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle Against Revolution 1789–1814 with independent scholar, Philip Mansel. Patrick Harris  is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he specializes in the entangled political and intellectual histories of the British and French Empires. His dissertation project, “Imperial Exiles: Emigration and Counterrevolution in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” follows the transimperial trajectories of displaced French colonists, the efforts of British and French imperial authorities to survey and regulate them, and the impact of the colonial exile experience on emerging conceptions of global order in the nineteenth century. Philip  Mansel  is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Literature, and the Institute of Historical Research, a co-founder of the Society for Court Studies, and President of the Comité scientifique of the Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles, France. His books include Louis XVIII (1981); The Eagle in Splendour: Inside the Court of Napoleon I (1987, 2015); The Court of France 1789–1830 (1989), Paris Between Empires (2001); The Prince of Europe; the Life of Charles Joseph, Prince de Ligne (2003); Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costume from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II (2005); and co-edited with Kirsty Carpenter The French Emigrés and the Struggle Against Revolution (1999). Mary Ashburn Miller  is Associate Professor of History and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, USA. She is the author of A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination (2011). She has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright grant, a Harry Frank Guggenheim grant for violence studies, and an ACLS New Faculty Fellowship. An article based on her research on French émigrés, entitled “A Fiction of the French Nation: The Émigré Novel, Nostalgia, and National Identity, 1797–1815,” was published in Historical Reflections in 2018. Friedemann Pestel  is Lecturer in Modern European History at Albert-­ Ludwigs-­Universität Freiburg, Germany. He was a research fellow at the German Historical Institutes in Paris and London and at the University of Vienna. His research interests and publications include the French and Haitian Revolutions, political emigration in the age of revolutions, the history of classical musical life in the nineteenth

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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and twentieth centuries, and memory studies. In 2015, he published his book Kosmopoliten wider Willen: Die monarchiensals Revolutions emigranten (Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Monarchiens as Émigrés of the French Revolution) with Oldenbourg-De Gruyter. Laure Philip  is an independent literary historian of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her thesis, completed in 2016 at the University of Warwick in the UK, explored the prose and memoirs of three women exiles in London in the 1790s with a focus on the trauma of the emigration. Laure was a research associate at the University of Western Sydney, where she worked on the ‘Illegal Book Trade Revisited’ strand of the ‘Mapping Print Charting Enlightenment’ ARC funded project. In 2017, she co-organised the Connected Histories and Memories conference with Juliette Reboul, which led to this volume. Laure now works in the Not-For-Profit sector. Juliette Reboul  is a historian, specialising in the study of the circulation of ideas in eighteenth-century Europe. In 2017, she published her first monograph French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution with Palgrave Macmillan. She has worked on the Mapping Trade, Charting Enlightenment project (University of Western Sydney), before joining the MEDIATE team at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. In this, she examines sales catalogues of British private libraries to better understand what were the bestsellers of the Enlightenment. In 2017, Juliette co-organised the Connected Histories and Memories conference with Laure Philip, which led to this volume. Clare  Siviter is Lecturer in French theatre and performance at the University of Bristol. She completed her thesis on Napoleonic tragedy at the University of Warwick in 2016, a revised version of which is due to appear in 2020. After Warwick, Clare was a postdoctoral fellow at the Université Clermont Auvergne, where she remains a Research Associate on the SITHERE project, on the bestsellers of revolutionary theatre. She has published or completed works on French theatre in Paris, the provinces and the German Lands during the period 1789–1815. Kelly Summers  is Assistant Professor of History and the Humanities at MacEwan University in Canada. She received her PhD from Stanford University and is completing a book on emigration and re-migration ­during the French Revolution. It explores how French attempts to police residency, which struggled to distinguish between rebels who posed an

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active threat to the new nation and refugees from the Revolution’s excesses, preoccupied every government that held power between the fall of the Bastille and the Restoration of the monarchy, and in the process established the émigré and the refugee as enduring political actors. Sydney  Watts is Associate Professor of History at the University of Richmond, USA, where she teaches early modern European history. She has published several journal articles and essays on food history, and a book on the meat trade, Meat Matters: Butchers, Politics and Market Culture in Old Regime France. Her research focuses on the émigrés of Brittany and Normandy during the period of migration and the Restoration. Matthias  Winkler is completing his thesis on French émigrés in the Habsburg monarchy at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. A graduate from Bamberg University, Germany, and Central European University Budapest, Hungary, he specialises in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century central European history, Franco-Habsburg interrelations, and the history of migration and political exile. His recent works include ‘Provisorische Integration und Kulturtransfer. Französische Revolutionsemigranten im Heiligen Römischen Reich deutscher Nation’, with Friedemann Pestel, Francia 43 (2016), 137–160 and ‘Das Exil als Aktions- und Erfahrungsraum: Französische Revolutionsemigranten im östlichen Mitteleuropa nach 1789’, Jahrbuch für Regionalgeschichte 33 (2015), 47–71.

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1

Sites of embarkation from Brittany and Normandy for the Island of Jersey, 1789–98. (Source: http://dsl.richmond.edu/ frenchrefugees/)81 Fig. 4.2 Sites of embarkation across northwest France for the Island of Jersey, 1789–98. (Source: http://dsl.richmond.edu/french refugees/)82 Fig. 4.3 Émigrés in Jersey according to social status. (Source:  The National Archives—Kew. Records of Foreign Office, Declaration of Aliens. FO 95/608, 328 folios) 82 Fig. 4.4 Titles used by émigrés (with overlap). (Source: The National Archives—Kew. Records of Foreign Office, Declaration of Aliens. FO 95/608, 328 folios) 83 Fig. 4.5 Number of households emigrating to Jersey. (Source: The National Archives—Kew. Records of Foreign Office, Declaration of Aliens. FO 95/608, 328 folios) 83 Figs. 13.1 (r and v): The Brassard de Bordeaux. (All images are from the author’s private collection) The Order of the Brassard de Bordeaux was founded by Louis XVIII on 6 September 1814, at the request of his agent in Bordeaux Taffard de SaintGermain, to reward the royalists who had served in Bordeaux in March 1814. As a royalist rallying sign, they had worn a white ‘brassard’ or arm-band, which was probably a reminiscence of similar arm-bands worn by émigrés serving in the Armée de Condé in the 1790s. This illustration shows the insignia of the Order: a white arm-band decorated with a gold sun-burst enclosing two entwined L’s, for Louis XVIII, and the legend ‘Bordeaux 12 March 1814’. It comes from a ‘Précis historique xv

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du 12 Mars 1814’ composed by ‘Jacques Dejernon, ex-Maitre de Pension a Bordeaux, natif de Pau, volontaire royal du 12 mars 1814’ and printed by the Imprimerie de Moreau in Bordeaux. Angoulême and his court officials Guiche, Etienne de Damas-Crux and Comte Francois d’Escars, always wore the Brassard de Bordeaux in 1814–1815 289 Fig. 13.2 Jacques Dejernon, Portrait of Louis XVIII between the Duc and Duchesse dAngoulême’. (All images are from the author’s private collection) This picture was reproduced above Dejernon’s lists of royalists in ‘Précis historique du 12 mars 1814’, who had served in Bordeaux in 1814 and 1815 either in the Garde nationale, or in the Garde royale, or as ‘Volontaires royaux’, with accounts of the events of those years. Angoulême revisited Bordeaux in March 1815 with his wife. They helped make it a bastion of popular royalism and opposition to Napoleon, but thereafter resided in and around Paris 290

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Laure Philip and Juliette Reboul

‘They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing’: the chevalier de Panat’s barbed witticism has become a sort of cliché and self-fulfilling prophecy in scholarship on the French emigration.1 This is partly due to the fact that the phenomenon has long been analysed within the narrow confines of counter-revolutionary political agendas (whether ultramontains, legitimist, or monarchiens) or the émigrés’ nostalgia for their homeland. By contrast, the present volume aims to highlight the multiple connections and interdependencies between the French emigrants, their hosts, and the revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries who never left France. It argues that all participated to differing degrees in the production of cultural objects and the generation of political decisions and symbols surrounding the emigration, as well as the evolution of feelings and ideologies. Indeed, the impact of the roughly 150,0002 French emigrants on their host countries and their homeland upon their return remains a subject that warrants much analysis, as does the question of the influence of the host societies on the French emigrants themselves. L. Philip (*) Independent Scholar, Sydney, NSW, Australia J. Reboul Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Gelderland, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Philip, J. Reboul (eds.), French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_1

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To the editors’ knowledge, there are no recent synoptic studies of the manifold repercussions of emigration across Europe, much less on the world beyond.3 In the past, however, there have been only a few genuine and serious attempts to further an international agenda (though rather Western European). This was mostly influenced by Baldensperger’s 1924 comparative analysis of the ideological changes and renewal of sensibilities in the literature of emigration, which he described as depending upon cultural aspects specific to each host country.4 The historiographical and epistemological conditions to further these efforts were not yet in place and, unfortunately, the study of emigration seems to have subsequently stagnated. At least until the 1990s.5 In the past couple of decades, a multitude of micro-studies of French emigrant communities in a few specific locations, as well as several biographies of émigrés of varied backgrounds, were published or undertaken in academic circles.6 This resurgence was made possible by a combination of factors. Scholars in the field of emigration have been slowly filling several archival and literary gaps and absences: physical,7 historiographical, and especially epistemological. To complement the research undertaken in major national archives and libraries, as well as on émigré literary successes, many scholars are now investigating smaller libraries and archival repositories throughout Europe and even beyond. By unearthing documents previously unseen, they allow for the cross-referencing of various ancillary sources containing snippets of emigrant experiences. This had the direct consequence of filling some historiographical voids when direct records had not been kept. Louis XVIII, Calonne, and Chateaubriand are now sharing centre stage with lesser-­known and sometimes anonymous ideologues, soldiers, clergymen, women, children, and even domestic servants. Though not as publicly influential as the political and literary leaders of the emigration and counter-­revolution,8 their unassuming but powerful role in shifting private thoughts and mores is slowly being revealed.9 Since many epistemological conditions permitting scholarly renewal are now established and the methodologies of connected histories and cultural transfers have been well defined, we now have the ability to think what was unthinkable a few decades ago.10 Thus it is now possible to turn our focus away from elites to the masses, whilst simultaneously moving from the impact of emigration in European capital cities to its influence on geographical fringes. We can discuss the émigré public sphere dominated by male figures while recognising the French emigration as the heterogeneous migratory movement it was: the experiences and writings of women and

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other minorities are finally perceived as meaningful. Therefore, rather than replacing studies of public émigré figures and those on the legislative, political, and social impact of emigration on France and major European exile hubs such as London or Coblenz, the new and sustained focus on geographical margins and lesser-known or anonymous actors in the movement allows us to complete and fill many gaps in the narration of the emigration. In the editors’ opinion, the recourse to theories and concepts used in different disciplines in combination with a collaborative approach will be crucial in the renewal of the scholarship on emigration and to the analysis of connections between migrants and hosts in general. It is hoped that this collection exemplifies the aforementioned shift in sources, methods, and interests. The volume itself is the result of an international conference held in the Netherlands in the summer of 2017.11 It is not very often that scholars studying the topic of emigration come together to share their findings and discuss the future of their research topic: in fact, it had been almost 20  years since the publication of the last collective volume in English, which focused solely on the topic of the French emigration and was edited by Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel.12 The 2017 conference and ensuing volume aimed to encourage research projects that transcend traditional conceptions of the French emigration via active collaboration and interdisciplinary approaches. We can only regret that the editors were not able to include other analyses and studies by many talented researchers focusing on different geographical locations, different sources, and different concepts.13 However, this volume offers an invaluable collection of chapters that will be used as a starting point for further historical and critical research on the French emigration, as well as the literary innovations it generated.

1   Historiographical and Epistemological Revolutions on the Topic of the French Emigration It could be argued that renewed scholarship on the emigration has grown out of attempts to expand its traditional chronological boundaries, which are usually set between the flight of Louis XVI’s brothers in summer 1789 and their final return in 1815. The end date has sometimes been prolonged to 1825, with the legislation on the milliard des émigrés. As for the phenomenon’s inception, some see Calonne as the first émigré malgré lui (reluctant) when he departed for London in 1787

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after being accused of despotism.14 This is however highly contested. Taking into account the organic relation between emigration, counterrevolution, and counter-­Enlightenment, we could even theorise that emigration, as an ideological phenomenon, predates the Revolution. Counter-revolution and counter-­Enlightenment can be seen as ‘polysemous’ words,15 determined by a variety of discourses and personal agendas. Exiles and European counter-revolutionaries recuperated many of the counter-Enlightenment arguments, moderate and vindictive, while using enlightened rhetoric to their advantage. Most obviously, Edmund Burke’s Reflections was praised as a counter-revolutionary work by French counter-revolutionary advocates because it echoed counterEnlightenment themes, whilst championing the idea that, unlike France, Britain had successfully ended its revolution and kept its monarch and ancestral traditions alive.16 Yet, the idea of an ‘Ancient constitution’, common to many counter-revolutionary discourses, can be associated to a will to reform. In that, counter-­revolutionary declarations by émigrés should be seen in the continuation of previous discourses, enlightened and counter-enlightened. The contestation of the chronology of emigration influenced (and was influenced by) a renewed perception of its geography. The historiographical stakes of shattering the disabling compartmentalisation of emigration as a singularly French phenomenon are immeasurable, allowing researchers to escape the national (sometimes nationalist) narratives that have dominated scholarship on the French Revolution and the European counter-­revolution. The French emigration is no longer seen as wholly French, and its reception in host countries the exclusive concern of governments and elites. The (counter-)revolutionary diaspora encompasses various local, national, regional, and global issues, some of the entanglements of which are explored in this volume. Recent historiography on emigration has moved away from traditional studies of its impact in a select number of European nations (mostly Britain and Germany).17 Like the French Revolution itself, emigration had a global impact from the West Indies and North American territories to Australia. These facets of the historiography of emigration, however, remain under-explored.18 While there was a sporadic émigré presence in the Ottoman Empire, Siberia, China, and India, the impact of French revolutionary legislation (including that on emigration) in the non-European space, in particular in Asian trading ports, demands greater attention. A truly transnational perspective on emigration must comprise more than a collection of disparate

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case studies that, while traversing several countries and continents, still fails to illuminate how the experiences of men and women in exile, of migrants and hosts, are interconnected. In an essay on the scales of history, Philippe Minard advised historians to ‘embrace a contextual approach that can be broadened to a planetary scale, and to shed light on all the exchanges, movements, transfers and métissage that normally disappear behind the blinders on the nation-state perspective’.19 Studying various geographical scales simultaneously allows scholars to transcend the teleological nature of the concept of the nation-state and its thorny association with fixed territorial boundaries. This revised geography takes into account the physical locations where encounters between the French migrants and their hosts occur; but also the intangible intellectual, emotional, and creative spaces that were born of the migrants’ and hosts’ shared experience of exile. First, detailed local and regional case studies on communities of French émigrés contribute to reframing and enriching debates on host-migrant relations and connections: the marginalisation and rejection by patriotic crowds and nationalist policies that are often described by French migrants in literary documents and retrospective narratives is complicated by the study of sources contemporary to their migration. These often demonstrate the existence of connections between migrants and hosts. Second, the plurality of individual experiences of emigration clearly demonstrates the complex relation of migrants to the new construct of the nation, especially as physical borders are in flux and the political becomes woven into the emotional. Including alternative geographies of exile—both physical and imaginary— not only serves comparative purposes but brings much-needed insight to the study of transnational exchanges that transcends fraught debates over the concept of the nation. As shifting geographies resulted from successive (and sometimes contradictory) legal decrees in France and in the host countries, subjective and emotional attachment to regional/national entities were consistently challenged and altered. This led to a profound questioning of embedded feelings of marginality, otherness, patriotism, and assimilation from the viewpoint of both the émigré and the host communities, whether welcoming or hostile. Émigré prose, fictional or not, repeatedly alludes to a fantasised idea of the nation.20 This nation appears to be community imagined from abroad, made of sensorial and symbolical spaces and interiorised expatriate identities rather than a territorial reality. This meaning-making and even identity-building dimension of the exile should not be left exclusively to literary scholars since it represents a vital

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part of the puzzle: that of the human agency in experiencing and narrating the exile from the perspective of both the émigrés and their hosts. The connections highlighted in the title of this volume reflect the fundamental evolution of historical and literary understandings of the French emigration. While much remains to be done, much has changed since the bicentenary of the 1789 French Revolution. The history of emigration and the literary criticism of émigré works certainly profited from new research agendas, the introduction in the discipline of important heuristic concepts such as transnationalism, trauma, or gender, as well as the establishment of new methodologies such as that of cultural transfers. These have had a drastic impact on the volume’s quality, and the complexity of research questions about a topic that has traditionally been considered too obsolete or politically charged to warrant fresh analysis. An important first step was taken by our predecessors with Palgrave Macmillan. When they edited the first volume in English on the French emigration 20 years ago, Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel initiated what was deemed a first wave of revisionism.21 The strength of their work was in the European scale of their project and the explicit socio-cultural approach taken by their contributors. Together, the chapters combined studies of highly visible public figures with the emigration’s forgotten majority. Significantly, four of the original contributors have also contributed to this volume. Carpenter and Mansel’s predominantly British reflection on emigration was published at the same time as works from German and French scholars on émigré relations with and integration into their host countries, as well as the existence (or absence) of cultural transfers. This refers to the importation of cultural products from one culturally defined environment to another, followed by their evolution and adaptation to suit their new context.22 For example, Thomas Höpel and Karine Rance, who systematically studied self-narratives of French noble émigrés in Germanic countries, determined that émigrés who sojourned in Germany facilitated very few cultural transfers to their hosts.23 Returned migrants, however, proved greatly influenced by the cultural influences of their host environments.24 Lately, the methodological debate testing out the intellectual cultural transfers, as opposed to a more prosaic connected history, actually opened up new perspectives by broadening the extent of what was to be seen as an exchange, a change visible in many of the chapters presented in this volume.25 While the emigration’s cultural impact varied, it is now seen as the location of many successful creative

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

and lucrative opportunities, going in both directions; for instance, as the exile went on the issue of securing livelihood became inescapable. Many émigrés were forced into socialising with their hosts, taking jobs in teaching, cooking, or the confection of garments for their hosts. The study of ‘contact points’ has brought out new and fruitful discussions in the history of emigration. A second beneficial shift originates in literary studies. Scholars in the field have ventured into the memorial and literary landscape of emigration, at times employing literary criticism to illuminate questions of trauma and refuge. Trauma studies developed closely with medicine and psychology in the second half of the nineteenth century: the very concept of trauma did not exist in 1789. This does not mean that speaking of trauma in the case of the Revolution and exile victims is anachronistic. The last two decades have seen a redrawing of trauma studies, away from the idea that to merely hear about someone’s traumatic past is to understand it. In speaking of the ‘paradigm of trauma’, Roger Luckhurst admitted that ‘an aesthetic of unspeakability or unrepresentability would fail to register how cultural forms have actually responded to our torturous times’.26 Trauma is thus a useful analytical tool for the history of emigration: Katherine Astbury directly applied clinical stages of recovery from trauma studies to the works of the émigré author René de Chateaubriand. This method allowed her to explore the impact of the emigration on prose fiction.27 The notion of memory, and therefore the analysis of the narration of traumatic memories, has also been critiqued. Karine Rance successfully introduced a new methodology, based on Ricoeur’s three temporalities, to better understand retrospective self-narratives, distinguishing between the particulars of an event, the private reconstruction of traumatic memories, and the necessity to adapt a memory to different audiences’ horizons of expectations when publishing.28 Examining the novels, memoirs, and essays of the French exiles is no longer strictly used to confirm political leanings: scholars have slowly started to reconsider the émigré texts like versatile sources as a means to delve into the cultural impact of the emigration. Perhaps because of the revalorisation of the diversity of the European literary landscape,29 and the renewed interest for middlebrow and forgotten literature, often overlooked émigré texts have been resurrected and deemed worth reading. Their historical anchorage gives them a distinct tone and hybridity found nowhere else: their deeply meaningful contribution to the revolutionary literary culture is now recognised in its own right.30 Likewise, the memoirs

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of ex-exiles, previously studied solely to collect information about public figures and major political events, are now considered a rich source for gender studies, the history of ideas, sociology, and many other fields. Henri Rossi stated that the period between the ‘two revolutions’, 1789 and 1848, saw an explosion of published memoirs, attesting to the creative power engendered by the collapse of the Ancien Régime and exile.31 The prolific nature of this period has only recently been matched by editorial efforts to publish unknown books and memoirs of the emigration, many of them by women.32 The émigré writer or protagonist, rather than being reduced to nostalgic sterility, is increasingly perceived as a driver of and inspiration for the literary developments of the second half of the nineteenth century, such as Romanticism and the beginnings of the social and realist novel.33 The concept of gender has perhaps inspired the most important changes to social and cultural history, and consequently that of emigration, although much remains to be done. Scholars have charted the evolution of gendered representations at the turn of the eighteenth century throughout Europe.34 Unsurprisingly, the first emigration studies massively underrepresented women migrants in comparison to men. This changed in the last two decades when some literary scholars successfully applied gender studies to the analysis of female émigré authors and their works. They showed that the prose of these émigrées articulated demands for reformed gender roles and a softening of paternal authority.35 Although many scholars have debated the issue of the evolution of gender roles during the French Revolution, from the Enlightenment’s co-ed salonnières to the Empire’s patriarchal backlash, no study has attempted to investigate gender within the context of the emigration. The experience of exile exposed men and women to unfamiliar social practices and gender norms just as the end of the Ancien Régime sparked a dramatic redrawing of familial, matrimonial, and social relationships. Meanwhile, the recent multiplication of studies of masculinity attests to a need to balance out the female-­ centric approach that has dominated gender studies so far, and to thereby challenge normative representations of virility across time and place.36 The emigration’s historiography has yet to consider the evolution of gender roles and behaviour in relation to the émigrés’ contact with other societies and the impact that exile had in shifting pre-revolutionary traditions and representations of both women and men.37

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9

2   What Is Behind a Name? The aforementioned historiographical and epistemological shifts gave rise to a recurrent question in the making of this volume: what should one call the population that left France during the Revolution? Naming conventions can reflect the deeply held identity of those labelled, as well their stereotypical perception by outsiders. The variety of terms used during/ since the Revolution and, consequently, throughout this volume—ranging from émigrés, refugees, asylum seekers, and exiles to the most neutral option, emigrants—testifies to the heterogeneity of the group that left France and the variety of perspectives adopted to study it.38 Ultimately and after much debate, the editors felt that imposing the use of a name or a category would be limiting, even counter-productive as it would shackle the renewal of perspectives and approaches they were so intent to promote from the beginning of this venture. It is difficult today to erase the partisan undertone of the term ‘émigré’, which featured in the French legislation of the early 1790s with the intention of legally and politically marginalising all absentees.39 It was consequently used in nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, both anti- and pro-revolutionary.40 For some, the noun ‘émigré’ defined a group of people who had left France to plot the overthrow of the New Régime, and who functioned as a convenient aristocratic and clerical scapegoat for all revolutionary ills. For others, émigrés were heroes to be celebrated, the unsung martyrs of a noble and chivalric counter-revolutionary cause. For those legally defined as such, however, being placed in this category had serious and sometimes fatal ramifications. Accordingly, many contested this status very early on. This challenge was primarily legal, with many trying to have their names removed from the émigré lists drawn up by successive French governments.41 Many have correlated émigrés’ political leanings to his/her date of emigration, with the ultras having left France quickly and the constitutionalist departing around the summer of 1792. Yet, becoming associated to a political group was sometimes involuntary, and projected on the émigré by his/her compatriots abroad. This rhetoric of association/dissociation did not strictly map onto reality: some constitutionalist monarchiens left before the inauguration of the French Republic and some ultras left France relatively late.42 Thus the émigré was not only a legal construct but a rhetorical and symbolic one. As a result, depending on when and why people left, as well as their perceived political loyalties and socio-economic interests, different waves of migrants were

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excluded from and/or shunned established émigré communities. Their shared experience of exile and collective proscription for having left France during the Revolution was not enough to forge a common identity and many deliberately avoided the companionship of fellow Frenchmen while in exile. Later, during the Directoire, aspiring returnees were eager to eschew the label’s reactionary overtones and to distinguish themselves semantically from the emigration’s ultra-royalist holdouts. In her recent dissertation, Kelly Summers points out that ‘to escape the negative connotations of the term émigré, which ascribed a wilful treachery to all who had fled, prominent figures including Stäel, Constant, Roederer, and Lally-Tollendal began to substitute the word “fugitif”, often drawing explicit parallels to France’s original refugees, the Huguenots’.43 By positioning themselves as involuntary refugees akin to the Huguenots, individuals who fled after the September Massacres cast themselves as the victims of terrorist repression rather than counter-revolutionary villains. Others were excluded from the group because of real and perceived political or socio-economic differences: in Britain, domestic servants who left France to accompany their employers were sometimes denounced as Jacobins; many were refused charity if they could not prove their loyalty to the Ancien Régime.44 For all of these reasons, Jean-Clément Martin was right to warn against thinking of the emigration as ideologically united.45 Shifting the perspective to that of the émigrés’ host nations and communities, the use of a political and legislative ‘émigré’ category has little purchase since the community was first and foremost a foreign import. A study of several hundreds of civilian British sources from the late 1790s showed that the term ‘émigré’ was in fact seldom used in the British Isles to describe the newly arrived population. The word ‘emigrant’ was preferred.46 Being an émigré also meant different things to different audiences: at opposite ends of the spectrum of potential reactions, authorities and populations in the host countries could see migrants as victims of the Revolution in need of support, or as potential political agitators.47 In Britain, for instance, the public opinion was divided about the French exiles. Caricature prints diabolised the French as skinny cannibals and/or frivolous Catholics eager to bring the revolution across the Channel; meanwhile destitute émigrés received financial support from the government on the grounds of Christian charity and a shared feeling of horror for the political unrest happening on the Continent. The term ‘refugee’ raises different issues. While partly anachronistic, given its Huguenot origins, it simultaneously invokes a situation familiar

1 INTRODUCTION 

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to many today. It has been employed by certain scholars to describe the emigration from 1792 onwards as thousands fled the violence of the Terror and the revolutionary wars.48 The term refugee began to surface in Thermidorian debates about reforming the emigration system, and it began to chip away at the stereotypical perception of émigrés as an undifferentiated bloc of traitors.49 Used as a heuristic concept rather than a legal category, the term refugee certainly allows for the renewal of scholarship as it brings to the fore the interrelations of political, socio-economical, and cultural consequences in forced migration. This varied terminology offers the opportunity to situate the history of the French emigration within broader studies on the ‘Age of Refugees’, the ‘Siècle des exilés’ (the century of exiles), or the ‘Age of Emigration’ introduced by Friedemann Pestel in this volume,50 thereby facilitating necessary and welcome possibilities for comparative studies. Most importantly, it sees the French emigration as a series of epiphenomena with their own peculiarities, while highlighting the many connections between French emigrants and other exilic populations before, during, and since the Revolution.51

3   Connecting Global Histories and Memories of the French Emigration Bringing together the research of 13 scholars inspired by the aforementioned concepts and employing these new methodologies, this volume interrogates the intersection between emigration and asylum, the infighting between exiles’ nostalgia for the homeland and their gratitude towards the host country. The chapters have been grouped around four themes. The first section discusses the challenges posed to local host communities by the French emigration. The second then turns to consider the cultural impact emigration had in host countries and the literary production triggered by these interactions. The third explores some of the many global entanglements born of French revolutionary emigration, and the final section highlights some of the problems posed by the return and reintegration of the émigrés. These four sections reflect a new appreciation for the impact that emigration had on individual trajectories, cultures, and societies, as well as on nascent nations and national sentiments. However, many questions asked in these chapters override the structure. Several contributors mention the question of cultural transfers, for instance, whilst the spectre of a return is alternately touched upon throughout the volume as

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a private wish, an emotional and political problem, a logistical challenge, and the actual experience of homecoming. The first part of this volume brings to the fore ways of understanding the often-paradoxical relationship between French emigrants, host societies, and local governments. Departing from Greer’s seminal statistical study on the incidence of the French emigration, Mary Ashburn Miller, Matthias Winkler, and Sydney Watts all propose alternative chronologies based on the lived experiences of both migrants and host communities, thus contesting categories imposed both by French legislation (which applied to not only French territory but that of Sister Republics) and by the hosts’ legislative response to the influx of foreigners.52 Each of these case studies suggests that while legal and political categories defining an émigré led to the categorisation of exiles as others, aliens, and foreigners (and therefore constant objects of suspicion), studies of individual and local strategies of identification and integration suggest a richer and more complex relationship between the emigrants to their home and host countries. Some fought to be recognised as contributing members of the French Republic; others imagined a new French nation in exile; many actively sought to be socially, economically, and culturally integrated in their host society. Alongside studies of the legislation surrounding emigration, questions of integration, adaptation, and the reinvention of the self-­challenge notions of personal consent and political will are at the core of what it means to be an émigré, an emigrant, a refugee, or even an immigrant. Did one become an émigré by chance or by choice? Defining what makes an émigré is central to Chap. 2, ‘The Impossible Émigré’, by Mary Ashburn Miller. She brings a novel perspective to the inconsistencies and sometimes ludicrous consequences of French policy on emigration in its annexed territories, in particular the Belgian ones. The conception of the French nation as a contractual body of willing citizens is undermined by the lived experience of migrants. Ashburn Miller’s case study of the unfortunate Louis Anné, a Brussels resident, demonstrates the depth of the gap between highly theoretical legislation and the reality of age-old economic migrations as the new French Republic invaded its neighbouring countries. This chapter marks a new milestone in the study of the relation between emigration, citizenship, and the making of modern nations. Also dealing with legislation, this time from the perspective of the host country, Matthias Winkler takes the focus on the French emigration further east, to the Habsburg dominions. In Chap. 3, ‘Interaction and Interrelation in

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

Exile’, he compellingly proposes to relativise the importance previously given in the historiography to clashes between the exiles and their hosts with micro-studies of local encounters and contact points. Thanks to his use of the heuristic concepts of interrelation and transfer, Winkler successfully demonstrates that while the exile should be seen as a ‘mutual challenge’ for both émigrés and hosts which led to the implementation of local legislation against or pro-emigration, émigré/host interactions should be analysed in terms of cultural interpenetration and as creative processes. The importance of contact points as the location of identity formation and self-reinvention is further explored in Chap. 4, ‘The Jersey Émigrés’, by Sydney Watts. Her examination of the island as a liminal and ambivalent space deepens the debate over the capacity of governments to impose the legal and political categories that define the émigré population, which she challenges by pointing to the sheer uncertainty and subjectivity of migrants’ experiences on the island. While these three chapters study three distinct regions, the micro-studies they present challenge a historiography that traditionally sees emigrants as they are defined by the authorities. By placing the individual and émigré/host contacts at the core of their discourse, they humanise a group often seen as homogeneous. The second section assembles four chapters arguing that social encounters between the emigrant community and its host societies engendered both tensions and traumas but also a rich cultural output. They were ambivalent spaces where claims of cultural authority and authenticity were challenged on a daily basis. Kirsty Carpenter, Juliette Reboul, Laure Philip, and Clare Siviter examine various under-explored cultural aspects of the emigration, from the political conundrum of educating children in exile while sustaining the hope of a quick return home, to the long-term influence of émigré-host encounters on literary creations and the formation of transnational counter-revolutionary identities. In these, the imaginary boundaries between the self and the other were often blurred, resulting in the creation of hybrid cultural objects.53 From these studies emerges a highly heterogeneous network of European actors and agents involved, voluntarily or not, in the circulation of ideas and the institution of cultural transfers: teachers and school administrators, writers and novelists, actors, publishers and readers. The children of the emigration, or the petits émigrés as Madame de Genlis wrote, are both an absent and a fascinating group of migrants in the scholarship. In Chap. 5, ‘Émigré Children and the French School at Penn’, Kirsty Carpenter focuses on the pedagogical and financial challenges

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encountered by various administrators of the school for émigrés boys created in 1792 by Edmund Burke in Buckinghamshire. She argues that this unique institution is a valuable angle from which to observe the tensions between the British and the French. How could one teach émigrés the English language whilst preserving French tradition and a French (counter-­ revolutionary) identity? In studies of refuge, the choice to leave is often perceived as ‘an individual investment decision. Family members other than the household head are not always explicitly considered.’54 Understanding the intellectual formation of the youngest in exile opens the door to the question of the intellectual impact of emigration on identity formation in the nineteenth century. This long-term approach is precisely how Juliette Reboul seeks to comprehend the influence of the literature of emigration and counter-revolutionary theories on European mentalities. In Chap. 6, ‘Counter-Revolutionary Transfers?’, she surveys approximately 40 catalogues of British private libraries printed between 1795 and 1830 with the aim of creating a methodological basis for a larger study on the European influence of émigré literature and the literature on emigration. With her bottom-up approach, she deftly shifts away from the traditional literary microcosm made of vocal émigrés. The focus is instead the penetration of émigré and exilic ideas into the homes of the host society. The ultimate argument of her chapter is that titles by French exiles need to be thought of as constitutive of the much larger nexus of texts produced after 1789 in order to comprehend the reception and mutation of exilic counter-revolutionary ideas and practices in the British Isles (and, as her sample expands, throughout Europe) from the 1790s onwards. Zooming in on the novels and memoirs of three émigré women who had been exiled in London, Laure Philip delves into the traumatic images and the melancholia conveyed through these texts in Chap. 7, ‘The Trauma of the Emigration in the Novels of Three French Émigrées in London’. Her literary analysis brings a fresh look to the study of private and gendered experiences of exile whilst it contends that key traumatic episodes of the emigration are creatively reworked through prose fiction. Philip argues that fiction writing provided solace for these émigrées-turned-authors during or after the exile. In detangling the layers of fictionalised, embellished, and at times traumatic memories, one can get a better understanding of the cultural impact the emigration had on the sentimental novel and these women’s individual stories. From émigré novels to émigré theatre, Clare Siviter revisits the theatrical cultures of Mannheim and Hamburg during the emigration in Chap. 8, ‘Playing the Nation?’. She compellingly

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

claims that the concept of ‘émigré theatre’ in German lands should not be restricted to troupes of exiles performing plays in French, but should also include the study of local troupes adapting their programme to émigré audiences. Wholeheartedly embracing the pragmatism and business flair of local theatres in Germany in their adaptation to an influx in French migrants, and coining their enterprise as a phenomenon of ‘émigré theatre’, Siviter paves the way for many comparative studies of émigré theatre in Europe. Together, these four chapters question the part played by the foreign or the other in the formation of national imaginaries, even when the émigrés made ‘public claims about the continuity of their identity as “French” despite their travels abroad’.55 The French emigration is placed within the broader conceptual framework of global and imperial entanglements in the third part of this volume, questioning both the uniqueness of the experience of the émigrés in an age when many where forced away from their homeland by political upheavals and the impact of migration on the Atlantic colonial world. Patrick Harris and Friedemann Pestel both widen the scope of this volume: geographically, with the inclusion of non-European territories (in both the Atlantic and Pacific), and chronologically, by carefully demonstrating that their flight did not stop the colonial claims of planters-turned-­émigrés and analysing the complexity of migrant social circles in exile in which new exiles and historical refugees bonded over their losses. In Chap. 9, ‘Émigrés and Transimperial Politics’, Patrick Harris zooms in on the colonial pretensions and lobbying of Pierre Victor Malouet. This émigré publicly assumed a strategic role in the imperial war opposing Britain and the French Republic over Saint-Domingue and the newly independent Haiti. Harris’ detailed overview of Malouet’s political manoeuvring with the Pitt ministry about the fate of the French Caribbean colony shows how ‘British imperial policy was interwoven with distinctively French perspectives and debates surrounding empire, slavery, and the fundamentals of political order’. Friedemann Pestel takes a broader approach in ‘The Age of Emigrations: French Émigrés and Global Entanglements of Political Exile’. In Chap. 10, he considers the French emigration in connection to seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century forced migrations and imposed exiles, including the Huguenots and the American loyalists. This impactful ‘Age of Emigrations’ corresponds to what he previously defined as ‘the creation of a multinational political diaspora of refugees of revolution’ in which ‘interrelations began to dissolve the individual characters of the various revolutions and the emigrations they caused’.56 Pestel argues that the collaborative and

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c­ompetitive tensions between these turn-of-the-century migrants reinforced the émigrés’ fight for political relevance. It certainly permitted them to mobilise support from their host societies. Perhaps central to both chapters is the émigrés’ need to influence host governments and to establish a strategy of survival that saw many trying to sway—from a singularly inferior position and often to no avail—those who might restore some of their previous status and grant them some modicum of stability. The volume concludes with the thorny problem of the return to France from legal, political, and religious standpoints. Napoléon’s policy-making agenda takes centre stage in analysing the conditions of return and resistance to the new regime. Away from Paris, the modalities of the return of the Bourbons rely heavily on local populations’ desire for peace and prosperity and on British political meddling. In Chap. 11, ‘Healing the Republic’s “Great Wound”’, Kelly Summers tackles the complexities of the legal reintegration of the émigrés in the first few years of the Consulat. The process of radiation from the list of émigrés was one, Summers explains, that was notoriously inefficient and corrupt, and its reform became the object of constant ‘inter-ministerial power struggles […] and brash experimentation’. She situates Bonaparte’s evolving policy towards the émigrés, which culminated in the General Amnesty of 1802, in his broader plan to consolidate power as emperor and establish a ‘police state’. Also concerned with the impact of Napoléon’s policies on emigration, Dominic Aidan Bellenger discusses the dilemmas faced by the exiled clergy in Britain and its reorganisation after the 1801 Concordat in Chap. 12 on ‘Blanchardism’. He paints a vivid picture of the exiled bishops’ networks and how they articulated their opposition in the form of Gallicanism and an almost messianic Episcopalianism. Bellenger shows the sheer determination of a group of controversialists that ‘lost the campaign but not the war’. The Duc d’Angoulême was as determined to return to France as the Blanchardistes, but he was more successful: in Chap. 13, ‘The Return of the Émigrés’, Philip Mansel discusses the importance of the local and international network of the Duc d’Angoulême in securing his landing in Bordeaux on 12 March 1814. He demonstrates how the royalist discourse promising a return to economic prosperity seduced the Bordelais. Above all, Mansel reveals a greater British role in this Bourbon victory than previously thought, whilst he brings to the fore the political and strategic importance of provincial cities in the Restoration. Simon Burrows, now a veteran of the study of the French emigration, concludes the volume with Chap. 14 with a postface exhorting young

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researchers to embrace a subject which, as a young scholar in the early 1990s, he stumbled upon by accident. As he points out, the contributions to this collection prove that the study of the French emigration has been completely revolutionised in the last 20  years. Far from having ‘learnt nothing and forgotten nothing’, the émigrés are now perceived as agents of cultural, social, and political modernity. In finding themselves out of time and place, connected and disconnected to the patrie, at odds or integrated with foreign host societies, hoping for their memories to become history, the French émigrés played an integral role in the transition to the nineteenth century while simultaneously leaving a long-lasting mark as unique actors of our European history. Acknowledgement  We are grateful to Kate Astbury and Kelly Summers for their careful reviewing of this introduction.

Notes 1. Letter of the Chevalier de Panat to Mallet Du Pan, January 1796, reproduced in A. Sayous, Mémoires et correspondance de Mallet du Pan, II, 195– 197, at p.  197. On the question on the aftermath of 1815 and the counter-revolution, see Caron and Luis, Rien appris, rien oublié. 2. The question of the incidence of the French emigration has not been resolved since Greer attempted in the 1950s to calculate how many individuals had been recorded on the French émigré lists. A recent attempt at counting émigrés can be seen in Dunne ‘Quantifier l’émigration des nobles’. It is furthermore difficult, if not impossible, to define the incidence of emigration per host country due to the absence of exhaustive contemporary administrative sources from non-French governments. 3. The often quoted Vidalenc and Diesbach failed to go beyond the anecdotal. 4. Baldensperger, Mouvement des idées dans l’émigration française. A second attempt in comparative history and the impact of the emigration in various European countries was initiated by Carpenter and Mansel, French Emigrés in Europe. See also the work by Baldensperger’s student and emulator in the discipline of comparative history: Maspéro-Clerc, Un Journaliste contre-révolutionnaire. 5. We do not imply that there was no scholarship related to the emigration. There were multiple biographical studies on aristocratic émigrés, the emigration from various French regions, or the economic impact on the French society and State of the emigration in the late 1790s up to the mid-­ nineteenth century. On the latter, see Bouloiseau, Etude de l’émigration;

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Bodinier and Teyssier, L’Evènement le plus important de la Révolution, and, more recently, Franck and Michalopoulos, ‘Emigration During the French Revolution’. 6. For an excellent summary of the historiography on this topic before and after 1989, see Rance, ‘L’Historiographie de l’émigration’, in ed. Bourdin, Les Noblesses françaises dans l’Europe de la Révolution, pp. 355–368. 7. Physical is understood here as sources that were non-existent, had been destroyed or physically absent but rediscovered by scholars. 8. There have been several excellent biographies and studies of émigrés and counter-revolutionary thinkers. See, for instance, but not exclusively, Mansel, Louis XVIII; Armenteros, The French Idea of History. 9. See, for instance, Walczak, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and ‘Die Französische Revolution und der Kunstmarkt Englands’. 10. These epistemological advances happened notably in transnational studies, global history, and a refining of gender studies, for example. 11. The conference, entitled ‘Connected Histories and Memories; French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe’, was held at Radboud University Nijmegen in June 2017. The editors of this volume are forever thankful to Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen and the University of Western Sydney for their gracious financial help. 12. Carpenter and Mansel, eds., French Emigrés in Europe. Collections including chapters on the emigration abound; see, for instance, Bourdin (ed.), Noblesses françaises and Höpel and Middell (eds), Réfugiés et Emigrés. 13. We are particularly grateful to Matthijs Lok who presented a paper on François-Xavier de Feller’s anti-Enlightenment thoughts; Lien Verpoest for her communication on the émigrés in Russia; and Lisanne Jansen who presented a new perspective on Madame de Genlis’ writings. We would also like to thank Gabriella Angeloni who offered a useful comparison between the émigrés of the French Revolution and the English loyalists of the American one. 14. According to Lacour-Gayet, Calonne or Christophe Henning in Visse, 1789. L’Année révolutionnaire. 15. Biard and Dupuy, (eds), La Révolution française, dynamiques et ruptures, p. 219. See also McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment and Masseau, Les Ennemis des Lumières. 16. Edmund Burke, Reflections. See Bourke, Empire and Revolution. On the idea of a transnational reinvention of an ‘Ancient Constitution’, see ‘Reinventing the Ancient Constitution’ in the soon to be published monograph by Matthijs Lok (manuscript in progress). 17. For instance, on Germany and Austria see Burkhardt, Konstanz im 18. Jahrhundert; Winkler, Emigranten der Französischen Revolution. On the British Isles see Carpenter, Refugees. Reboul, French Emigration.

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19

On Italy see Amandine Fauchon, ‘Mutations de la sociabilité mondaine’ and her chapter in Bourdin, Noblesses françaises; Chopelin, ‘Des Loups déguisés en agneaux’. On Spain and Portugal see Gutierrez, El Exilio; Luis, ‘Vivre et survivre en exil’ and ‘Une histoire de réfugiés politiques’; Castelo-Branco Chaves, A emigração francesa em Portugal durante a Revolução. On North America see Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French; Meadows, ‘Engineering Exile’, Villerbu, Les Francais et les Etats-Unis. On Austria and Eastern Europe see Lien Verpoest, ‘Enlightened Path’; Godsey, ‘La Société était au fond légitimiste’. 18. See Lynn Hunt ‘The French Revolution in Global Context’ and Maya Jasanoff ‘Revolutionary Exiles: The American Loyalists and French Émigré Diasporas’ in Armitage and Subrahmanyam, The Age of Revolutions. 19. Philippe Minard, ‘Global, Connected, or Transnational: Shifting the scale of history’. 20. One of the most recent articles on the subject is Ashburn Miller, ‘A Fiction of the French Nation’. 21. Carpenter and Mansel, eds., French Emigrés in Europe. 22. Espagne, Transferts culturels franco-allemands. 23. Thomas Höpel, ‘Kulturtransfer im Vergleich’. Karine Rance, Mémoires de nobles émigrés. See also Middell, ‘Révolution française et l’Allemagne’. A similar observation is made in Burrows, ‘Cultural Politics of Exile’. 24. On cultural transfers from the French to their hosts, see, for instance, Maike Manske, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Kulturtransfers and Matthias Winkler and Friedemann Pestel, ‘Provisorische Integration und Kulturtransfer’. 25. Werner and Zimmerman, ‘Beyond Comparison’. 26. Modlinger and Sonntag, (eds), Other People’s Pain. See also Luckhurst, The Trauma Question and his article ‘Beyond Trauma’, p. 15. 27. Astbury, Narrative; see also Philip’s chapter in this volume and her thesis ‘The Novels of French Noblewomen Emigrées in London in the 1790s’. 28. Rance, ‘Identité narrative et ipséité’. 29. Ian Watts’ idea that the sentimental novel is essentially British is long gone; scholars now consider the diversity of literary creations in Europe and the cultural exchanges between national canons. Watts, The Rise of the Novel. Michael McKeon’s critique of Watts is a good place to start: ‘Watt’s Rise of the Novel’. 30. Jaquier, Lotterie, Seth, (eds), Destins romanesques de l’émigration. 31. Rossi, Mémoires aristocratiques féminins. Claudine Giachetti, in her Poétique des lieux, also theorised literary critique for the female memoirs of this period, speaking of emotional spaces. 32. See, for instance, Genand, Romans de l’émigration.

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33. Astbury, Narrative Responses. The period 1830–1850 has been seen as the moment when realism ‘displace[d] the sentimental novel’. The realist novel appropriated some of the sentimental novel’s characteristics according to Margaret Cohen, in ‘Women and fiction in the nineteenth century’, p. 55; 60. 34. See Hunt, Family Romance of the French Revolution; Barker and Chalus, (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England; Hesse, The Other Enlightenment. 35. Jennings, Masculin/féminin; Carpenter, Novels of Madame de Souza; Eugénie et Mathilde. 36. Male studies are still underrepresented in gender studies, especially in France, despite being the topic of recent doctoral theses. See Corbin and Perrot, ‘Des femmes, des hommes et des genres’ and Riot-Sarcey, Le Genre en questions. 37. Heuer, Family and the Nation. 38. On the question of the heterogeneous profile of émigrés, see Rance, ‘L’Historiographie’. Rubinstein’s 1933 thesis, Die franzosiche Emigration nach 1789, only recently published, was amongst the first to present a sociology of emigration, presenting a very heterogeneous group. Greer in his Incidence of the Emigration was amongst the first to demonstrate the socio-­ economic diversity of the group using only French sources; his national survey of emigration has been confirmed and specified many times since. Bellenger in his French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles, Carpenter in her Refugees of the French Revolution, Höpel in Emigranten der Französischen Revolution in Preussen, to cite only a few studies, found a similar socio-­ economic heterogeneity when studying émigré groups in their host communities. The scholarship on the political diversity of emigration was renewed with studies such as Simon Burrows, French Exile Journalism or more recently Pestel, Kosmopoliten wider Willen. 39. Wahnich, Impossible citoyen. 40. The term itself entered the dictionary of the Académie in 1798. 41. See in this collection chapters by Ashburn Miller and Summers. 42. Pestel (‘French Revolution and Migration’) associates the dichotomous periodisation of emigration to political self-fashioning during the Restoration period—Madame de Staël justified her emigration by its lateness. However, this dichotomy was perhaps already at play in the late 1790s. 43. See Chapter 3 of Kelly Summers’ ‘The Great Return’, as well as her forthcoming book on the topic. 44. On domestic servants in exile, see in this collection the chapter by Sydney Watts. See also Reboul, French Emigration to Great Britain. 45. Martin, Contre Révolution, révolution et Nation.

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46. Reboul, French Emigration to Great Britain. 47. Idem. See also Carpenter, Refugees and Bellenger. 48. Carpenter, Refugees. 49. For more on this semantic shift, see Kelly Summers above, as well as the foundational study that she cites, Boroumand, ‘Emigration and the Rights of Man’. 50. Jasanoff, ‘Revolutionary Exiles: The American loyalist and the French Emigré diasporas’ in Armitage and Subrahmanyam, Age of Revolutions in Global Context; Sylvie Aprile, Le Siècle des exilés. 51. See Pestel, ‘French Revolution and Migration’. In this, he argues that the French Emigration differs from predeceasing migratory phenomenon (the Huguenot Diaspora and the Jacobites’ flight) ‘on account of its political character and geographical scope’ as well as the temporal dimension. 52. For Britain, see, for instance, Sparrow, ‘The Alien Office’. 53. See Bhabha, Location of Culture. 54. Epstein and Gang, ‘Introduction: Migration and Culture’ in Epstein and Gang (eds), Migration and Culture. 55. Ashburn Miller, ‘A Fiction of the French Nation’. 56. Pestel, ‘French Revolution and Migration after 1789’.

Bibliography Armenteros, Carolina. The French Idea of History. Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs, 1794–1854. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. Armitage, David and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Ashburn Miller, Mary. ‘A Fiction of the French Nation. The Emigré Novel, Nostalgia, and National Identity 1797–1815’, in Historical Reflections 44/2 (2018): 45–66. Astbury, Katherine. Narrative Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution. Oxford: Legenda, 2012. Aprile, Sylvie. Le Siècle des exilés. Bannis et proscrits, de 1789 à la Commune. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2010. Baldensperger, Fernand. Le Mouvement des idées dans l’émigration française (1789–1815), 2 tomes, Les Expériences du présent; Prophètes du passé, Théories de l’avenir. Paris, 1924. Barker, Hannah and Elaine Chalus, (eds). Gender in Eighteenth-Century England. London, New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997. Bellenger, Dominic Aiden. The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after 1789. Bath, Downside Abbey, 1986. Biard, Michel and Pascal Dupuy, (eds). La Révolution française, dynamiques et ruptures. Paris: Armand Colin, 2004.

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Bodinier, Bernard and Eric Teyssier. L’Évènement le plus important de la Révolution. La Vente des Biens Nationaux (1789–1867). CTHS: Paris, 2000. Boroumand, Ladan. ‘Emigration and the Rights of Man: French Revolutionary Legislators Equivocate,’ trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Journal of Modern History 72 (March 2000): 79. Bouloiseau, Marc. Etude de l’émigration et de la vente des biens des émigrés (1792–1830). Instructions, sources, bibliographies, législations, tableaux. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1963. Bourdin, Philippe. Les Noblesses françaises dans l’Europe de la Révolution. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010. Bourke, Richard. Empire and Revolution. The Political Life of Edmund Burke. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the French Revolution. London: James Dodsley, Pall Mall, 1790. Burkhardt, Martin. Konstanz im 18. Jahrhundert. Materielle Lebensbedingungen einer landstädischen Bevölkerung am Ende der vorindustriellen Gesellschaft. Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1997. Burrows, Simon. French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000. ———, ‘The Cultural Politics of Exile: French émigré Literary Journalism in London, 1793–1814’, in Journal of European Studies, 29/2 (1999): 157–177. Carpenter, Kirsty. Refugees of the French Revolution. Emigrés in London, 1789– 1802. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Carpenter, Kirsty and Philip Mansel. The French Emigrés in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution, 1789–1814. Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Carpenter, Kirsty, The Novels of Madame de Souza in Social and Political Perspective. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. ———, Eugénie et Mathilde, ou Mémoires de la famille du comte de Revel, by Madame de Souza. MHRA Critical Texts, Vol. 26, London 2014. Caron, Jean-Claude and Jean-Philippe Luis. Rien appris, rien oublié? Les Restaurations dans l’Europe postnapoléonienne (1814–1830). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015. Castelo-Branco Chavez, José. A Emigração Francesa em Portugal durante a Revolução. Amadora: Livraria Bertrand, 1984. Chopelin, Paul. ‘Des Loups déguisés en agneaux? L’Accueil des prêtres constitutionnels émigrés dans l’Etat Pontifical (1792–1799)’ in Annales Historiques de la Révolution Francaise, 341(2005): 85–109. Cohen, Margaret. ‘Women and Fiction in the Nineteenth Century’. In The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel from 1800 to the Present, edited by Timothy Urwin, 54–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Corbin, Alain and Michelle Perrot, ‘Des Femmes, des hommes et des genres’ in Vingtième siècle. Revue d’Histoire, 3–75, (2002): 167–176.

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Diesbach, Ghislain (de). Histoire de l’émigration: 1789–1814. Paris: Perrin, 1984. Dunne, John. ‘Quantifier l’émigration des nobles pendant la Révolution française: problèmes et perspectives’. In La Contre-Révolution en Europe XVIIIe-XIXe siècle: Réalités politiques et sociales, résonances culturelles et idéologiques, edited by Jean-Clément Martin, 133–141. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001. Epstein, Gil and Ira Gang (eds). Migration and Culture: Frontiers of Economic and Globalization. Bingley: Emerald, 2010. Espagne, Michel. Les Transferts culturels franco-allemands. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. Fauchon, Amandine. ‘Les Mutations de la sociabilité mondaine au miroir des réseaux épistolaires d’une noblesse d’affaires (1807–1813), in Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, 373 (2013): 59–79. Franck, Raphael and Stelios Michalopoulos. ‘Emigration during the French Revolution: Consequences in the Short and Longue Durée. NBER Working Paper No. 23936. 2017. Furstenberg, Francois. When the United-States spoke French: Five Refugees who shaped a Nation. New York: Penguin, 2014. Genand, Stéphanie (ed). Romans de l’émigration. Paris: Champion, 2008. Giacchetti, Claudine. Enquête sur les mémoires féminins de l’aristocratie française (1789–1848). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009. Greer, Donald. The Incidence of the Emigration during the French Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951. Godsey, William. ‘La Société était au fond légitimiste: Émigrés, Aristocracy, and the Court at Vienna, 1789–1848’ in European History Quarterly v35 n1 (01/2005): 63–95. Gutierrez Garcia-Brazales, Manuel, ‘El Exilio del Clero Francés en España durante la Revolución (1791–1815)’. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Zaragoza, 2005. Hesse, Carla. The Other Enlightenment. How French Women Became Modern. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Heuer, Jennifer Ngaire. The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Höpel, Thomas. Emigranten der Französischen Revolution in Preussen (1789– 1806). Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2000. ———. ‘Kulturtransfer im Vergleich. Revolutionsemigranten in Preussen und Sachsen an der Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert’, in Gregor Kokorz and Helga Mitterbauer, Übergängen und Verflechtungen. Frankfurt am Main, 2004: 23–46. ———. and Katharina Middell (eds) ‘Emigrés et Réfugiés. Migration zwischen Frankreich und Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert’ in Comparativ. Vol 7 No 5/6 (1997). Hunt, Lynn. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992.

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Jaquier, Claire, Florence Lotterie and Catriona Seth (eds). Destins romanesques de l’émigration. Paris: Desjonquères, 2007. Jennings, Chantal Bertrand. Masculin/féminin. Le XIXe siècle à l’épreuve du genre. Toronto: Centre d’Etudes du XIXe siècle Joseph Sable, 1999. Lacour-Gayet, Robert. Calonne, financier, réformateur, contre-révolutionnaire, 1734–1802. Paris: Hachette, 1963. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge, 2008. ———. ‘Beyond Trauma: Torturous Times’, European Journal of English Studies, 14 /1 (2010): 11–21. Luis, Jean-Philippe. ‘Vivre et survivre en exil: le Cas du clergé français émigré en Espagne pendant la Révolution’. In Après 89, la Révolution, modèle ou repoussoir?, edited by Lucienne Domergue and Georges Lamoine, 89–103. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires de Toulouse le Mirail, 1991. ———. ‘Une Histoire de réfugiés politiques: le Clergé français réfugié en Espagne pendant la Révolution Française’. in Exils, passages et transitions. Chemins d’une recherche sur les marges, Hommage à Rose Duroux, edited by Anne Dubet and Stéphanie Urdican, 25–34. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise-­ Pascal, 2008. McKeon, Michael. ‘Watt’s Rise of the Novel within the Tradition of the Rise of the Novel,’ in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 12, Number 2–3, (January– April 2000): 253–276. McMahon, Darrin. Enemies of the Enlightenment. The French Counter-­ Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Mansel, Philip. Louis XVIII. London: John Murray, 2005. Manske, Maike. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Kulturtransfers. Emigranten der Französischen Revolution in Hamburg, Bremen und Lübeck. Saarbrücken: 2008. Martin, Jean-Clément. Contre Révolution, révolution et Nation. Paris: Le Seuil, 1998. Maspéro-Clerc, Hélène. Un Journaliste contre-révolutionnaire, Jean-Gabriel Peltier (1760–1825). Paris: Société des études Robespierristes, 1973. Masseau, Didier. Les Ennemis des Lumières: l’Antiphilosophie au temps des Lumières. Paris: Albin Michel, 2000. Meadows, Darrell. ‘Engineering Exile: Social Networks and the French Atlantic Community, 1789–1809’, in French Historical Studies 23/1 (2000): 67–102. Middell, Matthias. ‘La Révolution française et l’Allemagne: du paradigme comparatiste à la recherche des transferts culturels’, in Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, 317 (1999). Minard, Philippe. ‘Global, Connected, or Transnational: Shifting the scale of history’, in Esprit, 12 (2013): 20–32. Modlinger, Martin and Philipp Sonntag, (eds). Other People’s Pain: Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics, Cultural, History and Literary Imagination, vol. 18. Bern: Peter Lang, 2011.

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Pestel, Friedemann. Kosmopoliten wider Willen. Die ‘monarchiens’ als Revolutionsemigranten. Pariser Historische Studie 104: Berlin/Boston, 2015. ———, ‘Educating against Revolution. French Émigré Schools and the Challenge of the Next Generation’, in European History Quarterly, 47/2 (2017): 229–256. ———, ‘French Revolution and Migration after 1789’, Europäische Geschichte Online (2017): http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/europe-on-the-road/political-migration-exile/friedemann-pestel-french-revolution-and-migrationafter-1789 Petit, Bruno. ‘Productions francophone contre-révolutionnaire des imprimeries en Suisse, 1789–1815’ in Annales Historiques de la Révolution francaise (2016): 3–26. Philip, Laure. ‘The Novels of French Noblewomen Emigrées in London in the 1790s. Memory. Trauma and Female voice in the Emigré novel.’ Unpublished thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. Rance, Karine. ‘Mémoires de nobles émigrés dans les pays germaniques pendant la Révolution française’. Unpublished thesis, Paris I, 2001. ———. ‘Identité narrative et ipséité’. In Identités, Appartenances, Revendications Identitaires, edited by Marc Bellissa, Anna Bellavitis et  al., 385–393. Paris: Nolin, 2006. Reboul, Juliette. French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Riot-Sarcey, Michèle. Le Genre en questions. Pouvoir, politique, écriture de l’histoire, (Recueil de textes 1993–2010). Paris: Seuil, 2015. Rossi, Henri. Mémoires aristocratiques féminins 1789–1848. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998. Rubinstein, Nina. Die Franzosische Emigration nach 1789: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der Politischen Emigration (ed. Dirk Raith). Graz and Vienna: Nausner & Nausner, 2000. Sayous, A. Mémoires et correspondance de Mallet du Pan pour servir à l’histoire de la Révolution française, 2 vols. Paris: Amyot and Cherbuliez, 1851. Summers, Kelly. ‘The Great Return: Reintegrating Émigrés in Revolutionary France, 1789–1802’. PhD diss., Stanford University, 2015. Verpoest, Lien. ‘An Enlightened Path towards Conservatism: Critical Junctures and Changing Elite Perceptions in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia’, in European Review of History (2016): 704–731. Vidalenc, Jean. Les Emigrés français (1789–1825). Caen: Publications de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de l’Université de Caen, 1963. Villerbu, Tangui. Les Français et les Etats-Unis, 1789–1815. Marchands, exilés, missionnaires et diplomates. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017. Visse, Jean-Paul. 1789, l’Année révolutionnaire. La Voix du Nord, 1990. Wahnich, Sophie. L’Impossible citoyen, l’étranger dans le discours de la Révolution française, Paris: Albin Michel, 1997.

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Walczak, Gerrit. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun: Eine Kunstlerin in der Emigration 1789– 1802. Munich; Berlin: Deutscher Kunsterverl., 2004. ———, ‘Die Französische Revolution und der Kunstmarkt Englands: Jean-­ Laurent Mosnier in der Londoner Emigration’ in Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 69 (2006): 37–66. Watts, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and. Fielding. University of California Press, 1957. Werner, Michael and Benedict Zimmerman. ‘Beyond comparison: Histoire Croisée and the challenge of reflexivity’, in History and Theory, 45/1 (2006): 30–50. Winkler, Matthias. Die Emigranten der Französischen Revolution in Hochstift und Diözese Bamberg. Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2010. ——— and Friedemann Pestel, ‘Provisorische Integration und Kulturtransfer. Französische Revolutionsemigranten im Heiligen Römischen Reich deutscher Nation’ in Francia – Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte 43 (2016), S. 137–160.

PART I

The Regional and National Challenges of the Emigration

CHAPTER 2

The Impossible Émigré: Moving People and Moving Borders in the Annexed Territories of Revolutionary France Mary Ashburn Miller

On 13 Ventôse, year 7 (3 March 1799), the French Directory examined a petition on behalf of a Brussels resident named Louis Anné.1 Anné had been placed on the dreaded Liste Générale des émigrés, a list of individuals who had left France since the start of the Revolution and thereby became suspected of counter-revolutionary sentiments. Individuals who were deemed to be émigrés could have their property confiscated and were forbidden from reentering French territories upon penalty of death; their families were often put under surveillance. Anné, understandably, was petitioning to have his name removed from the list.

The author wishes to thank the members of the Portland-area French History group, especially Patricia Goldsworthy-Bishop, Jessica Hammerman, Tom Luckett, Sue Peabody, and Barbara Traver, for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

M. A. Miller (*) Reed College, Portland, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Philip, J. Reboul (eds.), French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_2

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The narrative presented in his petition was this: sometime in 1794, Anné had left his native Brussels to travel for his work as a wine merchant. Not long after he left, French troops arrived in Brussels; the Belgian provinces of the Austrian Netherlands were annexed by France on 9 Vendémiaire of year IV (1 October 1795).2 Nine new departments of France were created, including Dyle, which encompassed Brussels. Meanwhile, Anné fell ill in the town of Bremen and was unable to return to Brussels within three months of the French invasion, as required by French law. Never intending to leave Brussels permanently, and certainly never intending to leave France, which after all had not had sovereignty over Brussels at the time of his departure, Anné argued that he should be removed from the list of émigrés, that he should be permitted to return to Brussels, and that his belongings should be deemed safe from confiscation. As evidence for his story, Anné’s petition included a declaration from nine citizens of Brussels attesting that he had left four months before the arrival of French troops, and a doctor’s note saying that Anné had fallen ill and had been unable to return to his hometown after Belgium became a part of France. Despite the apparent logic of Anné’s petition, it was denied, as were all thirteen of the petitions from alleged émigrés from the new department of Dyle that the Directory saw that day, all of whom were requesting removal from the Liste Générale, and many of whom recounted narratives similar to Anné’s. Individuals who had left Belgium well before the arrival of French troops were deemed to be émigrés from the French nation. Anné would remain on the list, excluded from reentering the newly expanded boundaries of France, and living in Hamburg and Bremen until Napoleon offered a general amnesty to almost all the émigrés in 1802. The case of Anné, and of émigrés in the annexed territory of Belgium more broadly, allows for a reflection on the ways in which emigration can challenge and reshape understandings of the nation. Like the negative of a photograph, émigré legislation reveals the citizen in reverse: in drawing the lines between emigrant and citizen, legislators demarcated the ideological and geographic boundaries of the nation. Anné’s seemingly absurd case highlights fundamental questions about sovereignty exposed by the problem of emigration, especially as France expanded its borders in the late Convention and Directory. Emigration in the annexed territory of Belgium, in this case, threatened two fundamental tenets of revolutionary sovereignty: first, the idea of citizenship and sovereignty as the products of will, and, second, the notion of a united France subject to universal laws.3

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Emigration is typically understood as the willful transgression of national borders. Indeed, émigré legislation throughout the French Revolution emphasized the importance of distinguishing those emigrants who merely happened to be outside the borders of the nation or who were traveling for a legitimate purpose from those who left with counter-­ revolutionary intentions. But what happens when the borders of a nation shift or become illegible, as in the case of the annexed territories? How can someone intentionally cross a border that does not exist, or that is not clear? Anné’s case crystallizes the crisis of citizenship caused by the confluence of moving people and moving borders. He fell victim to the need to establish clear boundaries in times of tumult and movement. Anné’s case, on paper, seems to be a straightforward one: merchants were supposed to be excluded from the list of émigrés, as were individuals who had left prior to the integration of Belgium and France. There is no evidence that his documents were doubted or that he was suspected of counter-­revolutionary activity; to the contrary, the few records I have been able to find about his stays in Hamburg and Bremen suggest that he was involved in provisioning the French armies.4 And yet he, like many of his compatriots, remained on the list; the outcome of Anné’s case was the rule rather than the exception. Although French legislators tried to distinguish between mere border-crossers and émigrés, making emigration a willed, ideological break with the nation, the opacity and mutability of borders in the era of annexation made such distinctions not only more difficult, but seemingly moot. The very definition of a nation as a contractual body of willing citizens, so crucial to revolutionary ideas of sovereignty, was tested and ultimately undermined by the circumstances of alleged émigrés from annexed territories.

1   Emigration as an Act of Will From the very first discussions about criminalizing emigration, French legislators debated the relationship between the citizen, the émigré, and the social contract binding the nation together. Indeed, it is in the sessions on emigration that members of the National Assembly made some of their clearest enunciations of what it meant for a nation to be bound by a contract, and what it would mean to leave it. When the National Assembly debated the constitutionality of criminalizing emigration in 1791, some legislators referred to contract theory to argue for each individual’s right to leave the nation as the counterpoint to the willed contract that created

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the nation. According to Louis-Jean-Henri Darnaudat, ‘To forbid emigration is not a right … In a free nation, we should understand that an association only lasts as long as the shared sentiment of its members, and that the laws of the association obligate those in the minority only because they have the right to subscribe to them to withdraw from the association.’5 Condorcet likewise maintained that ‘Nature accords all men the right to leave their country.’6 The expatriate might abandon his civic rights by leaving his nation, but the nation could not strip him of his human rights. Even as opponents of emigration legislation referred to contract theory to support their positions, so too did legislators seeking to criminalize emigration. For Jean-François Rewbell, the social contract relied on the expectation that citizens would support one another rather than desert their society in times of hardship. On 28 February 1791, Rewbell argued that emigration laws were essential for any functioning Constitution: ‘I cannot conceive of a Constitution without conceiving of a society at the same time; I will never believe that a society could exist in which the duties of its members were not reciprocal.’ Émigrés, he argued, shirked their responsibilities to their fellow countrymen: ‘By what right can my associate demand that I defend his possessions with my body and my blood, while he flees and will not defend mine?’7 To the future Committee of Public Safety member Prieur de la Marne, this idea of reciprocity was ‘the essential foundation of all Constitutions, and without [it], a society cannot exist.’8 Society was held together by the expectation that members would support one another; widespread emigration fractured that expectation as individuals left society instead of supporting their fellow ‘associates.’ Embedded within these debates was the crucial question of just what the nation was, and what it meant to cross its geopolitical boundaries. As Ladan Boroumand has pointed out, these debates point to two sometimes contradictory understandings of the social contract: Is the nation a collection of willing individuals who choose the compact under which to live? If so, then Condorcet was right: the converse of willed citizenship is willed emigration; for a contract to be meaningful, it needs to be chosen, and the freedom to opt out of the contract must be retained. Or was a nation, on the other hand, a collective and mutually responsible body, whose individuals gave up certain natural liberties upon entering into their shared contract? If so, then any time the collective was at risk, an individual’s ‘natural rights’ could be curtailed for the good of the nation.9 In their laws regarding emigration, legislators tried to walk a tightrope between these two conceptions of the contract by emphasizing two

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factors: the timing of an individual’s departure and his motive. Legislators who argued for the criminalization of emigration did so based on an understanding of what comes after the instantiation of the social contract; namely, that while one could opt out before the contract, to do so after was equivalent to abandoning the society that had protected him. Thus the initial laws against emigration distinguished between those who left France before 1 July 1789—presumably before the instantiation of the new contract—and those who left after. Article 7 of the initial 1791 law regarding émigrés stated, ‘Excepted from the [requirements for returning to the nation or relegation to émigré status] are Frenchmen established in foreign lands before 1 July 1789, [and] those whose absence dates from before that time.’10 These stipulations were reiterated in the more expansive anti-emigration law of 28 March 1793. After 1 July 1789, individuals were understood to have been involved in the reciprocal relationship that Prieur de la Marne had insisted held a nation together; leaving France after that date constituted a violation of the social contract. Post-Terror legislation for the most part affirmed the categories established by these early laws; the law of 25 Brumaire year III affirmed that post-Terror France would retain the category of émigré according to the same criteria as those established by the National Convention, and expanded it to include territories annexed since that date, while the Constitution of Year III explicitly stated that no émigrés would be permitted to return, and forbade the new legislature from creating new exceptions to the category of ‘émigré.’ Emigration was also, according to these laws, an act of will, just as citizenship itself was. From the outset of the Revolution, the amorphous ‘will of the people’ underpinned revolutionaries’ claims to legality and legitimacy. The 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen boldly declared, ‘The principle of all sovereignty rests essentially in the nation.’ The legitimacy of the nation’s constitution, laws, and governing bodies came not from God, nor from the will of the king, but from the nation itself. As Keith Baker has argued, this claim was one of the Revolution’s defining characteristics: ‘the principle of national sovereignty lay at the very heart of the French Revolution.’11 The nation was not merely an assemblage of individuals gathered under the aegis of a single authority, or the fortuitous coincidence of being born within the boundaries of a given territory, but instead was a contractual agreement binding individuals who chose to submit to the laws of a government.12 Thus, for the early period of the Revolution, it was an individual’s will, and specifically his willingness to swear a civic oath, that turned a foreigner living on French soil into a citizen.13

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It was also an individual’s will that turned a citizen into an émigré. Thus, children under the age of fourteen were exempted from the 28 March 1793 law against émigrés, presumably because they could have no responsibility for their actions.14 Legislation in 1800 would exonerate female émigrés under the demeaning assumption that they could not have willed to leave the nation, and instead had merely been the pawns of fathers and husbands who emigrated and took their female dependents with them.15 Emigration was not an accidental wandering across a border or a coerced voyage at the whim of another, but a willful rejection of the social contract. As the future Girondin Pierre-Victurien Vergniaud made clear in 1791, ‘It will not be the act of emigrating, but the guilty intention determining it, [that] will be punished.’16 As a result, emigration law was filled with intentional loopholes: individuals who were traveling for medical reasons to take the waters at spas were exempted in September 1792; businessmen, laborers, and students were exempted in March 1793, provided that they were traveling in accordance with their work and study needs. Vergniaud put the conundrum of identifying who was a mere traveler and who was an émigré most clearly: in the words of John Torpey, ‘Vergniaud noted that the essential point was to be able to distinguish between those who wanted to “leave the realm” and those who wanted to “abandon the patrie” – that is, the purpose of these measures was not to restrict emigration, but to be able to make ideological distinctions among those leaving.’17 At the very heart of émigré legislation, then, was the need to distinguish between those whose physical departures from France aligned with their ideological departures from the nation. What happens, however, when the borders around that nation become ambiguous? With the success of the revolutionary army, France’s boundaries stretched to encompass new lands; between 1792 and 1798, France annexed Savoy (1792), Belgium (1795), the ‘Left Bank of the Rhine’ (1797), and parts of Switzerland (1797–1798).18 These annexations unwittingly problematized the definition of the émigré as the shifting boundaries of the nation challenged the idea of willed entry into or exit from the French nation. The legal debates about categorizing émigrés from these territories, who often found themselves transgressing borders they did not know existed, raised questions about what defined both citizenship and emigration, what acts violated the social contract, and even what place the idea of the social contract should have in regulating citizenship in revolutionary France. The premises underlying emigration laws— the assumption that there was a difference between those who left before

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and after the start of the Revolution and the assumption that emigration was an act of will—would unravel as France’s borders shifted with the annexations of the 1790s.

2   The Law of 25 Brumaire The most relevant legislation regarding emigration in annexed territories like Belgium was the law of 25 Brumaire Year III, which stated in Title II that ‘all citizens who live in the pays of the Republic … who have left since the proclamation of the resolution [l’émission du voeu] of its inhabitants for a reunion with France, and who have not returned within three months from the date of the proclamation of the unification with the Republic’ are émigrés.19 There is much revealed in the language of this law. First, French citizenship in the annexed territories began with a will to be French. L’émission du voeu, the expression of consent by a body of people, was the basis of the integration of new territories under the revolutionary regimes. As Edward Kolla has demonstrated, French revolutionaries enacted a new form of territorial acquisition based on the principle of national self-determination. Prior to the Revolution, the fate of Belgium would have been decided by treaty between the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor, who had sovereignty over the Austrian Netherlands. The ‘will of the people’ would have been immaterial. But beginning in 1789, the French National Assembly began seeking some representation of consent from the people of territories it would annex, including Avignon, Savoy, and Nice.20 The law of 25 Brumaire, then, reflected the revolutionary ideal of self-­ determination, the idea that belonging to the French nation was a choice rather than a coincidence. Furthermore, according to the law of 25 Brumaire, one was an émigré from the moment of the declaration of the people’s will, not from the moment that the annexation was made official. This ambiguity is how Anné fell victim to the laws despite having left prior to annexation. Thus, for example, Dorothée Antoinette Quarré, who like Anné had left Brussels before the union of Belgium and France, was ‘definitively maintained’ on the Liste Générale des émigrés by the Directory, who directly appealed to Title II of the law of 25 Brumaire in the rejection of her petition, saying that departure was illegal not from the moment of annexation, but of the expression of the territory’s will—a moment that, astonishingly, was not given a specific date in Belgium.21

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The possible lapse in time between the often ambiguous expression of a region’s consent and its official annexation led to some dangerously subjective interpretations as to when that will was first expressed.22 In Belgium in 1795, no formal referendum was taken before the official annexation, making the moment of the ‘expression of the will’ a seemingly arbitrary date: was it 1787, when revolutionary murmurs had begun there; 1792, when French troops first ‘liberated’ parts of Belgium; 1795, when unification took place, or some moment in between?23 The question of timing, so important to original emigration regarding legislation, was here left unclear, especially because the law of 25 Brumaire itself predated the annexation of Belgium. Instead, alleged Belgian émigrés like Anné and Quarré seem to have been caught in a legal aporia. The 1795 law that formalized the annexation of Belgium and Liège referred back to the ‘resolution [voeu] expressed in 1793 by the communes of Ypres, Grammont, and other communes in Flanders and Brabant.’24 Yet between the spring of 1793 and the formal annexation of 9 Vendémiaire, those very communes had been under the dominion of the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II (from fall 1793 to 1794), and then under a military occupation by France for almost fifteen months, during which they were treated as conquered lands ripe for exploitation and depredation. The law of annexation, and its reference back to the voeu of 1793, seemed to erase these transfers of sovereignty, creating the illusion of a constant and uncontested will to be a part of France, and of constant and uncontested sovereignty of French law. That illusion opened up a temporal abyss into which Louis Anné tumbled. The law of 25 Brumaire, passed while Belgium was under Habsburg rule again, and the law of 9 Vendémiaire, which dated the émission du voeu of the Brabant lands to 1793, meant that Anné, leaving Belgium’s borders in 1794, was subject to a law that did not apply to him and that he could not have knowingly violated, and condemned for crossing a border that did not yet exist.25 Thus, according to the law of 25 Brumaire, to be French required an affirmative assertion of one’s will to be French. And yet, as Anné’s and Quarré’s cases reveal, the state provided no clear opportunity for asserting or demonstrating one’s will. To the contrary, borders became proxies for referendums. In this way, the social contract came to be represented by the boundaries of the nation.26 To choose to leave the nation was therefore understood to be a choice to leave the contract. Ironically, by reading border-crossing as a political act, and by using physical location to stand in

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for an assertion of the will, the French state ultimately undermined its own principles of self-determination, replacing willed citizenship with imposed citizenship. Anné could not have willed to leave France, since when he left Belgium it was not a part of France. What is more, his desire to be in France was not considered valid evidence when his petition was considered. Part of Anné’s plea was that he had been physically prevented from returning to Brussels within the three-month grace period allowed by the law of 25 Brumaire, and he provided letters from doctors to affirm that fact. Although he had wanted and intended to return, he could not. Yet such a claim proved insufficient. At the top of Anné’s petition, Jean-Pierre Duval, the Minister of Police, wrote his reason for dismissing Anné’s appeal: ‘Even if he had produced irrefutable evidence of an illness that prevented him from returning, it would not put him in the condition of any legal exception.’27 He underlined the last words for effect. It did not matter if Anné had wanted to return home, or even if he could. Here, not just will, but possibility was trumped by legality. Citizenship, far from being an assertion of will, became a series of bureaucratic checkboxes. A hard, dark line was drawn between those who were inside of France, and therefore loyal citizens, and those who were outside of France, and therefore traitorous émigrés. Dozens of Belgian citizens accused of emigration dutifully sent doctors’ notes to the Directory, hoping that evidence of an illness would justify their failure to return to their homelands within three months required by law. Across the board, their petitions were denied.28 Under the Directory, the reasons either for leaving the territory of France or for failing to return to France within the grace period accorded by the law of 25 Brumaire were no longer taken into account in assessing Belgian émigrés’ petitions. The Directory no longer made the distinction called for by Vergniaud in 1792 between those who left the territory and those who left the nation. Like in the legislative body itself, where those seated on the left were understood to be radicals and those on the right reactionary, where you stood physically came to signify where you stood politically. To step beyond the borders of France, then, was to demonstrate your unwillingness to participate in the social contract. The nation was redefined not as a community of willing citizens, but as a border that was both created and enforced by a bureaucratic state. Duval’s assertion that even if Anné had willed to return yet not been able to do so, there would be no legal grounds for accepting his petition, suggests that the discourse of will— crucial to the foundations of the French Republic—had become an

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a­ dministrative burden. The challenge of demonstrating will, especially in annexed territories, reduced an amorphous but powerful social contract to an administrative legal contract. Those who could not prove their residency using the necessary forms could not be granted citizenship. To some extent, Anné’s story and the story of the émigrés in annexed territories follows a similar trajectory as the broader narrative about foreignness and citizenship in the French Revolution traced by scholars like Michael Rapport and Sophie Wahnich.29 The French nation, which began with the spirit of cosmopolitan openness that allowed Anacharsis Cloots to sit in the Legislative Assembly, rapidly closed itself off, making the boundary between insider and outsider, citizen and foreigner, friend and enemy, much more difficult to traverse. Ladan Boroumand has argued that from the outset, emigration law problematized the idea of a nation bound by a willed contract; according to her, even the earliest emigration laws redefined the nation: ‘The citizen’s attachment to the fatherland cannot be the product of a contract; it is organic.’30 Yet the history of the annexed territories reveals a continuing attachment to the idea of will, alongside a recognition of its near impossibility to demonstrate. Other demonstrable factors became the representation of will—representations that superseded the words and statements of individuals. James C.  Scott has described the development of the state as involving, ‘rationalizing and standardizing what was a social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format.’31 In this case, the often illegible ‘hieroglyph’ of will was translated for administrative purposes into legible characteristics like geographic location (outside the borders) and adherence to the letter of the law (failing to return within the ninety days required by law, regardless of circumstances). Anné’s case, and the case of emigration in the annexed territories as a whole, serves as a reminder that revolutionary moments are times of effervescence, of confluence, of exchange and excitement, but they are also times of urgency, when identities get fixed and crystallized, when borders are created and enforced, when place and politics interact, and suspicion and entrenchment result. In our current day, we are all too aware of the ways in which border-crossers create anxieties for neighboring states, but we should remember, too, that movement changes and challenges the very definition of the state that individuals are leaving as well. The emigration crisis isn’t just a crisis caused by the French Revolution; it is also a crisis that reshapes the Revolution, and its very definition of nationhood. The debates over the application of the law of 25 Brumaire reveal that regardless of the emphasis on a ‘national will’ as the criterion for

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integration into the French nation, the individual’s willful acceptance or rejection of the social contract was no longer a necessary part of the definition of the émigré. Despite appeals to the importance of national self-­determination and the expression of a national will, neither becoming French nor becoming an émigré were typically acts of will in the case of annexed territories. Sylvie Aprile has referred to the émigrés as ‘cosmopolitans by chance.’32 Yet Louis Anné and many of his compatriots had become émigrés by chance. As the borders of France shifted, and as individual agency over one’s national identification diminished, emigration law became increasingly difficult to both navigate and enforce, and the idea of a nation as a contractual community bound by common will exposed its fragility, only to be replaced by a top-down definition of both the nation and the émigré. In 1802, Napoleon ended the debates over the law of 25 Brumaire and, indeed, about emigration legislation as a whole by offering a blanket amnesty of all émigrés on the Liste Générale, save the most dedicated royalists in the Bourbon coterie. This amnesty, examined in detail in Kelly Summers’ essay in this volume, gestures toward the ways in which the ideas of contract, and of a community of shared will, had been undermined by the last ten years of emigration and annexation. Instead of exonerating individuals on a case-by-case basis, determining their innocence based on questions of timing and will in a process that Summers demonstrates was extremely onerous and time-consuming, Napoleon issued a blanket amnesty that treated all émigrés—French, Belgian, German, Savoyard—as equals, regardless of the circumstances of their departures. Anné, our impossible émigré, was among those amnestied in 1802. And in 1804, he again petitioned the government, this time successfully: as an amnestied émigré, he was subject to government surveillance—surveillance, in particular, of his movements. Each time Anné, or any other amnestied émigré, wanted to leave their registered place of residence, they had to appeal to the Minister of Police and justify the reasons for their travel; once they arrived in a new location, they needed to register their arrival with the municipal government.33 And so in 1804, Anné petitioned to return to Hamburg and Bremen, where he had spent his emigration, in order to collect debts that were owed to him.34 Even after Anné had been permitted to come home, it was still his movements—not his political activity or commercial dealings—that required additional surveillance and suspicion. Under Napoleon, Anné’s relationship with the state was still defined by where he moved rather than what he did.

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Notes 1. Archives Nationales (Henceforth A.N.), AF/III/582, plaquette 3982. 2. For purposes of clarity, I will refer to these regions of the southern Netherlands as ‘Belgium’ in this chapter, although the term is anachronistic. 3. Although this chapter focuses on the tensions of the first tenet, it is worth noting that alleged émigrés in Belgium and, later, the so-called Rive Gauche du Rhin, had laws applied to them in different ways than those in the métropole: the French nation as of 1789. Because the law of 25 Brumaire, discussed below, was passed before Belgium was a part of the French nation, it was applied retroactively to Belgian cases of emigration, meaning that Belgians were punished for violating a law of which they had not been aware. See A.N.  BB/1/108, ‘Ministère de la Police Générale, Rapport aux Consuls’ in which a French official states that the Directory had intended the law of have a ‘retroactive effect.’ See also A.N. BB/30/166 (dossier 2), Mémoire sur la question de savoir si la loi du 25 brumaire, an 3, est applicable aux citoyens absens des ci-devant Provinces Belgiques, for further discussion of the retroactive application of the law. 4. A.N. F/7/3564. 5. Archives Parlementaires (henceforth AP) 28: 74 (9 juillet 1791). All translations, unless otherwise noted, are by the author. 6. AP 34: 395 (25 octobre 1793). Quoted in Ladan Boroumand, “Emigration and the Rights of Man: French Revolutionary Legislators Equivocate,” Journal of Modern History 72.1 (Mar. 2000): p. 97. 7. AP 23: 569 (25 February 1793). 8. Ibid. 9. Boroumand, ‘Emigration and the Rights of Man,’ pp. 107–108. 10. Quoted in Ibid., p. 83. 11. Keith Baker, “Sovereignty” in Francois Furet, and Mona Ozouf, eds., Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 844. 12. On ideas of nationhood in the pre-revolutionary period, see David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Peter Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 13. Jean Bart, “Citoyenneté et naturalité,” in Citoyen et citoyenneté sous la Révolution Française, ed. Raymonde Moynnier (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 2006), p.  35. ‘L’élément déterminant est moins le fait d’être né ici ou là, de parents d’ici ou d’ailleurs, c’est cette volonté d’adhérer à la cause révolutionnaire.’

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14. Pierre Louis Le Caron, ed., Code des émigrés, ou Recueil des dispositions législatives (Paris, 1825), pp.  76–77. This law, nevertheless, required all émigré children over the age of ten to return to France immediately, suggesting that ten (!) was the age of responsibility. 15. On the status of female émigrés, see Jennifer Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), chapter 4. 16. AP 34: 401 (25 October 1791). Quoted in Boroumand, “Emigration and the Rights of Man,” p. 96. 17. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 41. 18. In addition to Nice and Avignon, which became a part of France before the start of the wars. 19. Le Caron, ed., Code des émigrés, p.  179. The law went on to clarify the dates of expression of ‘the resolution of the inhabitants’ for the regions recently united with France: Savoy, which had become the département of Mont-Blanc; Nice and Monaco, which had become the département of Alpes-Maritimes; and the short-lived Republic of Rauracie, which had become the département of Mont Terrible. 20. Edward James Kolla, Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2017). As Kolla demonstrates, the means of acquiring and demonstrating consent varied from territory to territory, as did the amount of coercion that took place. See, in particular, pp. 121–159, on the case of Belgium. Jorg Fisch argues that the various referenda taken in the revolutionary period to demonstrate consent ‘served clear power-political aims, [and were] not an open or domination-free decision-­making process.’ Fisch, The Right of Self-Determination of Peoples: The Domestication of an Illusion (Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 88. 21. A.N. AF III/584, Rapport no. 4538, Quarré femme Ribaucourt, year 8. 22. This was true as well in other annexed departments. In the département of Mont-Terrible, where more than 3% of the population was ultimately put on the Liste Générale, alleged émigrés were given dates of departure stretching back to a full year prior to its 1793 unification with France. See Jean Suratteau, “Problèmes frontaliers de l’émigration révolutionnaire: l’exemple du Mont-Terrible,” Bulletin d’histoire économique et sociale de la Révolution française (1967): 23. For a contemporary discussion of when to date the start of the Revolution in the region, see A.N.  BB/1/108, “Extrait des registres des séances publiques de l’administration départmentale du ­Mont-­Terrible séante à Porentruy au 1er de la 2e décade au 2 mois de l’an 2 de la République française.”

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23. The 1795 annexation took no referendum. In reality, whatever will Belgians had expressed to join the French nation was likely as much a result of the horrible conditions of the French occupation, which were, in the words of Michael Rapport, ‘ghastly enough to persuade even Belgian conservatives that becoming part of France was for the best.’ Michael Rapport, “Belgium under French Occupation,” p.  54. On Belgian ideas of self-­ determination, see Jan Roegiers, “Belgian Liberties and Loyalty to the House of Austria,” in Nationalism in Belgium, ed. Kas Deprez and Louis Vos (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998). 24. “Loi sur la réunion de la Belgique et du pays du Liège à la République française du 9 vendémiaire” (Paris: De l’Imprimerie du Dépôt des lois, 1795). 25. See endnote 4 on the retroactive application of the law. 26. As Miranda Spieler has written, ‘During the French Revolution, the soil and geographical limits of France became symbolic expressions of the regenerated French people.’ Spieler, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 21. 27. A.N. AF/III/582, plaquette 3982. 28. See, among others, the petitions of Guillaume Becker, Jean-Henri-­Joseph Beeckman Vieusart, Francois-Charles-Regis Baesen, Dominique-­ Joseph Bonnard; Jean-Francois Philippe Dasson, Maximilien de Béesen, TheodoreFourneau de Cruquembourg, and M. and Mme Goossens, all of whom claimed illness (most with justificatory documents) as a reason for not returning within thirty days. A.N. AF/III/582. 29. Sophie Wahnich, L’Impossible citoyen: L’étranger dans le discours de la Révolution française (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997); Michael Rapport, Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners 1789–1799 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000). 30. Boroumand, ‘Emigration and the Rights of Man,’ p. 107. 31. James Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 3. Quoted in Ben Kafka, “The Demon of Writing: Paperwork, Public Safety, and the Reign of Terror.” Representations, no. 98 (2007): 17. 32. Sylvie Aprile, Le siècle des exilés: Bannis et proscrits de 1789 à la Commune. (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2010), p. 55. 33. See the note from the Minister of Police in A.N.  F/7/3565, dossier Bonchamps: ‘Un individu qui a été inscrit sur la liste des émigrés (quelque soit sa position actuelle) ne peut circuler dans l’intérieur de son département sans l’agrément du préfet, il ne peut pénétrer dans aucun département et surtout dans celui de la Seine, sans l’autorisation du ministre de la Police Générale.’ 34. A.N. F/7/3654, 4 fructidor an 13.

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Bibliography Aprile, Sylvie. Le siècle des exilés: Bannis et proscrits de1789 à la Commune. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2010. Bart, Jean. “Citoyenneté et naturalité,” in Citoyen et citoyenneté sous la Révolution Française, ed. Raymonde Moynnier, Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 2006. Bell, David. The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Boroumand, Ladan. “Emigration and the Rights of Man: French Revolutionary Legislators Equivocate.” Journal of Modern History 72.1 (March 2000): 67–108. Fisch, Jorg. The Right of Self-Determination of Peoples: The Domestication of an Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Furet, Francois and Mona Ozouf, eds. Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Heuer, Jennifer. The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Kafka, Ben. “The Demon of Writing: Paperwork, Public Safety, and the Reign of Terror.” Representations, no. 98 (2007). Kolla, Edward James. Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Le Caron, Pierre Louis ed. Code des émigrés, ou Recueil des dispositions législatives. Paris, Bossange père, 1825. Madival, M.J et al., eds. Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860. Paris: Librairie administrative de P. Dupont, 1862–1913. Polasky, Janet. Revolution in Brussels 1787–1793. Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 1987. Rapport, Michael. “Belgium under French Occupation: Between Collaboration and Resistance, July 1794 to October 1795,” French History 16:1 (March 2002): 53–82. Rapport, Michael. Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners 1789–1799. Oxford: Clarendon, 2000. Roegiers, Jan. “Belgian Liberties and Loyalty to the House of Austria,” in Nationalism in Belgium, ed. Kas Deprez and Louis Vos. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998. Sahlins, Peter. Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Scott, James. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Spieler, Miranda. Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

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Suratteau, Jean. “Problèmes frontaliers de l’émigration révolutionnaire: L’exemple du Mont-Terrible,” Bulletin d’histoire économique et sociale de la Révolution française (1967). Torpey, John. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Wahnich, Sophie. L’Impossible Citoyen: L’Étranger dans le discours de la Révolution française. Paris: Albin Michel, 1997.

CHAPTER 3

Interaction and Interrelation in Exile: French Émigrés, Legislation, and Everyday Life in the Habsburg Monarchy Matthias Winkler

1   Emigration as a Mutual Challenge Beginning with the departure of King Louis XVI’s youngest brother, the Comte d’Artois, and other princes du sang for the Austrian Netherlands in mid-July 1789, emigration from revolutionary France became an enduring issue in all parts of the Habsburg monarchy for more than a decade.

This chapter is a reworked version of my previously published paper: Matthias Winkler, “Exil als wechselseitige Herausforderung. Französische Revolutionsemigranten in der Habsburgermonarchie,” in Aufnahmeland Österreich. Über den Umgang mit Massenflucht seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Börries Kuzmany and Rita Garstenauer (Vienna, Berlin: Mandelbaum, 2017), 69–93. All translations of German and French quotations into English in this chapter were undertaken by the author.

M. Winkler (*) Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Philip, J. Reboul (eds.), French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_3

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Even though Artois and his peers, having spent only a fortnight in Brussels, soon left for the Savoy residence of Turin, an example was set. In the months and years that followed, thousands of Frenchmen poured into the Austrian Netherlands and, soon afterwards, into the province of Further Austria in the south-westernmost corner of the Holy Roman Empire.1 Under the eyes of vigilant yet permissive provincial authorities, these military officers, clerics, nobles, as well as commoners such as servants, craftsmen, and merchants, sojourned in these western Habsburg provinces along the French border awaiting the moment to return home. In a note to Austrian State Chancellor Kaunitz from early 1791, the Imperial Minister Plenipotentiary in Brussels, Mercy-Argenteau, expressed his worries about influential factions in the French National Assembly possibly disapproving of the considerable daily influx, which he feared would have severe repercussions for already fragile Franco-Habsburg relations.2 However, even for a cautious and experienced diplomat like Mercy-­ Argenteau, taking action against people who ‘only come here to live on their money without further intentions’ was out of the question.3 As to the expectations of a swift return, numerous arrivals after the King’s failed flight in June 1791 made clear instead that political upheaval in France would not cease any time soon. When eventually war broke out in 1792 and living conditions in the border communities rapidly deteriorated, émigrés, once again, sought refuge in flight.4 Increasingly scattered across continental Europe, many émigrés reached the Habsburg heartlands in central Europe.5 During the 1790s, we do not only find them in the Austrian military or mingling with Viennese aristocrats in salons and societies in the Imperial capital, as many accounts from the exile period suggest.6 In fact, the Habsburg monarchy as a whole appears to have gradually emerged as a hotspot for émigrés: hundreds (mostly clergymen) gathered around émigré French bishops in the Further Austrian town of Constance, making it the most densely populated émigré colony in the Hereditary Lands; smaller communities mushroomed in Prague, Linz, Trieste, and other provincial capitals; remote localities in the Alps and hamlets in rural Moravia, Galicia, and Hungary offered shelter and opportunity for earning a livelihood in unsettling times.7 On the part of the host society, authorities and subjects alike were confronted with a growing number of émigrés who, as the most vivid consequence of the French Revolution, became part of everyday life. Their perennial sojourn in the Habsburg monarchy not only prompted new policies while, at the same time, putting policing capacities under constant

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strain. It also had a considerable effect on many local environments and shaped each party’s perceptions of one another.8 Consequently, this chapter conceptualises the exile period as a mutual challenge for both the émigrés and the host society and investigates their interactions and interrelation. It aims to differentiate the stay of émigrés in the Habsburg monarchy chronologically, spatially, and socially, while approaching it from a variety of angles. Three aspects are addressed: First, after reflecting on the émigrés’ mobility, the chapter suggests a chronological three-stage model of policy towards emigration in the Habsburg monarchy. Examining émigré-related legislation from the beginnings of the Revolution in summer 1789 to the Napoleonic amnesty in 1802 constitutes only one aspect, though. A complementary approach that integrates the micro-perspectives of both émigrés and locals helps to fathom the ways and means exile conditions were negotiated. This is of particular interest since these bargaining processes had a formative impact on interaction, perception, and, again, legislation. Second, beyond formalised interaction, everyday relations with the local population enabled émigrés to accommodate themselves to a new environment more easily. In pursuing their own political and economic goals in exile, émigrés assumed all kinds of functions as they met specific demands in the host society. This productive interplay of interests entailed cultural transfers in various fields and in many directions.9 Although previous studies have repeatedly acknowledged the émigrés’ role as cultural intermediaries in post-1789 Europe, the multidimensional effects of these transfer activities came into focus quite recently.10 Third, despite their view of the Habsburg monarchy as a temporary refuge and the re-migration of the overwhelming majority to Napoleon’s France from 1799 onwards, a considerable number of émigrés remained in the Habsburg monarchy even when a safe return home was possible. The means and conditions of their integration are discussed in the final section of this chapter.

2   Émigré Itineraries and State Responses Research has shown that émigrés left revolutionary France in a sequence of waves. Until the end of the Terror in 1794, most of these waves are regarded as causally correlated with particular events or phases of the ever-­ radicalising Revolution.11 Following the émigration joyeuse of high-­ranking aristocrats that accrued after the Storming of the Bastille, anti-feudal leg-

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islation passed by the National Assembly boosted emigration of the propertied nobility. After the king’s capture at Varennes, thousands of French soldiers, among them the better part of the officers’ corps, went abroad in order to form the Armée des émigrés under the princes’ command. Critical junctures such as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the outbreak of war, the proclamation of the Republic, and the September Massacres led to a dramatic increase of emigration—a trend that finally culminated in an all-­ time high during the Reign of Terror.12 Before 1792 emigration was neither prohibited by law nor did it involve formal obstacles.13 With no passport regime or border controls in force, everyone willing to leave France could easily reach places like Brussels, Luxemburg, or Freiburg. It mainly was the émigrés’ military activities in the Austrian Netherlands and in the adjacent Electorate of Trier that triggered émigré legislation in France.14 A first law from 1792 stipulated that those Frenchmen abroad who would not return before an official deadline were to lose their property. In addition, a new passport regime aimed to enhance border management and decrease illicit departures.15 In the first months of war, tightened legislation worsened the émigrés’ legal status even more drastically: émigré lists were drawn up, and their property was confiscated, nationalised, and sold. Perpetually banished from France, those registered who dared to return during Jacobin rule faced capital punishment. Worse yet, the same penalty applied in case French troops got hold of émigrés in conquered territories. This peril was the reason for a particularly high spatial mobility in wartime as émigrés were frequently impelled to elude capture and find new shelter elsewhere. In the first years of revolutionary turmoil, the two westernmost provinces of the Habsburg monarchy, the Austrian Netherlands and Further Austria, were among the émigrés’ preferred destinations. Due to their geographical, cultural, and linguistic proximity, many favoured the Austrian Netherlands, while others proceeded into the territories along the Rhine. In most places, these ‘early’ émigrés were warmly welcomed by the local population, not least because their wallets were wide open.16 Others registered a trade or simply carried on their business or journalistic activities. Both sides, émigrés and locals, perceived this arrangement to be only temporary, even though a definite end was not in sight. At this stage, the provincial authorities in Brussels and Freiburg acted on individual cases only and abstained from issuing general directives. They certainly regarded the influx as unusually high, but not as a detriment to public order.17

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Conspicuously, most migration studies on the Habsburg monarchy have covered the French emigration mainly with regard to the legislation and the policing measures introduced in the early 1790s. As a result, historiography conceived the emigration issue as a public security threat, adding to the teleological narrative of the emerging Austrian police state of the Metternich era.18 Therefore, when comparing different emigration policies across European host countries, it is no surprise that the Habsburg monarchy has usually been referred to as a sealed-off and unwelcoming place for political exiles in general (unlike in the first half of the nineteenth century) and for émigrés in particular.19 While Philipp Ther has identified a ‘lack of political solidarity’ with the émigrés’ interests and objectives, Hannelore Burger did not shy away from calling the émigré-related legislation in the Habsburg monarchy a ‘flood of xenophobic decrees’ caused by an epidemic fear of spies and infiltration.20 As a matter of fact, this impression is not entirely wrong—at least not at first glance. The wording of the ill-famed Emigrant Decree of 1793, for instance, truly does not suggest a particular magnanimity for émigrés. However, an interpretation fixed on a small set of solely normative sources from a narrow time frame inevitably involves a heuristic bias, which has been passed on in historiography for decades. An in-depth analysis must avoid such oversimplifications by distinguishing emigration policies with regard to their variability over time and in their local implementation. To this end, a chronological three-stage model provides a suitable analytical framework.21 The first stage between summer 1789 and the outbreak of war in April 1792 was characterised by a very liberal approach towards emigration from France. Apart from half-hearted attempts to register incomers, provincial authorities in Brussels and Freiburg stuck to the ‘principe général d’hospitalité’ (common principle of hospitality), as the new Minister Plenipotentiary, Metternich, put it.22 A stalwart advocate for émigrés, Metternich repeatedly received them at his residence in Brussels and interceded for them on many occasions. At this point, strict regulations applied only to military formations of émigrés. Their drills along the border were henceforth banned in order not to add fuel to the political debate in Paris. Similarly, Governor Sumeraw of Further Austria forbade recruitment and the selling of arms to émigré units. ‘As long as [the émigrés] remain quiet, calm and confined to the limits of asylum and do nothing that can be interpreted as warmongering’ Leopold II approved of this indulgent handling of the issue.23 The Emperor even explicitly acknowledged ‘the hard lot of these unfortunates’, while

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according to his State Chancellor Kaunitz émigrés were to be granted ‘refuge’ in the Hereditary Lands.24 However, circumstances quickly changed. New emigration waves from France and a French military offensive, launched after the Austro-Prussian fiasco at Valmy, placed émigré communities across the bordering territories in distress. The Armée des émigrés, which had operated along with coalition forces in northern France, was in disarray or retreat.25 In the Austrian Netherlands, one émigré colony after the other began to dissolve. Émigrés and other fugitives were on the move into territories on the right bank of the Rhine and beyond. The town of Constance, for example, previously inhabited by roughly 4000 souls, sheltered almost 1000 émigrés in the winter of 1792/3, the majority of them clerics.26 Meanwhile, numerous others reached Tyrol, Upper Austria, and even the Imperial capital Vienna. The increased dispersion of émigrés all over Europe paved the way for a new migration regime that slowly assumed shape. After 1792, many receiving countries started issuing regulatory measures ranging from entry requirements to limited residence permits.27 In the Habsburg monarchy, this paradigm shift involved a more decisive role of the Imperial Court in migration and security policy. Centralised legislation, growing bureaucratisation, and a steering mechanism to distribute émigrés evenly across the Hereditary Lands were intended to channelise the influx and ease migratory pressures. The crest of this second stage of emigration policy was the aforementioned Emigrant Decree, drafted by the State Chancellery and the recently refounded Police Ministry, and issued on January 5, 1793. It stipulated that ‘no French emigrant is to be granted entry into the Hereditary Lands, if he does not possess a passport issued by the State Chancellery. Everyone […] who arrives at the borders without such a passport is to be rejected, and provided he has already entered [the country], he is to be deported and given the warning that, if ever encountered on Austrian soil again, he would be taken into custody. Those, however, who […] do possess such passports, are forbidden to sojourn in the countryside or in country towns; they remain confined to the provincial capitals or to Vienna’.28 In order to make procedures easier, commanding officers of the Austrian army as well as the heads of Austrian diplomatic missions all over Europe were additionally authorised to issue entry documents.29 Thus, émigrés who failed to obtain passports via the provincial administration in Brussels or Freiburg could turn to the Austrian embassies, for instance, in Turin, London, Frankfurt, Cologne, Rome, and Venice. These places were

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soon crawling with émigrés trying to get in touch with officials, arranging for safe passages into the inner Austrian lands, and catching up on the ­latest transit conditions. Making long-term arrangements often proved futile, though, as various obstacles thwarted their plans on a regular basis: dwindling resources, changing frontlines, and constantly shifting migration laws in the countries émigrés needed to pass through required them to rearrange and improvise. In order to master these obstacles, émigrés revived and enhanced personal contacts and networks; new acquaintances made en route oftentimes proved helpful when weighing options and alternatives; travelling in groups was more the rule than an exception as resources and risks could be shared. A route highly frequented by émigrés travelling eastward was the Danube. Not only did the course of the river offer the most direct way into the Austrian Archduchies, to Vienna, Hungary, and further east, it also provided a fully functional transport infrastructure.30 When word got around that it was comparatively easy to get the Austrian mission at the Diet in Regensburg to issue passports to émigrés passing through, the Danube route became even more attractive. In the meantime, the central administration had established a vetting system intended to manage entries into the Habsburg monarchy according to the most recent legislation.31 After thorough passport inspections at the border stations, the militia directed arriving émigrés to the nearest provincial capital—in case of the Danube route they were usually pointed to Linz. Having arrived there, émigrés lodged the passport with the local authorities and formally solicited for a residence permit documented with a ‘licence note’ (Lizenz-Zettel). Those who wished to proceed to Vienna or to other cities in the Habsburg dominions or simply pass through to Russia or Poland had to procure an extra permission from the Police Ministry. By these means, both provincial and central authorities made sure that both name and current whereabouts of each and every émigré who had entered Habsburg realms were duly registered. All provincial administrations regularly submitted tables featuring the latest arrivals to the Police Ministry, where the personal data of incomers was being centralised. This constantly updated database put the Police Ministry in a supervisory position to monitor and steer the movements of émigrés in the Habsburg lands. In order to obtain a residence permit, an applicant had to comply with two requirements, both of which reflected the soaring security concerns in the host society: a surety for his ‘good thinking and principles’ as well as

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proof that he was able to provide for himself.32 Hence, the usual letters of recommendation which émigrés had used extensively during their travels no longer sufficed to obtain a residence permit. What they needed now was a guarantor to vouch for them. This person had to be a resident in the Habsburg dominions or otherwise registered with the authorities. Regarding self-sufficiency, émigrés were allowed to take up employment. However, jobs in schooling and education were excluded, since the administration feared nothing more than ‘party spirit’ and political factionalism spreading like wildfire. The sensational trials of ‘domestic’ Jacobins in Vienna and Hungary in 1794 nurtured these fears even further while providing the Police Ministry with justification for a hard stance on migration from revolutionary France.33 The idea that incomers had to undergo some kind of ‘ideological screening’ in order to sort out those considered ‘dangerous’ became a leitmotif in the second stage of emigration policy. But even during the fiercest months of anti-Jacobin frenzy émigré-­ related legislation was by no means all about security. Émigrés approached the authorities with all kinds of requests, such as those for collections for fellow émigrés in need, printing licences, or pastoral care for French prisoners of war. Issues like these required the administration to continuously and constantly update rules and regulations. As a by-product of this communication process, the authorities incrementally refined their criteria and classification systems for political migrants: fugitives from the Austrian Netherlands and other French-conquered territories, for example, usually met with certain lenience whereas émigrés, with the notable exception of clergymen, often had to cope with implicit or even open distrust. Sanctions applied to émigrés unable to exhibit the documents necessary for entry or residence. They were either rejected at the border posts or later deported to neighbouring countries. In fact, deportation was not just the penalty for a specific misdemeanour or crime, such as the absence or the forgery of documents. The Police Ministry also acted on mere suspicion. Confidential informants, sometimes émigrés themselves, frequently reported on exiles deemed politically or otherwise dubious. This easily grew out into slander and denunciation, which could also result in deportation.34 However, the fact that the Police Ministry kept admonishing the provincial authorities to painstakingly observe all the rules and regulations with respect to émigrés leads us to the conclusion that implementation and enforcement remained most deficient throughout the 1790s.35 What is striking about this second stage of emigration policy is its ambivalence. For legislation and regulatory measures represented only

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one side of the host society’s reaction to the challenge the émigrés posed. On the other side, apart from lack of enforcement, there was considerable leeway for émigrés to avoid standardised procedures. Personal ties to officials, recommendations, and interventions by third parties could ease or even obviate formal obligations. Periodically informed about individual cases by his police minister, even Emperor Francis II personally issued exemptions for émigrés on a regular basis.36 Jules de Polignac, the Princes’ representative to Vienna since 1791, and even more so his successor La Fare, the former bishop of Nancy, interceded countless times on behalf of émigrés and vouched for their integrity.37 Solidarity was yet shown by many more. As we gather from émigré memoirs, letters, parish registers, and other non-governmental sources, Austrian nobles with Alsatian or Lothringian pedigree acted as protectors, monasteries and rectories offered shelter, and parishes provided funding and accommodation for emigrated priests. When, during the French campaigns in northern Italy and southern Germany in 1796/97, émigré numbers in the central and eastern Habsburg dominions instantly soared, a rather pragmatic approach ushered in the third stage of emigration policy. While all norms and directives issued and adjusted since 1793 remained in effect, authorities on all levels began to approach émigré issues in a more forbearing manner. As long as public order was not impaired and a minimum of police surveillance was held up, it was possible for émigrés to purchase land, live in remote rural places, be accepted into the estates of the country, and even take up employment in pastoral care and education.38 In all cases, dispensations were confined to individuals or clear-cut groups. Never was there a state-­ run relief system for émigrés as in Britain, not even for those in acute need. When in October 1797 the Bregenzer Wochenblatt, a weekly from the Vorarlberg province, reported on an abrupt surge of thousands of émigrés around Lake Constance, accompanied by ‘human misery in all its dimensions’, this dramatic development did not result in any governmental response.39 Over the 1790s, Habsburg authorities established a refined web of rules to cope with the consequences of emigration from France. A liberal approach until the summer of 1792 as well as countless exceptions and discretionary decision-making on the part of the authorities at later stages permitted a great many émigrés to find a place to stay in the Habsburg monarchy. Although scarce and corrupted archival records make it virtually impossible to determine their approximate number it is safe to say that

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émigrés sojourned in every dominion of the Hereditary Lands. Scattered over a vast territory, émigrés came in touch with the domestic population at various places. Their encounters oftentimes led to complex patterns of interaction and exchange, as the émigrés gradually became a factor in many local environments.

3   Interactions and Transfer In numerous accounts contemporaries ascribed rather unflattering traits to the émigrés roaming Europe in the 1790s.40 When looking for comments originating from the Habsburg monarchy, it is fairly easy to come up with pejorative quotations too. Descriptions like ‘French arrogance’ and ‘a demeanor of hostile hordes’ are legion.41 In return, a notoriously quoted émigrée who came to Vienna in the mid-1790s retrospectively complained about the ‘extraordinary antipathy for the emigrated nobility’ and the ‘faint-hearted mistrust against all French’.42 Along with elements of the legislation, comments like these have played well into the image of the Habsburg monarchy as a ‘xenophobic’ place. Indeed, historiography, with some exceptions, has not been able to shake off this traditional bias, even though quotations like these are drawn from a much broader range of opinions, which includes positive perceptions of émigrés by locals and vice versa. Furthermore, these statements, catchy as they may be, are often cited detached from their specific context and must therefore be considered contingent.43 Both collective and individual views of Habsburg subjects and émigrés of one another underwent changes over time. Commonplaces and prejudices on both sides were thus often overcome with concrete personal interaction. Due to the social composition of the emigration, contact zones differed considerably. Émigrés of high rank regularly moved in the circles and societies of Viennese aristocrats, where they took part in the usual modes of social life.44 Although émigrés sometimes met with certain reservations, the majority of the mostly Francophone aristocracy took a particular interest in their French counterparts as, despite the Revolution, French culture and language were still held in high esteem. In his seminal biography of the Prince de Ligne, Philip Mansel has highlighted Ligne’s residence in Vienna as a main venue for prominent émigrés like the painter Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the writer Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan.45 From the journal of the Marquis de Bombelles, a former French diplomat who spent

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many years of exile in the Moravian capital of Brno, we gather that hosting or even temporarily accommodating émigrés could be a way to boost one’s status in local society.46 Curiosity about their lives and travels and a shared disdain for the Revolution composed a solid foundation for conversation and exchange.47 However, these encounters also involved a growing awareness of cultural differences and otherness on which émigrés in particular reflected in their numerous accounts.48 Taking part in the social life of the haute volée was not only an opportunity to resume social practices émigrés were used to before they left France. It also compensated for the sometimes precarious living conditions in exile, the waning hopes that they would ever be able to return to France, and the resultant melancholy or even apathy.49 The Habsburg nobility, sensitive to reports of the political radicalisation in France in general and the execution of King Louis and Queen Marie Antoinette in particular, reacted with sympathy, as they regarded the émigrés to be tragic victims of illegitimate violence. This compassionate attitude contrasts the occasionally harsh wording and implied mistrust many laws and directives were imbued with. Apart from interaction at the top level of society, everyday life also put émigrés in touch with ‘ordinary’ people. Again, historiography has stressed the deprecatory stance taken up by the general public, which supposedly considered the émigrés’ lot as largely self-inflicted and certainly well deserved.50 But again, on closer examination, we also find instances suggesting a more positive reception. For example, when in 1798 a group of roughly 200 mostly French Trappists, led by Louise de Condé, was heading downstream on the Danube route, they were everywhere greeted and received with elation.51 Temporarily accommodated in the monastery of the Salesian Sisters in Vienna, their divine services in the neighbouring church attracted crowds of onlookers so large that access to the interior had to be restricted by the city militia.52 Although the Trappists only sojourned a couple of months in the Imperial capital, ‘some twenty’ Viennese expressed their wish to join the order.53 The emigrated clergy as a whole is a good example of how the interests on the part of the host society influenced the living conditions of émigrés. As their capacity for self-sufficiency proved to be highly fragile, priests and other ecclesiastics were particularly dependent on assistance and solidarity in the reception countries. Given that the individual willingness to make donations was rather shaky and could not be counted on, the emigrated

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clergy in Constance under the leadership of the Archbishop of Paris, Juigné, set up structures of self-help ranging from organised meals for indigent clerics to pan-European offertories.54 Regardless of their often precarious resources, emigrated ecclesiastics should not be considered destitute or otherwise helpless supplicants. Instead, they possessed skills that made them eligible for a vast array of employments.55 Their most obvious competence was as clerics. Ever since the church reform introduced under Emperor Joseph II in the 1780s, there had been a chronic shortage of priests delegated to pastoral care.56 At the request of confreres or individual parishes, French priests contributed to fill these gaps. Others, owing to their French mother tongue and familiarity with French culture, took over positions of domestic chaplain or personal steward (Hofmeister) in various aristocratic families. A confidant of the family head, an employee often accompanied the patron on journeys and served as private confessor. Apart from monthly grants and free lodging, the perennial service was usually rewarded with a lifelong pension that made appointments like these all the more lucrative. Another field of occupation was education and language teaching. Despite émigrés being barred by law from instructing the ‘domestic youth’, archival evidence suggests that many clerics were given either short-term teaching jobs or even positions as tutors extending over several years.57 Some émigrés even managed to be assigned one tutorship after another and thus spent their years in exile constantly employed. In rural areas, where urbane educators were scarce, their services were particularly favoured by the landed nobility, which, among other things, was reflected in substantial pay. As the chances for undertaking the traditional grand tour to France were rather slim in time of war, employing a French tutor could make up for this omission. In the late 1790s, French clerics were even appointed by renowned education institutes such as the Theresianische Ritterakademie in Vienna, or established small schools on their own.58 Émigrés from the Third Estate were often engaged in business activities. The ongoing war had heavily impaired the exchange of goods with France while public demand for French luxury products remained great as ever. This market niche was a chance for small-scale enterprises run by émigrés to pitch in. Perfumers and salesmen of French fabric and knitwear could count on a well-off clientele in places like Vienna, Prague, and Trieste. Others made a living as peddlers. Manufacturing on a large scale proved to be a trickier challenge because economic protectionism and special interests frequently thwarted ambitious projects from the outset.

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Those émigrés who did succeed in setting up manufactories had previously coordinated their efforts with local investors, the better to convince the authorities to suspend rules and regulations.59 In the best-case scenario, economic success and solidarity for fellow émigrés were interlinked, as the career of the Comte de Moré illustrates. Under the alias of one Joseph Labrosse this émigré had settled down in Trieste where he first established a trading house followed by a bank.60 Labrosse not only provided the urgently needed funding for the Corps Condé, a remnant of the disbanded Armée des émigrés: in 1800, he also supported the personal chefs of the late Mesdames de France to launch a restaurant in Trieste. The Locanda al Lauro Imperiale offered a special ambience for a special taste. Dining under the portraits of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, both émigrés and local gourmets could share a truly ‘royalist’ gastronomic experience and try delicacies of the kind prepared at Versailles before the Revolution.61 Living together in blissful harmony was certainly not the case everywhere. Differences in opinion and experience could easily turn into conflict. In his diary, the future Austrian statesman Carl Friedrich Kübeck von Kübau narrates an incident with his French language teacher, an émigré who had fled France at the risk of his life. When one day young Kübeck dared to cautiously speak out in favour of some ideas of the Revolution, his tutor was frantic with rage.62 Meanwhile, in the Lower Austrian village of Oberhollabrunn, residents launched a smear campaign against their French vicar because they disliked the way he ministered the parish.63 Another typical objection blamed émigrés for causing a rise in prices. The inhabitants of Prague, for example, repeatedly called upon the Police Ministry to restrict the further influx into the Bohemian metropolis. In contrast, no complaints are reported from the abovementioned town of Constance, even though rents and food prices there had increased by 1500 per cent within a decade.64 The growing demand accompanying the sojourn of thousands of émigrés had resulted in an unprecedented economic upswing, which imploded in a moment when the majority of émigrés returned to France after the turn of the century.

4   Emigration and Integration Ever since their departure from France, émigrés everywhere eagerly awaited a situation that would allow them to return home. No matter where they had found a place to stay in the meantime, in their understand-

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ing, living abroad was merely a makeshift solution and was not accepted as a permanent condition. However, as years passed and revolutionary ­turmoil inside and outside France increased, their cherished wish for a safe return was repeatedly proven unrealistic throughout the 1790s. These two conflicting mindsets had a formative impact on life and decision-­making in exile. Given that an overwhelming majority of émigrés never let go of the idea of an eventual return to France, the pattern of their social interaction in the host society can best be described as ‘provisional integration’.65 On the part of the émigrés this course of action involved frequent contacts within their local environments and a gradual immersion into social structures, quite often because it simply was an economic necessity. Being exposed to the domestic population for years propelled not only learning processes on a sociocultural level, for example, the acquisition of the vernacular, but also led to a change in self-perception.66 After the hardship and uncertainties in the first years of emigration, this shift in awareness enabled the émigrés to better adjust to shaping their lives under exile conditions.67 What stands out is that this integration ad interim was not a unilateral, but a reciprocal process. As seen above, émigrés coming into the Habsburg monarchy were neither rejected nor merely tolerated by the domestic population but oftentimes received with interest and even appreciation. This interplay of interests involved various opportunities for émigrés and hosts alike. Despite many fields of interrelation, there was no enduring integration on a larger scale. This was mainly due to the political changes in France. For the vast majority of émigrés Napoleon’s strategy of ‘national reconciliation’ launched after 1799 paved the way for a safe return home. Nonetheless, there were a comparatively small number of émigrés, widely disregarded in the historiography, who remained in the Habsburg monarchy. Apart from royalist ultras and fierce opponents of the Concordat among the French episcopate, who refrained from any compromise with Napoleon’s France and only returned after the Restoration in 1814/15, this group was also made up of people who favoured their current situation over the uncertainties of a return to their deeply changed homeland they had left more than a decade ago.68 Historical studies have focused on two groups of émigrés in particular who decided to stay in the Habsburg monarchy. A prime example of the emigrated nobility is the family of Rohan, who after 1800 purchased a number of large estates in Bohemia and elsewhere. Additionally, there were those émigrés who had entered the Habsburg military service after 1793 and pursued their careers in the army.69 The Habsburg nobility, with

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their centuries-long experience in integrating nobles from virtually all European countries, proved to be inclusive in their case, too. However, integration was not only about well-known families such as the Mandell-­ Ficquelmonts, Mensdorff-Pouillys, and Ségur-Cabanacs, who became fixtures of the later Austrian Empire.70 Émigrés from the Third Estate married in exile and assimilated culturally. Others succeeded economically and even received noble titles—for them emigration and exile life had unexpectedly brought the chance for advancement.71 Clerics had committed to pastoral care or held beneficia and other churchly titles. Compared with this, the alternative of going back to France may have lost its appeal since prebends had been nullified and property sold during the Revolution. With no indemnity in sight it seemed reasonable to give up on the idea of a return once and for all.72 The lack of studies investigating long-term trajectories and paths of integration is symptomatic of the narrow scope historiography has applied to the French émigrés in the Habsburg monarchy in the past. In contrast, putting contact zones, patterns of interaction, and the variability of norms and attitudes at the centre of analysis is a more promising and prolific approach for future research, as it sheds new light on the exile as a mutual challenge for both the émigrés and the host society.

Notes 1. For the Austrian Netherlands see Magnette, Les Émigrés français aux Pays-­ Bas; for Further Austria see Pawlik, “Emigranten in Österreich,” 98–100. 2. Presle, Die Einstellung der Regierung der österreichischen Niederlande, 23–24. 3. Quoted from Presle, Die Einstellung der Regierung der österreichischen Niederlande, 23. 4. Zedinger, Migration und Karriere, 49–96. 5. Pawlik, “Emigranten in Österreich,” 98–116. 6. Du Montet, Souvenirs; Vigée Le Brun, Souvenirs; Des Cars, Mémoires. 7. Moser, Die französische Emigrantenkolonie in Konstanz; Winkler, “Das Exil als Aktions- und Erfahrungsraum,” 47–51. 8. Pestel and Winkler, “Provisorische Integration und Kulturtransfer,” 146. 9. For the concept of cultural transfer see Espagne, Les Transferts culturels. 10. For the émigrés as agents in cultural transfers see Schönpflug and Voss, Révolutionnaires et Émigrés; more recently Reboul, French emigration to Great Britain. For the multidimensional character of transfers, especially for the interaction between émigrés and other exiles, see Friedemann Pestel’s chapter in this volume.

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11. For a detailed periodization see Henke, Coblentz, 28–31. 12. Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration, 32. 13. For the legal debate on emigration in revolutionary France see Mary Ashburn Miller’s chapter in this volume. 14. Carpenter, “Emigration in Politics and Imaginations,” 332–35. 15. Torpey, “Revolutions and Freedom of Movement,” 845–47. 16. Henke, Coblentz, 54. 17. Presle, Die Einstellung der Regierung der österreichischen Niederlande, 27. 18. Wangermann, From Joseph II to the Jacobin Trials, 123–28. 19. Bahlcke, “Zwischen offener Zurückweisung und praktischer Solidarität,” 259. 20. Ther, Die Außenseiter, 181; Burger, “Passwesen und Staatsbürgerschaft,” 76. 21. Pestel and Winkler, “Provisorische Integration und Kulturtransfer,” 141–46. 22. Magnette, Les Émigrés français aux Pays-Bas, 45. 23. Circular by State Chancellor Kaunitz, 21 January 1792, in Vivenot and Zeissberg, Quellen zur Geschichte, 341–42. 24. Ibidem. 25. Henke, Coblentz, 272–89. 26. Burkhardt, “Die französischen Réfugiés in Konstanz,” 60. 27. Pestel and Winkler, “Provisorische Integration und Kulturtransfer,” 143. 28. Sr. k. k. Majestät Franz des Zweyten politische Gesetze und Verordnungen für die Österreichischen, Böhmischen und Galizischen Erbländer, vol. 2, (Vienna, 1817), 1–3. 29. Austrian State Archives (ÖStA)/Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv (AVA), Polizeihofstelle (PHSt) 1793/266. 30. Tóth, “French Émigrés in Hungary,” 68–82. 31. Pawlik, “Emigranten in Österreich,” 111–12. 32. Governmental instruction for Bohemia, 25 November 1794, in Kropatschek, Sammlung der Gesetze, 607–8. 33. For the infamous Jacobin trials see Wangermann, From Joseph II to the Jacobin trials, 117–69. 34. Zedinger, Migration und Karriere, 74. 35. ÖStA / AVA, PHSt 1799/291. 36. Among the beneficiaries was the Abbé de Luzines, the former tutor of the Duc de Bourbon: ÖStA/AVA, PHSt 1796/202. 37. Guglia, “Die ersten Emigranten in Wien,” 182–84; Brye, Consciences épiscopales en exil, 303–4. 38. Pawlik, “Emigranten in Österreich,” 119; Godsey, “‘La société était au fond légitimiste’,” 68. 39. Bregenzer Wochenblatt, 20 October 1797, 4.

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40. Zimmermann, “Die Emigranten der französischen Revolution,” 305–54. 41. Quoted from Arneth, Wessenberg, 11. 42. Du Montet, Souvenirs, 264. On retrospective memory and relations to the host countries see Rance, “Mémoires de nobles français émigrés,” 245–62. 43. Wagner, “Emigrantinnen der Französischen Revolution,” 18–19. 44. Vigée Le Brun, Souvenirs, 465–89; Godsey, “‘La société était au fond légitimiste’,” 77. 45. Mansel, The Prince of Europe, 167–69. 46. Bombelles, Journal. 47. Interaction and exchange between émigrés and hosts was also a recurring subject matter in contemporary fiction, for example, in Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan’s novel L’Émigré (1797). 48. Wagner, “Emigrantinnen in Wien,” 18–24. 49. Rubinstein, Die Französische Emigration nach 1789, 181. For the link between emigration and melancholia in the émigré novel see Laure Philip’s chapter in this volume. 50. Ganster, Die Beurteilung Frankreichs, 197–200. 51. Dargnies, Moreau and Teyssou, Mémoires en forme de lettres, 146–47. 52. Muck, “Abt Rainer II. Sigl von Zwettl,” 340. 53. Fux, “Emigrierende Trappisten in Österreich,” 334–35. 54. Bahlcke, “Zwischen offener Zurückweisung und praktischer Solidarität,” 268–69. 55. The resourcefulness of émigrés in finding employment in exile was obviously not limited to clerics or to the Habsburg monarchy but was a pan-­ European phenomenon; see Carpenter and Mansel, The French Émigrés in Europe. 56. Dickson, “Joseph II’s Re-Shaping of the Austrian Church,” 89–114. 57. Diocesean Archives Vienna (DAW)/Priesterpersonalakten, Louis Finet, Contract with count Wilczek, June 28, 1804. 58. Gemmell-Flischbach, Album des Kaiserl. Königl. Theresianums, 75–77. 59. For the example of a large-scale textile factory set up by two émigrés in Eastern Galicia see Winkler, “Das Exil als Aktions- und Erfahrungsraum,” 61–70. 60. Fauchon, “Réseaux familiaux et construction identitaire d’une noblesse d’épée,” 397–411. 61. Incontrera, “Giuseppe Labrosse e gli emigrati francesi,” 392. 62. Kübeck von Kübau, Tagebücher, 32–35. 63. DAW/Landpfarre Oberhollabrunn, Residents of Oberhollabrunn to the Viennese consistory, 15 June 1804. 64. Burkhardt, “Die französischen Réfugiés in Konstanz,” 82. 65. Pestel and Winkler, “Provisorische Integration und Kulturtransfer”.

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66. Rance, “Die Emigration des französischen Adels in Deutschland,” 158–78. 67. This shift in awareness resulted in a growing range of occupations, commercial activities, and financial investments on the part of émigrés from the mid-1790s onwards. The Imperial Court was abreast of this change: in 1797, Emperor Francis II assigned the Hofkammer (Court Chamber) to compile a list of available estates in his dominions émigrés were allowed to acquire; see Pawlik, “Emigranten in Österreich,” 118–19. 68. Brye, Consciences épiscopales en exil, 451. 69. Godsey, “‘La société était au fond légitimiste’,” 66–67, 76–77. 70. Ther, Die Außenseiter, 181–82. 71. Winkler, “Das Exil als Aktions- und Erfahrungsraum,” 69–70. 72. Franke, “Le Milliard des Émigrés,” 124–37.

Bibliography Arneth, Alfred von. Johann Freiherr von Wessenberg: ein österreichischer Staatsmann des 19. Jahrhunderts. 2 vols. 1. Vienna: Braumüller, 1898. Bahlcke, Joachim. “Zwischen offener Zurückweisung und praktischer Solidarität. Vom Umgang mit französischen Revolutionsemigranten in Deutschland während des ausgehenden 18. Jahrhunderts.” In Migration als soziale Herausforderung. Historische Formen solidarischen Handelns von der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Edited by Joachim Bahlcke, Rainer Leng and Peter Scholz, 255–72. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2011. Bombelles, Marc-Marie de. Journal, vol. 5: 1795–1800. Geneva: Droz, 2002. Brye, Bernard de. Consciences épiscopales en exil: 1789-1814; à travers la correspondance de Mgr de La Fare évêque de Nancy. Paris: Cerf Éd, 2004. Burger, Hannelore. “Passwesen und Staatsbürgerschaft.” In Grenze und Staat: Paßwesen, Staatsbürgerschaft, Heimatrecht und Fremdengesetzgebung in der österreichischen Monarchie 1750–1867. Edited by Waltraud Heindl-Langer and Edith Saurer, 3–172. Vienna: Böhlau, 2000. Burkhardt, Martin. “Die französischen Réfugiés in Konstanz am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts.” In Les migrations de l’antiquité à nos jours, edited by Bernard Vogler, 59–71. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 1996. Carpenter, Kirsty. “Emigration in Politics and Imaginations.” In The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution, edited by David Andress, 330–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Dargnies, Nicolas-Claude, Richard Moreau, and Roger Teyssou. Mémoires en forme de lettres pour servir à l’histoire de la réforme de La Trappe établie par dom Augustin de Lestrange à La Valsainte, par un religieux qui y a vécu de 1793 à 1808, avec trois lettres inédites de dom Augustin de Lestrange à l’abbé Antoine-­ Sylvestre Receveur. Paris, Budapest, Turin: L’Harmattan, 2003.

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Des Cars, Jean-François. Mémoires du duc Des Cars, vol. 2. Paris: Plon, 1890. Dickson, Peter. “Joseph II’s Re-Shaping of the Austrian Church.” The Historical Journal 36, no. 1 (1993): 89–114. Du Montet, Alexandrine. Souvenirs de la baronne du Montet 1785–1866. Paris: Plon, 1904. Espagne, Michel. Les Transferts culturels Franco-Allemands. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999. Fauchon, Amandine. “Réseaux familiaux et construction identitaire d’une noblesse d’épée: l’exemple de l’émigré Albert-François de Moré.” In Les Noblesses françaises dans l’Europe de la Révolution, edited by Philippe Bourdin, 397–411. Rennes, Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010. Franke, Almut. “Le Milliard des Émigrés: the Impact of the Indemnity Bill of 1825 on French Society.” In The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle Against Revolution, 1789–1814, edited by Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel, 124–37. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Fux, Ildefons. “Emigrierende Trappisten in Österreich.” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige 98 (1987): 295–358. Ganster, Ingrid. “Die Beurteilung Frankreichs und der Franzosen durch die Wiener Stadtbevölkerung zur Zeit des Wiener Kongresses”, PhD Diss., University of Vienna, 1983. Gemmell-Flischbach, Max von. Album des Kaiserl. Königl. Theresianums (1746– 1880). Verzeichniß sämmtlicher Angehörigen der K.K. Theresianischen Akademie. Vienna: Moritz Perles, 1880. Godsey, William D. “‘La société était au fond légitimiste’: Émigrés, Aristocracy, and the Court at Vienna, 1789–1848.” European History Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2005): 63–95. Greer, Donald. The Incidence of the Emigration during the French Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951. Guglia, Eugen. “Die ersten Emigranten in Wien 1789 bis 1795.” Österreichisch-­ ungarische Revue N.F. 5 (1888): 177–92. Henke, Christian. Coblentz: Symbol für die Gegenrevolution: Die französische Emigration nach Koblenz und Kurtrier 1789-1792 und die politische Diskussion des revolutionären Frankreichs 1791–1794. Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2000. Incontrera, Oscar de. “Giuseppe Labrosse e gli emigrati francesi a Trieste.” Archeografo triestino 18/19 (1952/1953): 81–132; 361–423. Kropatschek, Joseph, ed. Sammlung der Gesetze, welche unter der glorreichen Regierung des Kaisers Franz des Zweyten in den sämmtlichen k.k. Erblanden erschienen sind, vol. 4 (1794). Vienna. Kübeck von Kübau, Carl Friedrich. Tagebücher des Carl Friedrich Kübeck von Kübau: vol. 1, part 1: 1795–1809. Vienna: Gerold, 1909. Magnette, Félix. Les Émigrés français aux Pays-Bas (1789–1794). Brussels: Hayez, 1907.

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Mansel, Philip. The Prince of Europe: The Life of Charles Joseph De Ligne (1735– 1814). London: Orion, 2005. Moser, Arnulf. Die französische Emigrantenkolonie in Konstanz während der Revolution (1792–1799). Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1975. Muck, Ernst R. “Abt Rainer II. Sigl von Zwettl und die Trappisten.” Cistercienser-­ Chronik 46, no. 549/550 (1934): 340–53, 378–94. Pawlik, Maria. “Emigranten der Französischen Revolution in Österreich (1789– 1814).” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 77 (1969): 78–127. Pestel, Friedemann, and Matthias Winkler. “Provisorische Integration und Kulturtransfer. Französische Revolutionsemigranten im Heiligen Römischen Reich deutscher Nation.” Francia 43 (2016): 137–60. Presle, Benedikt. “Die Einstellung der Regierung der österreichischen Niederlande zur französischen Emigration in den Jahren 1789–1794”, PhD Diss., University of Vienna, 1947. Rance, Karine. “Die Emigration des französischen Adels in Deutschland: eine “vorübergehende” Emigration,” Comparativ 7, no. 5/6 (1997): 158–78. Rance, Karine. “Mémoires de nobles français émigrés en Allemagne pendant la Révolution Française: la vision rétrospective d’une expérience.” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 46, no. 2 (1999): 245–62. Reboul, Juliette. French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Rubinstein, Nina. Die Französische Emigration nach 1789: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der politischen Emigration. Graz: Nausner & Nausner, 2000. Schönpflug, Daniel, and Jürgen Voss, eds., Révolutionnaires et Émigrés. Transfer und Migration zwischen Frankreich und Deutschland 1789–1806. Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2002. Ther, Philipp. Die Außenseiter: Flucht, Flüchtlinge und Integration im modernen Europa. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017. Torpey, John. “Revolutions and Freedom of Movement: An Analysis of Passport Controls in the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions.” Theory and Society 26 (1997): 837–68. Tóth, Ferenc. “French Émigrés in Hungary.” In The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle Against Revolution, 1789–1814, edited by Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel, 68–92. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Vigée Le Brun, Élisabeth. Souvenirs: 1755–1842. Paris: Champion, 2008. Vivenot, Alfred von, and Heinrich von Zeissberg, eds., Quellen zur Geschichte der Deutschen Kaiserpolitik Oesterreichs während der französischen Revolutionskriege 1790–1801, vol. 1: Die Politik des oesterreichischen Staatskanzlers Fürsten Kaunitz-Rietberg unter Kaiser Leopold II. bis zur französischen Kriegserklärung: Jänner 1790 – April 1792. Vienna: Braumüller, 1873.

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Wagner, Walter. “Emigrantinnen der Französischen Revolution im Exil in Wien.” In Exildiskurse der Romantik in der europäischen und lateinamerikanischen Literatur, edited by Frank Estelmann, 17–28. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. Wangermann, Ernst. From Joseph II to the Jacobin Trials. Government Policy and Public Opinion in the Habsburg Dominions in the Period of the French Revolution. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Winkler, Matthias. “Das Exil als Aktions- und Erfahrungsraum. Französische Revolutionsemigranten im östlichen Mitteleuropa nach 1789.” Jahrbuch für Regionalgeschichte 33 (2015): 47–71. Winkler, Matthias. “Exil als wechselseitige Herausforderung. Französische Revolutionsemigranten in der Habsburgermonarchie.” In Aufnahmeland Österreich. Über den Umgang mit Massenflucht seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Börries Kuzmany and Rita Garstenauer, 69–93. Vienna, Berlin: Mandelbaum, 2017. Zedinger, Renate. Migration und Karriere: Habsburgische Beamte in Brüssel und Wien im 18. Jahrhundert. Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 2004. Zimmermann, Harro. “Die Emigranten der französischen Revolution in der deutschen Erzählliteratur und Publizistik um 1800.” Francia 12 (1984): 305–54.

CHAPTER 4

The Jersey Émigrés: Community Coherence Amidst Diaspora Sydney Watts

On November 10, 1798, British officials began a process of documenting over 430 émigré households on the Channel Island of Jersey. These groups of men, women, children, and their domestic servants were among the neediest if not the most vulnerable of the island’s population. Three biographical sketches below provide a rare glimpse of the émigré experience, and serve as examples of the range of social profiles and migration patterns among the thousands who sought exile in the revolutionary era. The three biographical sketches are taken from a manuscript register (folios 288, 203, 275, respectively) with over 300 registered households of declared aliens receiving aid from the British government. The register is located in the Foreign Office public records in the British National Archives (herein TNA), Records of Foreign Office, Declaration of Aliens, FO 95/608, 328. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author. This project was supported by a faculty grant and Summer Research Fellowships from the University of Richmond. Many thanks to my team of undergraduate researchers Claudia Eco, Bradley Fisher, and Nathaniel Griffee for their assistance in this research, and to Chris Bischof, Christine Haynes, and Patricia Tilberg for their valuable feedback. S. Watts (*) University of Richmond, Richmond, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Philip, J. Reboul (eds.), French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_4

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Madame Jeanne de Vaillant, like all the other documented émigrés, registered her family with the port authorities as a provision of Britain’s Aliens Act. According to the official register, the thirty-seven-year-old noblewoman and her teenage daughters, the demoiselles Cécile (age fourteen) and Constance (age thirteen), were now with two younger brothers (ages six and five) and two sisters (eighteen months and an infant), as well as three domestics. The Vaillants had departed from the city of Caen in Normandy in the winter of 1791, before the four younger children were born, presumably while abroad. Like many of the French émigrés in Jersey, this family of ten remained temporary British residents until the mass departures for France took place in May and June of 1802. Nearly four years after Madame de Vaillant and her two daughters arrived in Jersey, seventy-four-year-old Jean le Breton left the town of Dol in Brittany to spend the end of his life on the same island. As one of several marine pilots who ferried people to this place of refuge, his declaration attests to his military service under the British. The presence of dozens of retired officers, many in their seventies, added to the population of active seamen and soldiers stationed on the island. Jean lived with widow Jeanne Vautier and her five children until his death in June 1801, recorded by the Foreign Office as an addendum to the same declaration. For Vautier, Jersey was the place to live out the last days of one’s life. For the Vaillants, it was a place to settle and build a family. Other single travelers found themselves ‘dropped off’ in the comings and goings of the Channel crossing. Such was the case of a Norman boy named Jacques Cassimier, a presumed orphan who, at age seven, left France and passed through Jersey for England. Five years later, he found his way back to the Channel Island and settled there for at least the next three years in the home of Richard Cook in the town of Saint-Hilaire. The British records note that Jacques, a minor, lived under the protection of the parish priest of his native Normandy village, M. Fleury. The teenager’s departure from Jersey is unknown, as he is noted as one who ‘disappears’ from the alien registry in May 1800. As studies of the French Revolution’s emigration show, not all of the roughly 150,000 exiles who departed France between 1789 and 1801 were privileged aristocrats and persecuted clergymen; nor were all émigrés fleeing after the fall of the monarchy in 1792, only to return when the monarchy was restored in 1815. This chapter focuses on the varied social profiles and experiences of a small portion of Jersey’s 3500 to 4000 émigrés1 to demonstrate how the emigration and resettlement operated under

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the conditions of diaspora, propelling those in power to deploy political strategies and construct bureaucratic frameworks to contain and regulate the movement of people. Even as officials spoke of the émigrés as a coherent community, imposing legal and political categories that defined their status, they had to contend with the indeterminacy of wartime migration, particularly with refugees from the west of France whose domestic ruptures were the result of civil conflicts and the dramatic overturn of the traditional, social order.2 The three examples above, taken from the 1798 register housed in the Foreign Office at Whitehall, suggest a much more complicated picture of the émigrés than the legal and political categories that British officials and French republicans assigned to them. Identifying and managing  Jersey’s revolutionary refugees show  the ambivalences and contradictions from both sides of the Channel. For many revolutionaries of Year II, the designation ‘émigré’ fixed a traitorous label to a citizen’s act of departure. But many local authorities applied punitive measures against absent residents quite differently. The term may have politicized many  French  radicals, whereby the émigré became the ‘other’ who rejected the newly constituted nation and remained attached to a defunct, noble privilege. But it also allowed for wide interpretation across France and across the borders. For the British, the category ‘alien’ applied to the foreigner, most commonly the French living in exile. While the fears of an influx of refugees and potential revolutionaries subsumed many officials, others seemed to regard the large groups of destitute French people as a call to action. The documentation of aliens for charity rolls  accompanied Britain’s own cosmopolitanism and nascent humanitarianism to take in the émigrés and support them financially. Echoing a key term in Friedemann Pestel’s chapter in this volume, it was in this ‘Age of Emigrations’ when a range of responses over the movement of displaced persons to and through various exiled communities became more evident as it occurred on a much larger scale than in previous religious diasporas. Moreover, the conditions of diaspora for French émigrés differed from other previously exiled communities because of their strong expectation of return. In addition, competition and collaboration characterized much of their experience as they encountered other migrant communities moving to and held back from their final destination. Many men, women, and children who escaped the revolutionary conflict sought nearby shelters; others found safe havens across the border where host societies, sympathetic to their condition, provided them with temporary assistance. Jersey was filled with refugees from Brittany and

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Normandy, not surprising considering its proximity to the northwest coast. The Channel Islands had long served as a favorite spot for exiled communities, from the Huguenots to the Jacobites. Transitory populations, landing at Saint-Hilaire, sought passage to other destinations across the Channel and the Atlantic. Given the fluidity of borders and boundaries, the unpredictable aspects of war, revolution, and the ‘émigré status,’ I argue that Jersey’s émigrés were not teleological figures. Neither their exodus nor their resettlement dictated their lives. Rather, these émigrés were subject to particular conditions of diaspora—construed in relations between the homeland and the host-land—an uncertain space in which they, in turn, constituted their own subjectivity.3 Jersey, with its limited size (45 square miles)  and population  (about 20,000), provides a unique case study to analyze the social profile and migration patterns of its émigré community. This French-speaking British island, with its proximate location to the continent situates Jersey’s inhabitants at the threshold of the emigration—what was for many a ‘liminal space’ amidst the blurred subject-positions of forced exile and the free movement of people. This chapter begins by considering the larger context of the island’s political and cultural geography, not only its military-­intelligence operations and relief efforts, but also the situated understanding of this particular location that offered safety, security, and even opportunity along the edge of France. The chapter then takes a closer look at the social structures of refugee households and explores some of the individual strategies of émigrés that reveal the adaptability and ambivalence about migration and refuge. * * * Until the late 1990s, most of what historians knew of the emigration of French people who departed between 1789 and 1801 drew on the few dozen memoirs and diaries (often published decades after the period), and the official records of the migration from local, regional, and national archives in France.4 Donald Greer’s painstaking reconstruction of the entire emigration, cross-referencing numerous lists of émigrés in local and regional French archives, was the first to establish this group’s social diversity beyond nobles and clergy, classifying émigrés according to their place of origin, date of departure, and occupation. More than simply providing a much more reliable and detailed accounting of the émigré population as a whole, Greer’s work challenged common notions of the émigrés’ social profile as the noble royalists or the loyal Catholic clergyman. While his

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scholarship continues to be the definitive source on mass migration, Greer’s interpretation is limited by his sources that do not look beyond the actual absence or purported departure of French people. Much of the interpretation of the migration fixates on the domestic concerns of civil war and counter-revolution. Several contributions in this volume reveal a much more complicated view of migration and settlement across Europe and the Atlantic world. As Pestel, Harris, Winkler, and Miller show, the indeterminacies of migration become contingent upon relations between émigrés and their host nations. Seen from these borderlands, the emigration loses its unidirectional and definitive measures. In these contentious spaces, the presence of émigrés becomes problems of ‘public tranquility’ and, in some cases, generates new systems of poor relief.5 Britain was perhaps the host country with the most to learn from these challenges as the country absorbed nearly 12,500 émigrés every year. In 1792, the migration reached a height of 25,000 who had entered Britain.6 The heaviest influx was distinctly different from the first years of the emigration as it included large populations of refugees with no source of subsistence. In Jersey, the number of refugees receiving aid varied over time, ranging from 300 to nearly 2500 households. This number would suggest that the total population of 4000 émigrés on the island is a conservative number, considering the numbers of those who moved through the island.7 At its height, the transient refugee population nearly doubled the island’s residential population during the decade of conflict. During the revolutionary wars, Jersey drew the vast majority of émigrés from the northwest and Atlantic coast. Nearly half of the roughly 800 documented aliens who departed between 1789 and 1798 (the year of the Alien Declaration registry) came from the western province of Brittany, the largest groups from the towns of Rennes (78 persons), St. Malo (76 persons), St. Brieux (63 persons), Lamballe (52 persons), Nantes (19 persons), Dinan (17 persons), and Vannes (16 persons). The number of émigrés from Normandy followed Brittany: the largest group came from Caen (22 persons), then Avranches (18 persons), with a dozen or more rural parishes and coastal villages alongside these provincial cities. Clearly, Jersey’s proximity to western France’s coastline (only 14  miles to the Cherbourg peninsula) encouraged émigrés to seek Jersey as a temporary refuge, a waystation to British ports and other lands. The digital map of Jersey’s émigrés8 plotted according to their previous residences (see Figs. 4.1 and 4.2) point to a geographical reach of

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this migration with many émigrés traveling distances over 500 kilometers to the first landing on the shores of Jersey. Military officers Comte de Chauvigny and August Desplatz came from Languedoc and Gascony, respectively. A small number of families arrived from Coblentz, Strasbourg, and other towns along the Rhine. A handful of émigrés registered their last address differently from their place of birth, which suggests that some internal migration could have occurred before quitting the country. François Joseph Cheronnet and his wife, Charlotte, both from Lyon, departed from Brittany in August 1791. The thirty-threeyear-old demoiselle, Justine-Hélène-Elizabeth Guillonit d’Orvillier, born in Cayenne, emigrated to Jersey on May 21, 1791, from Saint-Onge, a village near Angoulême in southwestern France. Another young noblewoman, traveling with her nine-year-old son and a domestic servant, listed her birthplace as Saint-Domingue, but had departed from Lamballe on May 19, 1791. These examples are unique as the vast majority of Jersey’s émigrés declare their last residence as the same or proximate place of birth, a fact that underscores Jersey as the ‘first landing’ for the northwest emigration, but not necessarily the last. Beyond the alien registry are émigrés’ own accounts of the to-and-fro across this Channel Island. The memoirs of Olivier d’Argens, a Jersey émigré from Brittany, describe the movement of people: The country where I live is a moving picture. It’s here where everyone arrives from everywhere. It’s from here where everyone leaves. It’s also here where one comes back and leaves again. You learn about it as soon as you arrive. You know about it in detail, and if someone asks me anything about it, I would be able to answer them right away!9

Jersey was the largest of the Channel Islands, with fortifications dating from the Middle Ages. Along with its sister island, Guernsey, Jersey served as a strategic British naval post from the 1780s through the Napoleonic Wars. Jersey’s navigable harbor, surrounded by rocky seas, only a few hours by sea to the coast of France, made it an ideal (albeit treacherous) excursion for small cutters to survey maritime activity to and from the continent. Guernsey, which housed prisoners of war from the Antilles, was the less favored site for French exiled clergy and laity. Defended from French invasion in 1781, the British defended the primarily agrarian island with a flotilla of war ships, taking advantage of its geopolitical base to

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police Channel smugglers who trafficked in guns, ammunition, and French currency (assignats). From the start of the Revolution, Jersey became a center of espionage planning and recruitment. Historians Alfred Cobban and Elizabeth Sparrow have argued for the important role of counter-revolutionary émigrés for British intelligence gathering, and shown how Jersey’s governors had built their own espionage rings that influenced Britain’s war with France.10 Cobban identified Jersey as ‘the natural centre for the collection of information about French naval preparations in the ports of the West.’11 As much as a center for espionage and smuggling, Jersey’s unique geo-­politics provided an accessible location for nobles and members of their households in their trans-migratory lives across the Channel. About a quarter of the Jersey émigrés had noble ties to Brittany and Normandy, areas of rebellion and counter-revolution (see Fig. 4.3). These émigrés who registered as aliens in 1798 included a noble title of seigneur, vicomte, or marquis (see Fig. 4.4). At least a dozen of these noblemen appear in the records of the Foreign Office as agents of espionage. The other quarter were made up of domestic servants who accompanied both noble and commoner families and were listed in the household declaration by sex with no other identifying information. Several domestics traveled alone, leaving little or no information about their birthplace, last residence, or current address. The validity of some of these declarations is questionable given the prevalence of espionage. The diary of Comtesse de Gouyon describes her travels to Jersey accompanied by her husband (then serving under the Prince de Condé) disguised as a country servant (servante de campagne).12 Jersey also  served as a recruitment center for several military forays along the Brittany coast, drawing on resident émigrés to enlist in counter-­ revolutionary invasions. The first was planned to launch from Saint-Malo (‘the other Coblentz’) led by Marquis de la Rouërie; the second was the Franco-British operation to land on the Brittany peninsula at Quiberon Bay in July 1795. Both military efforts failed completely. Even with its strategic location for intelligence gathering, naval sorties, and the containment of prisoners of war, the Channel Islands served as a place of sanctuary for many French exiles. The last French invasion of Jersey in 1781 ended in failure, in large part due to the well-armed civilian militias. During the revolutionary era, Jersey’s temporary residents benefited from a military hospital on the island with a full-time surgeon assigned to this population. There were at least two parish schools run by émigré

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priests for French children. Residents could attend regular masses led by the exiled clerics in four private chapels on the island. The governor and his staff provided regular mail service that allowed émigrés to correspond with family members in France and England. Many resident refugees found Jersey with its verdant land hospitable to livestock rearing and farming, as well as its burgeoning population to be sizable enough to build their livelihood. Of the 157 children listed in the register of aliens, nearly one hundred were born on the island. By 1797, the more resourceful émigrés on the island had established themselves to the point where they resisted relocating in the wake of war between Britain and France. In defending the continued asylum of these émigrés, the Comte de Botherel reported to British officials that ‘the (émigrés) have adopted a branch of industry or commerce; they have acquired the tools, the crafts, and the animals. They have made great sacrifices in the hope of improving their future prospects.’13 Beyond those who pursued teaching, crafts, trades, and agriculture were those who saw opportunities to act as local leaders. Jersey had a number of well-established French residents including lords from ­ Brittany and Normandy such as de Chateaubriand, de la Houssaye, de Beauvoir, de la Tour d’Auvergne, de l’Estourbeillon, de Chauvigny. All left civil records of baptisms, marriages and deaths on the island. Parish records from Jersey also include the names of several sailors and naval officers, legal professionals and robe nobles, including two presidents of Brittany’s parlement, as well as seven office-holding conseillers of the same provincial court.14 Many of the most respected men in residence were involved in a local committee that managed and administered charity relief that came from London. According to the migration patterns drawn from the list of aliens, most of the Jersey émigrés who traveled from the Normandy or Brittany coastline arrived in Jersey just before the fall of the monarchy. The high points of entries for all registered aliens in Jersey occurred in the second quarter of 1791 and again in the third quarter of 1792 (see Fig. 4.5). The average date of arrival for all registered émigrés was on January 2, 1793, after the two surges of emigration had passed, but long before the final registered household had arrived in October of 1798.15 Those from the northern regions emigrated earlier, while those who came from the furthest regions of southwest and eastern France migrated after the Terror. The forced migration thesis that pins waves of migration with the Revolution’s émigré legislation and other political events, such as when

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the civil war in the Vendée moved north of the Loire, could explain some of these patterns. But the early wave in 1791 predates even the earliest punitive laws against the émigrés, the Decree of February 9, 1792, that provided for the confiscation of émigré property. The period post-­ Thermidor also does not explain why so many continued to migrate to Jersey. While the documentation tells us their date of embarkation and arrival to the island, we cannot know when these émigrés left their homes, or how long their period of migration lasted before arriving in Jersey. It seems plausible that many could have been traveling from England, the Caribbean, and points along the Atlantic coast of the US during their period of exile. Finally, we know from the Declaration of Aliens that many Jersey émigrés stayed on the island even during the Peace of Amiens. Roughly a quarter of the total number of registered aliens remained on the island after the 1802 amnesty assured their safe return: Jersey may have offered something more than an escape from a war-torn country. Among the many ‘host’ countries across Europe who took in French émigrés, Britain provided the most generous settlement that included regular financial support through 1801.16 One émigré in the know, Madame d’Orvelliers, wrote to her cousin the Count de Maurville of the comfort and simplicity of Jersey, as well as the ‘generous subsidies’ that refugees were provided. The news brought him and his family to Jersey in April 1795. In addition to the aid given while living on Jersey, émigrés received a three-month advance on their monthly stipend upon their return to France.17 Refugee relief was administered on the island in a way that sought equity and fairness. Émigrés were provided with the same monetary relief as French refugees on the British Isles, roughly thirty shillings a month. Many of the elderly refugees, as well as families with young children, received ‘extraordinary funds’ in addition to the monthly stipend. Letters to the governor of Jersey, Philippe d’Auvergne, Prince of Bouillon, are filled with hundreds of petitions to receive additional revenue for the convalescence of ailing and elderly family members. The register of aliens (that recorded the monthly stipend of each Jersey resident) reveals that many noble families were recipients of extraordinary funds, while commoners listed in the register were not. While it is not clear why this was the case, the Bouillon papers are filled with individual petitions to get on the list. Madame le Fruglays, widow of Vincent le Fruglays, ‘gentihomme de Bretagne,’ sought aid for her four domestics, appealing to the governor’s sense of justice who ‘sought help for all émigrés.’ Louise Retour pleaded

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to gain a place on the list. This forty-one-year-old woman had come to Jersey alone and gotten work teaching children at the hospital. In her letter, she made clear that if she did not receive any aid she would be forced to leave the island. Jeanne Marie Marty and her husband, Guillaume Bricquer, who described their indigence in great detail, ‘living hand to mouth with a four-month-old baby,’ simply wanted to be treated as émigrés. Finally, Giuseppe Simon, an Italian musician who has been on Jersey for ten months, wrote to d’Auvergne asking for his share of aid that was denied him because of his foreign origin: ‘I appeal to your authority my prince to bring me justice.’18 Many émigrés found their way to Jersey after exhausting their savings in expensive cities along the south coast of England. Olivier d’Argens described a Jersey pilot who came to Southampton with a former officer who offered to take twenty other émigrés with him to Jersey. The officer had arrived in Southampton in November 1792 with 1200 livres, and was now down to 130 to sustain him. In Jersey, he found a modest home with a poor farmer in St.-Helier, receiving a shilling a day until the conditions were better to return to France.19 The Aliens Act, which began the process of identifying foreigners on British soil, also accompanied the humanitarian efforts to provide for them. Indeed, some of the same officials who wrote the legislation were also involved in establishing the relief committees. British leaders, many sympathetic to the French émigrés, did not see the Act as restrictive. The spirit of the law did not prohibit immigrants, but only sought to document them. Most considered the Act as a way to account for those who qualified for aid. Émigrés who arrived in Great Britain after January 1793 were required to give their names, ranks, occupations, and addresses to the local justices. Even those who housed or roomed with an alien had to send similar details. London authorities did little to police the émigré areas for unregistered aliens. Likewise, the law that required passports for refugees already in Britain to visit Jersey was seldom enforced. A memorandum sent to the Jersey Governor, Philippe d’Auvergne, gave explicit instructions to the landing of aliens without passports on ships coming immediately from France or any other country at war with Great Britain, which d’Auvergne rarely required, pardoning those undocumented refugees who escaped the civil unrest in Brittany and the Vendée.20 The Aliens Act appeared to have little effect on the actual migration or displacement of Jersey’s émigrés. The numbers of arrivals to Jersey increased throughout the 1790s well into the later years of the decade,

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even as the waves of mass emigration was waning to Britain. According to the charity rolls for the residents of Jersey, the numbers of newly enrolled recipients increased from 413 in October 1793, to 1267 the following year. By August 1795 there were 2090 on the roll (533 men, 570 women, 400 children, and 516 servants). At its height, the charity distributed £2870 to over 2500 émigrés.21 But the relief funds could not be sustained throughout the decade. Neither could Britain guarantee the protection of the island’s residents once Britain and France were at war. In July 1796, with a French invasion of Britain looking imminent, the government made efforts to forcibly relocate the entire civilian population as Jersey built its naval forces and needed to relocate its refugee population. By then, Jersey’s émigrés had become a very established group of teachers, artisans, townspeople, and farmers, and most refused to go. The fact that only 350 of the 1300 to 1400 émigrés (non-clergy) resettled in London points to a level of resistance not noted in other stories of emigration. Perhaps it was the quality of life in Jersey that far outweighed the crowding and squalor of urban London.22 Even as the Jersey émigré community held on to its homestead, the relief committees sought ways to cut back on their support at the end of the century, slowly forcing the émigrés to make the choice: either to return to France or to stay in Jersey with no guaranteed subsidies.23 By 1798, the under-secretary of the Home Office and the governor of Jersey who oversaw the declarations of all émigrés who resided on the island worked to help the Aliens Office not only document the foreign population, but also account for the charity rolls, whose active recipients often bartered and sold their welfare status with other émigrés. Philippe d’Auvergne, a native of the island who commanded the Jersey flotilla, was caught between the needs of both sides. His control over the arrival of émigrés fluctuated as many sought his favor, coming to pay court to the Prince of Bouillon at his lodging in the fortified castle. His instructions required ‘all masters or commanders of every ship or vessel that should arrive in any port of place of this kingdom and vessels register the names, ages, rank, occupations, and origins of all foreigners.’24 In 1798, the British authorities issued a standardized application, printed in French, to be completed by all resident aliens. The register noted detailed information about their migration to and settlement in Jersey, but no explanation of why they left, or what they sought in coming to Britain. Perhaps there was no need to declare one’s business, as most émigrés and their host countries knew it plainly. In the same way, the overwhelming majority of émigrés departed with their three months’ relief funds, no questions asked.

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As a source constituted to document a refugee population under the protection of British authorities, the declaration paints a cohesive community. Bundled together, it represents a carefully cataloged portrait of the French social order, arranged by rank and privilege. The social categories that officials used to classify Jersey residents further complicates our definition of émigrés as a whole, especially when their own self-­identification of office, rank, and domain drew on the Old Regime’s lines of social distinction and privilege that for many had lost their meaning. Even as the register of aliens reinscribed differences of status and rank according to hierarchical categories, the actual experience of wartime emigration splintered existing households and created new bonds between families without patriarchs or kin relations of any kind. According to Jersey’s 1798 list of aliens, 87 of the 207 domestics accompanied single travelers, nearly a third of them, female. Married women, many with young children, declared themselves heads of household with no reference to widowhood or separation from their husbands. We cannot know whether or not these solo travelers and single mothers found extended family on the island. The extent to which the settlement experience of these and other émigrés actually formed a coherent community while living on the island for five to ten years may be impossible to know. On the one hand, émigrés experienced their ‘native’ country’s efforts to criminalize their betrayal of the nation, taking away their rights of citizenship and claims to property, even appropriating the property of those who abandoned their homeland. For many émigrés, their loss of patrimony and, by consequence, desperate poverty erased any visible sense of class or distinction. For others, these losses only spurred them on to take arms and engage in counter-revolution. On the other hand, émigrés experienced a ‘host’ country that unwittingly took them in and provided welfare for them because of the injustice the host country saw in their condition. The documentation of aliens is one example of how British authorities exercised ‘justice’ in requiring all émigrés—high and low—to declare themselves so that resources could be distributed fairly. Nearly all of the refugees in Jersey received some sort of financial support from Britain, if not as beneficiaries of mutual aid from the English people, then as conscripted militia fighting to defend the island. Even as émigrés sought new a­ lliances— whether in bonds of marriage or the birth of children, in forging economic ties with other émigrés and residents, or in building shared strategies among military corps—they had to contend with the precariousness of this temporary home in a period of instability.

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For many French people, identities—even by standards of a traditional, corporate society bound to provincial region or city, and to rank and privileged rank—were being reinvented, if not becoming confused. Noble privilege (already a loose marker of identity) had been called into question and later discarded in the year of the Revolution. The French sans-culotte, not the aristocrat, was brandished as the epitome of a true citizen in the rhetoric of Maratand others. Just as Jacques Cassier moved across the Channel twice over (perhaps more) as a boy, or Madame de Vaillant, who settled as an alien resident of Jersey and raised six children there, émigrés who traveled alone or lived apart from their traditional heads of household relocated across fluid boundaries-in-the-making. Spun out in the extremes of centrifugal politics, these émigrés held loosely to place and nation if no other reason than to survive along the world’s borderlands. The foreign residents of Jersey, like many émigrés who went elsewhere, were castaways of a revolutionary war that fractured the social bedrock upon which religious, social, and political identities had rested for centuries. Beyond those who held to social categories of rank and position, among them cooks, notaries, palace guards, laborers, doctors were the most vulnerable victims of civil strife—the aged, the very young and parentless, widows and single women with children, and many young men and women without any family, without a profession, simply traveling alone. Kirsty Carpenter describes the post-1792 influx of ‘boat people’ migrating to Britain.25 Many were bound by the same experience crossing the Channel, forced to coexist in a sparsely populated, rural environment with few resources of their own. One example to illustrate this broken identity is the Comte de Cartrie, whose clandestine departure was precipitated by an escalating climate of fear. His memoirs provide one example of the harrowing experiences of a royalist seeking refuge behind and eventually across enemy lines. A noble of Anjou, Cartrie ran from his château, hiding in the forests and seeking help from local peasants. He fought in the Vendée war (the counter-­ revolutionary conflict, in which Jeanne Ambroise and Céleste Bulkeley, as legendary ‘amazons,’ also fought).26 His wife and grown children were victims of the revolutionary tribunal. He appears later as one of the few survivors of the failed military attack at Quiberon, from where he made his way to Jersey after three weeks waiting for calm seas to make the passage. Finally, a break in the weather appeared in December of 1795, says Cartrie:

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Contrary winds made this [crossing] still a work of twelve days; and I landed more dead than alive. The assistance I received from the faculty and the quiet on shore in a little time brought about my health. The merchants, too, were very kind in supplying me with some clothes, and at the representation of the Prince de Bouillon, I was allowed one shilling per day extra for a servant; but the pay of a servant amounting to twenty-four shillings per month, besides other expenses, I was put to the greatest difficulties to support myself, though with the utmost economy.27

The Comte de Cartrie does not appear on the 1798 list of Declarations, but he benefited from another person’s charity and gave up the cost of a domestic to secure himself financially. Cartrie provides a powerful testimony to the plight of a provincial nobleman, not simply one cast out as a victim of war, but one who sought to re-establish himself. He borrowed money from a domestic servant who nursed him to health. A nameless man, who needed to secure himself a position on the island, using Cartrie as his reference for another employer. With this money, Cartrie gained full recovery, eventually migrating to Southampton where he settled as a garden laborer. These last few stops that led to his financial freedom represent the briefest part of his memoir and the most illuminating when we consider how clearly he recognized the dramatic turn in his social condition. In a complete role reversal, the impoverished nobleman, financially indebted to a domestic servant, indentures himself to the servant. As Cartrie explains: I put the little clothes I had into my portmanteau and throwing it on my shoulder, I followed my domestic, or more properly speaking, my master, as by him I was now governed and for him I was now going to hard labor to satisfy his demand on me.28 The memoirs of Cartrie, published in London in 1906, and later translated in French and published in Paris, give us a humble vision of ‘the downtrodden émigré made new.’ Looking back, Cartrie reconstitutes an identity that agrees with what he has become.29 In this liminal space, émigrés like Cartrie who passed through Jersey regarded their exodus as a temporary condition. Many chose to wander rather than assimilate. As such, their condition of diaspora disrupted what little community coherence their host country could ascribe to them. Seen in contrast to the collective will of an exiled people lost in the wilderness, the Jersey émigrés offer an alternate history of the French emigration as a collection of individual experiences, each leaving for their own reasons, in their own ways. The men, women, and children who left France for Jersey, whether by choice or not, found a place of refuge in a time of domestic turmoil. Their

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itineraries must be understood within uncertainty and adaptability. Local turmoil and intermittent, political violence across northwest France (particularly Brittany, Normandy, and the Loire Valley) shaped their experience. Their displacement is better understood through local circumstances and historical contingencies that sent these émigrés to borderlands than the decrees and actions that imposed a categorical split between the revolutionary self and émigré ‘other.’30 Beyond the documentation of Jersey émigrés that differentiates this social group according to Old Regime categories was a community whose experiences under their diaspora was haphazard and contingent. In their effort to find security and stability beyond the borders of France, émigrés sought the cooperation and solidarity of other migrants. The category of ‘émigré’ was much more than one who quit his homeland. He was escaping war and seeking refuge wherever he could. She was a remaking her life abroad as a British alien in any way possible. They were joining forces for the hopes of a French counter-revolution, living in exile. And many of them could not accomplish this without the help of one another. Maps of French Emigration to Jersey

Fig. 4.1  Sites of embarkation from Brittany and Normandy for the Island of Jersey, 1789–98. (Source: http://dsl.richmond.edu/frenchrefugees/)

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Fig. 4.2  Sites of embarkation across northwest France for the Island of Jersey, 1789–98. (Source: http://dsl.richmond.edu/frenchrefugees/)

Social Analysis of Jersey Émigrés

Fig. 4.3  Émigrés in Jersey according to social status. (Source: The National Archives—Kew. Records of Foreign Office, Declaration of Aliens. FO 95/608, 328 folios)

Nobles

Non-Nobles

N/A

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Chevalier Chavalier de Saint Louis Vicomte/Vicomtesse Comte/Comtesse Noble Marquis Seigneur Gentihomme 0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Fig. 4.4  Titles used by émigrés (with overlap). (Source: The National Archives—Kew. Records of Foreign Office, Declaration of Aliens. FO 95/608, 328 folios)

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

1788

1789

1790

1791

1792

1793

1794

1795

1796

1797

1798

Fig. 4.5  Number of households emigrating to Jersey. (Source: The National Archives—Kew. Records of Foreign Office, Declaration of Aliens. FO 95/608, 328 folios)

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Notes 1. Donald Greer, The Incidence of Emigration during the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 93–94. Greer claims that there were anywhere from 3500 to 4000 who took refuge in Jersey, citing an earlier study of parish records on Jersey that compiled over 1200 families. 2. For a more detailed examination of the problem of intention and the legal definition of the willing citizen, see Mary Ashburn Miller’s chapter, ‘The Impossible Emigrant,’ in this collection. 3. Much of my thinking about diaspora is informed by Lily Cho, “The Turn to Diaspora,” Topia 17 (2007): 11–30. 4. Both sets of sources pose difficulties for the historian. Memoirs, often published decades after the migration, are reconstructed memories. The émigré lists are filled with inconsistencies. The administrative records from the revolutionary period (série L) in France’s departmental archives are filled with citizens’ petitions to have their names struck from official lists of émigrés that were listed incorrectly. Over 200 such petitions appear in the (French) Archives départmentales de Morbihan, série L 212. 5. The Aliens Act clearly stated the need for ‘public tranquility’ because of the ‘great and unusual number of persons’ who arrived in Britain. ‘An Act establishing Regulations, respecting aliens arriving in this Kingdom, or resident therein, in certain cases.’ TNA, FO 83/294, folio 8. 6. Kirsty Carpenter, working from the British administrative sources in the Wilmot Committee records and Bouillon papers, posits this number which exceeded Greer’s figures by several thousand. K. Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 40. 7. TNA, T 93/29. See also Régis de L’Estourbeillon, Les Familles françaises à Jersey pendant la Révolution (Nantes et Mayenne: Éditions régionales de l’ouest, 1880, 2000), 2, 4–5, 268–480. 8. http://dsl.richmond.edu/frenchrefugees/. Last accessed September 3, 2019. This map shows the last residences of all households prior to their migration to Jersey. Data is taken from the 1798 Declaration of Aliens, TNA FO/95 608. Figs. 4.1 and 4.2, included in the appendix to this chapter, are taken from this digital map. My sincere thanks to Rob Nelson and the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond for their help with this project. 9. ‘Le pays que je continue d’habiter est un tableau mouvant. C’est ici que l’on arrive de partout; c’est d’ici que l’on part. C’est encore ici que l’on revient pour repartir encore. On y est instruit de ce qui arrive; on le sera exactement, et si l’on me demandait quelque part, je pourrais m’y rendre promptement!’ Charles Hettier, Relations de la Normandie et de la

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Bretagne avec les îles de la Manche pendant l’émigration. (Caen: L’Imprimerie Le Blanc-Hardel, 1885), 491. 10. Alfred Cobban, “British Secret Service in France,” English Historical Review, vol. 69, no. 54 (1954): 226–61; Elizabeth Sparrow, “Secret Service under the Pitt’s Administrations, 1792–1806,” History 82, no. 270 (April 1998): 280–94. Cobban also cites two unpublished doctoral dissertations: A. King, “The Relations of the British Government and the Émigrés and Royalists of Western France, I793–5” (London, 1931); and N. F. Richards, “British Policy and the Problem of Monarchy in France, 1789–1801” (London, 1954). 11. Alfred Cobban, “The Beginning of the Channel Isles Correspondence, 1789–1794,” English Historical Review 77, no. 302 (January 1962): 38–52. 12. Hettier, Relations de la Normandie, 115–117. 13. Mémoire, Londres, le 23 juin 1797, le comte de Botherel. The Bouillon Papers. TNA, PC 1/118, folio 73. 14. R. de L’Estour beillon, Les Familles française à Jersey, 5. 15. See digital map: dsl.richmond.edu/frenchrefugees 16. Caroline Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Origins of Refugee Relief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 32. 17. Letters from Madame D’Orvilliers to her cousin, Charles Alexandre Bidé de Maureville, le comte de Maurville, December 1794 to April 1795. L’Estoubeillon, Les Familles françaises à Jersey, 481–95; TNA, FO 95/608. 18. Correspondence to Philippe d’Auvergne, Bouillon Papers, TNA, PC 1/115, folios 12, 108, 114, 118. 19. Hettier, Relations de la Normandie, 34. 20. TNA, PC 1/33/83. 21. TNA, T 93/29. 22. Carpenter, Refugees, 96–98. 23. See monthly treasury reports of bills of exchange drawn to pay the subsistence of the military and émigrés on this island ‘by the grace of the Duke of Portland,’ all written from Jersey in TNA, FO 95/607, March 1795– Jan 1810. 24. TNA, PC 1/33/83. 25. Carpenter, Refugees, 29. 26. Legends of the count’s sisters, Céleste Bulkeley and Jeanne Ambroise, the latter who married René Prosper Sapinaud, are inscribed in several chronicles of the house de la Catrie. Sophie-Céleste-Éléonore de Sapinaud de La Rairie (1770–1854), known as the ‘Belle Vendéenne’ has garnered interest in recent publications of her memoirs about experiences in the counterrevolutionary war. See Sapinaud, Mémoires de la belle vendéenne (ingrandessur-Loire: D. eet S. Lambert de La Douasnerie, 1999).

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27. Toussaint Ambroise Talour de la Cartrie de la Villenière, Memoirs of the Count de Cartrie (London: J. Lane, 1906), 184. 28. Cartrie, Memoirs of the Count de Cartrie, 188. 29. Pierre-Amédée Pichot edited and translated Cartrie’s memoir into French. It appeared under the title, Un Vendéen sous la Terreur: Mémoires inédits (Paris: Société des publications littéraires illustrées, 1910). 30. Examples of these contradictions became more problematic with the annexation of territories along the French border. See Louis Anné’s petition in Miller, ‘The Impossible Emigrant,’ in this volume.

Bibliography British Archival Sources Aliens Act, Foreign Office Papers, The National Archives at Kew Gardens   (series FO 83/294) Bouillon Papers: correspondence, reports, miscellaneous receipts. The National Archives   Foreign Office series: FO 95/3/4, FO 95/605, FO 95/606, FO 95/607, FO 95/608, FO 95/609   Home Office series: HO 5, HO 5/1, HO 5/5, HO 69/13, 69/15, HO 69/17, HO 69/18, HO 69/22, HO 69/33, HO 69/34   Privy Council series: PC 1/33/83, PC 1/115, PC 1/119A, PC 1/135 Farr Papers, British Library Manuscripts   (series MS 30764) French Refugee Relief Committee, The National Archives   (series T 93/25, T 93/28, T 93/29) Notification of Foreign Aliens, Middlesex Sessions, London Metropolitan Archives   (series MR/A/01 – MR/A/80) Notification of Foreign Aliens, Westminster Sessions, London Metropolitan Archives   (series WR/A/1 – WR/A/43) Relief Fund for Distressed Clergy and Laity, The National Archives   (series T/93/25, T/93/28, T/93/29) Windham Papers, British Library Manuscripts   (series MS 38663, MS 37857, MS 50851)

French Archival Sources Police reports on émigrés. Departmental archives in Rennes and Vannes. (Administration et police. L-series) Private family records of émigrés. Departmental archives in Rennes and Vannes (Archives privées. J-series)

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Secondary Sources Audran, Karine. « L’Accusation d’émigration des négociants malouins: Une justification abusive de la politique terroriste à Saint-Malo » Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 345 (July–Sept 2006): 31–53. Balleine, George R. The Tragedy of Philippe d’Auvergne; Vice Admiral in the Royal Navy and Last Duke of Bouillon. Chichester: Phillimore, 1973. Bastier, Jean. « La Fortune d’un émigré: Louis de Bonald » Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 221 (July-Sept 1975): 431–445. Carpenter, Kirsty. Refugees of the French Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Castries, René de la Croix, duc de. La Vie quotidienne des émigrés. Paris: Hachette, 1966. L’Estourbeillon, Regis de, comte. Les Familles françaises à Jersey. Nantes: Imprimerie Vincent Forest et Émile Grimaud, 1886. Gamblin, Claude. L’Immigration française en Grande Bretagne, 1789–1815. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000. Greer, Donald. The Incidence of the Emigration During the French Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951. Godechot, Jacques. The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action, 1789–1804. Translated by Salvator Attanasio. New York: Fertig Press, 1971. Huchet, Patrick. 1795, Quiberon ou le Destin de la France. Rennes: Ouest-France, 1995. Meadows, R.  Darrow. “Engineering Exile: Social Networks and the French Atlantic Community, 1789–1809” French Historical Studies 23, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 67–102. Morieux, Renaud, The Channel: England, France and the Construction of a Maritime Border in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Reboul, Juliette. French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Shaw, Caroline. Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Origins of Refugee Relief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Sutherland, Donald. France 1789–1815: Revolution and Counter-Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Turquan, Joseph. Les Femmes de l’émigration, 1789–1815. Paris: Émile Paul, 1911–12. Vidalenc, Jean. Les Émigrés français, 1789–1825. Caen: CNRS, 1963. Weiner, Margery. French Exiles 1789–1815. London: John Murray Ltd., 1960.

PART II

Reading the Emigration, Learning in Emigration and the Émigré Theatre

CHAPTER 5

Émigré Children and the French School at Penn (Buckinghamshire): 1796–1814 Kirsty Carpenter

If they are left to me for six months, a set of finer lads, for their age and standing, will not be seen in Europe. —Edmund Burke to the Marquis of Buckingham, April 1796 (BL Add Ms 37,843, f. 103. NB. Unless otherwise stated all translations are the author’s and a literal translation has been used in order to retain as faithfully as possible the French constructions)

Émigré children in Britain were caught in the crossfire of emigration and Counter-Revolution. They were subject to the death penalty if they did not return to France between the age of ten and fourteen. They had their sense of belonging destabilised by emigration and their education disrupted. The Penn school, which existed from 1797 to 1814, was designed to be a French school in Britain for émigré boys where young refugee nobles were to be educated to return to France equipped to continue the traditions of the Ancien Régime.1 As an emergency educational institution for providing refugee relief, the school is testimony to Franco-British counter-revolutionary cooperation, and to Edmund Burke’s very ­persistent K. Carpenter (*) Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Philip, J. Reboul (eds.), French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_5

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social activism until his death in July 1797. Two characteristics of the Penn school set it apart from other émigré schools—as a refugee measure it was directly financed by the host government and it had a military purpose. This chapter argues that the Penn school provides a unique case study of the tensions between the micro-history of emigration and notions of a revolutionised Europe, between French Ancien Régime rigidity and nineteenth-century European educational modernisation or change. It suggests that the school’s major impact is as a historical example of emergency management and humanitarian relief conceived by Burke, and of creative leadership on the part of its French headmaster, the abbé Maraine. The school changed over time and demonstrated that French ecclesiastical pedagogy was capable of flexibility and modernisation, and that the function of education in preserving tradition was as much a principle of education in the French provinces as it was in the British ones.2 The school evolved from its original mission to achieve a cultural hybridity that made it stand out even though its primary point of difference was that it had a 100% former noble French émigré student body. Other émigré schools admitted British children as well as French, and fundraised in the wider Franco-British community because they did not have government subsidies. Penn was removed from the wider French community by its dependence on relief funding, and émigré parents had little to do with their children at the boarding school as few had the means to travel. Its administrative records in the form of letters from the Director of the school, the abbé Maraine, to the Relief Committee detail its pedagogical identity, as well as tensions between the British who funded the school and the French who managed it.3 On the one hand, it was a nationalism-defying, Revolution-denying gesture implying that the elites of Europe retained a sympathy that bound them more closely than race or language,4 and, on the other, it was a one-off isolated solution, and its political idealism faded as the realities of debt and the burdens of teaching increased.5 As an institution, it underscores the difficulty of giving British émigré schools generalised characteristics, as schools run by ecclesiastics were very different to schools run by lay émigrés in urban settings for fee-paying pupils.6 The school’s creation was an emergency measure inextricably linked to the Quiberon expedition and relief efforts in London to help the children badly affected by that disaster. Nearly one-third of the refugee French population receiving relief in Britain during the French Revolution were children.7 In 1797 when all émigrés on the British relief lists were required to re-enrol as a way of purging the list 27.6% (12.8% boys and 14.8% girls)

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were enrolled as children; 16% of boys were over fourteen (average age 7) and 43% of girls (average age twelve) were nearly adult or grown up.8 By 1799 this figure had reduced to girls and boys making up 16% of the total number of refugees.9 It is important to note this was the first time that a relief document had required the number and age of children in a family to be recorded (or the number of domestic servants) before receiving financial aid.10 The Quiberon expedition was to have been the catalyst for the émigrés’ return to France. When the news came of the execution of the 748 émigrés, most of those near Vannes from 27 July 1795, the reaction was one of despair.11 The British forces had taken the combined hopes of the Counter-Revolution with them, but been vanquished largely by their own ineptitudes, and the better organisation of the republican forces. The commissions militaires had little to decide upon given that the émigrés taken prisoner had been caught in arms, and executions took place summarily.12 It was the first time in London that the grim reality for the wives of émigré officers reached the attention of their female British peers. These women, many used to a life of ease inside France, were struggling to buy firewood and keep their children warm, let alone educated.13 The Bishop of Ely had suggested a plan to create a means of providing clothing, food and education for the boys affected by the crisis, but due to a lack of funds, it had gone no further.14 Burke added a key ingredient in order to make it more attractive to the government: always an advocate of French self-help with a dash of British savoir faire he offered to create, stressing the need for the French to be fully involved, a preparatory military school.15 He became the voice of the victims of Quiberon and the creator (and to some extent the curator) of the Penn school. He went in person to investigate the case of Madame d’Aiguille whose husband had been shot at Vannes and was reported to have asked a little émigré boy, ‘Do you wish to become my son?’ The boy replied, ‘No I wish to always be the son of my Papa and remain French.’16 When Burke had felt the loss of his only son on 2 August 1794, these words left a profound impression.17 In the proposal for the school, he argued that it was necessary to save these children from growing up influenced by the low company they were keeping and to which the poverty of their parents condemned them. He flagged the harm this would do, stating: ‘If Providence should restore them to their country they will be utterly incapable of filling up their place in society; − no small calamity to all nations, to have France the receptacle of noble or ignoble barbarians.’18

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Burke found a suitable site nominating the house of his old friend the General Haviland that had been rented by the government in 1793 as a possible home for priests but never used. The Tylers’ Green House could hold sixty boys and tutors, and it was located in a spacious and healthy setting. Pitt, Buckingham and Windham were just a few of the office-­ holders whom Burke pressured to get the Penn school opened and operational promising Windham that he would be the Barrack Master.19 In March 1796, Pitt agreed to government funding for the school whose trustees were to be the Duke of Portland, the Marquis of Buckingham, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Loughborough and William Windham, Secretary for War. The Treasury was asked to provide £50 a month or £600 per year in monthly payments; £1000 was sought for furnishing and additional furniture, linen, clothing, and so on, and tutors were to be unpaid but given board and food. Burke wanted the boys at Penn to have a French education managed and administered by the French themselves. ‘All that we English have to do with this school is to protect it, to preserve it from wrong and fraud, and to feed it as well as we can.’20 The school was equipped with beds and furniture via the relief committee, an old stable was transformed into a schoolroom and the chapel cleaned up. The uniform chosen for the first twenty-five students was blue with a white cockade bearing the inscription ‘Vive le Roi’ on a red background for boys who had lost their fathers and a black background for those who had lost uncles. This distinction according to the proximity of the child to a fallen relative denoted prestige, and it was a visual patriotic statement of the family’s commitment to the service of the French King and the British Government.21 Uniform for the boys was therefore at once a reminder of the ceremonial dress traditions of the French Court, royal privilege and a practical measure.22 Students initially had a uniform for wear during the week and a second set for best, but by 1799, the uniform was worn out and the boys had no underclothes. The curator of the school beseeching that more cloth be supplied wrote, ‘I consider, Monsieur, the matter of clothing as an essential item that impacts greatly on the impression that the public forms of the school.’23 The selection of boys was to follow a plan, and death of a close family member in the war was the basis for receiving a place. Places were allotted to orphans from Jersey through the Prince de Bouillon, and he was inundated with requests.24 Places at the school were also sought by émigrés who heard of the school and applied through the French Committee whose job it was to administer (and vet) the lay French. Antoinette Peltier

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de Jolivette was not the only woman to write on behalf of her son— Charles, born 16 August 1790, son of Joseph Hastier de Jolivette, Trésorier de France au Bureau des Finances de Moulins.25 A very thorough background check was made and reasons given for refusing a place included ‘trop mauvaise santé’ (health too poor), not being over nine years of age and not being registered with the committee of secours (students had to be registered to receive the relief payment even though it was paid directly to the school).26 Les Pennois, as they were known, were a mix of ages, and those who did have fathers still living were from the noblesse of northern France, like Marie André Paul Louis du Verdier de Genouillac who was the son of a conseiller of the Parlement de Bretagne.27 The Marquis de Montaigne, président à Mortier au Parlement de Bretagne,28 the Marquis de Choiseul29 and the Marquis de Chardonnay, émigré de la province de Bretagne,30 illustrate the preponderance of nobles from Brittany who were fathers of Penn scholars. Normandy was also well represented. The list of names accepted into the school is a défilé of the old noblesse, even if a significant number were also turned away.31 There is no complete register of the names of all the boys who attended the Penn school, but there are surviving documents that provide in part, or for certain periods, the names of the boys who attended the school.32 Many siblings went through the school and the requests for admission often mention more than one child.33 A small number of the pupils at the Penn school were not old enough to be subject to the émigré laws, but most were of an age that required them to take responsibility for being absent from France and were liable to the death penalty if caught on French soil.34 While it had been Burke’s intention that there should be no fuss made about the opening of the school, and no public subscription should be made for it, as time went on he found he had to specify the purpose of the school. It was not a Royal School, or a permanent public foundation, but ‘the attempt of a private person, more full of zeal than of means to serve the meritorious French.’ However, when the opening of the school was announced in The Times on 14 April 1796, it was both an official government institution and a royal school.35 No mention was made of Edmund Burke. From the beginning the choice of tutors was controversial. The Bishop of Saint Pol de Léon’s opposition to the appointment of English tutors upset Burke who had hopes of giving the French boys a ‘good dash of English education and a working knowledge of the language [so that] the

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children, if unable to return to France, would be able to make a career for themselves in the military line in some part of the British Dominions. An English master in the house was absolutely necessary.’36 He described the Bishop of Léon’s intransigence as ‘intolerable.’37 ‘At least one of them must speak English – the boys speak it as well as natives – and they will be ruined if they are put back and made foreigners again.’38 Burke, to appease the Bishop, set out to find a priest with ‘a good knowledge of Latin, and a tolerable knowledge of Greek, and if some elemental knowledge of Mathematics is added it will be better – but the main fundamental part is a mastery of our native tongue with a power of reading it, in prose and in verse, in a firm, just and manly manner.’39 That proved elusive. The abbé Maraine, former superior of the Saint Nicholas Seminary in Rouen, was the Bishop’s choice of headmaster, yet he found himself challenged because the boys were not accustomed to the discipline of the religious life.40 Tense relations between Burke and the Bishop over appointments to the school strained relations, but Burke’s interest in the boys was personal, and he often improved the school’s fare from his own kitchens.41 When he died, his role in the school was continued but without a personal touch. A codicil to his will expressed the hope that Lord Loughborough, the Duke of Portland, the Marquis of Buckingham, Mr. Windham and Dr. Laurence would continue their protection and favour to the Emigrant School at Penn, and will entreat with a weight on which I dare not presume, the Rt Hon. William Pitt to continue the necessary allowance […], and that their willingness be pleased to exert their influence to place the said Young Persons in some military corps or other service as may best suit their disposition and capacities praying God to bless their endeavours.42

From this came the expectation that the graduates of Penn would serve with the British forces. In the Mémoires de madame la comtesse de La Boutetière de Saint-Mars, Louis Comte de la Boutetière (1782–1849), who was at Penn from 1796 to 1799, records that he did not accept the offer of a place in the British military and highlighted the practical problems associated with doing so. Certainly it is not for me to bemoan the generous aid received by the boarders at the Penn school, but it must be said that having given charitably Albion sought to profit from it. At the end of their schooling, students were

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directed to the Ministry of War and there they were offered an officer’s commission in the British army. Within twenty-four hours, the student had to choose between this commission and the cobblestones of London.43

It was hardly surprising that the process was crude and cumbersome, and that the ex-Penn students felt obliged, but objected to being press-ganged into British forces.44 They wanted to serve with French forces under French leaders and fight for the restoration of Louis XVIII. Drills were not part of the original curriculum, but they were introduced by the abbé Maraine who requested the services of an officer. Many of the boys were, however, too small to be given regular military training, and Maraine came to the conclusion that a military officer on his teaching staff of priests (Chevalier, Dutour and Merlin) was wasted compared to the extra teaching potential another priest could provide. But the Baron de Bellegarde had already been appointed, and he served at the school from May 1796 until 1802 where he was a constant source of discontent and personality conflicts with the ecclesiastics who found him lazy and idle.45 The financial operation of the school was also a constant source of supply problems and debt worries. From 1799, Maraine was constantly in a state of shortage and later could not pay his debts to the suppliers of the school. By 10 March 1801 the payments from the Treasury were four months in arrears even though the government had granted the sums, and Maraine was writing to his contact at the Treasury, Mr. Nagle, to ask for payment to be made signing himself: ‘I am with a profound regret ...’.46 In 1802 he wrote again to Walter King: ‘You would render us a great service if you could obtain from the Treasury the arrears owing to the Penn school, because for a long time now I am in the most deep distress.’47 The Treasury sent nothing and in September and he wrote again saying that they had lost their housekeeper but as the number of students was much reduced they could manage with two servants.48 By November he complained to the King that he had received nothing and could not pay the tradesmen who had already waited eleven months to be paid, some of whom were not prepared to do more without payment being made.49 In the present year he had received only £250, leaving six months outstanding. He wrote, ‘It is completely impossible to meet current costs with such a small sum.’50 The Penn school like the emigration struggled on, and managed by not replacing staff or using senior pupils to teach. Maraine wrote; ‘We have lost our good housekeeper, but as the number of students is much dimin-

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ished, it will not be necessary to employ another.’51 Mary Edwards, the Roman Catholic Housekeeper at the French School, was buried in the parish on 22 August 1802 aged sixty-two.52 On 28 April 1808 a letter from the Emigrant Office authorised and requested the payments by Treasury of £74,185 to be paid to the abbé Maraine for sundry expenses of that institution and £65 per annum to be paid for the rent of the house at Penn in Buckinghamshire ‘used as a military school.’53 This continued until 1814 when after the restoration of Louis XVIII money for the school’s operation was remitted directly from France to the Treasury for the school and its remaining students.54 Maraine adopted teaching strategies to unify and centralise the curriculum that was traditional apart from the addition of English (Latin, French, Mathematics, Science and Geography). The pedagogical structure of the school was Maraine’s responsibility, but it required more staff than he possessed, and he was constantly being creative with ways to interest the boys in learning. He divided the children into four different levels or classes for Literature, three for Mathematics, two for English and two for Geography. Maraine found himself asking for more teachers than just himself and two others, due to the great disparities in the learning needs of the boys, most of whom were aged from nine to twelve or thirteen, and most of whom were only starting on grammar. He wrote, Some don’t know how to read or write and others, only a little more advanced, are not all at the same stage. So as not to make them completely waste their time, it has been necessary to divide them into six or seven different classes. You will appreciate that with the most energetic zeal and the most robust health we cannot give all the instruction required to develop their minds.55

He instituted prizes for the best performing boys in order to reinforce this structure. He wrote to Dr. King on 14 October 1798, saying; There is another issue that seems as pressing, and that is to establish prizes for those children who distinguish themselves the most in their class – the children need a spur to help them apply themselves and there is nothing more powerful than the honour of getting a prize. I have told them that the books have been bought and that they can believe that they will come. Meantime I remember clearly that you have done me the honour of saying some time ago that they were at the binders – I beg you, Monsieur, to send them to me if they are ready and then to fix the day when they will be pre-

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sented. I can assure you that our children will resume their work with new ardour, and that the prizes will be of an infinite good to them.56

In suggestions to the Bishop of Saint Pol de Léon, he even chose a novel in English to be distributed as a prize, but the Bishop was not impressed. Maraine wrote to him saying, ‘I do not set store by the English novel that, my lord bishop, judges inappropriate to be given as a prize. I had indicated it as being an English book and quite agreeable without otherwise containing anything dangerous. I will be infinitely obliged, my lord, if you send me when the occasion presents itself, the volumes that you have had the kindness to order purchased.’57 The fact that the abbé Maraine had chosen a novel for the boys to receive reveals that he was a warm-hearted man who did not object to the children enjoying their reading more especially when it was a reward for study well done! The title of the novel was not mentioned, but the incident shows how far from running a seminary towards a more modern form of education Maraine had come. The prize-giving of 23 June 1800 was attended by Monsieur le comte d’Artois58 and the school enjoyed a royal favour that few other émigré schools had.59 ‘Tis only from the sturdy and the good that sturdy youths are born’60 was the dedication on the programme from Horati Carminum, Book, IV.61 A small brass cannon presented to the school by the Marquis of Buckingham and two flags of the French monarchy were proudly displayed.62 Maraine wrote, ‘There is not one whom this prize-giving has not inspired the desire to win one in future.’63 He sent the 1801 prize-list with a dedication from Virgil’s Aeneid64 to William Windham telling him that Mr. King and Mr. de Cazales who had distributed the prizes given by Monsieur had assured him that ‘our interests were taken seriously at the Treasury.’65 He did the same in 1802 soliciting continued support and funding: ‘Monsieur I have the honour of sending you the list of prizes that have just been presented to the students of the Penn school. This establishment being in major part your work and you being always declared its most zealous protector.’66 No trace remains of who presented the prizes for 1802 on the 6th of January,67 but the dedication on the programme was Horace, Arts Poetica, v 412–13.68 Maraine had clearly become a marketing director as well as chief strategist responsible for the academic curriculum. The teaching of English was a constant topic in Maraine’s letters. In 1800, he stressed that it was no longer adequate to have English taught by French priests, and proposed that he needed two more teachers, one of

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whom could teach English. He wrote in frustration: ‘There remains another point no less important to examine, and that consists in knowing if to teach English it is necessary that one of the masters needs to be English.’ Maraine felt that while in order to teach English well the teacher might have to be an English native speaker, he pointed out how difficult it would be when a teacher had other teaching duties like Sciences—that the students found hard to understand. He stressed that in order for the children to make progress in Latin they needed French-speaking teachers to explain the grammar to them, and that this could not successfully be taught to émigré children by an English native speaker. French language likewise suffered because with an English teacher the boys could not write French, without making horrible faults of construction and orthography. […] It is a fact well known to all who have any link with the school, and we would overcome all these inconveniences that one cannot deny to be grave, if we could find a French priest who possesses enough English language to be able to teach it. It is true that this master would not have, or be able to impart, the national accent as well as the first, but we would obtain the essential  – that is to put the children in the way of hearing and speaking English, and there would be this further advantage that they would be taught their own language in learning English.69

The modernity of the linguistic argument is admirable, but the Governors were not in a position to appoint an extra teacher. Maraine and his team of priests struggled to cope with the disparity of the levels of the children, but it is clear that they genuinely cared about extending the bright and the older ones. Reading between the lines the prize-winners from 1800 reveal the continuing  curriculum: Charles de Granvelle and Ange de Coatgoureden for Latin and ‘Version Française/ Discours Français’ and Charles de Maquillé, Joseph de Roquefeüil and Sever de Genouillac for ‘Langue Angloise.’70 Prizes were given for ‘Discours Latins,’ ‘Discours Français,’ ‘Version Françoise,’ ‘Vers Latins,’ ‘Mathématiques,’ ‘Langue Angloise,’ ‘Écriture (Angloise)’ and ‘Géographie.’ Prize-winners from the first class in 1802 included Grabiel de Lys, Sever de Genouillac, Paul de Riviere, Odon de L’Estrade, Hippolite de Froger, Elie de Pontcarré, René de la Villéon, Casimir de Quesnay and Xavier de Choiseul.71 In 1803 the prize-winners in the first class still included Odon de L’Estrade, Hippolite de Froger and Xavier de Choiseul, showing that the top class contained boys of a range of ages.72

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Maraine wrote, ‘We see with pain that the children in the lowest classes who arrived at the school a year ago or longer have remained in the same state of ignorance due to the absence of masters who could attend to them, and that it will be impossible to make them advance if things remain in the same state.’73 No record remains of the experience of life at the school or of how the émigré boys treated each other. An anecdote survived of the school pupils throwing stones at the onions in Mr. Bates’s garden located next door to the school saying, ‘There’s another one’s head cut off.’74 There was only one student fatality at the school, Ferdinand d’Aguisi aged sixteen and a half, and winner of the first prize in Maths in 1803, who died in an accident in 1806.75 On one level what had begun as a school for émigré boys to be educated preserving the culture and traditions of their French nation had become a military school serving the British Government and supplying British regiments. No distinction was made between the French royalist purposes of the school and the British goal of victory in the French wars.76 The French regiments—Loyal Emigrant and Royal Louis of de Castries and de Mortemart created by an act of Parliament from 1793—had also been reformed so that they could be allocated to serve anywhere in the British Dominions and not only in France.77 The experience of Quiberon and the danger to French royalist officers if caught on French soil had produced the effect of encouraging the British to avoid deploying émigrés on the Continent. Consequently, the possibility of being allocated to causes other than the war against France became a source of discontent among the émigré officers and Penn students, who came mostly from northern France and wanted to serve in the French wars. On another level, the Penn school, labelled a traditional ecclesiastical seminary at the outset, became a modern school fulfilling its original mission that was to teach French culture and habits using French émigré teachers but adding a bilingual twist. With an ecclesiastic as its headmaster, it was logical that Maraine who reported to the Relief Committee would appoint other ecclesiastics to teaching positions, and the problems with Bellegarde underscored some of the difficulties of mixing ecclesiastics and lay teachers. A logical question would seem to be why was Maraine not able to draw on more free ecclesiastical teaching support to get the extra staff he needed. The number of teachers was set by the Relief Committee, and as Maraine was having difficulties meeting costs, that must explain why he could not take on extra mouths to feed. This can be further explained by the fact that the relief payment per person set in 1794 and

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not adjusted throughout the wars for the lay émigrés was by 1799 barely adequate.78 The fact that Maraine was able to keep the school supplied at all shows some considerable dexterity in his own use of the English language, and skill in appealing to the kindness and patience of local suppliers. Penn’s historical worth has been masked precisely by the very dual nationalism that it sought to foster. It gave a profile to the humanitarian commitment of the British in their care of the French children, and provided a good example of organised relief for child victims of revolution.79 There is little evidence that it created strong émigré community links despite an occasional mention in the politicised émigré press, although it definitely had a propaganda value outside the school in promoting the royalist Bourbon cause.80 Located outside London, removed from émigré and British society, there was no parental participation in any aspect of the administration or curriculum. The émigré children, who were the school’s raison d’être, were subordinated to decisions made for them by the directors, the British Treasury and the Bishop of Saint Pol de Léon. Only an occasional Pennois remained in Britain like Henri de la Belinaye who became a surgeon with a Harley Street practice from 1823 to 1842 though even he died in Italy.81 The boys who passed through the school returned to France with at most a poetic fondness for the British countryside and a tolerant attitude to the British. Gustave de Rocquefeuil, echoing the way Penn had fused the two cultures wrote, ‘J’irai faire une tournée en Angleterre, c’est un pays qui me plait toujours infiniment. J’aime John Bull, j’aime les beef-steaks et comme dit Lord Byron j’love a porter beer as well as any.’82 Charles-André du Bois de Maquillé, one of the founding pupils, represented Maine et Loire in 1815–1816.83 The experience for the exiled teenagers was one in which food and friendship played a disproportionately large part in their day-to-day experience and the role of the unsung abbé Maraine and his team of French clergy was paramount. On 26 January 1815 the Gentleman’s Magazine recorded the transfer of the school to Paris, and the abbé Maraine received the Order of the Lys for his service from Louis XVIII.84 The building was dismantled in 1822,85 and the French School Meadows in Elm Road later became the grounds of the Penn and Tylers Green Football Club that adopted the Blue and White feathers from the old French school as their crest.86 In a fittingly sporting way, the French school lives on in the collective memory of the British locality, a testimony to an innovative refugee relief strategy, a committed headmaster, supportive locals and approximately 200 Pennois.

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Notes 1. No other schools at that point served only émigré boys and French schools often targeted a British clientele because they were more likely to pay. See Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution, 170–172. 2. See Gildea, Education in Provincial France, 4. 3. These records preserved in BL Add Ms 45,723 are complemented by the records of the Relief Committee and the correspondences of Edmund Burke (NRO A.XIX), William Windham and the Marquis of Buckingham. 4. This can be appreciated in contrast to the Jacobin position detailed in Wahnich, In Defense of Terror. 5. The Penn school case is not a seamless fit for the findings of Friedemann Pestel in ‘Educating against Revolution,’ 230. There is little evidence that Penn strengthened personal émigré networks in Britain or Europe during the emigration largely due to its multi-layered administrative structure and rural location. 6. Ibid. 7. This was because statistics for the lay French population, 1794–1797, included the young women and men beyond the age of military service. The figure for children accounts for a significant proportion of the laity. Carpenter, Refugees, 192. 8. PRO T(93) 57. Some distortion comes from the fact that daughters were included as ‘children’ even though they were adults still with the immediate family group. 9. Carpenter, Refugees, 202. 10. Prior to this, children were often included in tallies of lay émigrés receiving relief as in the Diary of the Bishop of Saint Pol de Léon. Ibid., 43. 11. See Hutt, Chouannerie and Counter-Revolution, 322. 12. Military justice was harsh anyway; see Germani, ‘The most striking and most terrible examples,’ 87–113. 13. Lubersac, Journal historique et religieux, 79–82. See also Carpenter, Refugees, 94. 14. PRO T(93) 8 p. 3, Committee to the Bishop of Ely, 24 March 1796. 15. See Burke to Henry Dundas, 8 October 1793, Correspondence VII, 445–6. 16. This is recorded in the Souvenirs of Mme de Ménerville, 183–4, and Prior, Memoir, vol. II, 352. 17. McDowell ed., The Writings, vol. IV, 1. 18. ‘Proposal by the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke relative to the Penn school,’ Fitzwilliam Burke ed., Burke Correspondence, IV, 338–9. 19. Jenkins, A History of the Parish of Penn, 150. 20. Burke to Mrs. Crewe, 3 March 1796, Correspondence, IV, 335.

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21. Martin in La Révolte Brisée, 200, develops a theme of counter-­revolutionary commitment and patriotism. 22. Mansel, Dressed to Rule, 72. 23. BL Add Ms 45,723, Maraine to King, 3 mars 1799 f. 7. 24. These letters can be found in the Aliens Office papers HO 1/3 and 1/4 and in the Bouillon Papers P.C. 117/A and 118/A. 25. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 50, 10 Little Marylebone Portland Place, 26 June 1801. 26. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 17, observations. 27. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 19, ‘gentilhomme français de la province d’anjou, conseiller au parlement de bretagne, résident habituellement à Rennes avant la révolution.’ Letter requesting the admission of his son Casimir Joseph. 28. BL Add Ms 45,723, f 16, Letter requesting entry for his son Maurice de Montaigne, 10 July 1799. 29. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 15, Letter requesting a place for his youngest son, Octave de Choiseul, 26 June 1799. 30. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 39, Letter requesting a place for his two sons, Jerome (12) and Robert (10). ‘Mr de Chardonnay espère que cette faveur lui sera accordée facilement, si Messieurs les Administrateurs veulent bien considérer qu’il est chargé d’une famille nombreuse.’ 27 May 1800. 31. BL Add Ms 45,723, f 17, gives a list of those refused with reasons, and f. 21 gives a list of those accepted and refused without explanation of the refusals; 13 received offers of places and 12 were refused. 32. The two principal sources are the PRO T(93) series where the records of relief payments are held, and the records held in the Northamptonshire Records Office in the Edmund Burke papers under A.XIX.14 ‘Correspondence with the French Committee relating to the Penn school.’ A.XIX.19 provides a list of the first students at the school. Others include lists like those found in BL Add Ms 45,723 ff. 17 & 21. Boys aged 15 and over at the school in 1798 are listed by Jenkins, op cit, 152. 33. See BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 39, 21 March 1800 ‘à Messieurs les Administrateurs de l’école de Penn.’ 34. For the laws of 28 March–5 April 1793 see Stewart, A Documentary Survey, 115, Carpenter, ‘Émigrés in Politics and Imaginations,’ 333. 35. ‘A Royal School has been lately established by Government in Buckinghamshire for sixty children of French Noblemen who were killed at Quiberon and in other places in the service of Great Britain. This ­establishment reflects the great honour on that generous Government which conceived and executed the plan.’ Jenkins, A History of the Parish of Penn, 150. 36. Burke to Dr. Hussey, 25 May 1796 (W. W. M. BK. 2134 and Burke to Dr. Douglass, 5 June 1796, W.A. Main series, vol. 46, f. 212.

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37. Lucas, ‘Edmund Burke and the Émigrés,’ vol. 3, 102. 38. Burke to Dr. Laurence, n.d. Burke, Correspondence, IV, p. 244. 39. Burke to Dr. Douglass, 5 June 1796, W. A. main series vol 46, f. 212. 40. Jean Marin Maraine 1746–1830. See Bellenger, French Exiled Clergy, 216, and Burke, Correspondence, VIII, p. 442–3. 41. Burke lived nearby on an estate bought in 1768 Gregories or Butler’s Court. The house was destroyed in 1813. See Jenkins, A History of the Parish of Penn, 149. 42. BL Add Ms 37,843, f. 213. 43. La Boutetière de Saint-Mars, Mémoires, 123. 44. This questions the assertion of Pestel that the school offered an occasion for a ‘mobilised émigré community’ to ‘combat the Revolution far away from the battlefield’ and shows the danger of applying globalised statements to émigré schools as they were all very different. 45. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 25, Maraine to the Governors of the School, 10 Janvier 1800. 46. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 43, Maraine to King 10 Mars 1801. 47. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 54, 4 June 1802. 48. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 57, 5 Sept 1802. 49. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 59 5 Nov 1802 to King. 50. Ibid. 51. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 57. 52. Jenkins, A History of the Parish of Penn, 157, cites the Parish register entry. 53. PRO T(93) 10 p. 232, letter from Thomas Glyn & M D Mansel to William Huskinson Esq Treasury Chambers dated 28 April 1808 requesting at the same time the payment for the emigrant clergy and laity for the month of May a sum of £6983. 54. Jenkins, A History of the Parish of Penn, 154, named the Treasurer with some uncertainty as a James Gomme who had replaced Mr. Nagle mentioned throughout the Abbé Maraine’s letters. 55. BL Add Ms 45,723, A MM ‘Les gouverneurs de l’école française de Penn’, 10 January 1798, f. 24 56. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 5, Letter from Maraine to King, 14 Oct 1798. 57. BL Add Ms 45,723, f 10, Maraine to the Bishop of Saint Pol de Léon, 3 May 1799. 58. The programme has survived in Add Mss 37,867 ff 150–151, and a list of prize-winners for January 1801 in Add Ms 37,868, ff. 1–2. 59. Monsieur also visited the schools of the Abbé Carron. Carron was a remarkably energetic fund-raiser, and he opened four schools in Somerstown for émigré children and local Catholics: two fee-paying and two charity, two for boys and two for girls. The fee-paying boys’ school (£30 per  annum) offered Latin, Poetry, French Grammar, Mathematics, Geography as well as Fencing and Dancing. The Laity’s Directory, 14–15.

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60. v. 30–32 are omitted ‘in steers, in steeds appear the merits of their sires; nor do fierce eagles beget timid doves.’ v. 33–36. ‘Yet training increases inborn worth, and righteous ways make strong the heart; whenever righteousness has failed, faults mar even what nature has made.’ Horace Odes and Epodes, trans. by Bennett, 296–297. 61. Ode IV, v. 29 & 33–36. Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis; … Doctrina sed vim promovet insitam, Rectique cultus pectora roborant; Utcumque defecere mores, Indecorant bene nata culpæ. 62. These items disappeared, but are mentioned in a letter conserved in BL Add Ms 45,723, f. ii, written to Mr. Green-Armytage by Mrs. G.  K. Chesterton (Frances) on 13 July 1929 who explained that she gave the collection of letters from Maraine to Monsieur de Perral and he advised that the collection should be put in the British Library. The letter from Mrs. Chesterton asks about the cannon and flags and mentions that there is no trace of these treasured items of the school’s memorabilia. Monsieur de Perral is almost certainly a misspelling of Christian de Parrel. Christian de Parrel’s papers are held in the CARAN in the series AB/XIX/3784-AB/ XIX/3789, AB/XIX/3854-AB/XIX/3857. An attaché at the French Embassy in London, he worked on the record of emigration and on Charles-­Alexandre de Calonne’s time in London. 63. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 32, Maraine to King, 5 February 1800. 64. Book. v. 485: Protinus Ænæas celeri certare fagittâ, Invitat qui forté velint, et praemia ponit. (‘Straightaway Aeneas invites all, who may so wish, to contend with swift arrows, and sets forth the prizes.’) BL Add Ms 37,868, f 1, letter dated 6 January 1801. 65. Virgil, trans. by Rushton Fairclough, 477. The Latin reads ‘Prontinus Aeneas celery certare sagitta, invitat qui forte velint et praemia point.’ 66. BL Add Ms 37,868, f. 204, Maraine to Windham, 6 January 1802. 67. BL Add Ms 37,868, f 206, (1802). 68. ‘Qui studet optatam cursu contingere metam, Multa tulit fecitque PUER, sudauit et alsit’ (He who strains to reach the turning-post has done and endured much as a boy, has borne heat and cold.) The Epistles of Horace, ed. by Wilkins, 75. The line following reads: ‘abstinuit venere edt vino’ (he abstained from love and wine). 69. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 25, ‘Maraine à messieurs les Gouverneurs de l’école française de Penn,’ 10 January 1800. 70. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 22–23 ‘Liste de Prix pour le nouvel an 1800.’ 71. BL Add Ms 37,868, f 206.

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72. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 63–64, ‘Liste des Prix distribués le 6 janvier 1803.’ 73. BL Add Ms 45,723, f. 25, ‘Maraine à messieurs les Gouverneurs de l’école française de Penn,’ 10 January 1800. 74. This story appeared in the Bucks Free Press, 16 March 1934, relating how when the boys returned to France and grew up, they sent Mr. Bates’s ancestor £2 a year as long as he lived for the damage they had done. Jenkins, A History of the Parish of Penn, 152. 75. Ibid. 152, register entry for the death states that he had lately been appointed to an ensigncy in the 60th Regiment. 76. Louis XVIII had financial backing from the British Government from 1810 onwards and resided at Hartwell House but commitment to restore him remained elusive. See Mansel, ‘From Coblentz to Hartwell’ in Carpenter and Mansel, eds, The French Emigrés, 13–15. 77. BL Add Ms 37,868, f. 201, ‘Note sur les corps français au service de sa Majesté Britannique.’ 78. See Add Mss 37,868, ‘Mémoire du comte de Botherel au ministre britannique,’ 1802. 79. Clavin, “Transnationalism and the League of Nations.” Her work emphasises the importance of the financial underpinning of relief. 80. The school prize-giving was reported in the right wing journal of Peltier Paris Pendant l’Année, 1799; Vol. 1 No 176, 15 March 1799 and Maspero-­ Clerc, Un journaliste contre-révolutionnaire. 81. http://www.victorianresearch.org/Obscure_contributors.html#belinaye, accessed 2015.  82. Vicomte de Rocquefeuil to Casimir de Genouillac, 15 February 1820. Family papers of the Marquis de Genouillac. Casimir de Genouillac was one of the first pupils at Penn with his older cousin Charles-André du Bois de Maquillé and served under General Andigné with the Chouans in 1815. He was arrested under Louis Philippe’s rule for his continued royalist activities. See Carpenter, Refugees, 111. 83. He was re-elected in 1824, and made Pair de France in 1827 before refusing to serve in Louis Philippe’s government. Robert, Cougny, Dictionnaire des parlementaires français, 251–252. 84. Gentlemen’s Magazine, February 2015, 143. 85. Jenkins, A History of the Paris of Penn, 157. In 1822 the house was sold to Earl Howe, by whom it was demolished; it is said that some of the cornices and other architectural fragments may still be seen built into walls of neighbouring cottages. When in 1882, the Bucks Architectural and Archaeological Society visited Penn, it was stated that at that time there remained of the old property only the garden wall, together with parts of a small building then used as an infant school.

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86. The Tylers Green House would have been situated on the present B474 (Elm Road) on the opposite side to the pond just a short way back towards Potter’s Cross. See Ibid., 157. A map without a page number at the end of the book shows its location.

Bibliography Andress, David, ed. Experiencing the French Revolution. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013. ———. The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Burrows, Simon, French Exiled Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814, London: Royal Historical Society, 2000. Carpenter, Kirsty. Refugees of the French Revolution, the Émigrés in London, 1789– 1802. London: Macmillan Press, 1999. ——— and Mansel, eds. The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution, 1789–1814. London: Macmillan Press, 1999. Church-Dupléssis, Véronique. “Aristocrats into Modernity? French Émigrés and the Refashioning of Noble Identities”, PhD diss. University of Toronto, Canada, 2015. Furet, François and Mona Ozouf, eds. The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, Vol. 3 The Transformation of Political Culture 1789–1848. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989. Hutt, Maurice. Chouannerie and Counter-Revolution, Puisaye, the Princes and the British Government in the 1790s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Lubersac, Charles François, M. l’abbé de. Journal historique et religieux de l’émigration et de déportation du clergé français de France en Angleterre. London, Imprimerie de Cox fils et Baylis, 1802. Foley, Susan. Women in France since 1789. London: Palgrave, 2004. Gildea, Robert. Education in Provincial France, A study of Three departments, 1800–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Jenkins, John Gilbert. A History of the Parish of Penn in the county of Buckingham. London: The Saint Catherine Press, 1935). Martin, Jean-Clément. La Révolte Brisée, Femmes dans la Révolution française et l’Empire. Paris: Armand Colin, 2008. Mansel, Philip. Dressed to Rule, Royal Court Costume from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005. McDowell, R. B., ed. The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. IV, The Revolutionary War 1794–1797. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. La Boutetière de Saint-Mars, Comtesse de. Mémoires rapportant les principaux événements de son émigration en 1791. Angers: Imprimerie Lachèse et Dolbeau, 1884.

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Ménerville née Fougeret, Souvenirs d’Emigration 1791–1797. Paris: Pierre Roger, 1934. Pestel, Friedemann. “Educating against Revolution: French Émigré Schools and the Challenge of the Next Generation,” in the European History Quarterly, vol. 47 (2) (2017): 229–256. Prior, J., Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke. London, 1826. Reboul, Juliette. French Emigration to Great Britain in response to the French Revolution. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Wahnich, Sophie. La Liberté ou la Mort: essai sur la Terreur et le terrorisme. Paris: La Fabrique Éditions, 2003. ———. Translated by David Fernbach, In Defense of Terror, Liberty or Death in the French Revolution. NY: Verso Books, 2012. Walsh de Serant, Vicomte, Souvenirs de cinquante ans. Paris: Au Bureau de la Mode, 1832.

CHAPTER 6

Counter-Revolutionary Transfers? Émigré Literature and the Subject of the French Emigration in British Private Libraries (1790s–1830) Juliette Reboul

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 682022. I would like to thank Alicia Montoya, Laure Philip and Stacie Allan for reading and commenting on early versions of this chapter. I am also grateful to the participants of the London-Paris Romanticism seminars, in particular David Duff and Marc Porée, who invited me to present what was then only a draft of this chapter. All translations were carried out by the author. In the endnotes, the catalogues of private libraries are referred to using the name of the book owner followed by the date at which the catalogue was published. A list of all catalogues used for this study and their short names is provided as an appendix. J. Reboul (*) Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Gelderland, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Philip, J. Reboul (eds.), French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_6

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Do refugees participate in the renewal of literary, social and political cultures in their host countries? While hundreds of thousands of individuals crossed France’s borders in the 1790s to find a haven outside their motherland, one might infer from the relative lack of scholarship on contemporary cultural exchanges that the presence of these migrants had no lasting impact on their host societies.1 Studies on relations between the community of French migrants and their European and North American hosts have traditionally privileged topics of top-level diplomacy, military strategy and hard political propaganda over longue durée questions surrounding soft power and the slow effect of daily encounters on the evolution of cultural habits and political practices in refugee and host communities.2 Examining the incidence and influence of the literature of and on emigration in host communities’ libraries, this chapter aims to sketch a methodology to analyse how the shared experience of emigration by displaced populations and host communities could have shaped post-revolutionary European cultures, politics and societies. Descriptions of social gatherings in counter-revolutionary Salons between the migrant community and its British hosts in the last years of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the next one often contain ancillary clues regarding the shared development of counter-revolutionary cultures. One such clue appears, for instance, in Frances Williams-Wynn’s diary, as she wrote on 9 January 1807: This morning I have been very much interested by an account given us of some of the horrors of the Revolution by the Duke de Sirent. He read to us a history of the last moments of Louis XVI., written by Abbé Edgeworth, at the request of the brothers of that unfortunate Monarch. In the history there was little that we did not know before from Cléry’s and other publications: but every particular became doubly interesting – first, from being so authenticated, but still more from the extreme emotion of the reader.3

A few sentences later, she adds, ‘At these words the poor old man’s voice faltered, and his eyes filled as he looked towards Lady B’. This scene brings out two aspects of the reception of literature by French exiles in their host countries. First, it places books penned by (political) migrants who left revolutionary France to find a haven abroad in the homes of British individuals.4 Second, this entry shows emigrant and British readers discussing texts by famous émigrés together. Abigail Williams recently reminds us in The Social Life of Books that we need to think of books as ‘texts with

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a­ udiences rather than readers, text that were […] better heard than seen’.5 The image of silent and solitary readers does not adequately portray how books, and for the purpose of this discussion books by émigrés and books on emigration, were enjoyed and received by late eighteenth-century reading communities. The scene described in this anecdote might have taken place in the library of a country estate. In categorical terms, private libraries were very ambiguous spaces throughout the eighteenth century. As the diarist suggests, they were intimate spaces where one could cry away one’s trauma while simultaneously displaying one’s personal politics. Hence, private libraries were also public forums. This intricate relation between intimacy and publicity is, in my opinion, key to understanding the connection between French counter-revolutionary migrants and their host society. Many years ago, Deena Goodman discussed how in the Habermasian theory the authentic public sphere originates from the private realm.6 According to her, Habermas’ ‘literate public sphere’ in fact referred to the informal gathering of private readers engaging in social and political debates.7 Using Goodman’s interpretation, this chapter aims to lay the foundation for a larger historical and literary reflection on a public dialogue between those who fled their homeland in response to the Revolution/the advance of the Republican armies and their host societies. It seeks to conceptualise the transnational aspects of counter-­revolutionary memories of the French Revolution by looking at the context in which books by émigrés and publications on emigration were received in London from the mid-1790s to the early nineteenth century. The results presented here are based on the transcription and analysis of 43 printed catalogues published between 1795 and 1830 listing the contents of private libraries intended for sale.8 This bottom-up approach allows us to shift the research perspective away from studying a political and literary microcosm made up of the most vocal émigrés. Instead, it focuses on retracing how emigrant ideas and ideas on emigration penetrated the homes and minds of the host society. Pragmatically, this empirical investigation into catalogues of private libraries firstly allows the identification and quantification of a set of titles by members of the French emigrant community, as well as titles related to the emigration. This helps in highlighting trends showing the popularity of some titles and authors amongst British book owners. Further scrutiny into these book lists brings to the fore the presence of many actors involved in the transfer of ideas generated by the emigrant population into a British cultural context.

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Finally, this chapter argues that titles by French emigrants need to be thought of as a constitutive part of a much larger nexus of texts produced after 1789 in order to comprehend the reception and transnational evolution of exilic counter-revolutionary ideas and practices from the 1790s onwards.

1   Defining the Literature of Emigration The overarching question of what an émigré book is and what makes someone an émigré relates indirectly to that of the definition of a heuristic category clumsily coined literature of emigration. The expression could first refer to any book written by a person identified as an émigré. But, as Mary Ashburn Miller and Kelly Summers have successfully demonstrated in this volume, how one is (legally) identified is not necessarily how one self-identifies. Then, the question of the owner’s intent matters: was a book purchased because of its author’s affiliation with the émigré community? This is impossible to say. For simplicity’s sake, books by the prolific novelist and educationalist Madame de Genlis printed before the outbreak of the Revolution were not included in this corpus since the date and reason behind their acquisition remained unexplained; however, her work produced whilst in emigration as well as new editions of her pre-­ 1789 works were classified under this heuristic category literature of emigration. This method finds that only 109 of approximately 4500 copies of post-1789 publications recorded in the catalogues were authored or edited by people having left France or the continent in response to the Revolution or the Empire. This corresponds to 73 individual titles.9 Arguably, the total number of copies of books by émigrés and exiles represents a very small percentage of all post-1789 books in these libraries (2.5% to be precise). Nonetheless, about 50% of the private libraries studied contained one or more such titles.10 A ‘broad-church’ definition of literature of emigration would include any work on the subject of emigration and, an even looser one all works with references to émigré characters or books mentioning emigration. In 2011, Katherine Astbury judiciously argued that scholars needed to break away from a research ‘conducted along national lines, with the results that the trans-national nature of the development of the [émigré novel] had not been recognised’.11 This was certainly embraced by Clare Siviter’s study on Franco-German theatrical exchanges.12 One can only wonder if, following in Astbury’s and Siviter’s footsteps, it would be equally relevant to discuss about a transnational

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nature of the literature of emigration. While studies on novels and theatre can hardly be extrapolated to examine every literary genre adopted by emigrant writers, thinking about the reception of books by émigrés and on emigration from a transnational viewpoint is, as we will see later, crucial. The study of private library catalogues demonstrates in various ways the caveats of an intransigent definition of the literature of emigration. This category is first contested by the system of classification adopted by booksellers: none of the 41 catalogues studied for this chapter includes a category ‘French refugee/emigrant books’ or headings mentioning emigration.13 Books by French émigrés were at best classified under the heading ‘French Books’; they were mostly mixed in with other books and listed alphabetically under their author’s name. Out of the thousands of catalogues published at the time, only one (to my knowledge) auction catalogue—for the household belongings of an anonymous London Lady—advertised on its title page a ‘Collection of French Books, relative to the French Revolution’.14 The collection, certainly not this lady’s personal library, was, furthermore, not itemised: all books were collectively described under lot 104 as ‘a valuable collection of French books, containing the whole that has been published relating to the Revolution in France, which will be sold in lots, consisting of 1200 articles’. On the whole, the best-selling exiled author was Madame de Genlis with 11 different titles and copies of her work present in seven different libraries.15 This is not unexpected as the governess of the Orléans children was already an established author in Europe before the outbreak of the French Revolution. The second most successful author was Antoine-­ Francois Bertrand de Moleville with seven copies of books in five different libraries.16 Six copies of the works by both Dumouriez and Madame de Staël were tracked in four libraries; this corpus also included four copies each of Lally-Tollendal, Mallet du Pan, Calonne, Delille and Peltier.17 Three copies of books by the Marquis de Bouillé and Jacques Necker were also described.18 Working from the bottom-up also allows for the identification of forgotten books, and therefore the enlargement of the corpus of texts by émigrés and on emigration currently studied. Several texts by émigrés were published anonymously and have only been identified through careful bibliographical comparison. Augusta, un roman published in French by London bookseller Dulau in 1798, and held in two libraries, was identified as Augusta, ou Tableau comparatif des moeurs françaises et des moeurs anglaises, avec des notes très instructives. Par un émigré, a work published in Paris by Ducauroy in the An IX (1800–1801).19 Years

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later, the authorship of the text was attributed by French journal La France Littéraire to returned émigré and legitimist writer Pierre-Salomon Vacquier-Limon.20 Determining the authorship of a couple of works, however, is more challenging: one clergyman owned a copy of Les Deux Tartuffes ou Cordélie, an anonymous epistolary novel allegedly written by a French émigré(e?), published in three volumes by Rivington in 1802.21 The work was reviewed in the British Critic as a ‘horrible’ tale of betrayal and incest amongst émigrés, using ‘Clarissa for [its] model’ and the author deemed ‘too well acquainted with human nature, at least as it is present constituted’, hence reinforcing the possibility of an émigré authorship.22 The political heterogeneity of these titles and the variety of their genres invites us to question the identification and definition of the literature of emigration category simply based on the departure of authors from France or their embracing of various counter-revolutionary principles. The scholarly consensus nowadays is that novels, plays and poetry by French revolutionaries and émigrés automatically assume a political status.23 This correlation creates an implicit expectation that emigrant writers wrote exclusively about counter-revolutionary politics and their experiences of exile. Furthermore, such a categorisation might be restrictive in its analytical capacities as it mainly depends on a framework of exile, trauma and politics. Finally, the assumption of an organic relation between the writer’s biography and his/her work’s intent is particularly questionable when it comes to genres other than fiction: is it reasonable to look for an implicit political statement in a scientific text penned by an émigré? A nobleman exiled in the English capital, Jacques-Louis de Bournon, wrote a Traité Complet de la Chaux Carbonatée et de l’Arragonite which he published in London in 1808.24 Seemingly, this is not a counter-revolutionary text. However, in his Discours préliminaire, Bournon evoked the reason for his emigration: La révolution qui a couvert la France de sang, de cendres et de larmes, et a fait depuis éprouver les mêmes maux à tout le continent, a commencé ses ravages. Il m’a fallu abandonner patrie, fortune et amis, et devenir simple habitant du monde, totalement indifférent aux nouveaux êtres que j’allois y rencontrer, et n’ayant auprès d’eux, pour toute recommandation, que celle si discréditée du malheur.25 [The Revolution that covered France in blood, ashes and tears, and has since made the entire continent experience the same evils, has started its ravages. I had to abandon fatherland, wealth and friends, and become a simple

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inhabitant of the world, totally indifferent to the new beings I would meet there, and having for them the sole and discredited recommendation of misfortune].

In this case the text is not political but the paratext clearly is. New editions of old works are likewise problematic. In 1793 an anonymous French speaker re-edited Besdel’s Abrégé des Causes Célèbres & Intéressantes.26 This work had previously been published in London in 1777 famously inspiring Charlotte Smith’s The Romance of Real Life.27 The 1793 Bath edition contained a preface entitled ‘Réflexions tirées des Circonstances Présentes’ (Reflections upon the Present Circumstances).28 This preface read as a programmatic political essay in favour of emigration. Presenting himself as a ‘Français & Français réfugié en Angleterre’ (Frenchman & Frenchman refugee in England) the editor urged British citizens to welcome distressed emigrants and called for the military involvement of the British government on French territory. Here again a text produced in a pre-revolutionary context took on a counter-revolutionary dimension because of its paratext. A new question follows related this time to the status of a text that was written before the emigration or the exile of its author but was re-edited by the latter when he found a haven outside France. The poem Les Jardins by Jacques Delille was first published in 1782.29 Delille left France in 1795 and reached London in 1799. The text of the 1801 London edition of Les Jardins presents many dissimilarities with earlier editions. In this revised edition Fernand Baldensperger identified references to Delille’s emigration modified descriptions of gardens and allusions to British patrons the poet visited during his exile. He also saw alterations influenced by the poet’s reading of English literature produced in the 1790s.30 Despite being written by the same person two different manifestations of a unique work might belong to different categories: one should be classified as a book by an émigré/exile and the other should not Books by French émigrés aside, the French emigration or particular émigré individuals were mentioned in at least 78 copies of books by British authors, with references in the main texts, in prefaces or in footnotes.31 Émigrés were of course characters in novels and poems as attested by the single copy in this corpus of Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants.32 Most of the time émigré writers were simply quoted: William Burdon in his Materials for Thinking and Jonathan Boucher in his Views of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution discussed their appreciation

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of writings by émigrés such as Lally-Tollendal, Mallet du Pan, Malouet or Moleville.33 Quoting Madame de Genlis was a commonplace in late eighteenth-­century writing, especially in education treatises. In this sample, however, she is mostly referred to for her pre-revolutionary works and not her work produced during the emigration even though her Petits Emigrés famously served as a model for several anglophone pedagogical books.34 The governmental effort to relieve the émigrés in London or in Westminster was also the subject of many debates in these books: Thomas James Matthias’s anger at Pitt’s government for ‘maintaining emigrant Catholic priests’ in his very successful Pursuit of Literature was rebutted in another best-seller by George Chalmers, the Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare-Papers [sic] in which the antiquarian denounced thrice the ‘uncharitableness’ of Matthias towards those in need.35 At least 11 books by émigrés were advertised in other books—hence, Lally-­ Tollendal’s Defence was quite randomly advertised in medicinal treaties.36 This list of books mentioning emigration or émigrés is fairly eclectic; in these, emigration is mostly an incidental subject. In his Modest Apology for the Roman Catholics of Great Britain, the Scottish theologian Alexander Geddes stated, ‘I put here the French Emigrants out of the question. They are only birds of passage’.37 He is not wrong as a diachronic study of this corpus reveals that the majority of these British books mentioning emigration were published between 1793 and 1801, roughly between the arrival en masse of French refugees in the British Isles and the treaty of Amiens when most returned to France. A restrictive definition of the heuristic category literature of emigration, including works by authors who have only been identified as émigrés, proves unsuccessful, as it creates unnecessary boundaries. Despite its limitations in size, this sample emphasises the political diversity of the emigration, with books by both legitimists and constitutionalists, by individuals who had adhered to revolutionary principles before leaving France in the early 1790s and by others who were exiled in the 1800s by Napoléon. It also highlights the various responses from the British host society. This list finally demonstrates the diversity of the genres invested by French authors in exile since it includes novels, poetry, plays, memoirs, political essays, dictionaries and grammar books, scientific texts as well as journals. A broader definition of literature of emigration including works with ­references to the phenomenon seems disingenuous as the presence of references on the emigration and that of minor works by French emigrants in private libraries remains incidental. Yet, while these

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works had little influence individually, viewed collectively, it is worth considering their impact on the community of readers in Britain.

2   Identifying Vehicles for the Transfer of Exilic and Counter-Revolutionary Ideas Catalogues of private libraries do not simply point out to titles, authors and dates. They contain details drawing attention to various individuals participating, willingly or not, in the circulation and penetration of ideas developed before and after their exile in the emigrant’s host countries. Michel Espagne labelled these individuals ‘véhicules du transfert’ (vehicles for transfers); Joep Leerssen identified these ‘human actors’ as ‘the carriers, enunciators and disseminators of notions, ideas and attitudes’, the ‘relay stations in a spreading cultural movement’.38 Sales catalogues of private libraries hint at several agents of transfers, often indirectly revealing the names of publishers, booksellers and translators involved in the trade of books by émigrés. Of course, the books listed in these catalogues are also directly associated with the name of one or several owners, unlike the items listed in book stock catalogues or catalogues of lending libraries. As we will see in the final part of this chapter, these owners should be themselves perceived as participants in the transfers of ideas. In this particular sample, the identification of vehicles for cultural transfers from the émigré/exiled communities to their hosts was facilitated by the relative completeness of the bibliographical information ascribed to books listed in the catalogues. More often than not, catalogue compilers included either a year or a place of publication, the name of a publisher or that of a translator, the format of an edition as well as the number of volumes in which they appeared. Combining two or more of these factual data frequently permitted the identification of an edition or a range of potential matches to the item described. However, as the dataset is enlarged and catalogues without bibliographical details are added to the corpus, the identification of particular manifestations of works by émigrés will be more complicated (and sometimes clearly impossible). Who published the émigrés and where could one buy books written by the French political exiles? The information provided in catalogues ­confirms that London was the trading epicentre of émigré books in Britain. All the books published in the British Isles in this particular sample were printed in London apart from a single edition from Bath. Some books by

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émigrés and on emigration in these libraries had been imported from Hamburg: after all, the emigration was a transnational phenomenon. In his study of French Exile Journalism, Simon Burrows reminds us that Hamburg was the ‘largest centre for emigration in Germany and a hub for the continental distribution of émigré literature and journals’.39 In fact, four out of five of the infamous Mémoires du Général Dumouriez écrits par lui-meme in our private libraries had been imported from the German Hanseatic city, where it was first published in 1794.40 Other books were brought in from Paris, mainly after Napoléon’s 1802 Amnestie Générale. These were all authored by returned émigrés. Famous publishers are sometimes mentioned in sales catalogues; but works by émigrés and on emigration were not collectibles. Therefore, not a single publisher for their work was named in these catalogues. However, further bibliographical research revealed that London publishers traditionally specialising in francophone literature did not have a complete monopoly on the publication of émigré works, whether these were in French or translated into English. The list of names henceforth created corresponded to those extracted from classified advertisements for books by émigrés published in major London newspapers with a national coverage.41 These complementary sources revealed a large network of traders involved in the circulation and diffusion of books by counter-­revolutionary exiles. This group included at least 50 booksellers, bookseller-publishers and print-sellers, as well as some stationers. Booksellers de Boffe, Dulau, Thomas Boosey, L’Homme, Conchy and Debrett, all involved in the francophone book trade, topped the list in terms of their involvement. But the presence of several other generalist establishments in this list allows us to hypothesise the wider appeal of books by émigrés. Significantly, all had set shop in London: the English capital was already a major publishing centre for the French book trade before the arrival en masse of French emigrants in the autumn of 1792. Throughout the eighteenth century, many titles were printed in Grub Street to escape the French State’s censorship and then smuggled to the continent.42 London’s centrality in the trade of books by emigrants could henceforth be perceived in continuity with the place it occupied in the francophone book trade before 1789. However, with the increasing number of exiled Frenchmen and women in the British Isles, it is likely that the readership for French books published in London changed. The presence of a francophone community opened up a new local market; it might also have led to the birth of a new England-wide market for French texts (which could

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perhaps even be scaled to the entire British Isles).43 Indeed, while London was the British epicentre of the émigré book trade, the ownership and readership of émigré books was not limited to the English capital city. Four of the libraries which contained émigré books in our sample were constituted and kept in northern England in large cities such as Liverpool, Manchester, York and Warrington. While publishers, booksellers and librarians in London and beyond had a financial (rather than political) incentive to act as agents for the transfers of émigré and counter-revolutionary ideas, the involvement of translators in the trade of books by émigrés is more ambivalent. Twenty individual titles (28 copies) in this sample were authored by emigrants and later anglicised. As per the tradition of the time, translators’ names rarely appeared on the title page of the edited works; neither did the translator write or sign a preface. This is mostly the case for novels and volumes of poetry, especially when works were translated by women: a 1794 (reprinted in 1796) English translation of Genlis’ Adelaide et Theodore was undertaken by ‘some Ladies, who, through misfortunes, too common at this times, are reduced from ease and opulence, to the necessity of applying, to the support of life, those accomplishment which were given them in their youth, for the amusement and embellishment of it’.44 Remarkably, five out of the seven works for which the translator is identifiable point to a single man: Robert Charles Dallas.45 Taking into account the works in this corpus but not the complete list of his translations, Dallas had been in charge of the English rendering of Mallet du Pan’s Mercure Britannique, Bertrand de Moleville’s Annales and his Memoires particuliers pour servir à l’histoire de Louis XVI, Clery’s Journal pendant la Captivite de Louis XVI and Weber’s Memoires de Marie-Antoinette.46 A catalogue form 1812 even misidentified him as the author of a book by Moleville.47 Today, Dallas is chiefly remembered for his private relation to the Romantic bard Byron.48 In the 1790s, however, he was involved in a public fight against Jacobinism. In the preface to an edition of his personal works, he declared that his oeuvre was composed ‘in the defense of society and reason against Jacobinism and confusion; for [he] had previously fought in the armour of the celebrated Mallet du Pan, whose Mercure Britannique [he] gave periodically to the public in English, concurrent with the publication of the original’.49 Dallas’ case, though extreme, is not unique. In her work on the transnational dimension of the émigré novel, Astbury noted that ‘translations often bore the mark of the translator’s political stance’.50 The same can be

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said of many works by émigrés in translation: the conservative political commentator John Gifford was accused of ‘transgressing the limits of prudence and propriety’ by a reviewer from the Critical Review with regard to his rendition of Lally-Tollendal’s Defence of the French Emigrants. On the contrary, a second reviewer praised the ‘judicious’ translator for ‘giv[ing] his own estimate of the newest French constitution’.51 Dallas and Gifford were not only translators of émigré works; they were also fierce anti-Jacobins and expressed these views in several works. Putting one’s name on the translation of an openly counter-revolutionary text is not an insignificant act; it can be clearly construed as a political gesture. The political or aesthetic ‘intention’ of a title by an émigré may therefore be changed and renewed by their translator. To impose a strict division between their own works and their translations is to forget the primal subjectivity of the act of translating.

3   Literature of Emigration and the Fashioning of a Counter-Revolutionary Reader The role of publishers, booksellers and translators as agents of transfers is fairly obvious; that of book owners less so. A significant pitfall when using catalogues of private libraries is that they do not indicate if a book was actually read, and who, besides the individual named on the title page, had access to it. First, the named owner might not be the reader: in an article about book collecting in the eighteenth century, David Allan states, ‘At the same time the nature of heritable property ordinarily descending under primogeniture also meant that documentary records tended by default to ascribe ownership to men even where female family members might in practice have been the most frequent users, even the original acquirers, of certain books’.52 Second, we can only infer from a small number of primary sources and previous studies on reading cultures that émigré books and journals must have had multiple readers. Let’s consider Mallet du Pan’s thrice-monthly publication, the Mercure Britannique. It was held in three of the private libraries studied.53 French exiled journals were notorious for being shared, with émigrés clubbing together to afford the expense of a single annual subscription.54 Jeremy Black suggested that on average 10 to 20 Englishmen and women read each copy of a newspaper in the eighteenth century.55 It is therefore highly likely, though unprovable, that these three copies had multiple readers. In

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fact, private libraries often functioned as informal libraries: one émigré, Gauthier de Brecy, even worked as a private librarian for a London gentleman.56 In his memoirs, he stated that he was free to lend books to his fellow exiles. Furthermore, and as mentioned in the introduction, books were read aloud in front of audiences made of relatives and acquaintances. Most of the titles by émigrés gathered for this chapter were published in portable formats such as the octavo or the duodecimo, both perfectly suitable for public readings. Private owners of books might not have always consciously assumed the role of vehicles for transfers, but through their reading and lending practices have participated in the circulation of ideas developed in émigré circles. Alongside the questions of the readership comes that of the owner’s intent, introduced in the early paragraphs of this chapter: why would a British person possess a book by an émigré? Individual purchases can be linked to tastes and interests. For instance, the owner of the aforementioned scientific Traité de la chaux et de l’arragonite by Bournon seems to have sustained an interest in physics and chemistry. A Mr. Jones from Chelsea (or perhaps his relatives) owned the majority of novels by émigrés in this sample: the collection advertised for sale demonstrated a private appreciation of fiction. In this sample, however, the possession of books by émigrés is most certainly related to owners’ private political leanings. The library owners, or at least the individuals named on the title pages of the catalogues studied in this chapter, were mostly wealthy upper middle-class men or members of the British gentry. Their socio-economic background certainly explains the overwhelming presence of conservative and anti-­ Jacobin books in their libraries. Together, these catalogues contained at least 450 copies of books in or translated from French and printed after 1789. Of these, more than a quarter expressed counter-revolutionary views formed by political migrants or royalists who remained in France. By contrast, only 10% of the copies of books in these libraries promoted revolutionary views or Bonapartist ones. Furthermore, the first results from this sample seem to indicate a correlation between the ownership of books by émigrés and that of books by British counter-revolutionary and conservative thinkers. The 21 libraries containing books by émigrés were about 95% likely to also contain books tending towards a conservative viewpoint; the 26 libraries c­ ontaining books authored by British conservative writers were about 75% likely to contain a book by an émigré. In fact, only one library that did not demonstrate conservative tendencies contained an émigré book. At least 181

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copies of books in these libraries were by prominent anti-Jacobin thinkers and adversaries of Napoléon. By contrast, these libraries contained only 24 copies of books by British radical politicians and religious dissidents, such as Fox, Priestley or Mackintosh. There was not a single copy of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Yet, 16 copies of works on the revolution by Edmund Burke belonged to 12 library owners. William St Clair has previously suggested that, in 1794, Paine’s controversial opus was removed from subscription libraries, allowing for Burke’s triumph.57 Collaborators of the anti-Jacobin newspaper and writers of anti-Jacobin novels were overwhelmingly represented, with many books by William Gifford, George Ellis, John Gifford, Isaac d’Israeli, Samuel Egerton Brydges and Hannah More.58 The ultra-conservative Anti-Jacobin and the Anti-Jacobin Reviews were read by at least six book owners, with two catalogues indicating long-term subscriptions to the latter. All but one of these six owners also possessed books by émigrés. As a matter of fact, the ownership of anti-Jacobin and émigré literature brings us once again to that of the relation between public and private life. The study of private literary interest must be complemented by that of (posthumous) processes of self-fashioning. In all likelihood, the inclusion and description of items in private libraries and later in catalogues was moderated by the library owners themselves, or, had they already died, their heirs and executors. With the largest wave of emigration in the autumn of 1792, charity towards the French emigrants was promoted as a national characteristic in the British Isles. Advertising the possession of works by émigrés could therefore be associated with a charitable public persona. It is, however, more likely that the overwhelming presence in these libraries of books by émigrés, counter-revolutionary thinkers and conservative ones was related to a choice to distance oneself publicly from radical politics. Stephen Colclough interpreted the removal of radical and politically sensitive books from upper middle-class subscription libraries as a political declaration: ‘Although [members of book clubs and reading societies] met in the domestic space of the home, they thought of themselves as publicly accountable for their actions’.59 It is not impossible that the owners of these private libraries owned more revolutionary titles in their collections. They might not have wanted to be remembered as radical readers. * * *

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In conclusion, at the most basic level, the systematic analysis of British private library catalogues can reveal which émigré titles and authors were most likely to be found in the homes of British men and women contemporary to the Revolution. As a preliminary to a larger study on post-­ revolutionary European memories, this small sample already highlights various problems that arise when attempting to define what is the literature of emigration. Questioning the diversity of the texts and authors present in catalogues is fundamental to furthering our understanding of the many political, social and cultural forms taken by the emigration. Moreover, the transnational network of writers, publishers, sellers, translators, reviewers, owners and readers identified through catalogues highlights the deceptiveness and artificiality of the separation of books by émigrés and books by others. Furthermore, and from the perspective of reception studies, these examples demonstrate how crucial it is to examine book lists in detail in order to comprehend the extent to which émigré political discourses infiltrated the British private realm and participated in shaping individual and collective memories of the Revolution and emigration in their host environment. In his seminal Transferts Culturels Franco-Allemands, Michel Espagne declared: ‘Lorsqu’un livre, une théorie, une tendance esthétique franchissent la frontière entre deux espaces culturels […] leur signification liée au contexte, se modifie par là même’ (when a book, a theory, an aesthetic tendency crosses the border between two cultural spaces […] their significance in relation to the context is henceforth modified).60 Books and their meanings are not static, and when inserted within a collection, albeit a collection of books from a different culture, they take on new meanings. Both the study of the transnational circulation and European reception of books by French émigrés and francophone counter-revolutionary exiles can offer new perspectives on the construction and definition of a transnational counter-revolutionary identity in the 1790s and early nineteenth century. It allows for an appreciation of how references to French anti-­revolutionary cultures permeated the private sphere through émigré books, and in the long term, influenced the host’s collective memory of the French Revolution and the Emigration. Indeed, long after the émigrés returned to France, they continued to exert an influence on their British hosts through the texts they had left behind.

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Appendix: List of Short Name References and Corresponding Catalogue Bibliographical Details References

Short title

Anonymous 1796

A Catalogue of a most capital and valuable library of books […] by a gentleman, retiring into the country […]. (London: Christie, 1796). A Catalogue of a Small Collection of Books […] which will be sold […] on Friday, February 11, 1803 […] (London: Mr. King, 1803) Catalogue of books, being the remaining part of the library of the late Richard Baldwin, Esq. […] (Dublin: James Vallance, 1796). A Catalogue of the valuable library […] of Mr. Henry Bankes […] (London: Leigh and Sotheby, 1803). A Catalogue of a valuable Library selected […] by the late Stafford Squire Baxter, esq. […] (London: King & Lochée, 1812) A Catalogue of a small collection of books, including a very choice and valuable selection of English poetry […]. (London: King, 1803). A Catalogue of the valuable library of the late Burges Bryan, Esq […] (London: Sotheby, Strand) A catalogue of the town-library of the late Sir William Burrell: Bart. L.L.D. Fellow of the Antiquary Society, Deceased […]. (London: 1796). Library of books, & furniture. A catalogue of the library of John Carr, L.L.D. deceased […]. (London: Barker, 1807). A Catalogue of the […] Library of Books of the Rev. Dr. Coleman […] (London: Christie, 1795) A Catalogue of an elegant and choice selection from the library of the Rev. L. Dutens […] (London: Leigh, Sotheby, & son, 1802) A Catalogue of the genuine and extensive library of a gentleman, lately deceased, (remove from his residence at Windsor, for convenience of sale) […] (London: King and Lochée, 1801). A Catalogue of the library […] of David Garrick, Esq. […] with the modern works added thereto by Mrs Garrick […] (London: Saunders, 1823) A catalogue of the choice collection of prints, drawings, books, books of prints […] late the property of W. Gaubert, Esq. late of Turnham-­ Green, deceased […]. (London: King, 1800). A Catalogue of the […] library of the late Alexander Geddes D.D. […](London: Leigh, Sotheby, & son, 1804) A Catalogue of the neat household furniture […] of Mr. Robert Green, decd. […] (London: Griffith & co, 1800) A catalogue of books, prints, and portraits, late the property of Mr Henry Hinton, […] together with the portion of the library of another gentleman […]. (London: King, 1816).

Anonymous 1803 Baldwin 1796 Bankes 1803 Baxter 1812 Beloes 1803 Bryan 1828 Burrell 1796

Carr 1807 Coleman 1795 Dutens 1802 Fazakerley 1801

Garrick 1823

Gaubert 1800

Geddes 1804 Green 1800 Hinton_ Anonymous 1816

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References

Short title

Jones 1803

A Catalogue […] part the property of Mr. Jones of Chelsea, deceased […] (London: King, 1803) A catalogue of the […] collection of books, prints, books of prints […] The property of the late David Martin, esquire, portrait painter to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales […]. (Edinburgh: C. Elliot and William Bruce, 1799). Bibliotheca Mastersiana […] (London: Arrowsmith and Bowley, 1798) A Catalogue (part the second) containing the Library of Books […] the property of Leonard Pickard, Esq. of York […] (London: King, 1802) Streatham Park, Surrey. A catalogue of the […] household furniture […] also, the extensive and well-selected library […] the genuine property of Mrs. Piozzi […]. (London: Squibb, 1816). A Catalogue […] late the property of George Radford (London: King Jun. 1815) A Catalogue of the Valuable Library late the property of Thomas Bryan Richards […] (London: King & Lochée, 1812) A Catalogue of the entire and curious library and manuscripts of the late Joseph Ritson, Esq., of Gray’s Inn […]. (London: Leigh, Sotheby and Son, 1803). Catalogue of the Valuable Library of Edward Walpole Roberts […] (London: Sotheby, 1828) A Catalogue of the Valuable and well-chosen Library […] of T.H. Robinson […] (Manchester: Winstanley, unk.) A catalogue of the curious and valuable library of George Smyth: Esq. […] (London: Leigh and Sotheby, 1797) A Catalogue of the curious and valuable library of Amos Strettell, Esq. […] (London: Evans, 1820) A Catalogue of the Library of the late Revd. Dr. Sumner […] to which are added the books of an architect […] (London: Evans, 1814) A Catalogue of the […] library of the late Rev. T.G. Taylor […]. (Ipswich: 1818). A Catalogue of the entire and valuable Library and Manuscripts of the late John Topham […] (London: Leigh, Sotheby, and Son, 1804) Catalogue of the entire Law Library of Raleigh Trevelyan. […]. (Newcastle: Emerson Charnley, 1818). Catalogue of books, prints, and books of print being the libraries of the Late Rev. Doctor Usher, F.T.C.D.: Mr. Clarendon, and another gentleman […]. (Dublin: James Vallance, 1796). A catalogue of the books and manuscripts, of the Late Mrs. Walcott. […] (Dublin: James Vallance, 1800)

Martin 1799

Masters 1799 Pickard 1802

Piozzi 1816

Radford 1815 Richards 1812 Ritson 1803

Roberts 1828 Robinson 0000 Smyth 1797 Strettell 1820 Sumner_ Anonymous 1814 Taylor 1818 Topham 1804

Trevelyan 1818 Usher_Clarendon_ Anonynous 1796 Walcott 1800

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References

Short title

Walwyn 1800

A catalogue of the elegant household furniture, and a variety of valuable effects, of James Walwyn, Esq. deceased. […]. (London: Willock, 1800). Catalogue of the valuable library […] of the late Holland Watson […] (Liverpool: Branch & Son, 1829) A Catalogue of the very valuable library of the late John Wilkes, Esq. M.P. […] (London: Leigh, Sotheby, & son, 1802) A Catalogue of the entire and valuable library of the late Joseph Windham, Esq. […] (London: Leigh and Sotheby, 1811)

Watson 1829 Wilkes 1802 Windham 1811

Notes 1. Studies on similar questions have been undertaken for other refugee communities exiled in the British Isles, starting with the long-term cultural influence of the Huguenot population on British society. In Refugees in an Age of Genocide (pp.  416–17), Tony Kushner and Katherine Knox discussed how ‘some of the gains of [refugees’] presence are measurable, including the creation of jobs and new enterprises as well as the development of intellectual and cultural life’. The researchers insisted on the manner in which ‘energy and innovation’ brought by refugee groups participated in the ‘revitali[sation of the] British Society at a national and local level’. 2. The same can probably be said of studies on refugees in general, in which demographics and politics often take centre stage. In their introduction to a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities (pp. 122–151), Stefan Manz and Panikos Panayi attempted for the first time to demonstrate the importance of studying the cultural impact of refugees in Britain since the seventeenth century. 3. Wynne-Williams, Diary, p. 30. 4. The text read in this meeting is likely to have been an early and manuscript version of Dernières heures de Louis XVI, roi de France, a pamphlet written sometime in the early 1800s. The earliest recorded publications of this text date from the 1810s. Cléry’s text is probably his Journal de ce qui s’est passé à la Tour du Temple, pendant la captivité de Louis XVI, roi de France, first published in 1798. 5. Williams, The Social Life of Books, pp. 3–4. 6. Goodman, ‘Public Sphere and Private Life’, p. 5. 7. Idem, p. 6.

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8. My research on books by émigrés is still in its early stages and the number of catalogues examined should grow exponentially. For a discussion on the advantages and pitfalls of using catalogues of private libraries as a source, see Helwi Blom, Rindert Jagersma and Juliette Reboul, ‘Printed Private Library Catalogues as a Source for the History of Reading’, in Jonathan Rose and Mary Hammond, Edinburgh History of Reading (Edinburgh: EUP, 2019). The start date roughly corresponds to the moment in the history of the French emigration when some émigrés decided to settle in their host territory. Furthermore, it has been assumed that the presence of books by émigrés in British libraries would be insignificant in earlier years as the movement only started around 1792. The cut-off date corresponds to the chronological limits of the project in which I am involved, MEDIATE (see mediate18.nl) 9. So far, I have only been able to identify half of the 4500 titles in my sample and the numbers and percentages I will now present are very conservative. 10. The number of books by émigrés in a library is not related to the total number of books. One of the smallest libraries (26 items) contained two books written by émigrés: Green1800, p. 9, items 20 and 24. 11. Astbury, ‘The trans-national dimensions of the Émigré novel’. In this, she argues that the émigré novel should be studied as a transnational genre that functioned around a ‘common series of plot devices through which to explore notions of identity and the interplay of politics and sensibility’. According to her, the émigré novel is not a text by an émigré but a novel about emigration obeying certain aesthetic criteria: Sophie Cottin, Isabelle de Charrière, Charlotte Smith and Auguste Delafontaine should therefore be considered as authors of émigré novels since they made emigration their subjects. 12. See Chap. 8 in this volume. 13. While the term émigré is used today as a collective to define the ensemble of the population that left France, the individuals and the community of migrants were mostly referred to in contemporary British documents as refugee or emigrant. 14. Catalogue of the […] furniture of a Lady […]. 15. The distribution of books by Madame de Genlis in the libraries studied was as such: Alphonisme: Bryan 1828, p. 19, item 612. Le Siège de la Rochelle: Garrick 1823, p. 31, item 945. Les Chevaliers du Cygne: Geddes 1804, p. 17, item 514. Rash Vows, or the Effects of Enthusiasm: Jones 1803, p. 5, item 106.

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Young Exiles: Jones 1803, p. 10, item 310. Duchess of La Vallière: Strettell 1820, p. 23, items 631 and 640. Duc de Lauzun: Strettell 1820, p. 23, item 639. Le Mari Corrupteur: Strettell 1820, p. 23, item 641. Adelaide et Théodore: Watson 1829, p. 11, item 293. Lecons d’une Gouvernante et de ses élèves: Wilkes 1802, p. 45, item 1260. 16. Annals of the French Revolution: Baxter 1812, p. 49, item 1068; Roberts 1828, p. 6, item 126. Private Memoirs of Louis XVI: Baxter 1812, p. 49, item 1064; Garrick 1823, p.  21, item: 622; Green 1800, p.  9, item 20; Roberts 1828, p. 17, item 472; Wilkes 1802, p. 5, item: 143. 17. Charles-Francois Dumouriez’s Memoires (in French or in English): Bankes 1803, p. 11, item 301; Anonymous 1803, p. 3, item 28; Wilkes 1802, p. 17, item 488, and p. 48, item 1357; Windham 1811, p. 24, items 654 and 655. Germaine de Stael, Corinne: Garrick 1823, p.  20, item 566; Strettell 1820, p. 49, item 1361; Robinson 0000, p. 42, item 570. De l’Allemagne: Strettell 1820, p. 16, item 459. Lettres sur les Ouvrages et le Caractère de J.J. Roussea: Dutens 1802, p. 3, item 68. Zulma: Strettell 1820, p. 16, item 1813. Lally-Tollental; Comte de Strafford: Dutens 1802, p. 4, item 103; Strettell 1820, p.  28, item 801; Windham 1811, p.  41, item 1154. Défense des Émigrés Francais: Wilkes 1802, p. 26, item 737. Mallet du Pan: Mercure Britannique: Garrick 1823, p.  24, item 721; Sumner_Anonymous 1814, p. 2, item 34; Baxter 1812, p. 48, item 1047. Des dangers qui menacent l’Europe: Anonymous 1803, p. 3, item 28. Calonne: Etat de la France: Baxter 1812, p.  27, item 616; Coleman 1795, p. 5, item 34; Garrick 1823, p. 13, item 390; Wilkes 1802, p. 9, item 268. Delille: Les Jardins: Bryan 1828, p.  10, item 252; Geddes 1804, p.  5, items 115 and 116; Dutens 1802, p. 6, item 140. Peltier: Derniers Tableaux de Paris: Masters 1799, p. 4, item 37; Wilkes 1802, p.  34, item 990; Windham 1811, p.  54, item 1521. Tableau de l’Europe: Windham 1811, p. 54, item 1521∗ 18. Bouillé: Memoirs relating to the French Revolution: Baxter 1812, p. 22, item 504; Roberts 1828, p. 4, item 57; Wilkes 1802, p. 8, item 232. Necker, Administration de Paris: Wilkes 1802, p. 33, item 951. Pouvoir Executif: Wilkes 1802, p. 33, item 950; Topham 1804, p. 13, item 430. 19. Strettell 1820: p. 2, item 17; Green 1800, p. 9, item 24. 20. Quérard, France Littéraire, v.10, p. 49. 21. Anonymous 1803: p.  3, item 31. A copy held in the British Library (RB.23.b.6429[2]) includes a manuscript note identifying the book collector as the Rvd Mr. Beloès.

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22. British Critic, p. 77. I have not been able to locate a single copy of this book. 23. For a discussion on the political status of émigré fictions, Astbury, Trauma, p. 2. In her introduction, she adopts the statement by Malcolm Cook that ‘Surely, it cannot be denied, in spite of the reticence of critics in this respect, that such novels, appearing when they do, assume a ­revolutionary status; and must be considered in the context of their political environment’. 24. Bryan 1828, p. 20, item 653. 25. Bournon, Traité complet de la Chaux Carbonatée et de l’Arragonite, vol. I, p. vi. 26. Topham 1804, p. 8, item 217; Roberts 1828, p. 4, item 46. 27. Smith, Romance of Real Life. 28. Besdel, Abrégé des causes célébres et intéressantes, p. v–xii. 29. On the status of Delille as an émigré, see Baldensperger, ‘L’Emigration de Jacques Delille’. The 1801 edition was in Dutens 1802, p. 6, item 140, and Geddes 1804, p. 5, items 115 and 116. 30. Baldensperger, pp. 91–92. 31. Based on distant reading, this list cannot currently include books that clearly emulated emigration novels or others that were strongly influenced by exiled counter-revolutionary discourses. 32. The use of the subject of the French emigration by non-émigré writers was poorly represented in this sample: books by writers such as Fanny Burney, Isabelle de Charrière or Sophie Cottin, to cite only a few, were not listed in these catalogues. This might be explained by the small size of the sample and the relative social heterogeneity of library owners mostly male and middle class. 33. Burdon, Materials for thinking, p. 375; Boucher, Views of the causes and consequences of the American Revolution, p. 111. 34. Genlis’s English emulators are studied in Pestel, ‘Educating against Revolution’. 35. Matthias, Pursuits of Literature, part I, pp.  21–23; 27; 52; Chalmers, Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare-Papers, pp. 519; 554; 583. 36. Willich, Lectures on diet and regimen, p.  672: ‘Books printed for T.N. Longman’. 37. Geddes, Modest Apology for the Roman Catholics of Great Britain addressed to all moderate protestants, p. xi. 38. See, for instance, Espagne, Transferts culturels and Leerssen, ‘Nationalism and the cultivation of culture’. While Michel Espagne thinks that ‘la diversité des personnalités enregistrées empeche les études sérielles’ (the diversity of the recorded personalities prevents serial studies), the method used in this study demonstrated that a serial approach to the question of cultural

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transfers can participate, revealing the vehicles of transfers in a fairly efficient and rapid way. 39. Burrows, French Exile Journalism, p. 62. 40. The fourth copy cannot be categorically identified as such since the place of publication is missing. It is probably the edition from Hamburg. 41. Reboul, French Emigration to Great Britain, pp.  155–163. See also appendix. 42. See Eisenstein, Grub Street abroad. 43. This is particularly visible in the increase in the number of English translations of émigré books in the mid-1790s and the rapidity of their publication. See Reboul, p. 160. 44. Watson 1829, p. 11, item 293—the edition actually catalogued for sale has not been identified due to a lack of details offered by the catalogue compiler. 45. The two other translators were Robert Clifford (Roberts 1828, p. 4 item 35—Barruel’s (Abbé) History of Jacobinism, 4 vols., 1797) and John Fenwick (Bankes 1803, p. 11 item 301—‘Fenwick’s Memoirs of Dumourier 1764 [i.e. 1794]’). 46. Respectively, Baxter 1812, p. 48, item 1047 and Sumner_Anonymous 1814, p. 2, item 34. Baxter 1812, p. 49, item 1068, and Roberts 1828, p. 6, item 126. Green 1800, p. 9, item 20; Wilkes 1802, p. 5, item 143; Baxter 1812, p. 49, item 1064; Garrick 1823, p. 21, item 622, and Roberts 1828, p. 17, item 472. Garrick 1823, p. 15, item 548. Radford 1815, p. 10, item 246. 47. Roberts 1828, p. 6, item 126. 48. ONDB: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/978 0198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-7038 (accessed on 02/04/2018) 49. Dallas, Miscellaneous Works and Novels, vol. I, ‘Preface’, p. xvi. 50. Astbury, ‘The trans-national dimensions of the Émigré novel’, p. 811. 51. See Reboul, p. 158. 52. Allan, ‘Book-Collecting and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, pp. 76. 53. Launched in September 1798, this successful series of political essays ran until March 1800. 54. Burrows, ‘Cultural politics of exile’, p.  158; see also his French Exile Journalism, p. 75 55. Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century. 56. Gauthier de Brécy, Mémoires véridiques et ingénues de la vie privée, morale et politique d’un homme de bien, pp. 274–276. 57. Saint Clair, p. 257; see also Colclough, p. 108. 58. See Grenby, ‘The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Fiction, British Conservatism and the Revolution in France’. A large number of Anti-­Jacobin novels

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identified by Grenby were listed in these libraries, including The Minstrel, Robert Bisset, Douglas or the Highlander; Samuel Egerton Brydges, Arthur Fitz-Albini; Mary Charlton, The Parisian; Elizabeth Helme, The Farmer of Inglewood Forest; Charles Lloyd, Edmund Oliver; S. Pearson, The Medallion; Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter; Charlotte Smith, Marchmont; Thomas Skinner Surr, George Barnwell. 59. Colclough, p. 121. 60. Espagne, pp. 28–29.

Bibliography Allan, David. ‘Book-Collecting and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in The Yearbook of English of English Studies 45 (2015): pp. 74–92. Astbury, Katherine. Narrative Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution, Oxford: Legenda, 2012. ———, ‘The Trans-national Dimensions of the Émigré Novel during the French Revolution’, in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 23 (2011): 802–832. Baldensperger, Fernand. ‘L’Emigration de Jacques Delille’, in Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 18–1 (1991), pp. 71–102. Besdel, Pierre-Francois. Abrégé des causes célèbres et intéressantes avec les jugemens qui les ont décidées. Bath: Aux dépens de l’auteur, 1793. Black, Jeremy. The English Press in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1987. Blom, Helwi Rindert Jagersma, and Juliette Reboul. ‘Printed Private Library Catalogues as a Source for the History of Reading’, in Jonathan Rose and Mary Hammond (eds), Edinburgh History of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Boucher, Jonathan. Views of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution. London: G.G. and J Robinson, 1797. Bournon, Jacques Louis (de). Traité complet de la chaux carbonatée et de l’arragonite. London: William Phillips, 1808. British (The) Critic and Quarterly Theological Review. London: F. and C. Rivington, 1802. Burdon, William. Materials for Thinking. London: Ostell, 1806. Burrows, Simon. French Exile Journalism and European Politics. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000. ———, ‘The Cultural Politics of Exile: French Émigré Literary Journalism in London, 1793–1814’, in Journal of European Studies, xxix (1999): 157–177. Catalogue (A) of the genuine household furniture of a Lady, removing into the country. London: Greenwood, 1790. Chalmers, George. A Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare-­ Papers. London: Thomas Egerton, 1799. Delille, Jacques. Oeuvres de J. Delille. Paris: Lefèvre, 1833.

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Dallas, Robert Charles. The Miscellaneous Works and Novels. London: Longman and co, 1813. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of Louis XVI to the Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Espagne, Michel. Les Transferts culturels franco-allemands. Paris: PUF, 1999. Gauthier de Brécy, Charles-Edme. Mémoires véridiques et ingénues de la vie privée, morale et politique d’un homme de bien. Paris: Imprimerie Giraudet, 1834. Geddes, Alexander. A Modest Apology for the Roman Catholics of Great Britain Addressed to all Moderate Protestants. London: printed for the author, 1800. Goodman, Deena. ‘Public Sphere and Private Life: Towards a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime’, in History and Theory, 31 (1992): 1–20. Grenby, Matthew. ‘The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Fiction, British Conservatism and the Revolution in France’, in History 83/271 (1998): pp. 445–471. Kushner Tony and Katherine Knox (eds). Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives during the Twentieth Century. London: Frank Cass, 1999. Leerssen, Joep. ‘Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture’, in Nations and Nationalism, 12 (2006): pp. 559–578. Manz Stefan and Panikos Panayi (eds). ‘Refugees and Cultural Transfers to Britain: An Introduction’ in Immigrants and Minorities (2012). Matthias, Thomas James. Pursuits of Literature, a Satirical Poem: third edition. London: T. Becket, 1797. Pestel, Friedemann. ‘Educating against Revolution: French Émigré Schools and the Challenge of the Next Generation’, in European History Quarterly, 47 (2017): pp. 229–256 (232–235). Quérard, Joseph-Marie. La France littéraire. Paris: F. Didot frères, 1839. Reboul, Juliette. French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Smith, Charlotte. The Romance of Real Life. London: T. Cadell, 1787. Williams, Abigail. The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-­ Century Home. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Willich, Anthony. Lectures on Diet and Regimen. London: Longman, 1799. Wynne-Williams, Frances. Diary of a Lady of Quality, ed. A. Hayward. London: Longman, 1864.

CHAPTER 7

The Trauma of the Emigration in the Novels of Three Women Émigrées in London Laure Philip

ces romans m’ont fait du mal, ils ont été remuer au fond de mon âme un vieux reste de vie qui ne servira qu’à souffrir. [These novels have hurt me, they stirred up, at the bottom of my soul, the last old remnants of life that will only bring more suffering.]

This chapter argues that one of the defining characteristics of the literature authored by French female émigrées of the Revolution is that it creatively comes to terms with the trauma of the emigration. Voicing a traumatic past through fiction is not reserved for women writers; men, too, productively used exile as a literary motif in their fiction works, and this formed a constitutive part of the literary landscape and novelistic leitmotifs of the nineteenth century.1 However, on the one hand, the relationship between biography and novelistic creation has seldom worked in women’s favour, and, on the other hand, not much research has wholeheartedly addressed the literary production from the circumstantial viewpoint of the female

L. Philip (*) Independent Scholar, Sydney, NSW, Australia © The Author(s) 2019 L. Philip, J. Reboul (eds.), French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_7

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victims of the Revolution turned novelists. Such a study, therefore, is pertinent because stylistically the female sentimental novel written by émigrées between the Revolution and the first half of the nineteenth century has either been overlooked as archaic remnants of the dying sentimental trend or been eclipsed by the remarkable male romantic writers such as Stendhal and Chateaubriand. And yet as this chapter shows, these female authors engage with Romantic aesthetics and male melancholia whilst simultaneously altering them in order to shift the focus to the psychological wound left by the emigration and suggest a feminine way of working through trauma. It concentrates on the novels of three émigré noblewomen and the way they chose to voice and represent the trauma of the exile. In doing so, this chapter argues for a firmer literary identity for the female émigré novel, whilst also proposing to reconsider the emigration as powerful inspiration for the literary movements of the long nineteenth century. The novels selected were written by Madame de Flahaut, later known as Madame de Souza, Madame de Boigne and Madame de Duras. Adèle de Flahaut (1761–1836) left France with her son who was allegedly the result of her affair with Talleyrand, while her previous husband stayed behind and faced the guillotine. Her emigration left her destitute, and she published her first novel, Adèle de Sénange (1794), as a means to survive and cope with the adversity.2 Mme de Flahaut then left London to go to Holland, before returning to Paris and marrying de Souza in 1802. Out of the numerous novels Souza wrote upon her return to France, some stand out because of the abundant references to a fictitious or real exile and/or England itself: this is the case of Émilie et Alphonse (1799), which narrates the heroine’s exile in the Pyrénées by order of her husband; Charles et Marie (1802), which is set in England; and Eugénie et Mathilde (1811), which explicitly tells of the emigration of a noble family to Belgium and Holland.3 Claire de Kersaint (1777–1828) had a traumatic childhood: her parents divorced during the Revolution and she fled alone with her weak mother to the colonies to recover their money, whilst her father got executed for being a Girondin. In London she formed part of the wealthy emigrant society but her marriage to the Duc de Duras left her unsatisfied. She returned to France in 1808 and formed an ambiguous friendship with Chateaubriand. Her bestseller Ourika was published in 1824, followed by Edouard in 1825. Olivier ou le Secret was composed during the

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same ­writing spree but not published until after her death. Duras’ novels characteristically place unconventional obstacles in the path of love; for instance, Ourika cannot be loved because she is black, Olivier because he is, supposedly, impotent. Her Mémoires de Sophie and unfinished Amélie et Pauline were published in 2011 and edited by Marie-Bérénice Diethelm: they both narrate the semi-autobiographical emigration of a noblewoman in England and her abandonment by her lover upon their return to Paris.4 Adèle d’Osmond (1781–1866) was just 8 years old when she left France. In London she married the non-noble general de Boigne to end her family’s financial precarity and expressed her resentment for him in her Récits d’une tante, a five-volume-long memoir from the Revolution to the July Monarchy published posthumously in 1921–1923. Her two novels La Maréchale d’Aubemer (1866) and Une Passion dans le grand monde (1867) were published at her death but probably written from 1835.5 The novels have not been critically acclaimed but they refer implicitly to the experience of the exile, notably in the way the heroine is displaced and unhappily married in a foreign country. The female émigré novel ought to be contextualised within the literary landscape of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. There are a number of reasons why such novels have been dubbed mediocre and overlooked. First, it is because émigrés have been the victims of many historical prejudices for far too long: when not reduced to over-simplified counter-­revolutionary views they are associated with frivolous egocentric stereotypes. The figure of the émigré often became politically charged in the successive tumultuous regimes of the nineteenth century. Following the path-breaking socio-economical study done by Donald Greer in 1967, the 1990s wave of revisionist émigré scholars insisted on the heterogeneity of the émigré population, and debunked old emigration myths. The 2017 international emigration conference in Nijmegen at the origin of this volume marked a decisive renewal in the historiography by putting the emphasis on pan-European and peripheral emigration journeys and inter-­disciplinary methods. Not only has emigration historiography come a long way, but the émigré literature is starting to be re-examined as a factor to account for the literary shifts unfolding in the nineteenth century. Previously the ex-émigré turned writer was denied any talent for carrying out the renewal of literature; for instance, Henri Peyre declared in his study on Romanticism: ‘Par malheur, ces émigrés femmes et hommes, […] ne furent pas poètes’; ‘Leur imagination aurait dû être

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mise en branle. Les vieux oripeaux du classicisme désuet […] auraient pu être balayés’. (Unfortunately, these female and male émigrés […] were not poets); (Their imagination should have been triggered. The ancient rags of old-fashioned Classicism […] should have been brushed away.)6 This view contrasts sharply with what Chateaubriand, former émigré later turned writer and political man, declared: ‘Le changement de littérature dont le XIXème siècle se vante lui est arrivé de l’émigration et de l’exil’ (The change in literature that the nineteenth century boasts about came from the emigration and exile).7 And yet, the female émigré novelists publishing in the aftermath of the Revolution have not received the same acclaim as Chateaubriand. Instead, they encountered political prejudice as well as misogyny. Jules Bertaut in Les Belles Emigrées in 1953 wrote that it was women who pushed men to emigrate because they were ‘more inclined to follow their emotions rather than reason’.8 This chapter, thus, also participates in the conceptual renewal, beginning in the 2000s, that challenges the idea that émigré literature was sterile, and the overlooked female novels particularly so. Stéphanie Genand declared that, unlike what scholars had argued concerning the mediocrity of revolutionary production, ‘La révolution ne tue pas le roman elle l’inspire’ (the Revolution does not kill the novel; it inspires it).9 Literary scholars, such as Katherine Astbury and the Destins romanesques de l’émigration authors, have already placed the émigré genre at the centre of the early nineteenth-century literary evolutions.10 Brigitte Louichon brought to the fore the surreal singularity of the ‘romancières sentimentales’ of the post-Revolution: ‘l’utilisation d’un modèle produit par l’Ancien Régime en un temps nouveau confère à leurs écrits une couleur idéelle ou nostalgique, une impression de décalage par rapport à la réalité’ (the utilisation of a canon produced by the Ancien Regime during a new age makes their writings appear idyllic or nostalgic, conveying a feeling of a gap from reality). Furthermore, Chantal Bertrand Jennings defended the possibility of alternative aesthetics of Romanticism emerging in the often forgotten female literary production of the post 1800s.11 The originality and innovation argued for by these scholars resonates greatly with the three female émigré novels chosen in this study. In addition, the émigré novels written by real witnesses have been shown to convey a more poignant and authentic insight into the psychological effect this traumatic historical upheaval had on individu-

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als when compared to fictitious accounts.12 ‘Fake’ émigré novels tend to detail the extraordinary revolutionary events and seize this opportunity to discuss politics and social reform: such is the case of Isabelle de Charrière’s Trois femmes and Lettres trouvées dans des porte-feuilles d’émigrés.13 In contrast, the real émigré accounts either display selected historical events for their profound psychological impact on protagonists or obliterate them completely preferring to metaphorically render the exile experience. Therefore, this chapter not only participates in the rehabilitation of the historical and literary value of forgotten female émigré authors but it also brings to the fore their resourcefulness in writing about traumatic memories, with the help of trauma studies and theories of re-enactment. The development in trauma studies in the last 30 years has opened up the possibility of using trauma as an analytical tool in literature. Cathy Caruth stated that literature could teach readers about trauma in indirect ways.14 Clinical studies of trauma have indicated a range of reactions and coping mechanisms that scholars could use particularly for delving deeper into music, art or texts. However, the view that trauma could be appropriated and understood by the recipient of the artistic object has been reassessed since. Bessel van der Kolk insisted on the fact that ‘all narratives that weave sensory imprints onto socially communicable stories are subject to condensation, embellishment, and contamination’.15 Roger Luckhurst spoke of the ‘paradigm of trauma’: trauma is impossible to capture concisely in literary or artistic language since it permanently escapes intelligible recording, and yet parts of it can still be re-worked and re-appropriated creatively.16 Although it is chimerical to claim that by reading émigré novels one can recover and understand an authentic and raw trauma, this chapter contends that it is possible to unearth the stylistic re-working of the painful exile. Closetext stylistic analysis will uncover the creative strategies elected by the female exile writers to evoke the displacement and personal disillusions in the aftermath of the Revolution. It will argue that, whilst each individual émigrée chose original narrative strategies, all display a type of safe re-enactment of the emigration in some way, which enables them to domesticate and thus come to terms with a traumatic past through fiction writing.

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1   The Crossing of the Channel: A Metaphorical Re-enactment of the Emigration in Madame de Boigne’s Memoirs and Une Passion dans le grand monde

The figure of the Channel as a narrative technique re-enacting the brutal exile is present in most of the female émigré novels selected. As insurmountable frontier but also gateway between England and France, the sea offered many narrative possibilities. Madame de Souza mentioned the dangerous travelling of the émigré family to Holland in Eugénie et Mathilde, whilst Charles et Marie is set in England. In Adèle de Sénange the dangerous navigation to England is remembered fondly and narrated by Adèle’s husband M. de Sénange. Madame de Duras evokes the crossing of the Channel in Olivier ou le Secret and the two lovers spend some time on the Isle of Wight. Edouard in the eponymous novel crosses the Atlantic to die in the American war. In Duras’ two inédit novels the Mémoires de Sophie and Amélie et Pauline, the exiled lovers in England reflect on the conflicted emotions evoked by staring at the Channel. Furthermore, crossing the ocean constitutes a rite of passage in many emigration memoirs, a genre that boomed in between 1789 and 1848.17 On average, the works of Souza, Duras and Boigne were written and/or published 20 years after the experience of the emigration, to the exception of Adèle de Sénange (1794). This lapse of time implies a partial, selective and creative recollection, which is often driven by a personal agenda.18 Unsurprisingly, like her fellow émigré writers, Boigne recalls the memory of her journey to England in the memoirs, but she magnifies this ultimate exile episode in Une Passion dans le grand monde. Looking at the crossing of the Channel as a key element of the exile via the comparison between her memoirs and her novel is pertinent in this light. Whilst the memoirs aim to be a faithful recollection of past events, they, nonetheless, use novelistic tropes to give more colour to the memories narrated. For example, Boigne inserts many dramatic and extraordinary anecdotes within the recollection of her exile that seem fit for a sentimental novel.19 Simultaneously, Boigne’s heartfelt declaration of modesty and truthfulness in the preface to the novel is surprising to the non-expert modern reader. It is, however, nothing more than an authorial ruse and a conventional declaration. This is because at the time she wrote, female authorship was still looked down upon in society, whilst novel writing was confronted

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by a myriad of contradictions and pressures, notably the necessity to narrate true facts and the belief that reading fictionalised events could be dangerous for morally weak readers. As a result, while Boigne’s memoirs take on fictitious features in places, her novel painstakingly tries to avoid being too ‘fictitious’. This porosity between the two literary genres takes on a greater significance in the case of the recollection-narration of the journey across the Channel as an émigré. Une Passion claims to be the true story of a noble family and its extinction, which recalls the fears of Boigne herself as childless heiress of the d’Osmond lineage. The attention to the description of the family lineage recalls the genre of the memoirs. However, it is in the creative reconstitution of the traumatic crossing of the Channel as an émigré that the line between past memories and fiction is truly blurred. Travelling at sea is the first crucial step of exile for Boigne in her memoirs and for Une Passion’s heroine Odille who crosses the Channel to marry in England and later, the Atlantic Ocean, to live in Brazil with her new husband. In the memoirs, Boigne stresses the emotional impact of the crossing of ‘l’Océan’, meaning here the Channel, had on her young self: ‘Je me rappelle seulement l’impression que me causa l’aspect de l’Océan. Tout enfant que j’étais, je lui vouais dès lors un culte qui ne s’est pas démenti. Ses teintes grises et vertes ont toujours un charme pour moi, auquel les belles eaux bleues de la Méditerranée ne m’ont pas rendue infidèle’.20 The use of the word ‘culte’ reinforces the spiritual link between water and emigration for Boigne. It is evident that the novelist’s first impressions of the exile had an impact on her later writings and particularly in the way she vividly expressed Odille’s paradoxical emotions towards the ocean. The heroine laments over the consequences of such distance and uprooting from her home and family. Progressively, the ocean-channel takes on a shifting status in the novel, being first a beautiful element of nature but also an active element of the exile: ‘avec quel serrement de cœur je contemple cet océan qui va me séparer de tout ce que je chéris!’21 It is more impenetrable than a frontier and threatens life as well as it cuts the heroine from her past life, which is worsened by the rare communications with Europe. Boigne was affected directly by this during her emigration: the anxiety of receiving news from loved ones while in exile is palpable in her memoirs. The communication between and Britain was slowed down throughout the revolutionary decade and the Empire: from 1793 the two countries were almost permanently at war, and Napoleon’s blockade in 1806 did not improve matters.

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The image of the sea-ocean is hugely ambivalent as it carries the hopes and resuscitates memories of life at home, being the only way back to the patrie. Renaud Morieux has pointed out the ambivalence of the conception of the Channel as a frontier in the eighteenth century, showing that its meaning shifted depending on its users.22 Sydney Watts explains in Chap. 4 that Jersey, because of its strategic position in the Channel, could be seen by French exiles as a temporary place to stop at, before travelling further to England or across the Atlantic. Close to France but under British government, the Channel Island could be perceived as the ideal place of refuge. Above all, the comparison of Boigne’s representation of the crossing of the Channel in the memoirs and in her novel highlights the incredible creativity the emigration experience could bring about and the mechanism of re-enactment of a traumatic past. The fact that the heroine is shown reminiscing about the consequences of exile when staring at the water indicates how important the motif of the ocean-channel is for Boigne. It is as if, in re-enacting this key moment of the emigration, the author can dismantle the element of anxiety attached to it and instead adorn it with elaborate metaphors of longing and contemplation with powerful identity-building elements. The memory of the emigration is idealised thanks to fiction writing; however, this re-enactment inevitably attenuates the raw trauma, hence providing solace for the émigré author.

2   References to England as Forging Identity in Souza’s Adèle de Sénange It is believed Souza wrote her first novel in the midst of her stay in a squalid lodging in London. And yet, Adèle de Sénange strikes the reader as the sentimental novel par excellence, a genre that had prevailed since the 1740s and came from Britain, not the story of a woman émigrée in London. The novel is an epistolary love story where an elegant English Lord tells his friend back home about his stay in a fantasised pre-­ revolutionary Parisian setting. In the foreword to the novel, Souza is particularly explicit as to the soothing effect writing had during her emigration. She wrote that since she was ‘Alone, in a foreign land’ she felt the need to depart from everything that was real and numb her feelings.23 This attests to the therapeutic properties she found in writing a novel set before the Revolution. Ronen Steinberg underlined that one of the coping mechanisms of victims of the Terror was to restrict emotional reactions in order

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to counteract the excesses witnessed.24 The idea that trauma can be re-­ worked through fiction writing with the aim of getting solace and closure has been applied with success by Kate Astbury to Chateaubriand’s novel Les Natchez. She utilised trauma scholar Shoshanna Felman’s re-­enactment theory which stated that ‘we project this fear onto the world in order to localize it, and […] to domesticate it. For once we locate it, the fear of our own dissolution is removed. Then it is not we who totter on the brink of collapse, but rather the Other’. Astbury also fruitfully applied clinical stages of recovery to the prose.25 The localisation and domestication of trauma described by Felman is implicit in Adèle de Sénange: this time, obvious clues, such as the fictitious crossing of the Channel, are obliterated altogether; and yet the overbearing references to England in the plot participate to safely re-enact the experience of the emigration. The multiple references to England, its customs and the English people in Adèle de Sénange would usually be attributed to the trend of Anglomania spreading from the mid-eighteenth century, which saw the French elite avidly seek British novels, fashion, horses and champion constitutional monarchy. Our noblewoman was also familiar with Anglo-Saxon culture from her acquaintances in her pre-revolutionary salon. However, on top of the fashionable and light-hearted, there are in her novel deeper reflections on the emotional effect of being in contact with a foreign culture, which immediately alludes to the exile. Being British or having been to England is crucial to forging identity for the key protagonists Lord Sydenham, M. de Sénange and Adèle. For example, M. de Sénange’s English adventure recalls the emigration, whilst being a character-building opportunity. Just like an émigré, he endured a difficult crossing of the Channel, and then became the protégé of an English family. The wording ‘dans une terre étrangère’ matches Souza’s foreword exactly and thus strengthens the argument that the female émigrée author projected her traumatic experience into fiction.26 It is possible that Souza re-enacted her own challenging arrival to England by tinting this story with hope and positive consequences. The way she made ‘Britishness’ and ‘Frenchness’ complementary and guarantors of virtue suggests an attempt at finding a way out of her sordid situation, projecting her own fate into a nicer and fictive one. This is obvious during Adèle’s widowing and discovery of love with Lord Sydenham. Having returned to the convent, she learns English, saying words aloud to improve her pronunciation: ‘jusqu’à ce que je l’aie dit précisément comme vous’ (until I have pronounced it exactly like you). In the plot this episode coincides with her transformation from a naïve

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child to a grown woman committed to her lover. In this sense, her apprenticeship of English is forging her identity. She says that ‘l’Anglais a pour moi, un charme d’imitation et de souvenir que le Français ne saurait avoir’. (The English language has for me the charm of imitation and souvenir that the French language shall never have.)27 Souza evokes here a way of learning English charged with positive emotions and a hint of nostalgia, something probably taking her back to her Anglo-Saxon friends in the Louvre, a time where insouciance surrounded everything British. In attaching positive values to British references through fiction writing, the author skips the traumatic association to the emigration. The Anglomania as trend before the Revolution offers a useful background from which the émigré novelist can revisit her memories and experience of ‘Britishness’ and gain a sense of normality despite the circumstances. Despite Souza’s attempt at transposing references to Britain into a timeless and idyllic pre-revolutionary setting, the fact that British culture is so important to the novel’s heroes undeniably evokes the experience of the emigration. The accentuation of the cultural porosity of British and French cultures are demonstrated by Juliette Reboul in her study of émigré books listed in British library catalogues in the preceding chapter. She claims that there was a ‘transfer of ideas generated by French émigrés into a British cultural context’ at play. Likewise, Kirsty Carpenter points out in Chap. 5 of this volume that the Penn school for émigrés at the initiative of Edmund Burke ‘was a nationalism-defying, Revolution-denying gesture implying that the elites of Europe retained a sympathy that bound them more closely than race or language’. It appears, therefore, that in depicting British culture and ideologies, Souza created an atmosphere where the Revolution never existed and both nations were acquainted in much less traumatic circumstances.

3   The Émigrée Melancholia Boigne, Souza and Duras all provide an alternative version of melancholia in their novels, one that is much more historically entrenched in the emigration and concerned about how it affected people rather than just a sterile and selfish display of lamentations by the hero. The literary expressions of melancholia that particularly flourished from the Empire onwards were traditionally male. Male melancholia manifested itself as a set of gloomy beliefs on the human finite existence, the futility of this world’s distractions and the unsatisfied yearning for beauty and perfection. Julia

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Schiesiari defined melancholia as an ‘expression of cultural malaise embodied within a particular individual or system of thought’, but she also noted that it was gendered.28 This section explains how female émigré novelists departed from the traditional representations of melancholia in two ways: in matching the generic literary melancholia with the exile trauma meaningfully, and in suggesting an alternative female malaise. Male characters in our female émigrés’ novels do resemble contemporary heroes appearing in non-émigré male novels. Just like Adolphe in the eponymous novel by Benjamin Constant (1816) or Octave in Stendhal’s Armance (1827) they encompassed the emotional and intellectual anxieties experienced in the aftermath of the Revolution.29 To be a melancholic hero is to feel an innate mal être from birth, but also to be distraught from contemporary living conditions and experiences. Typically, the hero feels disgust for the mediocrity of elite social gatherings and conveys the word le monde (the elite social world) negatively.30 In addition, he shows signs of psychological agitation materialised by unusual behaviour such as incessant pacing or anxiety fits, which are usually attributed to the mentally insane. Finally, the novels usually place premonitory warnings of the protagonist’s fatal ending, often paired with the description of degradation of health. This is particularly flagrant in Duras’ novels Edouard and Olivier ou le Secret: both characters adopt an air of madness, before voluntarily running to their death. And yet, the émigré novels also meaningfully merge the ‘mainstream’ manifestations of melancholia with the historical and traumatic destiny of the French exiled figure. This is of course the case for Chateaubriand and one of the reasons why his prose is so powerful: he fruitfully combined the historically entrenched condition of the exile with the melancholic figure of the wanderer. The important point, thus, is to have experienced the emigration, something that gives the author the potential and/or option to add historical and psychological depth to the tropes of melancholia in prose fiction. It is not that the melancholia painted by contemporary writers who had not been exiled rings totally unauthentic, and assessing literary quality in relation to the author’s more or less traumatic life would be reductive. Rather, this chapter argues that because they were exiles, these women novelists were able to articulate the ideas of errancy, marginality and otherness in a way that pushed the boundaries of ‘mainstream’ melancholia. Further still, as women writers and émigrées, they were doubly at odds with society. They had experienced first-hand the challenges and risks of female authorship whilst their exile exposed them to precarity,

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­ omesickness and uprooting. This prompted them to creatively manipuh late the literary motifs of melancholia. The insistence on errancy and its impact on the hero’s psychic state take on a deeper meaning in the émigré novel than elsewhere. In Duras’ inédit émigré novel Amélie et Pauline, Henry is travelling around Europe aimlessly since ‘rien ne l’intéressait assez’ (nothing interested him enough). The Revolution stripped him of his hopes, and the present is necessarily dissatisfying: ‘[il] ne voyait devant lui qu’un long avenir sans intérêts et sans bonheur’ ([he] only imagined a long, bland and unhappy future ahead of him).31 In addition, the idea of otherness and alterity emerges quite strongly from the more generalist strand of melancholia and contributes to singling out the émigré novel hero from his contemporary peers. In the case of Olivier, whose outcast behaviour is due to a physical ailment he never reveals, having a shameful secret resonates with the émigré trauma because it is centred on the incapacity to be in tune with the outside world. The émigré melancholia is therefore characterised by an absurd yet insurmountable disconnection between the individual and his or her environment. Edouard in Duras’ eponymous novel reacts by taking refuge in his own dreams, in the company of chimeras, which is abundantly developed in the prose: ‘j’ai dans mon âme un trésor de douleur et de délices que je conserverai jusqu’à la mort’ (I have in my heart a treasured collection of suffering and small pleasures that I will keep until my death).32 Could this trésor de douleur et de délices symbolise the specific émigré heartache in seeing everything that was reduced to dust? In re-adjusting melancholia to better fit the historical and emotional upheaval of the emigration, the ex-exiled woman turned novelist can also potentially come to terms with the trauma of her own ordeal. Through the curbing of the main melancholia vocabulary, the female émigré novelist also subtly invalidates the male malady whilst insisting on things that matter in light of her own experience abroad. Firstly, the hero’s suffering is presented as unjustified and absurd. For example, in the case of Olivier the reader is left wondering what could be his hidden reason for being melancholic.33 The secret is but a smoke screen authorising the novelist to emphasise how disconnected male melancholia is. As we have seen, the image of the secret crystallises the incomprehension between the outcast émigré and the society, but also between the heroine and the hero. Ultimately the reader is left wondering whether, had Olivier’s secret been told, the marriage with Louise would really have happened. Edouard’s malady comes from his incapacity to overcome

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class and social prejudice: this situation is often a key obstacle in sentimental novels. Strikingly though, Duras removes all external obstacles to the union: Edouard is warmly welcomed within Nathalie’s noble family and her father considers him as a son. His stubbornness and misplaced sense of honour is the sole reason why he decides to board a ship to America and to die for a cause that is not his. Duras showcases the shortcomings of the male melancholic hero, in the absence of any societal pressure: it is but an absurd, selfish and destructive emotion, always at the expense of the heroine. Life in London corresponded to a softening of the Ancien Régime etiquette and social pressures for women. In addition, British society was already a consumer society and allowed for a certain sense of freedom for women authors. Frances Burney married a French émigré out of love against her father’s will. Witnessing successful writers marry whoever they chose whilst being an example of Christian virtue represented an alternative way of being a woman in society. Boigne comments in her memoirs on the tightening of relationships in adversity, whilst Souza admits she wrote her first novel to earn a living as a single mother. Having experienced the thrills of being in charge of their own destiny and in a more modern social background, these women émigrées were thus ideally placed to voice the disillusion from the sterile display of male melancholia upon their return. Schiesari’s study of female responses to the masculine myth of melancholic genius argued for the possibility of an ‘alternative symbolic of loss and lack’.34 Gendered melancholia is evident in the works of ex-exiles, but should not be reduced to the rejection of male melancholia. BertrandJennings opposed the view that the mal du siècle is strictly romantic and male, but simultaneously did not wish to enclose women within their alterity. Inspired by Duras’ novels, she coined a parallel version of this malady, where the compassion for the other is stronger and where there is less ‘complaisance dans la souffrance morale’ (indulgence in moral suffering).35 This shift is evident throughout the selected female émigré novels: in the face of inconsistency and cowardice, the female heroine stands unchanged and loyal to her passion until the end. Her desire is no longer seen as a fault; the problem emerges from her lover’s lacking the will to place love above honour. The melancholia expressed in the novel is adapted to female trauma in the way it realistically evokes the struggle of the exiled noblewoman to adapt to the rigidity of post-revolutionary society, a society that failed to quench their thirst for a revival of the authenticity and simplicity of life experienced abroad.

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The heroines’ psychological strength in the face of upheaval is particularly visible in Boigne’s works. In her memoirs, she comments on the gap between her idea of France in exile and what it really was, describing Parisian society as sauvage (wild) and her tedious noviciat (apprenticeship) into the Restoration circles. The melancholia the heroine feels is not self-­centred though: caring for family or others is valorised as a remedy to the feeling of being an outcast. In Une Passion maternal love is compensation for the uprooting of the exile for Odille, something that gives ‘la force et le courage de tenir’ (the strength and courage to hold on).36 However, Boigne acknowledged the opportunity given by the difficult years abroad to tighten the nuclear family and refocus on genuine love. In La Maréchale d’Aubemer the plot zooms in on the necessity for women at different stages of their lives, from daughters to wives and widows, to adapt and take matters into their own hands. The Maréchale is a disillusioned and ageing widow who, turned benefactress, matriarch and resourceful woman, overcomes her initial melancholia and distaste for le monde. A similar emphasis of the family idyll brought by a destitute exile is hinted at especially in Souza’s Eugénie et Mathilde where the conservative noble family is forced to become less rigid and more tolerant in adversity. Furthermore, Souza’s heroines do more than lament melancholically over their awful fate. They not only energetically find a way to cope with the difficulty of the exile, but also actively encourage the softening of their father’s Ancien Régime-style authority. They oppose belligerent action in the name of love and family and show solidarity in the face of heartbreak, solitude and bankruptcy. In a less explicit rendering of the exile in Émilie et Alphonse, Souza develops the idea of ‘exile within’ as an alternative method of coping with the trauma of being ostracised in a unfamiliar environment. The heroine’s reaction to her forced ostracism is seeking refuge and creating a barrier from the outside world. Her stay in the Pyrénées is thus not a pious retreat like in many sentimental novels but becomes a self-learning experience. In Duras, even the most sensitive of heroes ultimately fails to quench the heroine’s thirst for genuine love. In the Mémoires de Sophie and Amélie et Pauline the heroines’ return to normality is coupled with the brutal disillusion that love born during the emigration in simpler settings could not survive once back in Paris. Therefore, the female émigrée’s perspective on melancholia is modern and pragmatic because it advocates compassion and adaptation as remedy to trauma. Far from being a sterile emotion like male melancholia, it hints

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at a desire for change in post-revolutionary society in light of the specific female experience of exile. The unstable identity of the French exiles and their difficulty moving forward in a changed post-revolutionary society is one of the things that sets the émigré novel apart. Philip Knee in L’Expérience de la perte autour du moment 1800 argued that ‘la pensée se dédouble’ (thinking becomes split in two) because the witnesses of the Revolution and emigration were both critical of a social reality and ‘partie prenante de cette réalité’ (fully part of this reality). He also believed that the victims of the Revolution became pertinent speakers of their physical, emotional and psychological throes.37 This argument concludes our study and confirms the importance of re-evaluating the real novels of émigré for their creative treatment of the deeply rooted stigmas of exile. This chapter rehabilitates the historical value of three female émigrées turned novelists by showcasing selected narrative strategies and literary topoi employed to work through the trauma of the emigration. The novels by female ex-exiles suggest a much more realistic approach to melancholia, indicating a shift of the sentimental genre towards the social novel, and thus modernity. This angle of research is consequently very useful beyond the emigration literature for nineteenth-century literary studies. It is easy to imagine how difficult it was to be a returned émigré in Paris in the 1800s. Duras spoke of an air of ‘émigré rentrés’ (returned émigrés).38 She also described heroines who almost craved the return of difficult times in order to feel alive. Ourika laments: ‘je suis comme ces génies malfaisants qui n’ont de pouvoir que dans les temps de calamités, et que le bonheur fait fuir’ (I am like these ill-intentioned spirits who only have power in times of calamity, and that are scared off by happiness).39 It is possible that the émigré novel was unfortunately destined to become forgotten after all because the psychological images it painted were too historically entrenched and thus by essence short-lived.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Dr Helen Bones and Dr Juliette Reboul for their invaluable feedback on my chapter. All translations have been carried out by the author. Letter from Claire de Duras to Chateaubriand, 5 April 1822, in Agénor Bardoux, La Duchesse de Duras (Paris: C. Lévy, 1898), 283. 2. Adèle Filleul, comtesse de Flahaut, marquise de Souza-Botelho, Adèle de Sénange, ou Lettres de Lord Sydenham, 2 vols. (Londres: Debrett; Hookham; Edwards; & chez De Boeffe, 1794).

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3. Adèle de Souza, Émilie et Alphonse, 3 tomes (Paris: Charles Pougens, 1799); Charles et Marie (Paris: Maradan, 1802); Eugénie et Mathilde, ou Mémoires de la famille du comte de Revel, 3 vols. (Londres: L. Deconchy, 1811). 4. Claire de Kersaint, duchesse de Duras, Madame de Duras, Ourika, Edouard, Olivier ou le Secret, ed. by Marc Fumaroli and Marie-Bénédicte Diethelm (Paris: Gallimard, 2007); Mémoires de Sophie, suivi de Amélie et Pauline, ed. by Marie-Bénédicte Diethelm (Paris: Editions Manucius, 2011). 5. Éléonore-Adèle d’Osmond, comtesse de Boigne, Une Passion dans le grand monde, 2 vols. (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1867); La Maréchale d’Aubemer (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868); Récits d’une tante, Mémoires de la comtesse de Boigne, née d’Osmond, 5 vols. (Paris: Emile-Paul Frères, 1921–1923). 6. Henri Peyre, Qu’est-ce que le Romantisme? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 65. 7. François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (Paris: Arvensa, Nouvelle Edition, 2015), Partie II, Livre I, XI. Génie du Christianisme; suite – Défauts de l’ouvrage, 572. 8. ‘plus portées à écouter leurs passions que la raison’; ‘ce sont des résistantes dans l’âme’ (they are rebellious minds), ‘entêtées […] comme, seule, une femme peut l’être’ (stubborn, […] just as women usually are), Jules Bertaut, Les Belles émigrées, (Paris: Hachette, 1953), 9. 9. Stéphanie Genand, Romans de l’émigration (1797–1803) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), 11. 10. Katherine Astbury, Narratives Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution, (Oxford: Legenda, 2012); Claire Jaquier, Florence Lotterie, Catriona Seth, eds., Destins romanesques de l’émigration, (Paris: Desjonquères, 2007). 11. Brigitte Louichon, Romancières sentimentales, (1789–1825), (Saint Denis: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010), 292. Chantal Bertrand Jennings, Un Autre mal du siècle, le Romantisme des romancières, (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2005). 12. Melissa Wittmeier argues that non-authentic émigré novels do not engage with the implications of uprooting as much as authentic émigré novels, in “The Eighteenth-Century Emigrant, Crossing Literary Borders”, L’Érudit franco-espagnol, Vol. 2, (Fall 2012): 93–106. 13. Isabelle de Charrière, Lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d’émigrés (1793) ed. by Colette Piau-Gillot, (Paris: Côté-femmes Éditions, 1993); Trois femmes, 1797, in Bibliothèque Numérique Romande, http://www. ebooks-bnr.com/ebooks/pdf4/charriere_trois_femmes.pdf, [accessed July 2018]. 14. Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma, Explorations in Memory (John Hopkins University Press, 1998).

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15. Bessel Van der Kolk, ‘Trauma and Memory’, in Bessel Van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, Lars Weisaeth, eds., Traumatic Stress, The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society (London: The Guildford Press, 1996), 279–302, 296. 16. Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 16; 80. 17. See, for example, the memoirs of these noblewomen émigrées: Henriette Lucy Dillon, marquise de La Tour du Pin, Journal d’une femme de cinquante ans, 1778–1815 (Paris: M. Imhaus & R. Chapelot, 1913); Elisa de Ménerville, née Fougeret, Souvenirs d’Emigration 1791–1797, (Paris: P. Roger, 1934). 18. Madame de Boigne returned to France in 1805 and started to write from the 1830s, even though her memoirs and novels were published posthumously. Madame de Duras returned in 1808, and wrote all her novels during a writing spree between 1821 and 1824. 19. Boigne narrates the extraordinary love story between Mary Kingston and the Colonel Fitz-Gerald. The lovers escaped the Kingston clan’s disapproval by boat, with Mary dressed as a man. Eventually they are caught and their illicit affair punished: Fitz-Gerald is assassinated; upon receiving his bloodied portrait Mary has a miscarriage and becomes mentally insane. Boigne insists: ‘on a inventé bien des romans moins tragiques que cette triste scène de la vie réelle,’ Récits d’une tante, 149–153. 20. ‘I only remember vividly the impression that the Ocean had on me. Even as a child, I already had an undying devotion that never became obsolete. I have always been seduced by its grey and green shades, so much so that the beautiful blue waters of the Mediterranean sea never made me betray them’, in Boigne, ibid., 79–80. 21. ‘With what heartbreak I contemplate this ocean that will separate me from everything I cherish’ in Boigne, Une Passion, 49. 22. Renaud Morieux, Une Mer pour deux royaumes. La Manche, une frontière franco-anglaise (XVIIe – XVIIIe siècle) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008). The link between exile and patrie which appears in Une Passion p.  87 is also present in Chateaubriand’s novel Les Natchez. The hero René is exiled in America and makes the link between the Ocean and his long lost home: ‘sans patrie, entre deux parties, à cette âme isolée, immense, orageuse, il ne restait d’abri que l’Océan’, (without patrie, in between two parts, to this isolated, immense and stormy soul, only the Ocean was left as a shelter), in René de Chateaubriand, Les Natchez, (Paris: Degorge-Cadot, 1872), 117. 23. ‘Seule, dans une terre étrangère’; ‘le besoin de s’éloigner de tout ce qui était réel’ and ‘de ne guère réfléchir’ in Souza, Adèle de Sénange, Préface, xxi–xxii.

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24. Ronen Steinberg, ‘Trauma before Trauma: Imagining the Effects of the Terror in post-Revolutionary France’, in Experiencing the French Revolution, ed. by David Andress, (Oxford: SVEC 2013:05), 177–199, 194. 25. Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (New York: Cornwell University Press, 1988), cited in Astbury, Narrative Responses, 1; 168. 26. See note 21. Souza, Adèle de Sénange, 112–115. 27. Ibid., t.2, p. 188–9. 28. Juliana Schiesiari, The Gendering of Melancholia, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (New York: Cornell University Press, 1992), 4. 29. Benjamin de Constant, Adolphe: anecdote trouvée dans les papiers d’un inconnu et publiée (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1816); Stendhal, Armance, ou Quelques scènes d’un salon de Paris (Paris: Urbain Canel, 1827). 30. See in particular Etienne de Senancour, Oberman, lettres publiées par M.  Senancourt, 2 vols. (Paris: Cérioux, 1804) and Astolphe de Custine, Aloys, ou le Religieux du Mont Saint Bernard, (Paris: Vezard, 1829). 31. Duras, Amélie et Pauline, 156. 32. Duras, Edouard, 79; 94; 95. 33. Olivier is said to have suffered from an illness as a child that almost killed him which was seen as the cause for his impotence. Duras never reveals his secret but scholars are convinced her novel is about this delicate topic. See the Introduction by Diethelm, in Ourika, Edouard, Olivier ou le Secret, 57. 34. Schiesari, The Gendering, x. 35. Bertrand-Jennings, Un Autre mal du siècle, 9–10; 21. Her theory on female honour is developed in Masculin/Féminin, Le XIXème siècle à l’épreuve du genre, (Toronto: Centre d’Études du XIXe siècle Joseph Sablé, 1999), 103. 36. Boigne, Une Passion, 331. This is also the case for the exiled Émilie in Souza’s novel, ‘Je compte m’occuper de leur éducation; trop heureuse si je pouvais me créer ici des objets d’attachement!’, (I plan on doing their education myself; so happy at the prospect of perhaps finding objects of attachment here!) in Souza, Émilie et Alphonse, t.2, 176. 37. Philip Knee, L’Expérience de la perte autour du ‘moment 1800’, (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014), 215; 97. 38. Sophie is appalled by the atmosphere of suspicion when she arrives in Paris: ‘le titre seul d’émigré devait être un reproche’ (the mere status of émigré would be a reproach); and comments on the fact that the exile did not stop once back in France: ‘l’émigration n’était complète pour un émigré qu’à son retour’ (the emigration was not complete until the émigré returned), in Duras, Mémoires de Sophie, 133; 139 n18.

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39. Ourika de Mme Duras, ed. by Christiane Chaulet Achour, (Saint-­Pourcain-­ sur-Sioule: Bleu autour, 2006), 68. Madame de Ménerville in her memoirs also declared: ‘je n’ai jamais retrouvé une société aussi franchement unie’ (I have never found such a united society again); and ‘j’en regrette la douce illusion’ (I regret its sweet illusion), in Ménerville, Souvenirs d’émigration, 171–172.

Bibliography Andress, David. Experiencing the French Revolution, Oxford: SVEC, 2013: 05. Astbury, Katherine. Narrative Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution, Oxford: Legenda, 2012. Bardoux, Agénor. La Duchesse de Duras. Paris: C. Lévy, 1898. Bertaut, Jules. Les Belles émigrées. Paris: Hachette, 1953. Bertrand Jennings, Chantal. Masculin/Féminin, Le XIXème siècle à l’épreuve du genre. Toronto: Centre d’Études du XIXe siècle Joseph Sablé, 1999. ———. Un Autre mal du siècle, le Romantisme des romancières. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2005. Boigne, Éléonore-Adèle d’Osmond, comtesse de. Une Passion dans le grand monde, 2 vols. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1867. ———. La Maréchale d’Aubemer. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868. ———. Récits d’une tante, Mémoires de la comtesse de Boigne, née d’Osmond. 5 vols. Paris: Emile-Paul Frères, 1921–1923. Caruth, Cathy (ed.). Trauma. Explorations in Memory. John Hopkins University Press: 1998. Charrière, Isabelle de. Lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d’émigrés, 1793. Ed. by Colette Piau-Gillot. Paris: Côté-femmes Éditions, 1993. ———. Trois femmes, 1797. Bibliothèque Numérique Romande, 1996. http:// www.ebooks-bnr.com/ebooks/pdf4/charriere_trois_femmes.pdf [Accessed July 2018]. Chateaubriand, François-René de. Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, Paris: Arvensa, Nouvelle Edition, 2015. ———. Les Natchez. Paris: Degorge-Cadot, 1872. Constant, Benjamin de. Adolphe: anecdote trouvée dans les papiers d’un inconnu et publiée. Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1816. Custine, Astolphe de. Aloys, ou le Religieux du Mont Saint Bernard. Paris: Vezard, 1829. Duras, Claire, duchesse de. Madame de Duras, Ourika, Edouard, Olivier ou le Secret. Ed. by Marc Fumaroli and Marie-Bénédicte Diethelm. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. ———. Mémoires de Sophie, suivi de Amélie et Pauline. Ed. by Marie-Bénédicte Diethelm. Paris: Editions Manucius, 2011.

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Genand, Stéphanie. Romans de l’émigration (1797–1803). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008. Gilman, Sander. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. New York: Cornwell University Press, 1988. Jaquier, Claire, Lotterie, Florence, Seth, Catriona (eds.). Destins romanesques de l’émigration. Paris: Desjonquères, 2007. Knee, Philip. L’Expérience de la perte autour du ‘moment 1800’. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014. La Tour du Pin, Henriette Lucy Dillon, marquise de. Journal d’une femme de cinquante ans, 1778–1815. Paris: M. Imhaus & R. Chapelot, 1913. Louichon, Brigitte. Romancières sentimentales, (1789–1825). Saint Denis: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge, 2008. Ménerville, Elisa de, née Fougeret. Souvenirs d’émigration 1791–1797. Paris: P. Roger, 1934. Morieux, Renaud. Une Mer pour deux royaumes. La Manche, une frontière franco-­ anglaise (XVIIe – XVIIIe siècle). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008. Schiesiari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. New  York: Cornell University Press, 1992. Senancour, Etienne de. Oberman, lettres publiées par M. Senancourt. 2 vol. Paris: Cérioux, 1804. Souza-Botelho, Adèle, marquise de. Adèle de Sénange, ou Lettres de Lord Sydenham. 2 vols. Londres: Debrett; Hookham; Edwards; & chez De Boeffe, 1794. ———. Émilie et Alphonse. 3 tomes. Paris: Charles Pougens, 1799. ———. Charles et Marie. Paris: Maradan, 1802. ———. Eugénie et Mathilde, ou Mémoires de la famille du comte de Revel. 3 vols. Londres: L. Deconchy, 1811. Stendhal. Armance, ou Quelques scènes d’un salon de Paris. Paris: Urbain Canel, 1827. Peyre, Henri. Qu’est-ce que le Romantisme? Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971. Van der Kolk, Bessel, McFarlane, Alexander C., Weisaeth, Lars (eds.). Traumatic Stress, The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. London: The Guildford Press, 1996. Wittmeier, Melissa. “The Eighteenth-Century Emigrant, Crossing Literary Borders”, L’Érudit franco-espagnol, Vol. 2, (Fall 2012): 93–106.

CHAPTER 8

Playing the Nation? The Clash of French and German Theatrical Troupes in Hamburg and Mannheim Clare Siviter

Peppered amongst émigré memoirs and recent studies dedicated to the field, we find numerous references to the world of the theatre. Disenfranchised from their original status, émigrés could become theatrical stars or build a new career in their adopted land as Jean Vidalenc and Paul Friedland amongst others have shown.1 Émigré theatricals appeared in areas such as London, Edinburg, Tuscany, and even as far away as the United States.2 Émigrés turned to the theatrical medium to occupy and amuse themselves, or to work through the trauma of exile, where theatre could offer a moment of catharsis. That said, the arrival of a foreign form of theatre was not always smooth, and competition between the established company and the new troupe could be rife, exacerbating tensions associated with emigration. This chapter focuses on two such encounters in Mannheim and Hamburg, where a strong tradition of German theatre was influenced by the emigration of the French Revolution.

C. Siviter (*) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK © The Author(s) 2019 L. Philip, J. Reboul (eds.), French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_8

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French and German theatre share a long and antagonistic history. France witnessed its theatrical cultural heyday during the seventeenth century, and during the early and mid-eighteenth century, French troupes circulated across Europe from Vienna to St Petersburg, as Rahul Markovits amongst others has eloquently shown.3 Most often, French theatre was performed at court, but it also had a significant impact on the development of local traditions, where vernacular playwrights, even those such as Johann Christoph Gottsched, who attempted to develop German drama, would imitate the French models.4 However, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the scales were tipping in the German lands. A succession of both Francophone and German critics attacked the French tradition, lambasting the unities of time and place, and the necessity of verse, promoting instead a new, more bourgeois approach to theatre, often via the new genre of the drame. Playwrights such as Denis Diderot and Pierre-­ Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée before him fostered this discussion in France, and criticisms of the French model by German critics such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing brought these attacks back onto French soil with greater intensity (Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie was written in 1767–1769 and translated into French as La Dramaturgie de Hambourg in 1785). This German criticism was in turn instrumental for further attacks on the French national model by the likes of Sébastien Mercier, who continued Diderot’s campaign for a new type of French theatre in the vein of the drame imitating real life, rather than the out-dated genre of tragedy.5 Back in the German lands, German theatre was gaining its own national character under the auspices of the likes of Lessing and Konrad Ernst Ackermann, who opened the first German Nationaltheater in Hamburg in 1767 (which closed in 1769 for financial reasons).6 The taste for French theatre was now generally on the wane in the German lands as a series of national theatres opened: by 1778 there were fourteen such institutions, and thirty by 1790.7 These theatres hosted the premieres of a new wave of German playwrights, such as Friedrich Schiller and his Die Räuber (Mannheim, 1782).8 The growth in German national drama reinforced the sustained poetic attack on the French tradition, and poetics became an ersatz realm for politics as war spread across Europe. The title ‘national theatre’ belies the didactic and political agency contemporaries attributed to theatre. Although scholars recognise that the understanding of nation and nationhood was far from homogeneous at the time,9 scholars such as David A. Bell and Eric Hobsbawm do associate the period of the French Revolution with the rise of French nationalism.

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Bell believes that sharing a common culture and language allowed individuals to situate themselves within a specific nation, and although Hobsbawm prefers to eschew such clear definitions, he too recognises that there was something specifically linguistic about the French conception of the nation.10 On the other hand, whereas French nationalism is assimilative, Rogers Brubaker has shown German nationalism to be much more ethno-cultural.11 In the wake of these studies, the importance of transnationalism and transculturality has also been highlighted and incorporated into the study of theatre for the period at hand.12 Current scholarship on French theatre in Mannheim and Hamburg is divided between studies on the rise of a German national theatrical tradition,13 local history,14 émigré history,15 or the history of freemasonry where artists played a large role.16 Whilst some of these works are replete with detail, I bring the methodologies of émigré studies and transnational theatre studies to ask for the first time and through a comparative approach what we understand by ‘French émigré theatre.’ Whilst the term ‘émigré theatre’, and more commonly ‘exile theatre’, has been applied to Russian and German exiles during the twentieth century, and whilst there are a handful of works treating theatre performances in French émigré hotspots during the 1790s, there has yet to be an interrogation of what the term ‘émigré theatre’ means in the case of the French Revolution.17 We should also be wary of taking a twentieth-­ century concept and applying it to the 1790s: theatre was a vastly different, larger and more accessible form in the twentieth-century period than in the eighteenth. Taking the case studies of French theatre performances in Mannheim and Hamburg while establishing a model that could be applied to other émigré contexts such as England and Italy, this chapter argues that we can understand French ‘émigré theatre’ as an audience; a Francophone troupe; and a series of Francophone theatrical networks. The first section of this chapter focuses on Mannheim in the early years of the Revolution, before its occupation by the French military, when the company of the Nationaltheater performed French plays in German to émigrés who had recently fled France. As I will show, the German troupe actively emphasised the political resonances of their French repertoire for their émigré audience. The second section focuses on the Francophone troupe that established a French theatre in Hamburg from 1794; this is émigré theatre in a more traditional sense. The third section investigates the expansion of émigré theatre into the contemporary cultural scene in Hamburg in the later years of the Revolution, allowing its transmission into the private sphere and to cities beyond the Hanseatic city. These three

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case studies allow us to reconsider what émigré theatre actually was in the German lands during the 1790s, revealing the concept to be much more complex in terms of national stakes than previously believed.

1   Mannheim: An Émigré Audience Mannheim is often left off the map when it comes to the history of émigrés, but the Palatine court welcomed a significant number of French exiles during the early years of the Revolution, many stayed until the order for their departure in 1798, and even then the Palatine city remained home for numerous exiles who found it too dangerous to return home.18 The city is more renowned, however, for its Nationaltheater, which continues until this day. The case of Mannheim is symptomatic of the shift in eighteenth-century tastes from French to German theatre: whereas the German-language company was the touring troupe from 1720 to 1776, the court had hosted a French troupe until 1770, who then themselves went on tour for another year. In 1777, the Prince-elector, Karl Theodor, founded a Nationalschaubühne [national stage] in Mannheim; in 1778 control of this new Nationaltheater, as it quickly became known, was given to Wolfgang Heribert von Dalberg, and in 1779 Abel Seyler became its director.19 By 1789 and the outbreak of the Revolution, the theatre regularly held three performances a week—usually on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday—and hosted some of the most prominent artists in the German language, including August Wilhelm Iffland who had starred in Schiller’s Die Räuber. As Lesley Sharpe and Michael Patterson have shown, the Mannheim theatre was a key site in the development of German national drama,20 but the programme was inherently international: during 1789 there were performances of French plays on average between two and four times a month, and we also find the translated works of William Shakespeare and Carlo Goldoni on the list of performed plays.21 International as it may have been, the archives clearly reveal how programming was tailored to the French émigré audience, a new ‘micro-­ society’ to borrow Karine Rance’s term, which necessitates a reflection on what émigré theatre means as a concept here.22 Mannheim does not fit the ordinary case of an exile troupe performing for exiles as discussed predominantly in more recent histories of Russian or German exile theatre in the twentieth century.23 In Mannheim, we have a German troupe, and a national theatre at that, reacting to the presence of French émigrés by increasing the number of French plays performed in translation. The

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Theaterzettel [playbills] allow us to ascertain that in 1790 there was an increase in the number of French plays performed compared to 1789, except in late March and early April when Mannheim was plunged into mourning following the death of the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II. The Mannheim Nationaltheater clearly knew when to be patriotic, and when to play to its international audience. Theatre relies on an audience for its effect, it is an inherent part of the theatrical event, and even for subsidised theatres higher audience numbers offer welcome financial reward. We cannot discount this component when discussing and conceiving of émigré theatre. To pull out these complexities, we now turn to the case study of Richard Cœur de Lion (1784), or in its German form, Richard genannt Löwenhertz, an opéra-comique by André Grétry that reveals the codification of the French repertoire within the Revolutionary and émigré context from as early as 1789. Both the original and the translation were overtly royalist: in short, this is a rescue mission led by the loyal squire Blondel to free King Richard captured on his return to England from the crusades, with much space for the glorification of loyal subjects and love for one’s king. Prior to the play’s application to the French royal family in the context of the Revolution,24 the Mannheim troupe had already linked the play to the fate of the French monarchy. We see Grétry’s play performed on 26 July 1789, as news of the storming of the Bastille reached contemporaries in the German lands. It is likewise programmed again when news arrives in Mannheim that Louis XVI had been captured after his flight to Varennes in 1791. The theatre noted at its performance on 2 October—when they had heard the news—that ‘Die Franzosen waren ganz außer sich. Man hörte nichts als Bravo und Vivat rufen, und weiße Sachtücher, an Stühle gebunden, winkten unaufhörlich im Parterre.’ [The French were besides themselves with joy. The audience were shouting Bravo and Vivat, white handkerchiefs tied onto the chairs were waving about in the Parterre.]25 The theatre performed Richard genannt Löwenhertz when it next opened on 4 October. The theatre administration noted in their documents that: Heute war der Lärm noch größer. Alle Scenen Blodels und Richards wurden rauschend applaudiert und beide gerufen, das Beste aber trug Blondel [played by Leonhard]. Er bekam einen anonymen Brief mit 25 Louisdor. Ebenso wurden an die Kasse anonym 19 Louisdor geschickt für die Soldaten, die den König Richard befreiten.

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[Today the clamour was even greater. All the scenes with Blondel and Richard in were heartily applauded and both were called onto the stage afterwards, but Blondel [played by Leonhard] was praised the most. He received an anonymous letter with 25 Louis d’or in it. Likewise, 19 Louis d’or were sent anonymously to the box office for the Soldiers who freed King Richard.]26

For the Mannheim theatre, there was a clear financial reward for performing these French plays for the émigré and royalist audience. The parallels with the present situation were evident for both the theatre and the spectators, and Richard genannt Löwenhertz offered the émigré audience a cathartic space to digest recent political events. What is more, Iffland, Mannheim’s star actor and a crucial force in developing a national German repertoire,27 actively increased the political resonance of the play (and the tensions between locals who were more revolutionary than royalist in their political leanings), by coming onto the stage after the performance, declaring: ‘Möge der König einen Blondel finden, der sein Leben rettet!’ [May the King find a Blondel who will save his life!]28 The combination of the theatre’s notes and Iffland’s actions reveal that the Nationaltheater purposefully tailored this French play, albeit in translation, to its émigré audience and was conscious of how they would use it for political and cathartic means. The Mannheim theatre was well aware of the national stakes of such a performance as Richard Cœur de Lion, but this performance of nationalism is more complex than at first glance. Certainly, the play was considered French in reception, even more so given its German performance context, and its quick repetition was aimed at a French audience. However, Grétry, a composer known for his opéra-comique works, was born in Liège under Austrian control (as discussed by Matthias Winkler in Chap. 3). Although he would later take French nationality, Grétry was not as ‘French’ as other staples of the repertoire. Likewise, the hero of the play, Richard, was also the King of England rather than France, yet it was he who served as a de facto ersatz king for Louis XVI. As French as this play could become in reception, its bare basics were much more international. With the arrival of the French military which then occupied Mannheim, the number of French plays dramatically decreased in the Nationaltheater’s programme. The idea of France that this theatre and its audience supported was a royalist one, and whilst some émigrés remained during the French occupation only to be expelled in 1798, the theatre no longer

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played to their tastes, perhaps to avoid its own censorship. Revolutionary habits spread across occupied areas according to the Rheinische Musen: now cockades, clubs and the title ‘citoyen’ were the order of the day, rather than monarchical recollections.29 However, the Mannheim ­experience was an important one in how to support a split national identity. When the French occupied Berlin from 1806 to 1808, Iffland overstepped the mark to play to a disenfranchised public when he made a speech to celebrate the Queen of Prussia’s birthday in Berlin.30 Playing to the audience and on their political leanings were the key to Iffland’s experience of émigré theatre.

2   Hamburg: A ‘French’ Theatre? Nearly 600 kilometres away, a very different type of French émigré theatre was to occupy the inhabitants of Hamburg. The north German Hanseatic city, which was a major international port, was one of, if not the largest, émigré centre in Europe (estimates range from 10,000 to 40,000 émigrés31). These were not just nobles: as Rance reminds us, émigré communities were composed of members of every level of society.32 Such was the French presence that the Spectateur du Nord called Hamburg ‘la capitale de notre  extérieure.’33 In a sense, then, it is no surprise to find that a French troupe would set up shop in Hamburg. This is French émigré theatre as a troupe, a building, and later as a press, but whose audience remained a mixture of émigrés as well as locals. There have been several important, if short, contributions on the French theatre of Hamburg so far. The major reference work is that of Heinrich Harkensee from 1896, written to coincide with the centenary of the emigration in Hamburg; Rance’s chapter from 2004 is perhaps the most complete modern piece of scholarship so far, tracing the provenance of the troupe and a brief account of the theatre’s activities, whilst Pierre-­ Yves Beaurepaire has studied a couple of its actors in relation to international networks of freemasons.34 Besides these articles, there is a handful of local history works. The majority of these works focus on the French troupe alone, side-lining how the French émigré theatre existed within the theatrical landscape of Hamburg, where there was not just competition between the German and the French theatres, but where the presence of Plattdeutsch [Low German], and English stages complicated the transnational offerings available to audiences,35 and that is without mentioning other German playhouses and other ‘spectacles’ such as a panorama, balls,

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masked balls, émigré balls, concerts and a variety of Volksschauspiele [popular dramas].36 Keeping the diversity of performances available to both émigré and local audiences in mind, the remainder of this chapter is the first interrogation as to what we should understand by ‘French’ and ‘émigré’ theatre within this transnational theatrical context. Like the French plays performed in Mannheim, the idea of ‘nation’ in terms of the Hamburg French troupe is somewhat complicated. Even if we accept the repertoire as ‘French’ (thus ignoring for the moment the role of composers like Grétry), as Rance amongst others has shown, the troupe which arrived in Hamburg in 1794 and gave its first performance on 17 December that year was in fact from Brussels rather than from what had been Ancien Régime France.37 Belgium, as we know it today, did not exist at the time but the geographical space had been under the control of the Holy Roman Emperor and was deeply impacted by the Revolution, as Winkler explains in more detail in his chapter. The troupe from Brussels arrived in Hamburg, allegedly fleeing the French troops. It was principally made up of theatrical families, including the Mees, the Adams and the Bursays, as was the norm for provincial troupes at the time.38 Some of these individuals had been long-standing fixtures at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels since the 1770s, and interestingly for a Francophone troupe, Mees had been involved in the pioneering efforts to establish a Flemish Opera in Brussels during the 1770s.39 In this sense, the troupe was not French but rather Francophone, and although they had had to flee Brussels because of the Revolutionary wars, the Revolution means something else to them compared to other sections of their émigré audience which included figures such as Madame de Genlis and the Comte de Neuilly. However, the actual national status of the Hamburg French troupe is even more complicated: it also contained French actors, notably the local celebrity Madame Chevalier who arrived in Hamburg from the Théâtre-Italien to give her first performance on 1 December 1795. Chevalier was a key member of the French troupe and attracted a significant amount of attention, not to mention the numerous odes dedicated to her.40 However, in terms of émigré theatre, she is an interesting case. Whereas the Belgian members of the Hamburg troupe can be shown as victims of the Revolution, Chevalier had stayed in Paris and survived the Terror: she is listed in the Almanach général de tous les spectacles at the Théâtre-Italien for 1791 and 1792, and the archives show her to be at the same Parisian theatre in the years 1793 and 1794.41 Chevalier managed to survive this period of turmoil when actors could be easily executed or

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imprisoned; even if she was not complicit with the Terror, she did not act against it as members of her audience had. Moreover, the move from Paris to Hamburg allowed Chevalier further room for reinvention: the Hamburg periodicals present the actress as their star from Paris, and her connection to the Théâtre-Italien is often mentioned. However, the Parisian Almanachs list Chevalier not as a star or even as having had a principle role: rather, she is simply a lowly chorus girl. The Hamburg company continued to be infused with Parisian artists: after Chevalier’s departure for St Petersburg in 1798, Mademoiselle Rose Collinet joined the company from the Paris Opéra.42 In short, the Hamburg French troupe was a heterogeneous combination of Francophone actors who came from a variety of national backgrounds and political persuasions. We must remember this plurality when considering Hamburg’s théâtre français and when referring to it as émigré theatre. In terms of the repertoire, the plays performed by the French troupe were principally those which had been performed in Paris, furthering the reconstruction of émigré Hamburg as a second Paris. No one has yet undertaken a thorough analysis of the French plays performed in Hamburg or created a calendar of performances. To remedy this lack, I have used the theatre advertisements in the Hamburger Nachrichten for 1795 to give the first grounded overview of the performances by the ‘französisches Schauspiel’ [French playhouse]: the French theatre was designated like the English and the German in terms of its national frame.43 The year 1795 is a particularly interesting year as it coincides with the opening of the French theatre, Hamburg remained densely occupied by émigrés, and it is when the English theatre is forced to close and with the acrimonious departure director of the German theatre, Friedrich Ludwig Schröder, in the face of French competition. The French troupe’s adverts were originally positioned under that of the German and the English theatres, but they soon overtook the English. Ordinarily, plays were announced with their French titles with a translation into German, and their genre according to German standards (‘Lustspiel,’ [a type of comedy] ‘Oper,’ [opera] ‘Singspiel’ [comic opera] and more rarely ‘Drama,’ ‘Melodrama,’ and ‘Schauspiel,’ [a type of drama] though it is worth noting there was some flexibility—Molière’s Tartuffe (1669) was first termed a ‘Schauspiel’ before being recast as ‘Lustspiel’). The act of translating the titles shows that the French theatre was targeting more than just the émigré audience. The French troupe normally performed two to three times a week in 1795, and the programme was made up of a comedy followed by a comic opera; they started

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giving the occasional vocal and instrumental concert in February (foreshadowing the troupe’s resourcefulness when they started offering balls in 1796); the audience was made up of a mixture of abonnements or ­subscriptions, and individuals who had come to see a specific play. This was far from émigré theatre for émigré audiences alone. We can draw meaningful conclusions from the 145 performances listed in the Hamburger Nachrichten for 1795, which complicate our understanding of the clash of theatrical cultures in Hamburg. The majority of the repertoire was made up of comedies, most of which included music. As mentioned above, an evening typically included two performances, starting off with a comedy, followed by a ‘Singspiel’. However, we must bear in mind that what might be an opera, a melodrama, or an opéra-­ comique in Hamburg could vary significantly in terms of its music score, orchestra size, and acoustic from the Parisian original. In terms of playing the nation, we should also remark that the repertoire reveals a marked liking for Grétry whose status as French was somewhat ambiguous. The majority of the French Hamburg repertoire dates from the Ancien Régime, and 1764 is the average premiere date of the plays where we can identify their publication. It is sadly not possible to analyse all 145 performances here but we can ascertain that they largely followed a format where someone or something poses an obstacle to a happy event, and this hurdle disappears to that pleasure can ensue. The comic plays which formed the crux of the Hamburg French repertoire performed a cathartic function in seeing virtue triumph over vice—this is not the traditional catharsis associated with Aristotle and the purging of the emotions, but rather the response to the portrayal of catastrophe that has been theorised by scholars including Katharina Gerstenberger and Tanja Nusser.44 Indeed, in the performance of Ancien Régime plays, the émigré audience were exposed to two catastrophes: the near catastrophe contained in the play, and the reminder of the world that they had lost: their own catastrophe, which allows for a working through one’s own trauma in psychological terms.45 Nonetheless, this is not universal: while the performance of staples of the older repertoire by the French theatre for its émigré audience may have been a nostalgic return to the Ancien Régime for some individual spectators, Ancien Régime plays were also still widely performed in Revolutionary Paris as Emmet Kennedy has shown.46 Likewise, amongst the seventy-eight plays performed, six premiered in France after 14 July 1789: the Revolution was not out of bounds and theatrical exchange continued between revolutionary Paris and émigré hotspots.47 There are also five plays where it has not

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been possible to identify the author and first performance or publication date, which may have been local compositions or adaptations—for example, L’Auberge vide was quickly performed after Jean-Baptiste Desforges’ L’Auberge pleine. Likewise, Baron de Crac, ou les Gascons clearly has intertextual references to Jean-François Collin d’Harleville’s Monsieur de Crac dans son petit castel, ou les Gascons (1791). The Hamburg version may well be a local adaptation of Harleville’s work which retains the noble title, but unfortunately the documents have not yet come to light to confirm this. On top of this, we have later traces of plays that émigrés in Hamburg wrote themselves such as Le retour désiré, ou les trois mariages interrompus (1797) or Le Non, ou la précaution dangereuse (no date).48 From the calendar of performances that I have established for this chapter and contemporary accounts, we can draw three principal conclusions. Firstly, the repertoire of the French theatre sought to offer familiar plays to its audience; secondly, this programming offered a space of catharsis—in the psychological rather than tragic vein—through the plots of the plays themselves, not to mention, as Rance has detailed, the reprisal of a former mode of sociability49; thirdly and most importantly, it also performed new plays from the Revolutionary era in an attempt to increase its spectators, even if this audience was not strictly émigré. There was also a substantial amount of competition between the German, English and French theatres. We have already seen how the French troupe soon overtook the position of the English for theatrical adverts, and that they attracted a German audience by publicising their performances in both languages. The French troupe directly tackled their German colleagues by occasionally performing German plays in translation, such as August von Kotzebue’s Les Indiennes en Amérique (1792) or Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf’s Doktor und Apotheke (1786) ‘nach dem Deutschen’ [after the German], translated as Le Médecin et l’apothicaire. Indeed, in the statistics we have for 1795, it is striking that the play with the most performances is a French translation of the German play Doktor und Apotheke. The prominence of German theatre in French translation has not currently been recognised by scholarship but it is essential in understanding the life of the French troupe in Hamburg. Like Winkler’s analysis of émigrés in the Habsburg lands in this volume, the case of the French repertoire underlines how the émigré theatre was extending its audience, becoming part of the local scene, at once participating in acculturation and remaining foreign.50

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The effect of the competition between the German and French troupes has been well documented by Harkensee,51 and although the English theatre also performed German plays in translation (e.g., all three theatres performed Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm (1767) in their respective ­vernacular,52 a play that includes a largely unsympathetic caricature of a Frenchman during the Seven Years War and had premiered in the first year of the Hamburg Nationaltheater), it was the French theatre that upset the German theatre so—indeed, whereas Minna von Barnhelm was established in the German repertoire and the translation dated from 1774, Les Indiennes en Amérique had only premiered in French in 1792. Harkensee suggests that it was this Francophone competition which led to Schröder’s departure from the German theatre and the closure of the English one.53 In any case, it is interesting to note the disappearance of the French theatre adverts from 13 June 1795 onwards which allowed the Hamburger Nachrichten to present a much more German cultural scene. Indeed, the documents Harkensee collects on the topic the German theatre also allow us to gauge the impact of this competition in terms of nationhood. Patriots flocked to the German theatre, and Schröder employed overtly nationalistic discourse to address his spectators, describing the loyal German audience who supported art as ‘Heiß für sein Vaterland, für seine Nation’ [ardent for one’s fatherland, for one’s nation].54 The French theatre and the émigré population were having a clear impact on the local landscape to the detriment of the German troupe. Tracing the French theatre in Hamburg also reveals that certain plays had similar political readings to those performed in Mannheim. Rance relates the enthusiastic, then tumultuous reception that awaited Richard Cœur de Lion as recorded by the Comte de Neuilly, where the émigrés’ joy was quickly quieted by republican aggression.55 Another important case here is Charles Collé’s comedy, La Partie de Chasse de Henri IV (1766). Unlike Richard Cœur de Lion, which was authorised by both the Mannheim and Hamburg authorities, La Partie de Chasse de Henri IV was prohibited in 1796. As the contemporary critic Heinrich Gottlieb Schmieder explains: ‘Man hatte nämlich in Erfahrung gebracht, das Stuck enthalte revolutionäre Kraftstellen, die zu Unruhen vor der Bühne Anlaß geben könnten.’ [Someone had heard that the play contained pro-Revolutionary passages which could lead to troubles before the stage.]56 The Hamburg audience contained multiple political parties and the authorities were worried by

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the tumultuous reception that could greet the play. In the face of the ban, the troupe decided to perform L’Obstacle imprévu (1788) instead, the play’s amusing title—The Unforeseen Hurdle—emphasising the censorship of La Partie de Chasse. This review of the French theatre’s troupe and repertoire from the calendar of performances and contemporary documents problematizes our current understanding of the French theatre in Hamburg as an émigré theatre performing a cathartic function for its fellow countrymen. Certainly, both the émigré and local audiences—both Hamburg natives and those working in the port city—understood the theatre as ‘French’ despite the various national provenances of the troupe and the repertoire, but these complexities offer us a privileged insight into the transnational nature of institutions which were perceived as being inherently national. It also reinforced the political and geographic heterogeneous nature of the French who stayed in Hamburg during the 1790s. In terms of émigré theatre per se, the calendar of performances crucially shows that the most successful plays for 1795 was a German play: as Mannheim’s national theatre bent to the émigrés, the émigrés in Hamburg bent to German theatre.

3   The French Émigré Theatrical Sphere The émigré theatre in Hamburg was having an increasing impact on the local theatrical scene and it became more established as the Revolution progressed. In 1796, the émigré company opened a new building which housed an auditorium, as well as a ‘salon de lecture françoise dramatique’ [a French dramatic reading room], a coffee house, and a hall for concerts and the immensely popular balls.57 In opening these new premises, three areas of émigré sociability came into one, bolstering and intensifying the impact of the émigrés on local life. The French theatre was not just confined to the physical building, however. There was a flourishing of French-language arts periodicals, including the Journal d’Apollon and Étrennes de Thalie, ou almanac du théâtre françois de Hambourg, which spread accounts and discourse on the Hamburg French theatre into the private sphere and across the German lands. Indeed, during this period, French theatre became further engrained into the cultural scene of Hamburg through the publication of a substantial quantity of music and songs for French plays. Upon finding a collection of music in 1922, Ernst Beutler believed that

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this was a specific press opened by the Mees family, one of the founding units of the French theatre in Hamburg who fled Brussels.58 It is clear from the documents that remain in the Hamburg Staatsarchiv that the son, Joseph Henri Mees, took over in 1796.59 However, the actual picture is more complicated. The airs started to be published from 1795, so the arrival of the Francophone troupe clearly sparked an interest and activity in French theatre, and there was a demand for a print version that individuals could take into the ­private sphere. However, the original publisher was Pierre-François Fauche, a third-generation Swiss bookseller from Neuchâtel, whose family’s illicit booktrade had long angered the French monarchy, but who had opened a French bookshop in Hamburg in 1787.60 Originating from Switzerland, Fauche was not impacted by the Revolution in the same manner as the émigrés, but his catalogue contains several émigré-orientated publications: booksellers in émigré hotspots adapted their offerings as Juliette Reboul discusses further in Chap. 6.61 With the music for French theatre, we can see Fauche diversifying his offerings.62 The series as preserved by the archive contains fifty booklets and ranges from 1795 to 1803. Taking the publications as a whole, there are twenty-six Ancien Régime works where Grétry dominates heavily. Earlier on, in 1795, eleven out of seventeen plays with identifiable dates were Ancien Régime productions, and there was evidently the demand for reprints of these earlier works as the new editions of Didon (1783) and Œdipe  à Colonne (1786) show.63 However, there was also the speedy transmission of works from Paris: La Maison isolée’s songs were published a year after its Parisian première in 1797 and Le Prisonnier, ou la resemblance (1798), La Rencontre en voyage (1798), and Les deux journées (1800) were all published within the same year.64 As we saw with the repertoire performed by the French theatre, audience tastes were split between a nostalgia for the Ancien Régime, which recalled the France the émigrés had left, and demand for novelty, even if this novelty came from revolutionary Paris. The French theatre publications originating in Hamburg were not a collective form of émigré theatre as performances were, but they provided material for private performances and spread the influence of the theatre into the private sphere, as well as far beyond Hamburg itself. Reading or private theatricals might be a more solitary form of theatre, but it still offered as space to relive the French tradition and spread the influence of the Hamburg French troupe.

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4   Conclusion The two case studies of theatre for French émigré audiences in Mannheim and Hamburg force us to interrogate how we understand the phenomenon of ‘émigré theatre’ for the revolutionary period and the theoretical models we currently possess for analysing such activity. Whereas modern scholarship has generally used the term ‘exile theatre’ in the case of Russian and German émigrés to denote plays in their respective languages being performed in an exile setting, I have shown that we need to expand the definition of ‘émigré theatre’ for the context of the French Revolution. Certainly, there was a French-language troupe performing plays in French as per the traditional model, but these two case studies show that ‘émigré theatre’ can clearly apply to a vernacular theatre targeting émigré audiences and beyond the stage to the local theatrical sphere where publications in the French language dramatically increased. However, much research remains to be undertaken, using different examples, be they free cities or court towns, in other geographic areas including Britain and Italy, and a comparison between these forms of theatre during the 1790s and the 1800s. In terms of theoretical models, this chapter has shown that as tempting as it might be to see French theatre in Germany within nationalistic lines, the closer inspection of this phenomenon reveals that ‘nation’ complicates rather than clarifies the picture. The ‘French’ plays performed were sometimes composed, written, and performed by individuals who were not French by birth or by their native language. What is more, we have seen how the repertoires of ‘national theatres’ included translations and adaptations from rival national traditions. Audiences were continually a mixture of émigrés and local inhabitants, and the theatre—be it German or French—had to respond to this heterogeneous demand. The study of émigré theatre thus offers an important means to examine the interaction between émigré and local populations, but as scholars of émigré studies we must urgently reintegrate the heterogeneous concepts of nation and nationhood into émigré studies to understand better the complex network of political and social interactions between émigrés and locals in the former’s new homes. French and German theatre would continue to clash on the ground for the remainder of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and there is an urgency to investigate properly how the two national traditions—national in the eyes of the state and the elite, at least—functioned in reality.

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Notes 1. Jean Vidalenc, Les Émigrés français, 1789–1825 (Caen: Association des publications de la faculté des lettres et sciences humaines, 1963) 311; Paul Friedland, Political Actors. Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), chapter 7. 2. See Vidalenc, Les Émigrés français, 311–13; Kirsty Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution: Émigrés in London, 1789–1802 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 74; Lord Mackenzie-Stuart, “French Émigrés in Edinburgh,” in French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle Against Revolution, 1789–1814, ed. by Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 108–123 (p.  114); Thomas C. Sosnowski, “French Émigrés in the United States,” in French Émigrés in Europe, 138–50 (p. 144). 3. For recent publications from the French perspective Rahul Markovits, Civilier l’Europe, Politiques du théâtre français au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2014) and Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, Philippe Bourdin, and Charlotta Wolff, eds., Moving Scenes. The Circulation of Music and Theatre in Europe, 1700–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2018); from the German perspective examples include Armas Sten Fühler, “Das Schauspielrepertoire des Mannheimer Hof- und National-theaters im Geschmackswandel des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 1779–1870” (PhD Diss., Heidelberg, 1935); Michael Steltz, “Geschichte und Spielplan der französischen Theater an deutschen Fürstenhöfen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert” (PhD Diss., Munich, 1964); and Wilhelm Herrmann, Hoftheater, Volkstheater, Nationaltheater. Die Wanderbühnen im Mannheim des 18. Jahrhunderts und ihr Beitrag zur Gründung des Nationaltheaters (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999). 4. Michael Patterson, The First German Theatre. Schiller, Goethe, Kleist and Büchner in Performance (London; New York: Routledge, 1990), 6. 5. For an overview of these attacks, see Florence Naugrette, Le Théâtre romantique. Histoire, écriture, mise en scène (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 22–29. 6. Lesley Sharpe, A National Repertoire. Schiller, Iffland and the German Stage (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 24. 7. Patterson, The First German Theatre, 15. 8. See ibid., chapter 1. 9. Michael J.  Sosulski, “Body, Text, and Nation: Theatrical Reform in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” (PhD Diss., University of Chicago, 1999), chapter 1.

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10. David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France, Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 21; Eric J.  Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5; 20. 11. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1; 8. 12. See Moving Scenes and Christophe Charle, Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, and York-Gothart Mix, eds., Transkulturalität nationaler Räume in Europa (18. bis 19. Jahrhundert)(Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2017), especially the chapters by Christophe Charle, “Traducteurs et adaptateurs de pièces de théâtre entre la France et l’Allemagne (1ère moitié du XIXe siècle),” 245–66 and Charlotta Wolff, “Transferts culturels aux abords de l’espace germanique: la traduction d’opéras-comiques français au Danemark et en Suède 1760–1810,” 341–59. 13. See for example, Sharpe, A National Repertoire. 14. Adolf Wohlwill, “Politische Demonstrationen im französischen Theater zu Hamburg 1799 und 1805”,  Mitteilungen des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 1 (1879): 114–16; Heinrich Harkensee, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Emigranten in Hamburg. I.  Das französische Theater (Hamburg: Lütcke und Wulff, 1896); Otto Weinrich, “Das französische Theater in Hamburg, 1794–1814,” Belletristisch-literarische Beilage zu den Hamburger Nachrichten 17 (1902); Otto Mittwald, “Das französische Theater der Emigrantenzeit in Hamburg,” Blätter des Hamburger Stadttheaters 5 (1928–1929): 65–72. 15. Karine Rance, “Le Théâtre français de Hambourg,” in Les Arts de la scène et la Révolution française, ed. by Philippe Bourdin et Gérard Loubinoux, (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2004), 235–49. 16. Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, “Hiram at the Playhouse: Masonic and Theatrical Travel in Europe,” in Moving Scenes, 189–99. 17. For the Russian example, see Laurence Senelick, ed., Wandering Stars: Russian Émigré Theatre, 1905–1940 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002) and Siggy Frank, Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 27–37. For the Germans, a clear overview of the current literature can be found by Uwe Naumann, “Theater” in Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration, 1933–1945, ed. by Claus-­ Dieter Krohn, Patrik von zur Mühlen, Gerhard Paul and Lutz Winckler (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008), pp. 1111–21. 18. The requests for permission to stay past 1798 can be found in “Ausweisung von Emigranten der franzoesischen Revolution aus Mannheim,” MARCHIVUM, GLA 213/3582. 19. Anton Pichler, Chronik des Grossherzoglichen Hof- und Nationaltheaters in Mannheim (Mannheim: J. Bensheimer, 1879), 18; Herrmann, Hoftheater, Volkstheater, Nationaltheater, 9; Pichler, Chronik, 48.

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20. Sharpe, A National Repertoire; Patterson, The First German Theatre. 21. For example, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was performed in a translation by Wieland on 1 February 1789 and on 24 May that year the troupe performed Goldoni’s La vedova scaltra (1748), translated as Die schlaue Wittwe, MARCHIVUM, THZB (1789), Zug. 18/2016 Nr. 9. 22. Karine Rance, “L’Émigration nobiliaire française en Allemagne: une ‘migration de maintien’ (1789–1815),” Genèse 30 (1998), 25. 23. While the majority of German exile theatre was exiles performing for exiles, there are some notable exceptions, such as the Zurich Schauspielhaus, a German-speaking theatre that welcomed exiles from Nazi Germany. For an example on Zurich, see Frithjof Trapp et  al., eds, Handbuch des deutschsprachigen Exiltheaters, vol.1 (Munich: Saur, 1999), 73. Another example is Max Reinhardt who became a successful director in the USA, My thanks to Steffan Davies for his precious help on this point. 24. Mark Darlow cites the Journal de Paris making this allusion clear on 16 June 1790, Mark Darlow, Staging the French Revolution. Cultural Politics and the Paris Opera, 1789–1794 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 255–56. 25. Theaterzettel, (2 October 1791), MARCHIVUM, THZB (1791), Zug. 18/2016 Nr. 11. 26. Ibid., (4 October 1791). 27. For more information on Iffland’s career and his role in developing German national drama, see Sharpe, A National Repertoire, and in relation to Mannheim, chapters 1, 2 and 3. 28. Ibid., 122. 29. Rheinische Musen: Journal für Theater und andere schöne Kunste 1 (1794/1795): 16. 30. Herman Granier, Berichte aus der Berliner Franzosenzeit, 1807–1809, nach den Akten des Berliner Geheimen Staatsarchivs und des Pariser Kriegsarchivs (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1913), 171. 31. Maike Manske, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Kulturtransfers: Emigranten der Französischen Revolution in Hamburg, Bremen und Lübeck (Saarbrücken: Velag Dr. Müller, 2008), 27. 32. Rance, “L’Émigration nobiliaire,” 6. 33. Le Spectateur du Nord: journal politique, littéraire, et moral, July 1799, 266. 34. See notes 14–16. 35. On the Plattdeustch performances, see Karl Theodor Gaedertz, Das niederdeutsche Schauspiel. Zum Kulturleben Hamburgs, 2 vols (Berlin: Hofman, 1884). The English performances are listed in the Hamburger Nachrichten.

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36. These other spectacles included the “Revolutions-Teufel” which has the guillotined heads of Orléans, Robespierre, Marat, Carrier, Lebon, and Charlotte Corday, Friedrich Johann Lorenz Meyer, Skizzen zu einem Gemälde von Hamburg, vol. 2 (Hamburg: Friedrich Hermann Nestler, 1800), 199–203. There was also another theatre in Altona, ibid., 189. 37. First performance date from Harkensee, Das französische Theater, 3. On the Belgian origins of the French-language troupe, see Rance, “Le Théâtre français de Hambourg,” 235–36. 38. Rance, “Le Théâtre français de Hambourg,” 236. 39. Bram Van Oostveldt, The Théâtre de la Monnaie and Theatre Life in the Eighteenth-Century Austrian Netherlands: From a Courtly-Aristocratic to a Civil-Enlightened Discourse? (Ghent: Academia Press, 2000), 105–09. 40. Harkensee, Das französische Theater, 27–30. 41. Almanach général de tous les spectacles de Paris et des provinces pour l’année 1791 (Paris: Proullé, 1792), 140; Almanach général de tous les spectacles de Paris et des provinces pour l’année 1792 (Paris: Proullé, 1793), 36. “Registre du Théâtre Italien pour l’année 1792–1793”, available at https://gallica. bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b525040015 [accessed 28 September 2018]; “Registre de l’Opéra comqiue national pour l’année 1793–1794”, available at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52504000q [accessed 28 September 2018]. 42. Harkensee, Das französische Theater, 30. 43. The advertisements cover a period of roughly six months. 44. Katharina Gerstenberger and Tanja Nusser, “Introduction,” in Catastrophe and Catharsis: Perspectives on Disaster and Redemption in German Culture and Beyond, ed. by Katharina Gerstenberger and Tanja Nusser (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015), 1–16. 45. See Gerstenberger and Nusser’s discussion of Sigmund Freud’s understanding of catharsis, ibid., 7. 46. Emmet Kennedy, Marie-Laurence Netter, James McGregor, Theatre, Opera and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris (London: Greenwood Press, 1996), 382–83. 47. L’Honnête criminel (1790), Le Directeur dans l’embarras (1790), Les Indiennes en Angleterre (1792); L’Auberge pleine (1793); L’Incertitude maternelle (1793); and La Colonie (1793). 48. Heinrich Gottlieb Schmieder, Neues Journal für Theater und andere schöne Künste 3, (1800):179. 49. Rance talks of the Comtesse de Neuilly ending her day of working as a fashion merchant to go to the theatre as a “dame” like she used to, Rance, “Le Théâtrefrançais,” 241. 50. See Matthias Winkler’s chapter in this volume. 51. Harkensee, Das französische Theater, 8–11.

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52. Ibid., 8. 53. Ibid., 8–10. 54. Ibid., 10. 55. Rance, “Le Théâtre français de Hambourg,” p. 244. 56. Heinrich Gottlieb Schmieder, Journal für Theater und andere schöne Künste 1, (1797): 74. 57. Harkensee, Das französische Theater, 13. 58. Ernst Beutler, “J.  Mees et Comp., ein französischer Theaterverlag in Hamburg,” Nordelbingen. Beiträge zur Heimatforschung in Schleswig-­ Holstein, Hamburg und Lübeck 2 (1923): 20–36. 59. “Se vend chez J. J. Mees fils” is stamped on the copy of L’Épreuve villageoise, opéra en deux actes par Mr Desforges, musique de M.  Grétry (Hambourg: P.  F. Fauche, 1795), Hamburg, Staatsarchiv, Sammelband: Über französisches Theater in Hamburg, A532/0045. 60. “Identifiant: Fauche, Pierre François,” https://www.idref.fr/059367792 [accessed 27 September 2018]. 61. See Juliette Reboul’s chapter in this volume. 62. “Nouveautés en nombre qui se trouvent chez P.  F. Fauche et comp. à Hambourg et à Brunswick,” 1798, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, FOL-Q10A-22. 63. Didon was printed in 1796 and 1797 and Œdipe in 1796 and 1799. Hamburg, Staatsarchiv, Sammelband: Über französisches Theater in Hamburg, A532/0045. 64. According to the Gregorian calendar, that is. Hamburg, Staatsarchiv, Sammelband: Über französisches Theater in Hamburg, A532/0045.

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——— “Le Théâtre français de Hambourg.” In Les Arts de la scène et la Révolution française, ed. by Philippe Bourdin et Gérard Loubinoux, 235–49. Clermont-­ Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2004. Rheinische Musen: Journal für Theater und andereschöne Kunste 1 (1794/1795). Schmieder, Heinrich Gottlieb. Journal für Theater und andere schöne Künste 1, (1797). Schmieder, Heinrich Gottlieb. Neues Journal für Theater und andere schöne Künste 3, (1800). Senelick, Laurence, ed. Wandering Stars: Russian Émigré Theatre, 1905–1940. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. Sharpe, Lesley. A National Repertoire. Schiller, Iffland and the German Stage. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. Sosulski, Michael J. “Body, Text, and Nation: Theatrical Reform in Eighteenth-­ Century Germany.” PhD Diss, University of Chicago, 1999. Steltz, Michael. “Geschichte und Spielplan der französischen Theater an deutschen Fürstenhöfen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert.” PhD Diss., Munich, 1964. Trapp, Frithjof et  al., eds. Handbuch des deutschsprachigen Exiltheaters, 2 vols. Munich: Saur, 1999. Van Oostveldt, Bram. The Théâtre de la Monnaie and Theatre Life in the 18th Century Austrian Netherlands: From a Courtly-Aristocratic to a Civil-­ Enlightened Discourse? Ghent: Academia Press, 2000. Vidalenc, Jean. Les Émigrés français, 1789–1825. Caen: Association des publications de la faculté des lettres et sciences humaines, 1963. Weinrich, Otto. “Das französische Theater in Hamburg, 1794–1814.” Belletristisch-literarische Beilage zu den Hamburger Nachrichten 17 (1902). Wohlwill, Adolf. “Politische Demonstrationen im französischen Theater zu Hamburg 1799 und 1805.”Mitteilungen des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 1 (1879): 114–16.

PART III

Global Entanglements of Exile

CHAPTER 9

Émigrés and Transimperial Politics: Pierre Victor Malouet and the Fate of Saint Domingue Patrick Harris

The West Indies were one of the principal theaters of Britain’s war against revolutionary France throughout the 1790s. The islands were, in one historian’s summation, ‘Pitt’s Vietnam.’1 Operations in Saint Domingue alone swallowed up more than 20,000 men and £4,000,000 before the British withdrawal from the colony in 1798.2 From the beginning, relationships with French colonists and with colonial émigrés were integral to this massive undertaking, and no Frenchmen in London played a greater role in the Caribbean counterrevolution than Pierre Victor Malouet. Over the course of eight years in exile, Malouet assumed many vocations: lobbyist, propagandist, advisor to the Pitt ministry, and the orchestrator of a plot to kidnap Toussaint Louverture’s teenaged sons.3 The most consequential of his interventions in colonial affairs as an émigré, however, came in the form of a strange form of exilic diplomacy centered around the question of Saint Domingue’s postwar status, in which Malouet aimed to preserve both the slave system and French sovereignty

P. Harris (*) Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Philip, J. Reboul (eds.), French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_9

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in Saint Domingue. For Malouet, as for other French émigrés with ties to the New World, the predicament of an exile—a double exile, in effect, given the overlapping upheavals in metropolitan France and the Caribbean—became an opportunity for triangulation between his foreign hosts and a hostile republic. A number of scholars have made tentative efforts to recover the global importance and diversity of the French emigration, but the specifically imperial implications of this phenomenon are yet to be fully explored.4 Both Malouet’s project for Saint Domingue and its ultimate failure reflect the ways in which the making of wartime British imperial policy became enmeshed with French exile networks, and thus with competing French interests and ideas surrounding the future of Caribbean slave societies. This transimperial space of émigré politics was in turn generative of Malouet’s distinctive analysis of the colonial problem, one that demanded interimperial concord in response to shared threats. It was precisely Malouet’s position as an exile that enabled him to pursue a counterrevolutionary agenda framed as a defense of the joint project of the European colonial system. Malouet’s career placed him at the intersection of the moderate constitutionalist wing of the Revolution (and subsequently counterrevolution), the defense of colonial slavery, and the Old Regime tradition of colonial governance. It was the combination of these allegiances that would define Malouet’s distinctive role as a transimperial actor. Malouet arrived in Britain in September 1792, amid the last and largest of the major waves of emigration to Great Britain.5 He had become a leader of the monarchien faction in the Constituent Assembly, which promoted a limited monarchy along British lines to serve as the safeguard of stability and property. The monarchiens had been largely politically hamstrung since the failure in September 1789 of their scheme for an absolute royal veto, by which the king as ‘head of the nation’ could check the majoritarian rule of the assembly6; Malouet remained in Paris for three years afterward, however, until the flight of the royal family to Varennes, and the subsequent fall of the monarchy rendered his position untenable. Malouet’s flight was thus occasioned by metropolitan politics, though he was to play a crucial function within the colonial segment of the emigration. Though a newcomer to the London community of exiles, Malouet already enjoyed a range of connections that would ensure his influence, particularly on colonial matters. Alongside his monarchien credentials, he was in frequent contact with the Marquis de Castries, the Bourbon

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court-­in-­exile’s foreign minister, through the latter’s representative in London, the Duc d’Harcourt. He further quickly gained access to the Pitt government via the British Foreign Minister George Grenville, with whose brother Malouet had become acquainted in France.7 Lastly, he was closely linked to the planters of Saint Domingue. Malouet occupied a prominent spot on the spectrum of colonial-metropolitan ‘hybridity’ Friedemann Pestel identifies as characteristic of many of the émigrés of the 1790s (see Chap. 10). Though Malouet had not set foot in Saint Domingue since the end of the tenure as an administrator there in 1774, he had married into the Dominguan elite and acquired plantation property. He had subsequently become well known as an eloquent opponent of French abolitionism, both in his pre-revolutionary writings (most notably the Mémoire sur l’esclavage des nègres)8 and as a member of the Club Massiac in the Constituent Assembly.9 Perhaps more than any man in London, therefore, Malouet was identified with the defense of the French colonial system. These factors made Malouet a natural choice as representative of the Dominguan planters in Britain, several of whom approached him soon after his arrival with a proposal to transfer the sovereignty of the colony to Britain. Malouet initially rebuffed them. He was suspicious of just how much of a constituency the delegation actually had among the elite of the colony. He knew that the absentee landowners, who were among the richest and most powerful in Saint Domingue, were largely in London or otherwise in flight from the Terror, and doubted that the British were prepared to intervene. Even if all parties were supportive of the plan, Malouet believed they had no right to alienate sovereign French territory.10 By February 1793 the political calculus had changed, however, with the execution of Louis XVI and the expected outbreak of war between France and Britain. The National Convention’s declaration of war was itself widely seen as driven, in part, by British collusion with colonial counterrevolutionaries.11 Now the official agent for the colonists of Saint Domingue, Malouet played a central role in drafting a set of propositions of capitulation for the French colonists in Saint Domingue. The task was trickier than it was for the parallel agreement reached by representatives from Guadeloupe and Martinique, which, it was understood, would be returned to France in the event of a Bourbon restoration.12 The Dominguan planters, harried by uprisings and civil war, were more than willing to accept permanent British rule or perhaps independence if it meant the preservation of their position and way of life. Malouet himself had toyed with the idea of an i­ ndependent

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Saint Domingue in his meetings with Grenville, an idea that would recur in his later thinking.13 He retained, nonetheless, his scruples about the transfer of French territory, a position that clearly set him apart from many of the leading colonists. The exiled Bourbon regency, meanwhile, which was excluded from the negotiations, rejected any such arrangement with Britain, preferring a ‘Spanish solution’ of alliance with its dynastic cousins to retrieve Saint Domingue from the revolutionaries.14 Not for the last time, Malouet was attempting to define the terms of the Anglo-émigré partnership against critics on multiple sides. In the deliberations surrounding the development of the treaty, Malouet accordingly sought to finesse the issue of sovereignty. For Malouet, steeped in the Old Regime tradition of colonial governance, the basis of the invitation to Britain could not be any right to self-determination for the colonists. French sovereignty was indivisible, even if the metropole had fallen into the hands of an illegitimate government. As individuals subjected to double exile from metropole and colony, however, the colonial émigrés were free to transfer their personal loyalty to the British crown. Until peace negotiations decided the ultimate fate of Saint Domingue, ‘the colony could be considered as put in sequester and under the protection of the English government.’15 This political state of limbo was the operating principle behind the Treaty of Whitehall, signed between the planter representatives and the British on February 19, 1793. Its terms left open the prospect of annexation by Britain favored by many planters but also held out the possibility of Malouet’s best-case scenario: the eventual restoration of Saint Domingue to a post-revolutionary France. A letter to Grenville in March reveals both the ambivalence and the ambiguity of Malouet’s position: In not dissimulating to you that we desire, as proprietors, to be and to remain English, we must not as Frenchmen permit ourselves any other measures than those equally compatible with the preservation of our rights and with our duties toward the monarchy to which we belonged before the present revolution.16

Malouet’s commitment to what he perceived as the French imperial interest placed him in an inherently unstable relationship with his principal partners in the endeavor, the colonial émigrés and the British. For the time being, however, those differences could be papered over: all parties had an interest in the success of a British invasion.

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One should take care not to overstate the extent of Malouet’s role in these events. He was, of course, profoundly dependent on the British. He had no direct access to the levers of state power; he was a hanger-on of those who did. His was far from the only voice to which the ministerial ear inclined with respect to Saint Domingue. Even if it had been, Britain’s Caribbean policy was not only determined by Caribbean events. During the years of British intervention in the Antilles, the government was simultaneously forced to account for the requirements of war on three continents, including a campaign in Flanders, financial and logistical support for European allies elsewhere, royalist revolts and landings in Brittany, the Vendée and Toulon (where Malouet himself played a minor role by drafting the British proclamation to the inhabitants17), colonial conquests in India, and continuing upheavals in Paris, to say nothing of domestic political considerations. As the Secretary of State for War Henry Dundas lamented, he was deluged by ‘a multitude of jarring interests’ that ‘created a sad expenditure of his time.’18 That complaint may explain why Dundas ignored Malouet’s letters and refused to meet with him for more than a month even as the British began to organize an expedition to Saint Domingue.19 Moreover, once the terms of the British intervention in Saint Domingue were settled, Malouet, and the Pitt ministry for that matter, were left largely as transatlantic spectators to events in the colony.20 Yet, while Malouet’s indispensability should not be exaggerated, his ability to straddle the lines of connection and communication between London, Saint Domingue, and the broader émigré diaspora lent him significant political agency. The vastness and complexity of the task confronting the wartime ministry ensured that it needed local knowledge and informed advice to clarify its strategic options. At a time when the bureaucratic apparatus of central government was miniscule by modern standards,21 personal access and proximity to key decision makers in London, reinforced by the pan-European conventions of polite sociability, granted foreign lobbies, and émigrés in particular, the ability to insinuate themselves into the production of British imperial policy from the center. Malouet, moreover, represented a constituency with considerable economic and political sway, both on the ground in Saint Domingue and, through commercial and social ties, in the metropole. Though marginal in a geopolitical sense, situated as they were between the British and the Republic, the colonial counterrevolutionaries were not mere supplicants (or not always so), but a real force the British needed to cultivate. The British campaign in Saint Domingue, consistently under-resourced as it

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was, required local collaboration to remain viable. Moreover, the sheer demographic weight of French émigrés in British colonial territory encouraged the British to cultivate good relationships with their leaders: as early as 1792 there were reported to be as many Frenchmen as Englishmen in the Jamaican city of Kingston.22 Working directly with the French planter assemblies in the West Indies and their agents in London also allowed the British to provide legitimacy for their occupation of French territory while bypassing the Bourbon regency, whose authority was not recognized by Britain and with whom the Pitt ministry had a mutually distrustful relationship (though, as Philip Mansel explores in Chap. 13, the royal court-­ in-­ exile would form a close partnership with the British during the Napoleonic period).23 Malouet, far from the conflagration in the Antilles as he was, nonetheless formed a crucial node in the transatlantic colonial émigré network through his ties to Whitehall. ‘I have good reason to believe [he] may be depended on,’ Dundas wrote in 1793.24 The Frenchmen consequently exerted some influence on the conduct of the British occupation, advising the British on colonial racial laws and categories, for instance.25 He also joined British merchant interests—many of them creditors to colonial émigrés, himself included—in lobbying the government to continue pressing the campaign in Saint Domingue.26 By the autumn of 1796, when the ministry was moving toward peace negotiations with France, the merchant interest had become even more vehement in lobbying Whitehall alongside the planters, since they feared a complete loss of £300,000 in collective investments, not only in lending outlays but also in trading branches established in Saint Domingue.27 If the merchants could not prevent the government’s handing the island over to France, they still advocated that any peace settlement include the reinstatement of property to royalist proprietors and the maintenance of some regime of forced labor in the colony, without which they could hardly hope to be paid. The episode nonetheless highlights one way in which the colonial emigration forged transimperial economic, as well as political, links, connections that Malouet was shrewd enough to exploit in his career as an émigré lobbyist. Meanwhile, the flagging British war effort allowed Malouet to once again play a central role in debates over the future of the French colonies. From 1796 onward, three interrelated trends on the international scene shaped his exilic political engagement. First, it was obvious that the British expedition to Saint Domingue had become a quagmire, putting the government increasingly on the defensive with respect to its West Indian

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­ olicy. Six thousand British soldiers had died in the colony by March of p that year, with the worst yet to come; in the words of Lt. Col. Thomas Maitland, who would soon take command of the British forces, ‘the dreadful scene of mortality exhibited there exceeds every idea of human credibility.’28 In London a dying Edmund Burke declared ‘it was not an enemy we had to vanquish but a cemetery to conquer.’29 The chief obstacle, aside from yellow fever and malaria, had become the black revolutionary army of Toussaint Louverture, who had joined the republican cause after 1794 and who threatened to overwhelm the entire island of Hispaniola. Second, the British government, due to dizzying cost of the West Indian campaign and reverses elsewhere, was increasingly eager to negotiate a peace settlement with France and began the process in earnest in October by sending Lord Malmesbury on a diplomatic mission to Paris.30 Third, the political winds in metropolitan France were shifting in a conservative direction after the downfall of Robespierre and the subsequent replacement of the National Convention by the Directory and later the Consulate. For Malouet, the first of these developments was frightening; the second, dangerous, but potentially an invaluable opportunity on account of the third. Working through his contacts in the Pitt ministry, his fellow colonial émigrés, and the international émigré press, Malouet sought to salvage a desperate situation in Saint Domingue through another diplomatic balancing act, one that increasingly impelled him toward transimperial solutions. The central problem confronting Malouet’s colonial politics, as Robert Griffiths observes, is that he wanted ‘le beurre et l’argent du beurre’: to preserve the plantation hierarchy and (what was widely assumed to be the same thing) the economic productivity of Saint Domingue, while also eventually restoring the colony to French sovereignty under a stable metropolitan regime.31 For the moment, British withdrawal would mean handing the colony over to French republicans and their black allies. Malouet knew that the government could not indefinitely support the occupation’s ruinous cost in blood and treasure. But neither could the Pitt ministry stomach the prospect of a slave revolution raging unchecked. As one French colonist’s memorandum to the War Office observed with trepidation, small boats could make the trip from Saint Domingue to Jamaica in 36 hours.32 The result was a sanguinary stalemate. Malouet, however, believed he had devised a solution that would relieve the overburdened British while securing the future of the colony.

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The plan was complex, ingenious, and ‘wildly optimistic.’33 The British invasion force would gradually draw down, to be replaced by a new colonial army composed of Spanish mulattos (presumed better able to bear the climate than the redcoats), a regiment of German regulars, and white colonial militia supplemented by loyal black troops. With this new force to counter the black revolutionaries, the British could withdraw, hand over the control of the colony to French royalist administrators (something Malouet had been advocating since 1795), and sustain the entire enterprise with a comparatively modest subsidy. The long-term success of the plan, however, would depend on the ‘tacit neutrality’ of the French Directory; that is, splitting the government in Paris from Toussaint. This goal in turn would require the British presenting the French with the possibility of recovering Saint Domingue in a peace settlement, with the understanding that the new planter regime in the colony would be preserved.34 Malouet’s scheme required a wide range of contingent elements in Britain, France, and Saint Domingue to fall into place for it to succeed. If it worked, however, he would settle the internal and external crises facing the colony in one fell swoop. From the British perspective, the use of Saint Domingue as a valuable bargaining chip in negotiations with the Directory was perhaps the best the government could hope for, particularly if renewed planter control curbed the cost of the occupation as well as the hypothetical threat posed by a pan-Caribbean slave revolt. As so often before, Malouet was able to insert his distinctive imperial agenda into the British policymaking process, but Anglo-émigré cooperation proved fickle. Malouet began by confiding the plan to lower level British officials, the M.P. George Ellis and the War Office undersecretary William Huskisson, who had been charged by Dundas with regulating the French emigration in Britain. With their support he moved on to Dundas and Grenville, who likewise approved the plan and authorized him to correspond with the French government. It was further decided that Malouet would set out for Saint Domingue to serve as its new chief administrator, with the émigré general the Marquis de Bouillé to serve as his military counterpart.35 In October 1796, however, Malouet’s planned Caribbean sojourn was scuttled at the last minute, even as his baggage waited on the docks at Portsmouth. The Home Secretary the Duke of Portland, who distrusted Malouet and favored colonists who would have been negatively affected by administrative belt-tightening, vetoed his appointment as chief administrator, leading the Marquis de Bouillé to decline the offer of command.36 The episode underscored how different

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French ­counterrevolutionary lobbies cultivated their own constituencies within the British government, often to cross-purposes. Despite this setback, Malouet continued to believe that a negotiated settlement could accomplish a colonial restoration. Under British approval he sent declarations to the French Legislative Assembly in the name of the Saint Domingue proprietors. Malouet proposed a colonial truce, arguing that ‘the war can cease in Saint Domingue even before it ceases in Europe.’37 He justified the British pact with the planters as a means for the protection of persons and property, and added that, since the French legislature had made tentative moves in the same direction, he could now submit a peace proposal that would serve the interests of the Republic as well as the planters. Equally important for his strategy was the quest to ‘prepare public opinion.’38 Malouet needed to gather support among the émigrés, particularly the colonials among them; more than this, however, he aimed to influence the broader political environment in metropolitan France. His essay on the colonial question,39 published in early 1797, sought to reconcile the French public, especially those with latent monarchist sentiments, to the prospect of a restored colonial regime with slavery as basis. If slavery remained abolished or if the royalist planters were treated as traitors, the hand-over of the island would be for naught. Without an accommodation with the planters, Malouet argued, France would gain nothing from the restoration of its colonies, while the ‘colonial democracy’ of the abolitionists threatened the entire European Americas with the ‘electric communication of anarchy’ among enslaved people.40 Saint Domingue could only be reconciled with France and with the security of the wider colonial world by the ‘reestablishment of a conservative regime.’41 Yet while the planters had the right to protection of the ‘mode of their existence,’ this right was conditional. ‘The dependence of the colonies and their fidelity to the metropole are the … the necessary compensation for the protection they receive from it.’42 The fundamental basis of colonial life required both the subjection of the plantation labor force and the subjection of the colonies themselves. Malouet’s Old Regime pre-revolutionary arguments in his Mémoire sur l’esclavage had returned in a high-stakes propagandistic bid for a settlement of the colonial question. Malouet emphasized an element in his defense of colonial slavery that had been less salient in his earlier works on the subject: a persistent concern with the international, even pan-European dimensions of the colonial problem. Malouet was concerned not only to promote the restoration of

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colonial slavery, but also to justify the guarantee of Saint Domingue’s domestic order by foreign powers, a notion seemingly at odds with his solicitude for French sovereignty. One way to do so, of course, was to wave the bloody shirt of rebel atrocities. But Malouet went farther: he did not wish to see France coerced into reestablishing slavery by external force, any more, he said, than he wished Britain to impose the abolition of the slave trade on the rest of Europe (an eerily prophetic remark). Malouet argued that what was needed instead was a consensus among the maritime powers that would serve as something like a new Peace of Westphalia. Whereas the settlement of 1648 had solidified shared conceptions of sovereignty in Europe, the new treaty would ‘fix without doubt the public rights of the European colonies’ and ensure the survival of the Euro-­ Atlantic world through a shared commitment to external protection and internal police of the colonies.43 The vital economic importance of colonial products extended beyond the confines of any one empire; as a result, ‘the colonies which produce them can be regarded as a common property to the European republic.’44 This was not the first time Malouet had entertained a ‘European solution’ for the colonial crisis: discussing the idea of an independent Saint Domingue with Jacques Mallet du Pan in 1795, he had suggested a ‘guarantee of the maritime powers of Europe, which would fix the form of its government.’45 In his propaganda for a peace settlement, however, Malouet had not only proposed a robust conception of empire as a pan-European interest, but further placed that concept at the center of his transimperial diplomacy. In seeking to influence metropolitan opinion around toward a favorable settlement of the colonial question, however, Malouet managed to alienate many of the colonists themselves. Tensions had long simmered between Malouet and many of the Dominguan proprietors over questions of their autonomy in the future political order in Saint Domingue, but the proposed peace settlement brought matters to a head. Malouet was accused in the London émigré press of being in secret contact with the Directory, or even its paid agent; how else to explain his determination to hand Saint Domingue over to the republic?46 Malouet’s real sin, however, was that he allegedly had weakened in his attitude toward slavery, a conclusion his detractors drew from the following passage: There is nothing lasting in the universe; everything changes, everything perishes, and breeds under diverse forms. Men and their monuments are the prey of time; thus, I do not pretend that the colonies of America and the

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slavery on which they are founded can have another destiny. God forbid that I erect also as a principle, as an imprescriptible right, the slavery of Negroes!47

Reactions came from across the Atlantic as well. A July 1797 declaration from an assembly of proprietors in Port-au-Prince roundly denounced Malouet’s pamphlet, both for its suggestion that Britain would not keep Saint Domingue and for its claim, as the colonists interpreted it, that ‘the public spirit of the nation seems to recognize that slavery is odious and useless.’ In the face of this ‘philanthropic tissue’ of a document, they formally disavowed Malouet as their representative, declaring that they needed no other agent than the British governor.48 Those who suspected Malouet of crypto-abolitionism were badly misreading him; in presenting slavery as both as historically contingent and an abstractly indefensible institution, Malouet said nothing he had not said in his pre-revolutionary writings. He went on, moreover, to declare that only those who lived within a given social system and were willing to assume the risks were qualified to reform it. Thus, Malouet’s supposed heresy on the question of slavery was couched within a defense of colonial society’s autonomy.49 However, the planters were still clinging to the increasingly desperate hope of a permanent British presence in Saint Domingue, and had no tolerance for Malouet’s nuances on the subject. Malouet defended himself in bitter letters to the colonial authorities in Saint Domingue,50 but his official role as liaison between Saint Domingue and Whitehall was finished. Malouet nevertheless hoped that some version of his new Westphalia might emerge from the peace talks between Britain and France, even without an immediate change in conditions in the colony. The secret instructions issued to the British plenipotentiary Lord Malmesbury in 1797 were quite similar to Malouet’s proposals, underscoring Malouet’s continuing access to the Pitt ministry.51 However dismal the situation in the Caribbean might be, Malouet and the other monarchiens were cheered by signs of growing royalist sentiment in France, and hoped that a restoration of monarchy might soon be at hand.52 However, no peace had been concluded by November of 1798, when General Maitland negotiated a cease-­ fire with Toussaint Louverture and evacuated all British forces from Saint Domingue. The end of the occupation rendered Malouet’s long-held objective of a negotiated hand-over from Britain to France moot. It did not, however, stop him from proposing new means of a colonial restoration. Malouet

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believed that the colony could still be recovered for France through accommodation with black leaders, in order to resubordinate the mass of the population within some regime of forced labor. Only by this means could there be ‘the reestablishment of any order whatsoever in this unhappy country,’ he wrote in a memorandum to Louis XVIII. ‘I say any order, for it would be imprudent to propose that one could reestablish the old regime without modification.’53 Malouet called for France to promote blacks as priests and officers, as the Spanish colonies did, as well as a ‘plan of invariable conduct,’ to protect slaves from the masters, including a provision (also borrowed from the Spanish) to allow slaves to choose to leave an abusive master for another. ‘No portion of the sovereignty can be exercised by a private man; and all manner of police must be regulated by the law.’54 Malouet, despite his firm attachment to the slave system as to monarchy, rejected the absolutism of either. In Saint Domingue as in France, a reformed restoration was the only way forward. Part of the reformed approach to empire, Malouet believed, was in recognizing that the character of the French colonies was dependent upon their relationship to broader patterns of imperial rule, British ones in particular. Britain, Malouet advised, possessed a naval and commercial supremacy that France could not match.55 Likewise, Britain’s tremendous power in Asia meant that France should not attempt to compete with it there. Malouet was conscious of Britain’s pivot toward both free trade and its Indian empire; as he had noted in his essay on the peace plan, the vast riches of India were sapping British interest in maintaining the Caribbean colonial system, which seemed increasingly useless, as well as immoral.56 In advocating the reconstruction of France’s Atlantic empire based on protectionism and slavery, Malouet was thus proposing not simply a policy of reaction (though in many respects it was that), but a French colonial project which complemented rather than directly challenged the Britain’s own. If it was not a Westphalian plan, it was nonetheless an arrangement that revealed Malouet’s persistent sense of France’s participation within a broader European imperial system. Malouet had not yet exhausted his means of cooperation with the British to further these goals. The 1800 kidnapping plot directed against Isaac and Placide Louverture was Malouet’s last attempt to achieve a breakthrough in Saint Domingue during his exile. Toussaint’s sons, students at the Collège de la Marche, were implicit hostages of the French Republic. If the boys were instead to fall into British hands, Malouet reasoned, Toussaint might break ties with Paris and find himself more

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a­ menable to British interests in the Caribbean. Malouet wrote to a fellow exile, the Marquise de Bouillé, suggesting that a female acquaintance of the Marquise in France whisk the boys away on a ship to Dover, whence they could be sent to Jamaica under the charge of the ‘good negro,’ Colonel Jean Kina—another Dominguais ex-slave and soldier, but one serving under the British flag.57 The plan was never put into effect; the French police uncovered its details the following year when the Marquise’s correspondence was searched upon her return from exile. But while the scheme was amateurish, if sinister, in conception, and may not have originated with Malouet,58 it was only the latest of Malouet’s attempts to exploit his peculiar position as an émigré, leveraging exile networks alongside British imperial resources to help shape the future of the French colonies. The next year the Louverture boys were placed on a ship to the Caribbean, but it was a French ship: Napoleon Bonaparte, perhaps reminded of Malouet’s plot, which had come to his personal attention, now planned to use the boys as leverage for his own invasion.59 By the time that doomed invasion force had departed, Malouet had at long last returned to France, where he continued to ruminate on means to restore and reform what he called the ‘colonial system,’ in the first systematic use of that term.60 He ultimately became the Minister of the Marine under the Restoration shortly before his death in 1814, during which time he set about reinstituting racial discrimination and the protectionist exclusif in the colonies. One of his last official acts was to dispatch three commissioners—one white, one black, and one colored—to what had come to be called Haiti, to investigate the possibility of reimposing French sovereignty.61 To the end, Malouet pursued his fixed aim of a colonial restoration—in terms of both French territorial integrity and the system of plantation labor—through whatever expedient he found at hand. Malouet’s history of political engagement as an émigré is largely one of failure. With respect to Saint Domingue, the failures of his plans were spectacular. Yet it is precisely the grand scope of those plans, and the diverse means by which Malouet was able to substantially advance them, that present a phenomenon worthy of attention by scholars of the emigration and of the British Empire in the Age of Revolutions. Malouet’s relationship with the British leadership demonstrates the remarkable permeability of the imperial policymaking for at least a select few individuals, many of whom lacked direct access to large-scale political, military, or financial power. The staggering demands of managing global warfare

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required the employment of local (or ex-local) knowledge, judgment, and personal networks. Even an essentially dependent figure like Malouet could, by attaining the status of a trustworthy broker of these intangible necessities, exercise considerable sway over the exercise of British imperial power from its very heart. In Malouet’s case, moreover, the particular configuration of the colonial emigration allowed him to exercise a distinctively transimperial62 form of political agency: transimperial not merely in the sense that Malouet occupied an intermediate political and cultural space straddling two imperial powers, but that Malouet was able to leverage his position as a member of a ‘society on the move’63 to pursue self-consciously imperial goals distinct from those of either of London or Paris. His integrated strategy of lobbying, advising, publishing, and conspiring needed the centers of official power in London and in Paris to be effective, but also operated in social and political spaces beyond and between them, from Port-Au-Prince to the Court of Louis XVIII. Malouet’s struggle for the maintenance and reform of metropolitan, colonial, and racial forms of power implicated distinctively French discourses and divisions in the conduct of British imperial policy: francophone newspaper articles published in Soho to be read in Paris could and did have an impact on the life-and-death struggle between British soldiers and black revolutionaries. British and French debates surrounding questions of race, slavery, and sovereignty had never been hermetically sealed, but Malouet’s exilic career underscores the particularly intense collision of political and intellectual cultures driven by the emigration. In the midst of this transimperial project, Malouet also developed a concept of the problems and opportunities confronting the colonies that increasingly focused on the inherent affinities of the British, French, and (to a lesser extent) other European imperial powers, and possibilities for imperial concord between them. Malouet was not unique in this outlook: as early as 1790, representatives from the planters of Saint Domingue arrived in Jamaica to promote ‘general confederation of the islands of the American archipelago’ to oppose the radical doctrines of the Rights of Man.64 It was, however, perhaps Malouet’s personal blend of the perspectives of a slaveholder, colonial administrator, and metropolitan politician that enabled him to transmute this impulse for planter solidarity into a general theory of the ‘European Republic’s’ shared imperial interests in the face of revolution. Malouet’s new ‘Westphalia’ evoked the spirit of the Congress of Vienna a decade and a half before its appearance, albeit in a

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more frankly brutal tropical mode. It also anticipated what David Todd has provocatively argued was an early nineteenth-century ‘French Imperial Meridian’ marked by the ‘gradual adoption of a policy of collaboration with Britain, to preserve and enhance France’s stake in the exploitation of the extra-European world.’65 If, as Friedemann Pestel has suggested, post-­ revolutionary France was a ‘post-migratory society in which experiences of political exile played an integral part,’ Malouet’s exile and return appears as an important site to explore the legacy of the emigration for French colonial mentalities and practices in the nineteenth century. Malouet’s career more broadly suggests the revolutionary emigration’s significant impact on the political and intellectual entanglement of Britain and France as imperial societies. The colonial counterrevolution was anything but parochial. On both sides of the Atlantic, emigration created new transimperial configurations of power and stimulated newly cosmopolitan understandings of the colonial system. Exile was not always a condition of political disempowerment; rather, the struggle for the future of the colonial world was conducted, in no small part, from the interstices of empire.

Notes 1. Stephen Tomkins. William Wilberforce: A Biography (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 125. 2. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), 292. For a detailed accounting of mortality during the British occupation, see Chapter 13 of David Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 3. On the kidnapping plot, see: Carl Ludwig Lokke, “A Plot to Abduct Toussaint Louverture’s Children.” The Journal of Negro History, 21.1 (January 1936): 47–51. See also: Deborah Jenson, “Kidnapped Narratives: The Lost Heir of Henri Christophe and the Imagined Communities of the African Diaspora,” in Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution, ed. idem (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 195–220. 4. See in particular the highly suggestive essay by Maya Jasanoff, “Revolutionary Exiles: The American Loyalist and French Émigré Diasporas,” in The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 ed. David Armitage (Houndmills-Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 37–58, as well as R. Darrell Meadows, “Engineering Exile: Social Networks and the French Atlantic Community, 1789–1809.” French Historical Studies, 23.1(2000): 67–102.

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5. Simon Burrows, French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814 (Suffolk: Royal Historical Society, 2000), 12. 6. Robert Blackman, “What was ‘Absolute’ about the ‘Absolute Veto’? Ideas of National Sovereignty and Royal Power in September 1789.” Proceedings of the Western Society of French History, 32 (2004): 133. 7. Charles Frostin, “L’intervention britannique à Saint-Domingue en 1793.” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer (1962), 310. 8. Notably, Mémoire sur l’esclavage des nègres (Neufchâtel: 1788). 9. The best account of Malouet’s early life and career can be found in Robert Griffiths, Le Centre perdu: Malouet et les ‘monarchiens’ dans la Révolution française (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1988). 10. Pierre Victor Malouet, Mémoires II (Paris: E. Plon, 1874), 264. 11. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), 203. 12. See the National Archives, WO 1/58 passim for discussion of the propositions, including early drafts. The treaty text concerning Saint Domingue can also be found in the appendix of David Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (London: Oxford University Press, 1982). 13. David Geggus, “The British Government and the Saint Domingue Slave Revolt, 1791–1793.” The English Historical Review 96.379 (April 1981): 295. 14. Frostin, “L’intervention britannique à Saint-Domingue en 1793,” 321–333. 15. Malouet, Mémoires II, 278. 16. Malouet to Grenville, 29 March 1793, quoted in Robert Griffiths, Le Centre perdu, 205. 17. Jennifer Mori, “The British Government and the Bourbon Restoration: The Occupation of Toulon, 1793.” The Historical Journal, 40.3 (September 1997): 709. Mori notes the author as “Jean-Pierre Malouet,” which appears to be an error. 18. Holden Furber, Henry Dundas, First Viscount Melville, 1741–1811: Political Manager of Scotland, Statesman, Administrator of British India (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 98. 19. Geggus, “The British Government and the Saint Domingue Slave Revolt,” 298. 20. Frostin, “L’intervention britannique à Saint-Domingue en 1793,” 315–316. 21. Even six decades later, the entire domestic staff of the Foreign Office numbered less than one hundred, including clerks and messengers. See The Foreign Office List for 1857 (London: Harrison, 1857), 9–10.

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22. Jacques de Cauna-Ladevie, “La diaspora des colons de Saint-Domingue et le monde créole: le cas de la Jamaïque,” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-­ mer 81.304 (1994): 338. 23. Phillip Mansel, “From Coblenz to Hartwell: the Emigré Government and the European Powers, 1791–1814,” in Kirsty Carpenter, ed., The French ÉmigrÉs in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution, 1789–1814 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1999): 8. 24. Henry Dundas to Adam Williamson, June 5, 1793, quoted in Lokke 388. 25. Malouet to War Office, May 21, 1793, WO 1/58, 75–78. For discussion, see Carl Ludwig Lokke, “Malouet and the St. Domingue Mulatto Question in 1793.” The Journal of Negro History, 24.4 (October 1939): 381–389. 26. Carl Ludwig Lokke, “London Merchant Interest in the St. Domingue Plantations of the Emigres, 1793–1798.” The American Historical Review, 43(1938): 795–802. 27. Carl Ludwig Lokke, “New Light on London Merchant Investments in Saint Domingue,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 22 (1942): 671. 28. Thomas Maitland to the Earl Lauderdale, July 15, 1796, quoted in Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 205. 29. Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), in Select Works of Edmund Burke III, ed. Francis Canavan, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 165. 30. Lokke, “London Merchant Interest,” 800. 31. Robert Griffiths, “Malouet en Angleterre,” in Malouet: Actes de Colloques des 30 novembre et 1er décembre 198, ed. Erhard and Morineau, (Riom: Société des Amis du Centre de recherches révolutionnaires et romantiques, 1990), 90. 32. M.  Lambert to the Duke of Portland, October 24, 1797. WO 1/36: 589–602. 33. Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 207. 34. Malouet, Mémoires II, 281–282. 35. Ibid., 283. 36. Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 208. 37. Malouet to the Colonial Office, June 29, 1797, CO 245/1, 121–27. 38. Malouet, Mémoires II, 285. 39. Pierre Victor Malouet, Examen de cette question: quelle sera, pour les Colonies de l’Amérique, le résultat de la Révolution Révolution française, de la Guerre qui en est la suite, et de la Paix qui doit la terminer? (London, 1797). Gallica database, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. http://gallica. bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k41678m. Accessed April 1, 2016. 40. Ibid., 16. 41. Ibid., 13. This term lacked the ideological specificity it would acquire in the nineteenth century; by it Malouet simply meant a social and political

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system that preserved the rights of proprietors and the ‘mode of their existence.’ 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 22 44. Ibid. Emphasis mine. 45. Malouet to Mallet Du Pan (4 December 1795), in Mémoires II, 451. 46. Malouet, Mémoires II, 285. 47. Malouet, Quelle sera pour les colonies…, 12. 48. “Extrait de l’Acte passé dans une Assemblée autorisé par S.E. le GouverneurGénéral de St. Domingue, et composée des grands Propriétaires de la Colonie qui se sont trouvés dans la Ville du Port-au-Prince” (July 1, 1797). WO 1/66, 521. 49. Griffiths, “Malouet en Angleterre,” 93. 50. Malouet to the Privy Council of Saint Domingue (August 17, 1797). WO 1/66, 539–542. 51. Griffiths, “Malouet en Angleterre,” 91. 52. Burrows, French Exile Journalism, 163. 53. Pierre Victor Malouet, Apercu des moyens les plus propres a accélerer et à consolider le rétablissement de la monarchie en France, in Erhard and Morineau, Malouet: 187. 54. Ibid., 191. 55. Ibid., 183. 56. Malouet, Quelle sera pour les colonies…, 11–12. 57. Lokke, “A Plot to Abduct Toussaint Louverture’s Children,” 48. 58. Ibid. Lokke suggests that Maitland was the author of the plot, given that he had previously discussed the problem of French custody of the boys with Toussaint. 59. Ibid. 60. Pierre Victor Malouet, Introduction, Collection de mémoires sur les colonies, et particulièrement sur Saint-Domingue (1802). For Malouet as the first systematic user of the phrase, see Chris Bongie, Introduction, The Colonial System Unveiled (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 47, 75. 61. Todd, David. “A French Imperial Meridian, 1814–1870.” Past and Present 210.1, 2011. 165. 62. The term “trans-imperial subjects” appears to have been coined by the Ottoman historian Natalie Rothman, but her sense, focusing on the ­mediation of culture and identity, differs somewhat from the one I employ here. See E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). 63. Philip Mansel, “From Coblenz to Hartwell: the Emigré Government and the European Powers, 1791–1814,” in The French ÉmigrÉs in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution, 1789–1814, eds. Kirsty Carpenter and idem (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1999), 10.

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64. Deputy Legrand, April 2, 1790, cited in Jean-Phillipe Garran-Coulon, Rapport sur les troubles de Saint Domingue, Tome II (Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1797), 192. 65. Todd, “A French Imperial Meridian,” 156.

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CHAPTER 10

The Age of Emigrations: French Émigrés and Global Entanglements of Political Exile Friedemann Pestel

In the year 1800, Charles Saladin-Egerton, a patrician from Geneva, whom the revolution of 1794 had driven out of his native city, reflected in London on the large-scale consequences of the revolutions in Europe and the Atlantic world from the perspective of migration: That a Polish refugee in Paris, an American loyalist in London or a French royalist émigré in St Petersburg cannot consent to consider as legal the governments that, by only the force of arms, by the progressive rise of a small faction, or by the wish of the majority of their compatriots, succeeded to those under which they had lived, this is conceivable; it is the effect of a more or less blind, but often honourable sentiment.1

What makes Saladin’s statement interesting is that he reflected on exile as a result of a ‘participatory observation’ in the very centre of a connected history of political migration. Living in the ‘capital of the emigration’,2 he All translations are my own. F. Pestel (*) Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Philip, J. Reboul (eds.), French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_10

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was part of a large transnational community of migrants of different origins, social profiles, and political orientations, who had left behind the revolutionary hotspots of the late eighteenth century: the United States, France, Saint-Domingue, Geneva, or Poland.3 French émigrés were by far the largest group of political migrants in the Age of Revolutions. Yet, wherever they went—to all parts of Europe, the Caribbean and North America, and as far as India or Australia—they met not only fellow exiles from France but also other political migrants. Around 1800, several hundred thousand exiles dislocated by revolution and war were constantly on the move. In one of the rare comparative studies on this topic, Maya Jasanoff, looking at American loyalists and French émigrés, has emphasised how the entangled experiences of expulsion and uprooting ‘made an age of revolutions into an age of refugees’.4 Enquiring into these migratory encounters in a more systematic way, this chapter develops Jasanoff’s category of an Age of Refugees further into an Age of Emigrations. I argue that the inhabitants of the Atlantic world and beyond experienced the immediate effects of revolution through the arrival of exiles and found that migration, exile, and mobility of different times, places, and speeds intertwined: one of the most important things French émigrés learned outside France was that they were not alone. Connecting with other exiles increased their political agency, encounters with and references to previous migrants promised solidarity, and added historical legitimacy to their claims. Earlier experiences of both religious and political migration highlight how the temporal horizons of political exile shifted after 1789. French émigrés and other exiles from revolution left their homelands with the expectation of a temporarily limited refuge, but many of them actually returned, at the latest after the downfall of Napoleon, in most cases already under the Consulate.5 The first part of this chapter, therefore, shows how the strong expectation of return and cooperation—and its final success— distinguishes the émigrés from their Huguenot and Jacobite seventeenth-­ century predecessors. Despite the temporal distance, these groups overlapped in the 1790s. When French émigrés went into Protestant territories in Europe and North America, they came into contact with Huguenot descendants. In their own ranks, they counted numerous members of Irish and Scottish Jacobite families whose ancestors had left the British Isles after the Glorious Revolution. Through references to previous migrants and personal networks, this chapter provides insights into the ambivalences of these migratory entanglements over time. It brings

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out how the renewed experience of exile raised questions of national belonging, and it addresses the issue of solidarity and material support. In the second part of the chapter, I focus on the political agency émigrés gained by drawing on and referring to other experiences of political mass migration. How and where did French émigrés interact with other exiles? Which interests and motives did French émigrés, Caribbean planters, American loyalists, Genevan patricians, or the Order of Malta share? To what extent did collaboration and competition among migrants reinforce their political relevance and mobilise support from the host societies? As the case of French planters from the Caribbean highlights, distinctions between royalists and republicans, metropolitan and colonial exiles became blurry. Transatlantic migration relied on older patterns of mobility,6 but expulsion and destitution sometimes turned into a double experience: French aristocrats could leave the metropole or save their fortunes in the Caribbean only to lose their colonial properties in the Antillean slave insurrections. In reverse, French absentee planters not returning to the metropole found their names put on the émigré lists. In the most extreme case, emigration could take place without mobility at all. As the third part demonstrates, this holds true for French expatriates such as diplomats, merchants, or travellers, who were living outside France. Simply staying where they were—for instance, in the Ottoman Empire— turned them into émigrés facing challenges similar to those of their compatriots who had made an often narrow escape from their revolutionary homeland. In the case of Australia, however, where actual émigré presence was marginal, French publications imagined the émigrés as deportees assimilated to the status of British convicts in Botany Bay. This criminalisation served to radically underline their definite exclusion from French and European society. In the conclusion, I provide an outlook on how the migratory connections in the Age of Emigrations resonated in nineteenth-century French political exile as the émigrés of the Revolution represented only the first generation of an entire siècle des exilés.7

1   Legacies of Migration: French Émigrés, Huguenots, and Jacobites A century before the émigrés, another group of subjects of the French king, similar in size and geographically widespread, had left France. The Huguenots’ profile, however, differed from the émigrés in at least three

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points: first, as Protestants, they not only had a different religious denomination, but also social composition. Whereas the Huguenot réfugiés were by and large commoners, more than 40 per cent of the émigrés came from the privileged classes, and their proportion grew probably even higher the more distant they moved from France.8 Second, Huguenots only settled in Protestant territories; besides England, the Protestant German States and Swiss cantons, or the Dutch Republic, they also went to North America, Suriname, or South Africa. For the émigrés, including the clergy, this religious landscape no longer played a decisive role, which also meant that émigrés would inevitably meet Huguenot descendants in Protestant territories.9 Third, the Huguenots were banned from returning to France throughout the eighteenth century though this situation changed precisely at the time when the émigrés left. After Louis XVI’s toleration edict of 1787, the legislative assemblies, between 1790 and 1792, passed a series of laws restoring confiscated property to expelled Huguenots and finally granting them full citizen rights in new Republic.10 It is one of the ironies of the revolutionaries’ understanding of citizenship and their ambivalence towards exile that they legally rehabilitated the alleged victims of monarchical-­catholic tyranny, while at the same time, seizing the properties of the émigrés and declaring them as ‘civilly dead’. The manifold encounters between émigrés and Huguenot descendants had different aspects: economics, religion, and integration. In Philadelphia, financier Théophile Cazenove hosted constitutionalist émigrés and conducted land business with them. In Charleston, a French newspaper compared the expulsion of the Saint-Domingue refugees from Cuba in 1809 to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and praised the new arrivals’ skills in the arts and in manufacture. In a trade metropole such as Hamburg, émigré merchants from western France with Protestant roots relied on family and economic networks in order to continue their businesses while in exile. In London, émigrés arrived with letters of credit for local bankers of Huguenot origin.11 Religious prejudices seemed to have played a lesser role. In political discussions with their foreign hosts, émigrés were confronted with the Huguenot reference when it came to discussing financial relief. Foreign Minister Lord Grenville suggested to the Comte de Lally-Tollendal that émigré support would not pay off for the British government in the same way it had done a century earlier when the Huguenots finally became British subjects.12

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Besides such numerous, yet scattered references, a broader enquiry into the reactions of Huguenot communities towards the influx of émigrés is much needed from the perspective of integration. Existing scholarship on the German territories provides an ambivalent panorama. When the topic gained attention in the wake of Franco-German cultural transfer studies, Étienne François and others have emphasised the cautious, if not hostile, reactions of Huguenot descendants. Rather than showing solidarity among ‘French’ people, as the émigrés had hoped, Huguenots seemed to fear stigmatisation as ‘French’ that put at stake their status between integration into their German host territories and their special religious, fiscal, and judicial privileges.13 Moreover, destitute émigrés appeared as potential rivals in professions related to French language, culture, and education. This view echoes stereotypical comparisons between the two groups made by German contemporaries that opposed the allegedly spoilt, decadent, deprived, and idle émigrés to the non-privileged, virtuous, moneyed, and industrious Huguenots. More than religious or political reservations, such statements largely reflected a humanitarian challenge: ‘hundreds of thousands of adult people of both sexes, without culture or industry—people who are not able to work because they have learnt nothing’,14 wrote a popular newspaper in an exaggerated tone. The irony here consists in the fact that this eulogy on the laborious Huguenots appeared in the prince-bishopric of Salzburg that had expelled all Protestants from its territory as late as in 1729. More recent studies have nuanced this image of confrontation by emphasising that Huguenot colonies did not simply repudiate the émigrés. In Leipzig, the Dufour family, established as silk traders, rejected the common complaint that émigrés would carry unrest and inflation into German territories.15 Once registered with the authorities and granted permission for residence, émigrés in Berlin were received into the administrative and judicial structures of the Huguenot colony. Ursula Fuhrich-­ Grubert has revealed that a limited number of marriages between the two groups provided access into professional occupations in the silk industry, military, or administration.16 Those parts of the Huguenot community that had not yet completely assimilated into Prussian society contributed to integrating the émigrés for the limited time span of their stay. Young Adalbert von Chamisso, the later romantic poet, coming to Berlin as an émigré in 1796, attended the Huguenot lycée that also hired his brother as a teacher.17 Therefore, we can conclude that although the arrival of the émigrés questioned the peculiar ideas of Huguenot belonging as ‘Prussian

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citoyens’,18 mental dispositions towards the new arrivals were more complex and thereby more open. In that sense, the reproaches the Huguenot pastor Jean Pierre Erman made to his congregation for not receiving the émigrés as ‘unfortunate brothers’19 document both community reservations and rising social awareness. The Jacobite migration from Ireland and Scotland after the Glorious Revolution, shortly after the Huguenot exodus, represented a mixed religious-­political movement. In religious terms, the Jacobites can be considered Catholic counterparts to the Huguenots moving to the Catholic territories in Europe, in particular France and Italy. Supported by their French ally, they directed their political objectives at the return to the British Isles and a restoration of the Stuart dynasty until well into the mid-­ eighteenth century. This already led them to consider exile as a temporary state—a feature they shared with the émigrés of the French Revolution. In contrast to the émigrés, however, this projected return largely failed so that, over the eighteenth century, Jacobite families gradually integrated into French nobility and merchant classes.20 As a consequence, numerous third- or fourth-generation Jacobites ranked among the émigrés after 1789—to mention only the Berwick, Dillon, Fitzjames, Hyde de Neuville, Lally-Tollendal, Macdonald, Mac-Mahon, or Walsh families. Their ‘second’ emigration as ‘French’ people not only proved their integration, but their persecution and confiscation of property represents another striking contrast to the revolutionaries’ contrary attempts at reintegrating the Huguenots into the new ‘France’—a paradox that is indicative for the exclusivist dimension of French republican nation-building.21 Many of these Jacobite émigrés, at some point during their exile, came to Hanoverian-Protestant Britain. This unexpected ‘return’, shortly after the centenary of the Glorious Revolution, marked political tensions, but also new opportunities. To understand this ambivalence, we need to consider that, on the one hand, the last Stuart pretender was still alive in his Italian exile. On the other hand, George III, in medieval tradition, still carried the title of a King of France so that Whig MP John Macpherson reported to the Prince of Wales a discussion he had with Jacobite descendant Lally-Tollendal on the political options of three pretenders to the French throne: the Bourbons, the House of Hanover, and the Stuarts.22 In return, the French Foreign Office under the Directory checked Stuart descendants and their possible claims to the British throne in order to undermine the British enemy from another angle.23 Finally, republican

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projects of a French descent in Britain were assimilated to the aborted Stuart invasion of 1745.24 Whereas such speculations were little more than intellectual gimmicks affirming the political status quo of the British monarchy, a Jacobite pedigree impacted more immediately the living conditions in British exile. Family ties and relational networks seem to have facilitated émigré accommodation in Scotland—one of the beneficiaries was the comte d’Artois, who spent much of his exile in Edinburgh.25 Lally-Tollendal made use of his pedigree in a much more straightforward way: digging out a law from the times of Queen Anne that considered descendants of Britons—including Jacobites—born abroad as ‘natural born subjects’, he obtained his recognition as British subject and swore his oath of allegiance to George III.26 Though he failed in reclaiming his Irish family properties as well as an Irish peerage, he was granted a royal pension—‘more than he ever had’,27 sneered Horace Walpole. Lally-Tollendal’s political opponents, who rejected his constitutional Anglophilia, despised such situational adaptations of national belonging in exile: ‘One has to choose between being English or French. You are lucky today to have this alternative. But the opinion of a person who has two fatherlands, who obeys to two sovereigns is suspicious. One faith, one king, one law: this is the vow of the true Frenchman.’28 Though Lally-Tollendal’s case was certainly exceptional, the overall presence of Jacobite émigrés was indicative for the depoliticisation of the Jacobite conflict that had pervaded the eighteenth century. Rare were British voices that feared a boost of politically suspect Catholicism in Britain by the influx of émigrés.29 Rather, the historical reference to the strong linkage between Jacobitism and the French monarchy contributed to the lasting Anglo-French pacification after the revolutionary wars though only including a small part of the French nation in the 1790s. One long-term effect of this reconciliation was that all French nineteenth-­ century monarchs—Napoleon I presenting a special case—spent a substantial part of their lifetimes as exiles on British soil. In the meantime, French émigrés mobilised the example of French Jacobite support as an argument with the British government to arm French émigré corps against their common enemy, the French Republic.30 On the level of political ideas, the Jacobite-Stuart reference shaped French royalist expectations towards the course of the Revolution. As Philip Mansel has shown, many French politicians interpreted the Revolution through the lens of seventeenth-century Stuart history.31 This

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was not only the case for the anglophile monarchiens, but over the 1790s many supporters of monarchy observed that the English civil war seemed to offer the same sequence of parliamentary revolution, regicide, terror, dictatorship—and final restoration of the king to the throne—as the French Revolution. However, the Stuart example provided two lessons: first, the successful restoration of Charles II in 1660; and, second, the lost restoration of James II in 1688. Whereas the latter comparison is more commonly associated with French liberals at the wake of the July Revolution,32 it was already prominent in émigré discourse. Stuart analogies served to criticise the political intransigency of Louis XVIII as a possible ‘James III of France’,33 who only hesitantly made political concessions for a successful restoration of monarchy: ‘Look at your Jacobites: do they not still believe in the resurrection of the Stuarts? It is the same spirit, the same behaviour, it will be the same end.’34 Discarding the negative outlook of a French ‘1688’, Louis XVIII fixed his attention to 1660. Consequently, he was looking for a new general Monck to pave the way to the throne for him. After first placing his hopes on the generals Pichegru and Moreau, the coup d’état of 1799 made him rely on Napoléon Bonaparte, who would prepare the nation for the return of the legitimate dynasty and who the king believed would then content himself with some remote principality.35 In the French diaspora, such enthusiasm about Brumaire was far from being consensual. A confidant of the Comte d’Artois asked not without reason: ‘Is he Cromwell or Monck?’,36 as he considered a much more pessimistic scenario that would culminate in a hereditary ‘dictator’. Lucien Bonaparte corrected the royalists of their illusions by his Parallèle entre César, Cromwell, Monck et Bonaparte.37 The missed restoration of 1799, however, did not prevent the émigrés, unlike their Jacobite predecessors after 1714 or 1745, from returning to France by large majority, including many Jacobite descendants, thanks to Bonaparte’s émigré amnesty in 1802. This early return, nonetheless, put no obstacle to them for taking office with the Bourbons at the Restoration.38 Among the early repatriates was François René de Chateaubriand, a proven expert on historical comparison since his Essai sur les révolutions anciennes et modernes. When he published his brochure Les quatre Stuarts in 1828, the Anglo-French circle of revolution, for him, seemed to have come to a standstill that elevated the Bourbon restoration above its Stuart predecessor. Arguing that Louis XVIII had learned his lessons from both Charles II and William III, he concluded: ‘The Stuarts passed, the

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Bourbons will remain.’39 Soon, the July Revolution disabused French royalists of this conviction, and the Bourbons would take up quarters in Scotland again. Some of their Jacobite followers joined the ranks of the legitimists. For the vicomte de Walsh, whose great-grandfather had taken Charles Edward Stuart to Scotland in 1745, this was an ‘old family habit’.40

2   Contemporaries of Revolution: French Émigrés and Revolutionary Exiles from America, Geneva, Saint-Domingue, and Malta According to Maya Jasanoff, French émigrés, because of their encounter with American loyalists, ‘experienced first-hand the imperial legacy of the American revolution’.41 In some cases, this started with a political misunderstanding. When Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was expelled from Britain by force of the Aliens Act, he was looking for recommendations for the United States, his next station of exile.42 In a Falmouth inn he fell on an ‘American’ he asked for support only to learn that the expected door-opener was the loyalist general Benedict Arnold who regretted being ‘perhaps the only American who cannot give you letters for his country’.43 In contrast to Talleyrand, many of his émigré compatriots directly or indirectly took immense profit from the American loyalist experience in their British exile in two respects. With the enormous influx of exiles in late 1792, British émigré relief was not only co-organised by private activists and governmental authorities, but its most important public institution, the Wilmot Committee, was headed by none other than John Wilmot, the former Loyalist Claims Commissioner, and counted a number of loyalists among its ranks.44 As the material indemnification of American loyalists passing into the remaining parts of the British Empire had not been settled by the peace arrangements, Britain had already confronted the necessity of relieving victims of revolution in the 1780s. Adopting this model for French émigrés, the authorities, backed by émigrés and British philanthropists, developed it into an overall efficient allowance system. The ‘a shilling a day’ scheme not only demonstrated the humanitarian challenge, but also documents the integral part émigrés played as ‘charitable subjects’45 within the British Empire against the backdrop of revolution and warfare.

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This imperial dimension of the loyalist model became particularly relevant with the British evacuation of Saint-Domingue in 1798. After large parts of the colonial planters had counted on British support against both the slave insurrectionists and the French republican army, the British retreat left them with even fewer options to maintain their properties.46 To those who resettled within the British Caribbean and Canada, the British government lobbied by planter representatives offered compensation as it had done for American loyalists before.47 On a similar promise, a group of French royalists headed by the Comte de Puisaye passed from Britain to Canada in order to prepare another resettlement also involving royalists from western France. The shared Anglo-French expectation was that the émigrés would strengthen the British position at the border to the American Republic.48 In the newly forming province of Upper Canada, loyalist Richard Cartwright welcomed them as a ‘valuable accession to the higher and antidemocratic society’.49 Material compensation played no significant role in the relations between French émigrés and political exiles from Geneva. The fact that some of them were of Huguenot origin points, in reverse, to long-term migratory legacies. Their collaboration, mainly in London, strongly relied on personal networks, joint publications, and political lobbying helped by influential contacts to the British government. Boundaries between these two Francophone groups were permeable as the political trajectories of Geneva’s political elites in the late eighteenth century were highly fragmented and often included a stay in France as well. The revolutions of 1768, 1782, 1792, and 1794, with the French annexation in 1798 as political nadir, had already driven many Genevan politicians to France or the British Isles. The aforementioned Charles Saladin-Egerton had opposed the anti-patrician revolution in 1782, then served as a representative of the restored aristocratic government before being sentenced to death in absentia by the egalitarian revolution of 1794.50 Many of the représentants as Étienne Clavière or Étienne Dumont, after their setback in 1782, passed to France and later joined the ranks of the Girondins. Soon suspected of ‘counterrevolution’, some of them ended their lives in prison or under the guillotine, others luckily escaped into exile.51 François d’Ivernois passed his banishment from Geneva in the 1780s in Ireland, making a short political comeback in his native city in the early 1790s before emigrating to Britain.52 In London he met his combourgeois and former opponent Jacques Mallet du Pan, a renowned journalist and

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political analyst of a similar socio-political background, who had made his career in France as editor of the Mercure de France. Mallet du Pan’s Genevan citizenship did not prevent him from being put on the French émigré list and finally being perpetually banned from Geneva after the French annexation in 1798.53 Reluctantly, the Mallet du Pan family joined the political diaspora of the Age of Emigrations. When the family retreated to Britain, his son wrote: I would rather direct my terrestrial machine to any part of the earth than witness the ruin and misfortune of my fatherland: I would rather never hear the word ‘Geneva’ than witnessing its fall and regarding the men who have sacrificed it! I will move back day by day, from shack to shack up to the poles with the crowd of exiles, I will see the ground collapse behind me the more I move forward, and I will end my days with the last of the Romans.54

In the Genevan circles in London, former political divisions played a less significant role than in the French émigré community. Old dissensions had become largely irrelevant once Geneva’s independence was lost to an ever-expanding French Republic. Against their common enemy, Genevan émigrés and French constitutional monarchists became likely allies.55 Some of them already knew each other from Paris. In return, Geneva had served as an early refuge for French émigrés before both groups were expelled together.56 French royalists, however, remained much more on their guard towards the Francophone Protestant ‘foreigners’.57 For them, Genevan émigrés remained Rousseau’s disciples counting rather as the initial instigators of the Revolution than as companions in exile. Against such reproaches of subversion and anti-monarchism, Genevans insisted on the shared opposition to revolution and experience of destitution and deprivation. From his temporary refuge in Berne, Mallet du Pan informed Saladin-Egerton, already in Britain, about the migratory consequences of the Genevan revolution of 1794: ‘Many fled and a big number will still flee into this canton; the exiles will choose the same residence where one will not miss to bother them until the moment when they will be all expelled like the French émigrés […]. One has to look after those who will remain without resources, and I see only England that can assist them.’58 When it came to distinguish themselves from the masses of political migrants all competing for resources and influence, however, the Genevans could more easily refer to their alleged impartiality than their French fel-

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low exiles. In order to recommend himself as a political correspondent to the Prussian minister Karl August von Hardenberg, Mallet du Pan opted to play the Genevan rather than French card: ‘No personal viewpoint, no political engagement, no passions will impact my accounts. I am not French, I am a born Republican, I merited the injuries of all extreme parties; but thirty years of experience under a popular government did not promise me, from the first powers of revolution, to see their utility.’59 The sheer number of French émigrés and refugees from Saint-­ Domingue led R.  Darrell Meadows to speak of the ‘first truly modern international crisis of exile’.60 Besides the quantitative importance of tens of thousands of people crossing the revolutionary Atlantic in both directions and the geographical scope of this migration stretching down to Australia, it is striking to observe that many French Atlantic émigrés were ‘double’ émigrés: planters from Saint-Domingue not returning to France after losing their colonial properties risked being on metropolitan émigré lists; absentee planters leaving revolutionary France for their properties in the Caribbean were driven out a second time by the slave insurrections.61 These two groups also came closest to each other in London, the ‘capital of the emigration’ inasmuch as the centre of the British Empire. As Robert Griffiths, David Geggus, and others have shown, the British government became the main target for French planter lobbyism.62 These initiatives culminated in the decision of the London refugee planters from Saint-Domingue to transfer their colonies, by self-assumed authority, under British protection in order to encourage a British military intervention while deliberately leaving open the future status of the colonies. Among the representatives the Saint-Domingue planters nominated with the British government was Pierre Victor Malouet who, besides his colonial background, had also been one of the heads of the anglophile monarchiens group at the beginning of the Revolution.63 Acting at the interface between continental and colonial émigrés, it is hardly surprising that Malouet tried to bring the interests of these overlapping communities together. Given the setbacks and immense costs of the British military expedition to Saint-Domingue as well as the uncertain outlooks for military émigré units in the service of the European powers, Malouet, together with the Marquis de Bouillé, in the mid-1790s, developed a scheme of bringing émigré troops to Saint-Domingue.64 The project was original insofar as Malouet presumed that, once the slave insurrections were suppressed and the French republican army driven out of Saint-Domingue, the émigrés

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would stay in the colony. Given their destitute situation in Europe, Malouet intended to establish them on plantations in the eastern part of the island that Spain had ceded to the French Republic in 1795. Though it was finally abandoned, this scheme demonstrates how the émigrés were not only a military, political, and humanitarian figure in Europe, but also promoted slavery and imperial expansion and defended the colonial system in the Caribbean. A few years later, given the tightened situation around the British evacuation of Saint-Domingue, the London planters looked for alternatives that would guarantee their properties. Support was offered from an unexpected source when a representative of the Order of Malta approached Malouet. Facing expulsion on its part due to the French expansion into the Mediterranean, the Order considered accompanying the émigrés to Saint-Domingue and serving as a permanent colonial guard to French royalist slaveholders. Malouet welcomed the proposal that promised to conform interests: ‘It would also suit us to be governed by a military and religious order whose politics and morals dismiss none of our colonial institutions.’65 This peculiar combination of exile, chivalry, Christianity, colonialism, and slavery highlights again the urgency of the colonial question for the French emigration, both Caribbean and metropolitan, and involved other political migrants looking for a new existence. Given the crumbling first coalition against the French Republic, the colonial periphery provided an imaginary space of opportunity that promised to be an alternative to a by-and-large revolutionised Europe where even Britain as France’s staunchest opponent had difficulty bearing the humanitarian émigré burden. As the Maltese project, and other attempts, remained chimerical, the British evacuation of Saint-Domingue shifted the correlation of forces in the Caribbean to the disadvantage of the anglophile settlers in the colony and the London refugee planters. At this point, however, the British government referred to recent exile experiences. Based on the American loyalist model, it considered granting land to the émigrés in the British Atlantic. Taking together these interrelations between French émigrés, American loyalists, Genevan exiles, Saint-Domingue refugees, and the Order of Malta, it is manifest that their collaboration took different forms and also had different impacts. Yet, collaboration represented a strategy for countering marginalisation and turning victimhood into political lobbyism which, over the 1790s, would continue to promote exiles as relevant figures in European and colonial politics.

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3   Émigrés, Convicts, or Expatriates? Status Confusions Beyond the Revolutionary Atlantic Scholarship on émigré presence beyond the revolutionary Atlantic is still scarce. Yet, the strong ties between the émigrés and the British Empire merit further exploration, for example of mobility towards India or Australia. Only shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution, the London government had sent the first convicts to Botany Bay. The confinement of criminals at the ‘end of the universe’66 subsequently nourished a negative émigré image as deportation provided, at least in theory, a form of definitely getting rid of the émigrés and their European connections: it promised to be ‘the last chapter of a great revolution’.67 In November 1792, the Théâtre des Amis de la Patrie in Paris staged a comedy entitled Les émigrés aux terres australes. The piece depicts a party of émigrés deported by the National Guard to an ‘uncultivated country’ without British presence but populated by indigenous sauvages. Opposing their natural virtues against the corruption of the Ancien Régime’s former elites, the native Australians finally ‘convict’ the émigrés to be governed by a French sans-culotte. Australia served here as a projection screen for unveiling the corruption and decadence of the French aristocracy and clergy against the social balance of the state of nature the natives lived in. At the same time, the piece presented a paradox that revolutionary politics of exclusion and émigré legislation were not able to solve: it was simply not possible to deport the émigrés who, by their very status, were already out of the country and had detracted themselves from revolutionary State power. All that the revolutionaries could actually do was to nullify their civic status, confiscate their properties, and persecute family members. In that sense, the imaginary of deportation provided an ideal of a political, social, and geographical separation of the Old and the New France that was blurred by the reality of migration, not least by the émigrés’ ties with other migrants of the Age of Emigrations. An anonymous French brochure published in London in 1799 put the émigrés in Australia in a more real scenario. It presented a mock call by the Comte d’Artois proclaimed ‘king of Botany Bay’ under the auspices of the British government. He invited ‘all the runaways and outlaws of France, princes and valets, traitors and bandits, princesses and daughters of joy, ignorant and venal judges, bawdy and impious priests’ to follow him to Australia, ‘asylum made for them’.68 Criminalising the émigrés, the clearly pro-republican text presented them as the French counterpart of the

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‘scum of Britain’, that is, British convicts. Yet, as the convicts were of little interest for stigmatising the émigrés, they did not play a key role in a first and foremost French scenario. By consequence, Australia appeared as France’s decadent other rather than as part of the British Empire. This Manichean symmetry between the Revolution and the emigration translated into an opposition of the two hemispheres. Australia’s new émigré capital Sodôme emerged as an anti-Paris, Artois proclaimed his government as ‘the model, the envy of the southern hemisphere, whereas the government of France will shatter the northern hemisphere.’69 Were such schemes fully fictitious and Francocentric, or was there a social reality behind the assumed links between French émigrés and British convicts? Though evidence is scarce, the case of the Breton noble Huon de Kérilliau supports the latter assumption. Arriving with the New South Wales Corps in Australia in 1794, he married a French-born girl who had been arrested in Britain for theft and then been deported.70 From a republican point of view, Australia’s geographical remoteness could be presented as largely disconnected from the ‘northern’, that is, Atlantic, hemisphere depicted as theatre of revolution and war. With the émigrés going to the antipode, they would virtually disappear as a political-­ military force or ideological opponent, or, in a more optimistic scenario, they opened up a horizon of possibility for revolutionary politics as well. At the end of Les émigrés aux terres australes, the sans-culotte émigré leader sings his variant of the Marseillaise ending with the line: ‘French, may our arms liberate the universe!’71 Not all exiles had to leave revolutionary France in order to be listed as émigrés. Emigration also became a problem for pre-revolutionary French expatriates who did not return to their homeland or demonstrate their allegiance to the new regime. This was the case for some French students at the University of Göttingen or the French ambassador to Switzerland, who, after resigning from his post, became an émigré by staying where he was.72 As Pascal Firges has shown, the most remarkable theatre of this emigration without mobility was the Ottoman Empire.73 When news of the downfall of the monarchy reached Constantinople, a number of expatriate merchants and diplomats, starting with Ambassador Marie Gabriel de Choiseul-Gouffier, resigned from French service; similar defections took place in Smyrna, Aleppo, and Salonika. In order to safeguard their property, these expatriates sought the protection of a non-French consulate or embassy. The more these other European powers were on poor terms with revolutionary France, the more willing they were to help the

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expatriates. As a result, revolutionary merchants, diplomats, and emissaries lived next door to their émigré counterparts so that the line dividing French republicans from émigrés became blurry. French authorities hardly managed to interrupt connections between the different groups, for example, when republicans stood in the service of émigrés. Securing their positions in Constantinople, however, did not prevent these immobile émigrés from losing their properties in France. Merchants were also cut off from their French business relations so that the number of commercial establishments in the Levant dropped considerably. Russian protection was particularly popular as it allowed easy passage into the territories of a staunch opponent of the French Republic for those expatriates who feared the proximity or new arrival of republican compatriots.74 Another move from the Ottoman Empire towards Russia came as a result of Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt. Rather than fearing the proximity of the revolutionary army, the émigrés had to face imprisonment that the Sultan imposed on all French in his territories. From Russia, the former dragoman and French legation chancellor in Constantinople, Joseph Fonton, then urged the liberation of these French prisoners.

4   Conclusion and Outlook: The Age of Emigrations and France’s Siècle des Exilés The connections between French émigrés, descendants of former exiles, and other uprooted migrants highlight the size, scope, and impact of political migration in the Age of Emigrations. French émigrés were the largest and widest-spread group in a diaspora of several hundreds of thousands of people in the revolutionary Atlantic world and beyond. Mutual references and cooperation in this diaspora helped articulate political interests, compensating material deprivation, organising relocation against the backdrop of the revolutionary wars, and counterbalancing the experience of marginalisation. As different and politically complex encounters with hesitating Huguenot descendants or autonomist colonial planters, political claims related to Jacobitism or American loyalism, or assimilations of high-rank émigrés and British convicts were: they shift our attention from the French foyer of revolution to its repercussions, appropriations, and interactions at a global scale. By emphasising their agency, such a focus provides an alternative to seeing émigrés primarily as ‘absentees’ from the Revolution, as

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victims, counterrevolutionaries, or reactionaries. It also complements the important corpus of studies on single territories of exile as émigrés often passed through several territories, connected with different host societies, and competed or forged ties with exiles from other revolutionary hotspots. To a large extent, these encounters were situational if not contingent rather than intentional and long-lasting. What distinguishes French émigrés and other exiles of the 1790s from earlier religious and political migrations is the final return in their homeland. The permanent anticipation of this return accounts for the obvious limits of integration into the host societies though such expectations still resonate in parts of the historiography. This shift from exile as an irreversible migration to exile as a temporary phenomenon marked an integral part of émigré agency: together with their hosts, they by and large believed that they were not to become new Huguenots or Jacobites. Even settlement projects for Saint-Domingue or Canada were first and foremost strategic and only emerged in response to the humanitarian challenge the émigrés presented to their host societies over time. In reverse, as the Australian case demonstrates, such scenarios served the political imaginaries of French republicans and their sympathisers who hoped for a permanent exclusion of their political enemies by confining them to distant world regions. Yet, the radicalism of such considerations is at the same time evocative for their improbability. The temporary character of exile, the hybrid status of many émigrés, who had metropolitan as well as colonial backgrounds or had already been expatriates at the beginning of the Revolution, and their mobility impacted the long-term transformation of political exile in the nineteenth century. Sylvie Aprile has demonstrated that the émigrés were the first political generation of an entire siècle des exilés triggered by France’s regime changes. A number of émigrés even accumulated several periods of exile over their lives, which makes it difficult to clearly distinguish between distinct successions of political migrants. To take only the case of the royal family: Charles X emigrated no less than three times spending altogether more than 30 years in exile; his successor Louis-Philippe hardly fared better. In terms of status, other hybrid trajectories invite for further broadening conceptions of exile experiences in post-revolutionary France: René Martin Pillet, an officer captured by the Prussian army in 1792, led the itinerant life of an émigré before becoming an American citizen in 1796. As such, a passport for France allowed him uninhibited travels between Hamburg, the Netherlands, and Paris until he was arrested but amnestied

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after Brumaire. Reintegrated into the Napoleonic army, Pillet served in Guadeloupe and Portugal, where he was taken prisoner again, this time by the British, only to be released at the Restoration. During his six years of internment, Pillet might have asked himself whether he could have avoided this fate had he not returned  from emigration and ‘successfully’ reintegrated into the post-revolutionary order.75 Héraclius de Polignac had lived only his first three years in France before ‘emigrating’ to Russia where he entered the Czarist army at the age of eight. Almost twenty years later, having fought all the major battles against Napoleon in Russian service, he returned to his native land in Russian uniform—as an officer of the occupation army taking command of Avesnes.76 Whereas these émigrés returned without fully leaving behind their exile experiences, later migrants would meet that minority of émigrés who had stayed in their exile. Bonapartists, disillusioned with the Restoration monarchy’s peculiar attempts at national ‘reconciliation’, settled in Alabama where they encountered émigrés from both the French and Haitian Revolutions.77 Therefore, the interaction between subsequent groups of both French and non-French migrants remained a persistent feature of political exile also in the nineteenth century. Finally, the interwoven emigrations in the Age of Revolutions touched on the question of restitution. The reintegration of the Huguenots by the revolutionary assemblies or the American loyalist model for land grants to French émigrés highlight that the solution of property right issues was an integral part for the redefinition of citizenship and political loyalty. In the long term, the massive property transfers triggered by the French and Haitian Revolutions became heavy burdens for post-revolutionary pacification and reconciliation. Given the entanglements between metropolitan and colonial destitution and emigration, it is hardly surprising that the two indemnification settlements for France and Haiti took place one shortly after the other in 1825.78 To a certain extent, returned émigrés were settling their own affairs then: Lally-Tollendal, the Jacobite descendant and naturalised British subject, now Ministre d’État and Pair de France, was indemnified twice: 1815 as a ‘Briton’ and 1825 as an émigré. He defended not only the planter interests in the debates about the recognition of Haitian independence in the Chamber of Peers but also presided over a section of the émigré indemnification commission. The son of Pierre Victor Malouet, the representative of the exile planters from Saint-­ Domingue in London in the 1790s, served as a member of the Saint-­ Domingue liquidation and indemnification committee.79

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These cases make clear that the Age of Emigrations not only marked political mobility and cooperation among exiles, but also resonated in post-revolutionary France. It shaped a post-migratory society of which experiences of political exile were an integral part.

Notes 1. Saladin-Egerton, Coup d’œil, 7. 2. Carpenter, “London”. 3. On these connections Polasky, Revolutions without Borders. 4. Jasanoff, “Revolutionary Exiles,” 38. For a further development of Jasanoff’s framework see Jansen, “Flucht und Exil”. 5. For a novel perspective on this under-researched dimension of the emigration see Kelly Summers’ chapter in this volume. 6. Meadows, “Engineering Exile”. 7. Aprile, Le siècle des exilés. 8. Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration; for a nuanced discussion Pestel and Winkler, “Provisorische Integration,” 145–46. 9. Lachenicht, Hugenotten in Europa und Nordamerika; Ruymbeke, “Refugiés Or Émigrés?”; Jainchill, “1685 and the French Revolution,” 57–58. 10. Ibid., 69–70; Banks, “The Huguenot Diaspora”. 11. Furstenberg, When the United States; Lachance, “The 1809 Immigration,” 118; Schmidt, “‘Französisches Emigranten Volck in Hamburg’,” 106; Arnault, Souvenirs, 384–85; see Reboul, French Emigration to Great Britain, 95. 12. Trophime Gérard de Lally-Tollendal to Charles Eugène Gabriel de La Croix de Castries, London, 10 March 1793, Archives Nationales, Pierrefitte-­sur-­Seine (AN), 306 AP/1722, Nr. 6. 13. François, “Du patriote prussien,” 229; Rance, “L’émigration nobiliaire française,” 15. 14. “Wie wären manchmahl Emigranten zu brauchen?,” Salzburger Intelligenzblatt, 15 April 1797, 235; see also Rance, “Mémoires de nobles émigrés,” 206–7; Middell, “Réfugiés und Émigrés,” 12–13; Fuhrich-­ Grubert, “‘Refugirte’ und ‘Emigrirte’,” 111. 15. Middell, “Hugenotten in Leipzig”. 16. Fuhrich-Grubert, “‘Refugirte’ und ‘Emigrirte’”; see also Viviane Rosen-­ Priest, “Berlin’s Huguenots,” 195–98; Böhm, “Hugenottische Netzwerke”. 17. Fuhrich-Grubert, “‘Refugirte’ und ‘Emigrirte’,” 117; René-Marc Pille, “Chamisso und die Berliner Hugenotten”.

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18. Fuhrich-Grubert, “‘Refugirte’ und ‘Emigrirte’,” 115. 19. Dampmartin, Mémoires, 183; see also Rance, “L’émigration nobiliaire française,” 14–15. 20. Chaussinand-Nogaret, “Une élite insulaire”; Genet-Rouffiac, Le grand exil; Clarke de Dromantin, Les réfugiés jacobites. 21. See also Jasanoff, “Revolutionary Exiles,” 51. 22. John Macpherson to George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, Mainz, 27 September 1790, in George IV, Correspondence, vol. 2, 98. 23. Archives des Affaires étrangères, La Courneuve, M.D. Angleterre, vol. 72, fol. 45–46. 24. Jean Louis to Jacques Mallet du Pan, London, 3 March 1797, in Malouet,Mémoires, vol. 2, 496–98. 25. Mackenzie Stuart, “French Émigrés in Edinburgh”. 26. Pestel, Kosmopoliten wider Willen, 110–11. 27. Horace Walpole to Mary Berry, Strawberry Hill, 1 May 1794, in Walpole,Correspondence, vol. 12, 98. 28. Huet de Froberville [?], Réplique, 72. 29. See Reboul, French Emigration to Great Britain, 204. 30. Memorandum by François Dominique de Reynaud de Montlosier, spring 1794, The National Archives, Kew (TNA), F.O. 26/25. 31. Philip Mansel, “The Influence of the Later Stuarts,” 1. 32. See e.g. Carrel, Histoire de la Contre-Révolution en Angleterre. 33. Lally-Tollendal to  Mallet du Pan, London, 10 January 1796, Balliol College, Oxford (BCO), Mallet Family Papers (MP) #33. 34. Mallet du Pan to John Trevor, s.l., 8 September 1795, TNA F.O. 67/18; see also Lally-Tollendal to Castries, London, 8 September 1795, AN 306 AP/1722, no. 10 and Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho (Portuguese ambassador in Turin) to Mallet du Pan, Turin, 27 February 1796, BCO MP #14. 35. Bertaud, Les royalistes et Napoléon, 51–69; see also Serna, “1799”. 36. Pierre François Balthazar de Sainte-Aldegonde to Mallet du Pan, Bremen, 26 November 1799, BCO MP #29. 37. Lentz, “Vers le pouvoir héréditaire”; Kerautret, “Napoléon et la quatrième dynastie”. 38. Mansel, “The Influence,” 3. 39. Chateaubriand, “Les quatre Stuarts,” 106. 40. Walsh, Mélanges, 389. 41. Jasanoff, “Revolutionary Exiles,” 54. 42. Waresquiel, Talleyrand, 179–80; on the Aliens Act see Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution, 36–39 and Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace, 29. 43. Talleyrand-Périgord, Mémoires, 207; cf. Furstenberg, When the United States, 141. 44. Jasanoff, “Revolutionary Exiles,” 54; Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution, 44–48, Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace, 31–35.

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45. Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace, 24. 46. Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution. 47. Jasanoff, “Revolutionary Exiles,” 51–52; Pestel, Kosmopoliten wider Willen, 293. 48. Hutt, Chouannerie and Counter-revolution, 555. 49. Quoted from ibid., 567. 50. Delvaux, “Saladin [−Egerton]”. 51. Whatmore, “Étienne Dumont”; idem, Against War and Empire. 52. Karmin, Sir Francis d’Ivernois. 53. Burrows, French Exile; Pestel, Kosmopoliten wider Willen. 54. Jean Louis Mallet du Pan to Jean Picot, Freiburg im Breisgau, 21 December 1797, Bibliothèque de Genève, Ms. fr. 7676, fol. 17’. 55. Ivernois, Réflexions sur la guerre, 119–20. 56. Engeli and Marin, “Les émigrés à Genève”. 57. Guer, Réponse, 16; see also Paris pendant l’année 1800, no. 195, 15 January 1800, 136. 58. Mallet du Pan to Charles Antoine Saladin-Egerton, Berne, 2 August 1794, in “Lettres de Mallet-du Pan”, 337–38. 59. Mallet du Pan to Karl August von Hardenberg, Berne, 1 February 1795, BCO MP #6. 60. Meadows, “Engineering Exile,” 67. 61. On the Saint-Domingue refugees see Brasseaux and Conrad, eds., The Road to Louisiana; Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans; White, Encountering Revolution; Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror; on the ‘double’ émigrés Pestel, Kosmopoliten wider Willen, 255–57. 62. Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution; Robert Griffiths, Le centre perdu, 197–227; Wagner, England und die französische Gegenrevolution, 230–50; Pestel, Kosmopoliten wider Willen, 265–98. 63. Griffiths, Le centre perdu; Pestel, Kosmopoliten wider Willen; see also Patrick Harris’ chapter in this volume. 64. Malouet to Henry Dundas, London, 18 July 1794, TNA W.O. 1/60, fol. 416–17; Malouet,Observations on the Treaty of Peace between France and Spain, August 1795, TNA W.O. 1/63, fol. 243–54; idem, A Plan for establishing the Emigrants in S.t Domingo, 19 August 1795, TNA W.O. 1/63, fol. 309–28. 65. Malouet to Charles de Thuisy, London, 6 December 1797, TNA W.O. 1/67, fol. 744; see also Thuisy to William Wyndham Grenville, Baron Grenville, London, 8 January 1798, TNA F.O. 27/53. Thuisy had already approached the War Office in 1795 for support of the Order; see also Gregory, Malta, 63–64. 66. Gamas, Les émigrés aux terres australes, 4. 67. Ibid.

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68. Anon., De par le Comte d’Artois, 3; see also Benis, Romantic Diasporas, 1–2. Benis’ study, however, focuses on representations of French émigrés and British convicts rather than on their possible interactions. 69. Anon., De par le Comte d’Artois, 20. 70. Stuer, The French in Australia, 44; Flynn, Settlers and Seditionists, 69–70. 71. Gamas, Les émigrés aux terres australes, 29. 72. Kruse, Emigranten in Kurhannover, 92–95; Pestel, Kosmopoliten wider Willen, 325. 73. Firges, French Revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire, 178–83. 74. For the following Boppe-Vigne, “Émigrés français de Constantinople”. 75. Tholoniat, “René-Martin Pillet”. 76. Breuillard, “Héraclius de Polignac”; Perret-Gentil, L’influence française. 77. Blaufarb, Bonapartists in the Borderlands; Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, 77–79. 78. Franke-Postberg, “Le milliard des émigrés”; Beauvois, “L’indemnité de Saint-Domingue”; Lewis, “Legacies of French Slave-Ownership”. 79. Pestel, Kosmopoliten wider Willen, 475–76.

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PART IV

The Return

CHAPTER 11

Healing the Republic’s ‘Great Wound’: Emigration Reform and the Path to a General Amnesty, 1799–1802 Kelly Summers

In the wake of the Directory’s unceremonious overthrow in Brumaire Year VIII (November 1799), émigrés throughout the French revolutionary diaspora anxiously awaited a signal from Paris. Their hopes for a mass reprieve were dashed when the Consular Constitution of Year VIII upheld their banishment. Yet by April 1802, the same government—now dominated by its First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte—had enacted a remarkable general amnesty that pardoned all but a thousand of the most notorious émigrés. This chapter explores the intersecting forces behind this stunning reversal, a haphazard process that was justified with appeals to a distinctly Bonapartist blend of realpolitik pragmatism and revolutionary principle. If the orderly repatriation of most émigrés was in the cards held close to Bonaparte’s chest, a comprehensive amnesty was not his preferred means of accomplishing it. He was only sold on the merits of a collective pardon, in fact, after his initial strategy to clear the Liste générale des émigrés (the Unless otherwise specified, all translations are the work of the author. K. Summers (*) MacEwan University, Edmonton, AB, Canada © The Author(s) 2019 L. Philip, J. Reboul (eds.), French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_11

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government’s centralized inventory of absent citizens) had failed and other pieces of his grand plan to end the Revolution, preserve its core legacies, and restore domestic and international harmony were securely in place. While at times complementary, the interests of Napoleonic power frequently trumped the liberal values invoked by the emigration system’s most credible critics. Fresh from negotiating a religious truce with Rome and a military one with Britain, Bonaparte ensured that the third component of his conciliatory trifecta—the émigrés’ re-migration—happened on his terms, and its realization proved a crucial tool in solidifying his power and transforming the Consular Republic into an imperial ‘security state.’1 The chapter concludes with an analysis of the militarized logic and profound political implications of revolutionary emigration policy and the top-down way in which the so-called great return was accomplished.

1   Revolutionary Migration: An Enduring Conundrum As detailed by Philip Mansel in Chap. 13 of this volume, the definitive resolution of France’s emigration saga awaited the return and coronation of Louis XVIII in 1814; a controversial indemnity bill known as the ‘émigrés’ billion’ followed a decade later. But the story’s penultimate chapter unfolded under the Consulate, which inherited the same regulatory system—a sprawling émigré code enacted in April 1793 and upheld with minimal revisions in November 1794—that had hobbled previous governments’ attempts to resolve the revolutionary problem of return in a regulated, strategic manner. Thanks to pioneering research conducted by some of the contributors to this volume,2 scholars now widely accept that, contrary to its overwhelmingly aristocratic and reactionary image, the émigré diaspora was riven by social, political, and geographic cleavages that only deepened with time. From its peak of roughly 150,000 names, the General List still included about 130,000 proscribed men and women when the Brumaire conspirators took power. Whatever their competing visions for the Revolution’s ideal resolution, this far-flung group greeted news of the coup d’état with guarded optimism, especially when its engineers promised to complete France’s revolutionary odyssey and reconcile its divided populace once and for all. One of the new regime’s first gestures—an amnesty for counter-­ revolutionary rebels in the Vendée—seemed especially auspicious to ­émigrés seeking to wipe their own political slates clean.3 The ultra-royalists

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among them dared hope that the First Consul’s allegiance to the caste of his birth would transform him into a modern-day General Monck, who had restored the English monarchy to the throne 140  years earlier.4 Indeed, in November 1800, Lucien Bonaparte circulated a pamphlet floating just such a comparison, though it was quickly retracted to assuage republican sensibilities.5 During what Friedemann Pestel in Chap. 10 rightly calls an ‘Age of Emigrations,’ however, many members of the French diaspora were eager to distance themselves from the throne-and-­ altar crowd. After all, more than half of émigrés were commoners, and thousands were frontier residents who would today be called refugees or asylum-seekers for fleeing marauding armies whenever France’s borders shifted with its military fortunes. These involuntary fugitifs hoped Bonaparte would distinguish the diaspora’s ‘good citizens’6 from its notorious traitors. Roughly a tenth of those included on the government’s ‘fatal list’—the so-called prévenus, or (wrongly) accused—had never left French territory at all, but found themselves the victims of false denunciations or administrative error.7 The stakes were high: regardless of when, why, or even if they had quit France, individuals whose names appeared on the General List of Émigrés were still liable to civil death, confiscation of property, and perpetual banishment on pain of death. As the nineteenth century dawned with an untested new government at the helm, a diverse wave of would-be returnees weighed the risks of going home, and thousands of those who had already snuck back awaited permission to emerge from the shadows. Although ‘all hearts were disposed towards reconciliation’ after Brumaire, wary compatriots who had weathered the French nation’s birth pangs from within its borders experienced the ensuing influx of émigrés as an ‘invasion … that threatened public tranquility.’8 Five years earlier, émigrés had heralded the Thermidorian coup that ended the Terror as a harbinger of their imminent return. Alas, most were ultimately excluded from Thermidor’s much-vaunted thaw. Though a growing chorus of emigration reformers had pushed for a comprehensive amnesty for unarmed émigrés, post-Terror legislators only proved willing to tinker with, not overturn, the problematic basis of revolutionary emigration policy: the criminalization of absence, regardless of one’s motives or actions abroad. Like the original émigré code from April 1793, the Thermidorian version passed in November 1794 struggled to distinguish between active threats to the new nation, passive dissidents, and refugees from the Revolution’s excesses. The law thus continued to relegate armed ‘rebels’ to military tribunals and unarmed ‘deserters’ to the criminal courts.9

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Though the émigré code’s harshest provisions were tempered by selective enforcement and a series of targeted, temporary, and inconsistently applied amnesties in the late 1790s, its fundamental premise—that absence was treason—remained in effect when the Consulate took power and promptly reinforced the constitutional ramparts against a mass return. At barely a quarter the length of its predecessor, the regime’s founding document stood out for its brevity. The fact that emigration featured at all reflects its status as one of the Republic’s stubborn ‘thorns.’10 The hastily penned Constitution of Year VIII (25 December 1799) forbade new exceptions to the émigré code for anyone who had ‘abandoned the fatherland,’11 reiterating almost verbatim the banishment clause from the Constitution of Year III (1795). The Consulate inherited not only the émigré code’s blanket proscription of absence but its foundering system to police it. Removal from the General List—a cumbersome, two-phase process known as radiation— was still the only avenue to return to France lawfully and attempt to reclaim (unsold) assets. Local administrators were responsible for granting provisional cancellations, but only Paris could sign off on definitive removals from the list. Successful appeals required a mountain of documentary evidence proving the petitioner had never left France. This fueled an underground trade in counterfeit residency certificates, witness statements, and military service records. Would-be returnees shopped around for cooperative officials willing to sign off on falsified documents,12 while the former terrorist-turned-Minister of Police, Joseph Fouché, grumbled that his agents would not suffer for work were they solely responsible for ferreting out emigration fraud.13 Although radiations had sped up under the Directory, the cumbersome bureaucracy could never keep pace with demand, a fact that was frustrating for petitioners and administrators alike. Besieged by requests from those stranded abroad, a French official posted in Hesse-Cassel memorably likened the logistical dimensions of the problem of return to a ‘bâton merde’14 [shit stick] that harried administrators passed back and forth, with no resolution in sight.

2   Emigration Reform: A Consular Priority Bonaparte was well aware of the problem. Indeed, healing what he called the Republic’s ‘great wound’15 was at the top of his to-do list when, in the run-up to the Brumaire coup, he resurfaced in Paris after abandoning his army in Egypt. He promptly called on the Directorial Minister of Justice

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(and soon-to-be fellow Consul), Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, who recalled that their discussion was ‘quite long … [and] dwelt essentially on legislation concerning the émigrés.’16 From the start, Bonaparte welcomed the prospect of a mass return, provided it exclude ‘bad citizens’17 who had irrevocably ‘divorced themselves from the country’ by taking up arms against it.18 Although their constitution took a hard line on emigration, the Brumairians soon set about softening its application. The Consulate’s first step was a conciliatory overture in line with its grand strategy of ‘ralliement:’ it repealed the Directory’s infamous Law of Hostages, which had permitted authorities in rebellious regions to respond to counter-­ revolutionary acts by detaining and even deporting the relatives of émigrés. Meanwhile, in late February 1800 (7 Ventôse VIII), Bonaparte established a special Commission des émigrés to expedite the appeal process, and on March 3, a Consular decree closed the departmental lists (a measure backdated to 25 December 1799, the day the Constitution of Year VIII took effect). This effectively re-instated freedom of movement, one of the early Revolution’s vaunted but short-lived innovations, thereby allowing the Consular regime to cast itself as the principled restorer of the ‘values of ‘89’ while permitting Bonaparte to cover his own Jacobin tracks. By the fall of 1800, the majority of émigrés were back in France19—still technically proscribed, but hopeful that their status would soon be regularized. The First Consul’s interest in resolving the problem of return was at least as pragmatic as it was principled. For starters, as a pre-condition of their reintegration, Bonaparte expected émigrés to accept the revolutionary land settlement with regards to national properties, a vital component of his plan to restore social stability. Having amassed a sizable portfolio himself, Minister of Police Fouché was especially eager to protect buyers’ investments. Bonaparte also saw the return of the émigrés as a recruitment opportunity. He set out to ‘rally to his person all the men who had shown some talent during various phases of the Revolution,’20 regardless of their emigration status or political leanings. In line with the Brumairians’ ­valorization of the early Revolution, Bonaparte was especially keen to lure back former members of the Constituent Assembly, whose names were summarily removed from the list.21 In addition, he recognized that maintaining a marginalized class in perpetuity would only fuel resistance to his rule. Moderates and apolitical refugees would be forced into the overtly counter-revolutionary camp if regime change seemed their only avenue

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home. Finally, even Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who as foreign minister panned Bonaparte’s plan to repatriate the émigrés, conceded that a mass return would have the benefit of denying Louis XVIII the ‘air of a king that a large emigration gave him.’22 Somewhat ironically, Bonaparte’s original strategy to deprive his Bourbon rival of a legitimizing diaspora seemed steeped in the traditions of royal absolution. There were, moreover, clear limits to his leniency. Against the advice of Fouché, a strict enforcer of emigration law during the Terror who now supported its systemic overhaul as a stabilizing measure, Bonaparte initially refused to consider a large-scale amnesty. Prodding from his brother Joseph also failed to sway him. Perhaps not surprisingly for a new ruler who was already ‘devoured by the desire of rendering his power immovable,’23 Bonaparte was drawn instead to a system of individual concessions reminiscent of the amalgam of monarch-subject privileges that had propped up the Old Regime. He thus directed the Ministry of Justice’s new Commission des émigrés to process returns on a discretionary, case-by-case basis,24 personally intervening when need be, often at the behest of his wife Josephine.25 Once this convoluted process played out, Bonaparte insisted on signing off on each claim. Still pushing for a comprehensive solution to the émigré problem, Fouché fretted about the optics of parceling out ‘favors’ to high-profile royalists on a piecemeal basis, a perception underscored by Josephine’s ‘inclination … [to perform] the part of Queen.’26 The former Marquise de la Tour du Pin attributed Josephine’s embrace of returning nobles to the same ambition: ‘She longed to be able to boast to the First Consul that she had secured the allegiance of a woman who was still young and fashionable, and a former member of the royal Household.’27 Tweaking but for the most part maintaining the radiation system allowed Bonaparte to co-­ opt talent from the counter-revolution and cultivate gratitude among beneficiaries of his largesse, while ensuring that his most stubborn enemies got what they deserved: either ‘eternal exile’ or ‘extermin[ation].’28

3   ‘Such a farce!’29 Navigating the Consular Commission des émigrés Comprising ‘thirty illustrious nobodies’30 who were selected to oversee the process with minimal partisan drama, the Consular Commission des émigrés faced the same problems that had plagued its predecessor, the Directorial Bureau des émigrés. Despite intermittent efforts, the latter had

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managed to remove only about 13,000 names from the General List over the course of the Directory, a total that concealed marked regional variations.31 The adjudication process laid out in the 25 Brumaire Year III code was notoriously susceptible to corruption, both in the form of personal favoritism (or enmity) and bribes. And except for genuine prévenus, those individuals included on the General List despite never having left France, a successful claim was the product of an elaborate documentary ruse that depended on the tacit complicity of petitioners and administrators alike. The aforementioned Henriette-Lucie Dillon de La Tour du Pin— whose revolutionary itinerary took her from a dairy farm in upstate New York to Switzerland and London—found the Commission des émigrés to be quite conciliatory, provided one did not arrive ‘empty-handed.’32 Ironically, her dealings with the commission related not to her own lengthy sojourn abroad, but to her mother-in-law’s non-existent one. A perfect example of the General List’s irregularities, La Tour du Pin and her husband were for some reason never registered as émigrés. This meant that, upon re-­ surfacing in Paris, they needed only present themselves to municipal authorities rather than petition for formal radiation. After hearing from a ‘cloud of witnesses’ attesting to her uninterrupted residency in France, the mayor overseeing La Tour du Pin’s case jokingly complimented her exclusively English wardrobe. Having exchanged the ‘necessary lies’ to solidify her own standing, she then petitioned the commission on behalf of her mother-in-law, a true prévenue who had been deprived of her assets despite having spent three decades within the confines of the Dames Anglaises convent in Paris. Located in a house on the place Vendôme, the commission functioned as a sort of social hub-cum-‘employment agency,’ where the Old Regime’s luminaries rubbed shoulders with humble petitioners, veterans of the system traded gossip and tips on how best to game it, and strapped patriarchs scouted out military appointments for their sons. Struck by the process’ ‘farc[ical]’ nature, La Tour du Pin reported that many protested their ‘unjust’ inclusion on the General List while brazenly comparing stories from their respective stints in Coblenz, Hamburg, and London.33 Instances of preferential treatment abounded, tainting the reputation of the Commission des émigrés and vexing Bonaparte to no end. He complained that certain members blithely removed armed rebels from the list while ‘closing the door’ to those ‘victimized by the incoherence of emigration laws … that should only be applied to [actual] enemies of the patrie.’34 Meanwhile, Henri La Salle, who ultimately resigned his seat on the

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commission and wrote an exposé protesting its irregularities, resented the entitled attitudes of many petitioners: ‘Nothing equals the impertinence that some ex-nobles demonstrate when demanding their removal …. They treat government officials like businessmen’ [un homme d’affaires] whose services were for sale. La Salle also pilloried the alternately coquettish and pious airs of aristocratic women, describing his colleagues as typical ‘bourgeois incapable of resisting the[ir] seductions.’ Class and gender biases swayed the speed and outcome of cancellation decisions, he warned, and thereby undermined their legitimacy.35 In short, the Consular Republic’s commitment to the rule of law and a dispassionate justice system was incompatible with a reintegration process that seemed to have replaced the vagaries of the Terror with an absolutist style of political patronage. Dubious integrity aside, the commission’s streamlined removal mechanism was still time-consuming, threatening to draw out the return process for years. After swiftly converting a backlog of provisional judgments into definitive ones, officials got bogged down processing 3500 new appeals. La Salle warned that such ‘delays contribute[d] to the demoralization of society,’36 and in a pointed letter to the Minister of Justice, André-Joseph Abrial, Bonaparte concurred.37 Dissatisfied with the negative press and slow pace, Bonaparte reluctantly took Fouché’s advice to dismantle the Ministry of Justice’s flailing commission and transfer its responsibilities to a nine-member body within the Conseil d’état.38 He lightened its successor’s load with a partial amnesty (20 Vendémiaire Year XI/20 October 1800), which identified multiple categories of persons for immediate removal from the list. By merit of their valuable skills, undue suffering, sex, age and/or lack of military capabilities, the beneficiaries of the 1800 amnesty had already been deemed worthy of certain concessions after Thermidor. They included women, minors, artisans, domestic servants, farmers, former representatives of the people, deported (and not merely self-exiled) priests, and the heirs of those proscribed by revolutionary tribunals.39 Thought to pose little risk to the political and social stability of the Republic, returnees from these groups had also been largely spared the excesses of military justice after the anti-royalist coup of 18 Fructidor Year V (4 September 1797). But unless they had been definitively removed from the General List or fulfilled the capricious requirements of their time-sensitive reprieves, they remained in legal jeopardy.40 To rectify this situation, a growing number of deputies and pamphleteers took up the cause of emigration reform under the Consulate, especially on behalf of the diaspora’s most sympathetic members: defenseless

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women and children who could neither vote nor fight, and were thus incapable of deserting or rebelling against their patrie in any meaningful sense.41 The targeted amnesty of Year IX (1800) struck some 52,000 names from the rolls. Many of those cleared were already back in France, but could only then begin to live without fear of Fructidor-style backlashes and try to reclaim assets that had not been sold.42 The upshot of these slapdash attempts to process rémigrés through individual cancellations and a partial amnesty was that Bonaparte and his Secretary of State, Hugues-Bernard Maret, received petition after petition from French men and women desperate to be struck from the General List when the available options failed them. These appeals employ many of the strategies developed by émigré apologists since Thermidor. Some invoked principle on behalf of long-suffering soldiers listed while serving France abroad, wretched prévenus stuck in legal limbo, and fugitifs who—having adopted the rhetorical mantle of the country’s original refugees, the Huguenots—had been forced to flee during ‘times of trouble and terror’ when the state had failed to guarantee the security of its citizens. Others emphasized the practical benefits of reintegrating estranged citizens to assuage mercantilist and demographic anxieties about population loss. Bonaparte and his ministers variously received letters from a young man who, due to his civil death, was unable to make an ‘advantageous’ match and start a family; a father whose sixteen children depended on his livelihood and modest assets for survival; an architect whose secret brick-­ making formula promised to quite literally rebuild the nation; and countless testaments on behalf of individuals whose ‘morality’ and commitment to ‘public tranquility’ would prove a boon to Consular France.43 Like the hapless Belgian merchant featured in Mary Ashburn Miller’s chapter in this volume, the decade-long ordeal of François-Louis Damoiseau was especially egregious, even by the Kafkaesque standards of French bureaucracy. A long-suffering prévenu, Damoiseau’s non-­ emigration was confirmed by dozens of documents submitted to the Ministry of General Police by everyone from his mayor, doctor, and departmental prefect to the police agents charged with monitoring his activities and the dozens of neighbors who vouched for his residency and civic reliability. Added to the General List in March 1792 when he briefly left his hometown to seek medical treatment in Lyon, Damoiseau promptly appealed his wrongful inclusion, and set about the painstaking process of assembling the required documents. Over the years that followed, he was summoned before multiple criminal tribunals, any one of which could

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have sentenced him to death for violating his banishment. In late 1797, having secured only provisional cancellation, he was ordered to leave French territory in the aftermath of the anti-royalist coup of Fructidor Year V, along with everyone on the General List whose clearance had not yet been finalized. A ‘manufactured’44 émigré if ever there was one, Damoiseau was careful to do everything above-board, securing a passport, seeking refuge in a neutral country, and after the Brumaire coup, taking an oath of fidelity to the new Constitution. The municipal and departmental officials who compiled his file considered it an open-and-shut radiation case. And yet, in a pitiful letter in 1801, his wife was left with no recourse but to beg for his definitive cancellation from the First Consul himself.45 Damoiseau’s ordeal was both patently unjust and a galling example of government ineptitude that distracted police, municipal, departmental, and ministerial authorities, not to mention the First Consul himself, from more pressing matters. Highlighting both the failures of cancellation procedure and the limits of the 1800 partial amnesty, his plight stood as a damning indictment of an emigration system that was irrevocably broken.

4   Building the Case for a Comprehensive Amnesty Protracted cases like that of Damoiseau converged with a perfect storm of internal and external considerations in 1801–1802 to help sell Bonaparte on the merits of an across-the-board amnesty. Beyond bypassing the radiation system’s elaborate red tape and rampant abuses, such a solution would have the added benefit of advancing his conciliatory agenda without denying the scale and scourge of revolutionary emigration. An undeniable flaw of the radiation process was that it absolved successful petitioners of all wrongdoing, and thereby reified the delusions of émigrés who, to the great annoyance of republicans, ‘return[ed] with all the conviction and candor of innocence.’46 For Bonaparte, part of the appeal of extending what he called a ‘rather disdainful gesture of clemency’47 in the form of an amnesty was that it treated a citizen’s cowardly absence during a national crisis as a transgression that warranted forgiveness, not exoneration. This point of principle had practical ramifications: when it came to the matter of the revolutionary property settlement, the cancellation process risked exposing the state to an endless parade of wrongful confiscation suits by treating successful petitioners as innocent rather than merely pardoned. Another pragmatic motivation related to resources: in 1800, fully

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one-third of Ministry of Police personnel who might have been deployed elsewhere were occupied with the screening and surveillance of both lawful and illicit returnees.48 Much as Consular authorities did when selling aspects of the Bonapartist agenda, critics of the emigration system often assumed the mantle of the moderate Revolution. Emigration reformers had for years tried to appropriate Thermidorian critiques of terrorist laws of exception to demand that protections afforded to the accused by the 1791 Penal Code be extended to émigrés. These included the defendant’s right to the presumption of innocence, trial by jury, legal representation, appeal, and graduated sentences that reflected the gravity of a crime.49 It was clear that trying to reconcile liberal penology with the decidedly illiberal émigré code would have created endless legal headaches. From the administration’s perspective, then, part of the appeal of an amnesty was its deft obviation of further debate over whether émigrés qualified for individual legal protections or not. As his ambitions became increasingly grandiose, moreover, Bonaparte came to see a mass pardon as a way to bolster the Roman lineage he was cultivating to legitimate his precipitous rise to power. In early 1802, a report presented on behalf of the Conseil d’état by Claude-Ambroise Régnier reasoned that an Augustan gesture of clemency was a prerogative of the ‘powerful and strong’ that would inculcate gratitude and humility among those forgiven. With thousands mired in the dysfunctional cancellation process, he argued, the time was right for a grand gesture that would ‘replace severity with indulgence.’ By restoring first religious harmony with the Concordat (which, as detailed by Dominic Aidan Bellenger in Chap. 12, was signed on 15 July 1801 and went into effect on 8 April 1802) and then peace in Europe with the Treaty of Amiens (25 March 1802), Bonaparte had ensured that ‘all hearts were disposed to … forget the past.’ To ensure that ‘public tranquility’ was not compromised by the return of the amnestied, Régnier proposed that the beneficiaries of the nation’s goodwill be subject to ‘special surveillance’ until their civic ­reliability was established. His call for a bold policy that was not only ‘expeditious’ but ‘worthy of national magnanimity’50 satisfied both Bonaparte’s passion for efficiency and his desire (short-lived as it would prove) to be seen as a wise peacemaker. As his handling of the Vatican and Britain was celebrated at a jubilant Easter service in Notre Dame, Bonaparte prepared to neutralize the Republic’s last entrenched foe by way of an amnesty for most émigrés.

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Having learned from the Directory’s ineffectual vacillations over the problem of return, the Consulate resolved to take decisive action by circumventing legislative debate, even if it meant violating the Constitution. Details of the amnesty were ironed out in a contentious secret meeting at Malmaison on 11 April, and approved by the Conseil d’Etat five days later.51 Later that month, the General Amnesty of 1802 (6 Floréal Year X/26 April) was passed down from on high in the form of a sénatus-­ consulte,52 an executive decree that bypassed both the Tribunate and the Legislative Body. Bonaparte had just used one to purge uncooperative members of the legislature, and top-down decrees would become a defining feature of Napoleonic governance when the Life Consulate was established a few months later. In return for clemency, the amnestied had to take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution of Year VIII (a document which, ironically enough, forbade their return); re-enter France before the first day of Year XI (23 September 1802); recognize the revolutionary land settlement; and submit to a decade of police surveillance. The decree pardoned most civilians and soldiers—all but a thousand (down from Fouché’s initial 3300-strong tally)53 of the highest military and political figures attached to the émigré court. Also excluded were prelates who rejected the Concordat, which had been officially proclaimed in churches across France just eight days before the amnesty was adopted.54 The General Amnesty thus excused all but the emigration’s most patently treasonous elite, who were still plotting to restore the Bourbon crown. This act, then, essentially concluded the Republic’s fraught attempts to distinguish between armed and unarmed emigration. As a final rush of returnees crossed the French frontier to register their oaths and confirm their removal from the list, only the remnants of the original emigration—the so-called die-hards55 [irréductibles]—remained abroad, awaiting Louis XVIII’s tenuous restoration in 1814–1815.

5   Conclusion: The Power of a Pardon First and foremost, Bonaparte’s resolution of the revolutionary problem of return underscores the inextricable relationship between war and emigration policy. As noted by La Salle, the disillusioned member of the Commission des émigrés, ‘Emigration is a crime more or less serious depending on the circumstances in which the government finds itself.’56 His observation aptly encapsulates the ebb and flow of revolutionary attitudes to emigration. In the euphoric days of 1789, when war and capital

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punishment were condemned as archaic relics of absolutist power, emigration was not merely tolerated but encouraged. The National Assembly’s rationale for opening France’s borders was both principled (declaring freedom of movement to be a natural and positive right) and practical (construing it as a peaceable way to purge the newly sovereign nation of dissidents). But as the outbreak of war became ‘a solid basis for the politicization of citizenship,’57 the Revolution’s newly militarized logic recast emigration as a grave threat, and residency during times of crisis became a non-negotiable civic duty that trumped the mobility rights that revolutionaries had only recently enshrined. The fateful decision to criminalize absence as treason, irrespective of an individual’s motives or actions abroad, was therefore sealed in the fall of 1791 when unarmed emigration was equated with desertion and its armed variety with rebellion. With the outbreak of a civil war that was in large part orchestrated and funded from abroad, meanwhile, ultra-royalist supporters of the court-in-exile became detested players on the counter-revolution’s external and internal fronts. It was only in the wake of Bonaparte’s pacification of the Vendée, his decisive victory at Marengo, and his back-to-back negotiation of the Concordat and the Peace of Amiens that the fundamentally disparate nature of armed conspiracy and unarmed emigration could finally be recognized in French law. The specter of religious unrest at home and war abroad was always the single most salient variable in the emigration puzzle, and as such, the timing of the 1802 amnesty was no coincidence. When Bonaparte finally granted a general pardon, he justified it with explicit reference to both the recent religious truce established within France’s borders with the Concordat and the military peace brokered at Amiens.58 Amnesty was extended, accordingly, to all but the most intransigent rebels and non-juring priests, bringing full circle the revolutionary convergence of war and migration policy. Another notable aspect of Bonaparte’s emigration strategy relates to its selective invocation of liberal values. However ineffectual the efforts of reformers to extend the early Revolution’s legal innovations to émigrés after the Terror, the General Amnesty did incorporate a provision of the 1791 Penal Code that Thermidorians eager to distance themselves from Robespierre had resurrected in 1794–1795. Their rediscovery of the so-­ called question of intent required jurists to establish motive before determining culpability in order to prevent the conflation of mere errors with crimes. While delineating a Robespierrist ‘circle of guilt’59 that would prevent blame from spilling too far beyond the coup’s designated villain and

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his leading henchmen, Thermidorian deputies attributed their terrorist pasts to excessive revolutionary zeal. With the Republic under siege, such ardor may have had regrettable consequences, but they could not be deemed criminal since they were the unintentional side effects of genuine patriotic fervor. Using similar logic, Directorial and Consular emigration critics tended to invoke fear as the primary motivation of unarmed émigrés, who deserved to be readmitted as blameless refugees at best and gutless hysterics at worst, rather than proscribed alongside committed rebels. When revising the émigré code in the fall of 1794, the Thermidorian Convention determined that motive should not factor into emigration verdicts, and then excluded émigrés from its otherwise capacious amnesty for ‘crimes relating to the Revolution.’ But by 1802, what after the Terror were fringe arguments made in defense of unarmed émigrés had gone mainstream: witness the amnesty’s preamble, which excused the emigration’s ‘great majority,’ who were ‘always more misguided [égarés] than criminal,’ while prescribing eternal vigilance against its ‘great guilty’60 [grands coupables]. In assessing the amnesty’s broader significance, finally, it is important to emphasize that Bonaparte’s solution to the émigré conundrum reverberated far beyond the 130,000-or-so individuals who were stuck on the General List when he assumed control. Consular émigré policy also served as a vital tool to consolidate the First Consul’s hold on power. For one thing, the massive operation to screen and monitor returnees inflated the state’s police capacities, and the amnesty’s decade-long surveillance requirement helped feed what Howard Brown calls the ‘extraordinary level of quotidian repression [that] lay at the heart of the Consulate’s return to law and order.’61 At the same time, the trio of reconciliatory feats that coalesced in the spring of 1802 launched Bonaparte to peak popularity. If the failure to resolve the problem of return after the Terror had sapped the Directory’s resources and sullied its legitimacy, credit for the émigrés’ orderly repatriation now accrued to Bonaparte, whose conciliatory pragmatism was widely praised beyond France’s shrinking circle of republican and royalist purists. As intended, the amnesty deprived ultra-royalists of their religious and military allies while creating a large class of probationary citizens indebted to Bonaparte’s indulgence. Some were eager to demonstrate their gratitude. The Marquis de Bouthillier, returning after a decade’s service in the émigré armies, described Bonaparte as a ‘pacifying hero and great man, healer of France, [and] restorer of order and calm.’ Bouthillier took

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seriously the amnesty’s call to ‘forget the sorrows inherent to a long revolution:’62 ‘I resolved to forget all differences of opinion that might exist,’ or, failing that, ‘at least to act as if this forgetfulness w[ere] real.’63 Of course, such groveling often aimed to curry additional favors as returnees competed for status in the new regime. Once again ensconced at the heart of Parisian noble circles, for example, La Tour du Pin sniffed that ‘everyone was hastening to gather about the rising star,’ and lamented how eagerly her acquaintances accepted positions at court when the First Empire was declared in 1804.64 All things considered, Bonaparte’s gambit paid off. It is true that an intractable faction of returnees could not resist intimidating owners of their former properties and orchestrating plots against the regime,65 thereby fulfilling Talleyrand’s warning that ‘not [everyone] whom the Revolution has pardoned will pardon the Revolution.’66 Many former émigrés, however, embraced the job opportunities Bonaparte dangled before them.67 Police reports spoke glowingly of local returnees’ ‘good morality’ and ‘excellent,’ or at least apolitical, ‘opinions,’68 although some (such as the shady Père Bonjour Claude of Paris, who traded in Illuminati secrets) remained ‘dangerous’ and thus deserving of continued surveillance.69 As a fawning prefect noted three years on, the department’s returned laborers lived ‘peaceably,’ priests busied themselves in the parishes, and even ‘former nobles … of irascible temperament’ behaved in a manner ‘worthy of imperial benevolence.’ After all, he reasoned: Can one imagine that they would not be totally devoted to the astonishing man whose first acts of government,… by returning them to their families, their friends, their dearest habits, restored to them everything which had escaped the voracious system that preceded the glorious administrations of the First Consul and Emperor?70

It did not matter that the lull in hostilities engineered at Amiens lasted only fourteen months. That proved long enough for Bonaparte to convert the accolades showered on him in spring 1802 into a tighter grip on power, and he soon harnessed his reputation as an invincible warrior-­ turned-­beneficent peacemaker to make the case for lifetime, hereditary, and then imperial rule. His reliance upon sénatus-consultes to bypass legislative input and his use of carefully contrived acts of clemency to broadcast his imperial largesse became habitual features of Napoleonic governance going forth.71 By plebiscite and then another sénatus-consulte

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in early August 1802, Bonaparte cemented his position as First Consul for Life, and a few days later, an organic sénatus-consulte established the streamlined Constitution of Year X, which both bypassed the issue of emigration entirely and granted the executive new powers over a neutered legislature; Article X even formally confirmed the new quasi-monarch’s right to pardon. While the General Amnesty of 1802 dispensed with one of the French Revolution’s first laws of exception, the émigrés’ repatriation was only realized on Bonaparte’s terms. As a result, the ‘great return’ facilitated the Republic’s transformation into an authoritarian security state.

Notes 1. Howard Brown describes the Consulate’s ‘modern security state’ as ‘one whose legitimacy derived above all from restoring and preserving order’ after a decade of political volatility. Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 358. 2. See, for example, Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel (eds.), The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1999), which built on Donald Greer’s foundational The Incidence of the Emigration during the French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951). 3. Bonaparte announced a provisional amnesty for Vendéen fighters on 19 December 1799, and negotiated a truce with rebel leaders the following month. Emmanuel de Waresquiel, “Joseph Fouché et la question de l’amnistie des émigrés, 1799–1802,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 372 (April–June 2013): para. 4. 4. Patrice Gueniffey, Bonaparte, trans. Steven Rendall (London: Belknap Press, 2015), 713–714 and 929; Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life (New York: Scribner, 2004), 214, 490; and William Doyle, Aristocracy and its Enemies in the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 310–311. 5. Passed off as the translation of an anonymous English pamphlet, A Parallel among Caesar, Cromwell, Monck and Bonaparte was likely written by Louis de Fontanes at the behest of Lucien, who had copies delivered to every prefect. In addition to the scholars listed immediately above, see Thierry Lentz, “Vers le pouvoir héréditaire: le ‘Parallèle entre César, Cromwell, Monck et Bonaparte’ de Lucien Bonaparte,” Revue du Souvenir Napoléonien 431 (October–November, 2000), 3–6.

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6. Prefect Laumond, 21 Floréal an III (F Ie iii, Bas-Rhin, 7); as quoted by Marcel Marion, “Les Fugitifs Alsaciens sous la Révolution,” Revue Historique, 143 (Jan. 1923): 225. 7. Greer, Incidence of the Emigration, 19–20; and Patrice Higonnet, Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 279. 8. Antoine-Claire Thibaudeau, Mémoires (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1913), 35. 9. Ladan Boroumand, “Emigration and the Rights of Man: French Revolutionary Legislators Equivocate,” trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, Journal of Modern History 72 (March 2000): 68, 79, 93. 10. Thibaudeau, Mémoires, 34. 11. Art. 93, Constitution of Year VIII (23 Frimaire Year VIII/13 December 1799); Article 94 upholds the revolutionary property settlement. “The Constitution of Year III,” in Frank M. Anderson (ed.), The Constitutions and Other Select Documents Illustrative of the History of France, 1789–1901 (Minneapolis: H.W. Wilson, 1904). 12. See, for example, Eugène-François-Auguste Arnaud Vitrolles’ account of his illicit preparations in his Souvenirs autobiographiques d’un émigré, 1790–1800 (Paris: Émile-Paul Frères), 220. 13. Fouché to Bonaparte, 29 October 1800, Archives nationales [A.N.], AFIV 1043; as cited by Waresquiel, “Joseph Fouché et la question de l’amnistie,” para. 23, n. 37. 14. Castries, La Vie quotidienne des émigrés (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1966), 288. 15. Bonaparte to Abrial, July 1807, Correspondance générale, Vol. 3, No. 5551, 350. 16. Bonaparte arrived in Paris on 16 October; the emigration-themed meeting took place on the 17th. Cambacérès, Mémoires, Vol. 1, 431; as cited by Doyle, Aristocracy and its Enemies, 308. 17. Louis Madelin, Histoire du Consulat et de l’Empire, Vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1937), 301. 18. Marc-Antoine Jullien, Entretien politique sur la situation actuelle de la France (Paris: Léger, 1799), 71–72; as cited by Gueniffey, Bonaparte, 660, 914n.12. 19. Greer, Incidence of the Emigration, 104. 20. Interior Minister Chaptal’s description of Napoleon’s attitude upon assuming power; as cited by Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2015), 238. 21. Waresquiel, Fouché: les silences de la pieuvre (Paris: Fayard, 2014), 340. 22. As cited in Mansel, “From Coblenz to Hartwell: The Émigré Government and the European Powers, 1791–1814,” in The French Émigrés in Europe, 7. 23. Joseph Fouché, Memoirs of Joseph Fouché, Duke of Otranto, Vol. 1 (New York: Merrill and Baker, 1900), 147.

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24. Gueniffey, Bonaparte, 946n.101. 25. Frederic Masson, Napoléon et sa famille, Vol. 1 (Paris: Albin-Michel, 1926), 330–332. 26. Fouché, Memoirs, 144. 27. Madame de La Tour du Pin, Memoirs: Laughing and Dancing Our Way to the Precipice, trans. Felice Harcourt (London: Harvill Press, 1999), 342. 28. Décision du 13 Floréal an IX (3 mai 1801); as cited by Thierry Lentz, Le Grand Consulat, 1799–1804 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 333. 29. La Tour du Pin, Memoirs, 344. 30. Masson, Napoléon et sa famille, 333. 31. Greer, Incidence of the Emigration, 104–105. 32. La Tour du Pin, Memoirs, 344. 33. Ibid., 344–345. 34. Bonaparte to Abrial, 29 messidor VIII (18 juillet 1800), in Correspondance générale, Vol. 3, No. 5535, 343; and 3 Thermidor VIII (22 juillet 1800), No. 5551, 349. 35. Henri La Salle, Sur la Commission des émigrés (Paris: Librairie du Cercle-­ Social, 1800), 5n.1 and 11. 36. La Salle, Sur la Commission, 11. 37. Bonaparte, Correspondance générale, Vol. 3, no. 5535, 343–344. 38. Waresquiel, “Joseph Fouché et la question de l’amnistie,” para. 23. 39. Lentz, Le Grand Consulat, 332. 40. Excluded from the amnesty were women who had abandoned their families to emigrate, civil agitators, and anyone who had taken up arms against France or held positions in enemy governments. 41. See, for example, the arguments presented on behalf of ‘mothers and orphans’ victimized by ‘retroactive’ decrees in the Pétition de plusieurs femmes et enfans d’émigrés aux administrateurs du Département de la Seine Inférieure, Frimaire an VIII [November 1799], and the Avis d’administration central du Département de la Seine-Inférieure, Rouen, le 9 Frimaire an VIII [30 November 1799]. 42. Greer, Incidence of the Emigration, 105; and Jennifer Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789– 1830 (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2005), 117. 43. A.N., AF/IV 1456, pp. 375, 363–366. 44. Greer, Incidence of the Emigration, 10. 45. A.N., AF/IV 1546, pp. 104–109. 46. As quoted by Marion, “Les Fugitifs Alsaciens,” 225. 47. Mossima Boffa, “Émigrés,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 330.

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48. Brown, Ending the French Revolution, 344. 49. Emigration critics also invoked the Penal Code’s eschewal of banishment because its permanence undercut a punishment’s rehabilitative potential. Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (New York: Norton, 1994), 356–357. 50. Claude-Ambroise Régnier, Discours des orateurs du gouvernement (Paris: L’Imprimerie du Dépot des Lois, 1802), 7. 51. See Gueniffey, Bonaparte, 279, 946 n.101. 52. Bulletin des lois de la République, 3eme série, t. VI, no. 178, 107–112 (Paris: Imprimerie de la République, X/1802). 53. Brown, Ending the French Revolution, 333. 54. Lentz, Le Grand Consulat, 334. 55. Castries, La Vie quotidienne, 266. 56. La Salle, Sur la Commission des émigrés, 8. 57. Pierre Serna, “Introduction—War and Republic: Dangerous Liaisons,” in Serna, Antonio De Francesco, and Judith A.  Miller (eds.), Republics at War, 1776–1840: Revolutions, Conflicts, and Geopolitics in Europe and the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 12. 58. Sénatus-Consulte, relatif à l’amnistie accordée pour fait d’émigration, du 6 Floréal an X de la République française, une et indivisible (26 April 1802). 59. Colin Jones, “9 Thermidor: Cinderella among Revolutionary Journées,” French Historical Studies 38:1 (February 2015): 21. 60. Recueil général des lois, décrets, ordonnances, etc: depuis le mois de juin 1789 jusqu’au mois d’août 1830, Vol. 9 (Paris: P. Dupont, 1839), 288. 61. Brown, Ending the Revolution, 344, 40. 62. Sénatus-Consulte, relatif à l’amnistie accordée pour fait d’émigration (26 April 1802). 63. Marquis de Bouthillier, “Return from the Émigré Armies,” in Napoleon, Symbol for an Age: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Rafe Blaufarb (Boston: Bedford, 2008), 67–68. 64. La Tour du Pin, Memoirs, 343. 65. Thibaudeau, Mémoires, 35. 66. Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life, 491 n. 19. 67. Ibid., 180. 68. See multiple examples in A.N., F/7/5796. 69. Ibid., pièce 78. 70. Prefect of the Vaucluse, “Report on Émigrés, 4 July 1805,” in Napoleon, Symbol for an Age, ed. Blaufarb, 69. 71. For examples of the latter, see Bruno Foucart and Jean Tulard, Les Clémences de Napoléon: l’image au service du mythe (Paris: Somogy Éditions d’Art, 2004).

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Bibliography Anderson, Frank M., ed. The Constitutions and Other Select Documents Illustrative of the History of France, 1789–1901. Minneapolis: H.W. Wilson, 1904. Avis d’administration centrale du Département de la Seine-Inférieure, Rouen. Le 9 Frimaire an VIII [30 November 1799]. Blaufarb, Rafe. Napoleon, Symbol for an Age: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford, 2008. Boffa, Mossima. “Émigrés.” In A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, edited by François Furet and Mona Ozouf, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 346–359. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Boisnard, Luc. “Les Émigrés sont de retour.” Revue du souvenir Napoléonien 423 (Jan. 2001): 21–30. Bonaparte, Napoléon. Correspondance générale. Volume 3. Edited by Thierry Lentz and Gabriel Madec. Paris: Fayard, 2004. Boroumand, Ladan. “Emigration and the Rights of Man: French Revolutionary Legislators Equivocate.” The Journal of Modern History 72.1 (March 2000): 67–108. Brown, Howard. Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Bulletin des lois de la République, 3eme série, t. VI, no. 178, 107–112. Paris: Imprimerie de la République, X/1802. Carpenter, Kirsty. “Emigration in Politics and Imaginations.” In The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution, edited by David Andress, 330–345. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. ——— and Philip Mansel, eds. The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution, 1791–1814. London: Macmillan, 1999. Castries, Duc de. La Vie quotidienne des émigrés. Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1966. Diesbach, Ghislain de. Histoire de l’émigration, 1789-1814. Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1998 (orig. 1795). Doyle, William. Aristocracy and its Enemies in the Age of Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Englund, Steven. Napoleon: A Political Life. New York: Scribner, 2004. Foucart, Bruno, and Jean Tulard, eds. Les Clémences de Napoléon: l’image au service du mythe. Paris: Somogy Éditions d’Art, 2004. Greer, Donald. The Incidence of the Emigration during the French Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951. Gueniffey, Patrice. Bonaparte. Translated by Steven Rendall. London: Belknap Press, 2015. Heuer, Jennifer N. The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2005. Higonnet, Patrice. Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

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Jones, Colin. “9 Thermidor: Cinderella among Revolutionary Journées.” French Historical Studies 38:1 (February 2015): 9–31. Jullien, Marc-Antoine. Entretien politique sur la situation actuelle de la France. Paris: Léger, 1799. La Salle, Henri. Sur la Commission des émigrés. Paris: Librairie du Cercle-­ Social, 1800. La Tour du Pin, Madame de. Memoirs: Laughing and Dancing Our Way to the Precipice. Translated by Felice Harcourt. London: Harvill Press, 1999. Lentz, Thierry. Le Grand Consulat, 1799–1804. Paris: Fayard, 1999. ———. “Vers le pouvoir héréditaire: le ‘Parallèle entre César, Cromwell, Monck et Bonaparte’ de Lucien Bonaparte.” Revue du souvenir Napoléonien 431 (Oct.Nov., 2000): 3–6. Madelin, Louis. Histoire du Consulat et de l’Empire. Volume 1. Paris: Hachette, 1937. Marion, Marcel. “Les Fugitifs Alsaciens sous la Révolution.” Revue Historique 143 (Jan. 1923): 210–228. Masson, Frédéric. Napoléon et sa famille. Volume I (1769–1802). 3rd edition. Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1897. Morieux, Renaud. The Channel: England, France and the Construction of a Maritime Border in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pétition de plusieurs femmes et enfans d’émigrés aux administrateurs du Département de la Seine Inférieure. Frimaire an VIII [November 1799]. Rance, Karine. “L’Historiographie de l’émigration.” In Les noblesses françaises dans l’Europe de la Révolution, edited by Philippe Bourdin, 355–368. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010. Recueil général des lois, décrets, ordonnances, etc: depuis le mois de juin 1789 jusqu’au mois d’août 1830. Volume 9. Paris: P. Dupont, 1839. Régnier, Claude-Ambroise. Discours des orateurs du gouvernement.  Paris: L’Imprimerie du Dépôt des Lois, 1802. Roberts, Andrew. Napoleon: A Life. New York: Penguin, 2015. Serna, Pierre, Antonio De Francesco, and Judith A. Miller, editors. Republics at War, 1776–1840: Revolutions, Conflicts, and Geopolitics in Europe and the Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Thibaudeau, Antoine-Claire. Mémoires. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1913. Waresquiel, Emmanuel de. Fouché: les silences de la pieuvre. Paris: Fayard, 2014. ———. “Joseph Fouché et la question de l’amnistie des émigrés, 1799-1802.” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 372 (April-June 2013): 105–120. Woloch, Isser. Napoleon and his Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2001. ———. The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994. Vitrolles, Eugène-François-Auguste Arnaud. Souvenirs autobiographiques d’un émigré, 1790–1800. Paris: Émile-Paul Frères, 1924.

CHAPTER 12

The Last Ditch: The French Émigré Clergy in Britain and the Concordat of 1801 Dominic Aidan Bellenger

The bequest of the French Revolution to the Catholic Church was a troubled one. The assumptions of a European Christian polity had been undermined. Secularism imagined a world where traditional religion was to play no part in government affairs and to lose any previously presumed influence in areas like education or public morals. Secularism had no time for the Christian priesthood and anti-clericalism had been part of the French revolutionary agenda as had, for a time, active dechristianisation. Liberalism, too, with its emphasis on liberty and equality, challenged traditional society and the place of religion within the State. The Church, dispossessed of surplus wealth and social status, was to be left to its own resources and, if needed, should be allowed to wither away. It responded by building up the ideological armoury of papalism. As the temporal power of the papacy faded away, its spiritual pretensions grew apace, culminating in 1870 with the declaration of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council. Among the Catholic faithful, the conspicuous suffering and prolonged exile of a succession of popes, including Pius VI (1775–99) and Pius VII (1800–23) during the French revolutionary period, gave this change of direction personal validation. D. A. Bellenger (*) Von Hugel Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK © The Author(s) 2019 L. Philip, J. Reboul (eds.), French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_12

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The word ‘Ultramontane’ began life as an adjective literally meaning ‘beyond the mountains’ (i.e. the Alps), which was first used in Italy to describe a pope or papal candidate who was not Italian. The term developed into something quite different: an Ultramontane viewpoint gradually became one which gave the pope a dominant role in Church affairs, and in France the epithet ultramontain became used in the eighteenth century to define those who favoured papal over royal authority in the governance of the Church, emphasising the pope’s universal immediate jurisdiction. In opposition to this view were those who were reluctant to look over the Alps for their leadership and were sometimes self-described as cisalpins. They argued for the inclusion of the Church within the authority of the State. Those who espoused this position were invariably (and not only in France) described as gallicans, because the French Church—the Gallican Church—in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular, while remaining in union with the pope, developed a strong national identity, with the monarch as its protector and effective head and its bishops as its principal and largely autonomous leaders. Various movements within the Church fine-tuned its character, most notably Jansenism, named after a theologian of the late Reformation period, which was notably critical of the Jesuits as centralising agents for papal authority and which encouraged a spirit of criticism and debate in French ecclesiastical society. The conflict between the two views of the Church was crucial to the debates surrounding the Napoleonic Concordat and no less relevant to the continuing ‘culture war’ in French society which was already implicit in the emigration. The ‘culture war’ reflected two contrasting value systems which were becoming increasingly in conflict: one traditional, Catholic, clerical, the other progressive, secular and anti-clerical. They were exemplified in the émigrés and those who regarded themselves as heirs of the Revolution. The republican separation of Church and State, the central part of laïcité in French republican opinion and the building blocks of a French counter-­ revolutionary tradition were all inferred in the many discussions and publications of the émigrés. What gave the debate an added piquancy was the fragility of the institution of the papacy itself. ‘The Roman Question’, referring to the temporal power of the pope, was not resolved until the Lateran Treaty of 1929, but from the Napoleonic era onwards the pope’s temporal hold was precarious; any critique from within the Church was perceived by the papal authorities as an attack on the pope himself. Whatever its weakness, the papacy took an elevated ideological line.

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This Ultramontanism was already suggested in the Concordat negotiated between the representatives of Napoleon and Pius VII. Napoleon was not seeking to increase papal influence but rather to harvest the residual religious feeling of the French. There was a perceived spiritual hunger which neither the Constitutional Church, born of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, nor the various revolutionary cults could satisfy. Popular religion and practices needed focus and order, and Napoleon, following his coup in 1799, realised that if they were harnessed his power could be increased and even legitimised. He looked towards the Catholic Church for its support. The Concordat was slow in its genesis. Although ratified in Rome on 15 August and in Paris on 10 September 1801, after a year of complex negotiations which saw the Church accepting both its loss of property and Napoleon’s legal status, it was not formally published until Easter Sunday (8 April) 1802. The surviving bishops of the Ancien Régime were neither involved nor consulted. They had been informed of the outlines of the Concordat by Charles Erskine (1738–1811), a papal diplomat, made cardinal in 1801, who was acting as an unaccredited papal agent in London. This gave the bishops the opportunity to have a series of meetings. Most of them were particularly upset by the inclusion of twelve former Constitutional Church bishops, chosen as part of the new French hierarchy. Compromise was not in their minds, even if it was central to those negotiating a deal between Napoleon and the pope. The Concordat was by its nature a pragmatic rebuilding of the French Church, or what remained of it after revolutionary depredation, which had been in a state of suspended animation since the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790. This had attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to marry the Church with the Revolution by nationalising it. The Concordat defined the status of the Roman Catholic Church in France as the ‘religion of the vast majority of the people’, confirmed the crucial role of the State in ecclesiastical government and appointments, and in theory ended the breach between Church and State in France.1 The suffering experienced by the Holy See was complemented by those of the émigré French clergy in the 1790s and strengthened their common resolve which was undermined by the Concordat which fomented discord and incomprehension among the French. Attachment to the Bourbon monarchy and the elaborate traditions and liberties of the Gallican Church had no place in the new compromise settlement. The solidarity of the exiled clergy in the British Isles, where the emigration was disproportionately clerical, was based on the supposedly immutable character of the

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French Church as it existed in the years before 1789, and this was the narrative that sustained their continued resistance. The clergy of all ranks were well received in Britain increasingly alarmed by the events in France and were becoming commonly perceived as victims of republicanism and sufferers for conscience’s sake. From this perspective neither their Catholicism nor their Frenchness seemed their defining characteristic, and this encouraged a generous series of subscriptions, which prevented the abject poverty that might otherwise have been their lot. In a decade—the 1790s—when the emigration was becoming a thorny political issue in the face of an unstable continental Europe, and the first Aliens’ Act was put into law, the supervision of the clergy by the government agencies was facilitated by the gradual movement away from voluntary assistance to government aid. Trusted individual émigrés assisted in this work. The financial support given by the British government was administered by the bishop of Saint-Pol-de Léon, Jean-François de La Marche (1729–1806), who had emerged as their leader. La Marche, one of the least politique of the exiled bishops, had an excellent reputation in his small and poor diocese in Brittany, where he was popularly known as the ‘potato’ bishop on account of his encouragement of agriculture. As his biographer suggested, he was a strong character, a ‘lutteur avant tout’, who had the good of his diocese and its priests at the top of his agenda; this was easily transferable to his new flock in Britain.2 The most senior of the French clergy in Britain by rank was Arthur-Richard Dillon (1721–1806), archbishop of Narbonne, who benefitted from his English family connections but was considered too worldly. Dillon’s knowledge of spoken English was an advantage as was his shrewd business sense, which brought him close to high office and inspired him as primate of Languedoc to invest heavily in his region’s local infrastructure, especially canals, even if it did not prevent him getting into serious personal debt through his addiction to gambling.3 He was well aware of his archiepiscopal status and continued, in reduced circumstances, his relaxed ecclesiastical lifestyle, but was quite prepared to defer to La Marche when it came to administrative detail and numerous meetings with lesser clergy. Other senior clergy drifted in and out of Britain, some of them compromised by their less-than-fervent opposition to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, attitudes towards which were regarded as a touchstone of orthodoxy and legitimacy. La Marche, one of the first to arrive in Britain, remained a constant presence. He was financially astute and personally devout and had established good political contacts not least with Edmund Burke, the most influential of

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anti-revolutionaries.4 Burke had made it his business to liaise with the French exiled bishops from their first arrival and owed his perspective on the Revolution to their counsel. He was the core of emigrant interchange of ideas, being influenced by them and in his turn influencing them in the creation of a vibrant conservative alternative to revolutionary change.5 Moreover, he was crucial in providing a conduit between the French clergy and Whitehall which made the provision of funds for the exiles much more acceptable, in an era of the small State, than it might otherwise have been. La Marche had issued a set of guidelines on appropriate behaviour and beliefs which provided a framework for the exiled clergy in the British Isles: decorum and gratitude were to be the clergy’s defining characteristics. His authority and integrity were unchallenged.6 The bishops of the Ancien Régime resident in Britain were ageing, their average age in 1789 had been sixty, but in 1801 they were still prepared to fight their corner.7 They realised that their influence was waning and that the absence of their pastors from France and the deconstruction of so much of the Church’s social structure was contributing to secularisation in both the emigration and in France.8 Personal faith and remembered rituals persisted across France but clericalised religion was in a fragile state. They were emboldened by the increasingly radical reconstruction of the Church planned by the Holy See and culminating in the papal bull Qui Christi Domini of 28 November 1801, which suppressed all the dioceses of the historic French Church, and by the Organic Articles of 6 April 1802 which tightened Napoleon’s grip on the contemporary French Church. It looked as if their whole world was disappearing and their traditional understanding of ecclesiology had been rejected. They came to believe that the Concordat was a papal act of betrayal and confirmation that the destinies of the French and Roman Churches were not necessarily compatible. Thirty-eight surviving bishops of the Ancien Régime rejected the Concordat and fourteen resident in London prepared a Mémoire to be presented to the pope, written in Latin and speedily translated into French. In its printed form it is a text of 106 pages dated 23 December 1801, published in London early in 1802.9 Although a work of controversy, it has a conciliatory tone. The bishops were men of educated sensibility and diplomatic nuance. They did not contest the pivotal place of the pope in ecclesial governance: ‘C’est Le Prince, le chef, le premier, le plus grand des apôtres; c’est le guide, le Pasteur, le président, l’orateur du collège apostolique.’ [That is (he, the Pope) is the Prince, the chief, the first, the greatest of the apostles; he is the guide, the shepherd, the president, the

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spokesman of the apostolic college].10 What is contested is the way in which this authority and ministry of the pope is exercised, arguing for a ‘collegial’ model of the Church in which bishops, all the bishops as successors of the apostles, exercise the fullness of apostolic authority, being entrusted with the ‘dépôt de la foi, du gouvernement de l’Église, de l’enseignement des fidèles’ [deposit of the faith, of the governance of the Church, and the teaching of the faith].11 Bishops, the Mémoire argued, hold their authority from Jesus Christ himself.12 In an age before episcopal retirement resignation was not seen as an option and although the French bishops had proffered their resignations as an attempt to preserve the unity of the Gallican Church in 1791 they were not accepted; they did not regard this as a precedent for the forced resignation of 1801, which they saw as an attack on the very heart of the Church. There was no doubt the signatories of the Mémoire would not resign.13 The common response of all the refractory bishops across the emigration was made clear in the Réclamations canoniques, dated 6 April 1803, and published in 1804 in London and Brussels.14 The fourteen London bishops received no concessions from the pope and were destined to remain in exile as ‘confessors of the faith’.15 The most junior of them, the bishop-elect of Moulins, Jean-Baptiste des Gallois de La Tour (1750–1820), archbishop of Bourges from 1817 to 1820, was the only one to take an active part in the post-Concordat Church.16 The archbishop of Narbonne, the bishops of Angoulême, Arras, Avranches, Lombez, Montpellier, Noyon, Périgueux, Rodez, Saint-Pol-de-Léon and Usez all died outside France, many of them laid to rest in St Pancras churchyard in London.17 The bishop of Nantes died in Paris in 1816—he had still been in Britain in 181418—as did the bishop of Vannes, the last survivor of the group, who died in 1829 after thirteen hidden years in France.19 Many of the memorialists were considered as dissident and were named by the Napoleonic authorities as unsuitable for promotion in the new order.20 The exiled bishops who accepted the new order were given sees but not returned to their former dioceses, which were all formally abolished. The last bishop of Lescar, Marc-Antoine de Noé (1724–1802), became bishop of Troyes for a few months before his death and the bishop of Comminges, Antoine Eustache, Baron d’Osmond (1754–1823) bishop of Nancy.21 Three very liberal and politique archbishops were also relocated. Jérôme Champion de Cicé (1735–1810) of Bordeaux was moved to Aix-en-Provence and François de Fontagnes (1744–1806) of Toulouse

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to Tours.22 The archbishop of Aix, one of the bishops whose political career had been ruined by the Revolution, Jean de Dieu-Raymond de Boisgelin (1732–1804) became archbishop of Tours and a cardinal—one of five Frenchmen elevated to the cardinalate in 1803—and preached at Napoleon’s coronation.23 Louis-Mathias de Barral (1741–1820), bishop of Troyes, who succeeded Boisgelin in Tours, was to be one of the most articulate supporters of the Concordat and an eloquent opponent of his erstwhile brother bishops in Britain.24 The memorialists attracted growing support in their continuing opposition. The depleted bishops received a powerful episcopal boost in the person of Alexandre de Lauzières de Thémines, bishop of Blois, who, having spent much of his exile in Spain, arrived in London in 1809.25 Thémines was a fearless defender of the episcopate.26 He had a magpie mind and although he had subscribers prepared to subsidise the publication of some works, his magnum opus, the autobiographical Considérations, remained unpublished.27 It was a prolonged meditation on the episcopal office which concluded that anyone, whether they be pope or emperor, who asked for the resignation of a bishop committed the sin of apostolicide.28 Thémines’ wide reading included many British authors and showed the way in which the exile influenced French writing and, in particular, underlined the Anglican model of the close connection between Church and king which was appealing to Gallican writers. The English Civil War, the Restoration settlement and the contemporary role of King George III were all examined and considered as pertinent to the contemporary state of affairs in France.29 Thémines lingered on until 1829 when, after years of excommunication, he was reconciled to the Church, the last of the dissident bishops to die.30 It was not the bishops but a group of lesser clergy who carried the anti-­ Concordatist argument up to the Bourbon Restoration and beyond. The émigré bishops, although well versed in the rhetoric of the political theology of pre-revolutionary France, were, with the exception of Lauzières de Thémines, not academic heavyweights, and it was left to other more articulate voices to take up their ideas and bring them to a wider audience. A significant movement known as Blanchardism was engendered which gave many of the exiled clergy in the British Isles an identity, a cause to unite them. It took its name from Pierre-Louis Blanchard (1758–1826), a curé from the Lisieux diocese and the author of numerous books and pamphlets—more distinguished by their prolixity than their elegance—published in London between 1800 and 1815.31 A Sorbonne-trained scholar,

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Blanchard had been professor of theology at his diocesan seminary before the Revolution. He returned briefly to France in 1814 with Napoleon’s first fall but thereafter lived permanently in Britain.32 François Gaschet (1749–1822), another Norman curé, considered the most vehement of the controversialists, and Pierre-Michel de Saint-Martin (1736–1818), who had taught theology at the Sorbonne, were significant writers on a similar theme to Blanchard’s.33 They proclaimed the immutable character of episcopal government and saw the combination of pope and Napoleon as the principal threat to the Church’s integrity. In his sixty-page Avis fraternels aux Ultramontains concordatistes (1809), Saint-Martin elegantly summarised what Blanchard took thousands to explain.34 The Blanchardist movement lacked leadership and its propagandists were prone to disagree on details, but it was resilient. Continuing exile hardened the position. Many of the exiled priests had returned to France in 1801–2 while peace between Britain and France was uneasily maintained. Those who remained included the small number who had found a home and employment in Britain and a larger number of those who held ultra views. The first decade of the nineteenth century witnessed the developing war between Britain and France which in its turn complicated the British perceptions of the remaining exiled clergy. National resentments and prejudices came to the surface and it required an unusual subtlety to distinguish between the French as enemies and the French clergy as enemies of Napoleon. A particular problem was within the English Catholic community and its leadership. In the 1790s, the vicars apostolic—missionary bishops without dioceses or cathedrals, drawn from plebeian rather than noble background—had managed the émigré clergy well, at least as long as the bishop of Saint-Pol-de-Léon could be relied upon as an honest broker, but with Blanchardism tensions reached breaking point. Under the influence of John Milner (1752–1826), the most belligerent of their number, the vicars apostolic were increasingly ultramontane and attempted to silence the dissidents. Like many of his fellow Catholic clergy in Britain, Milner had been educated in France and was well acquainted with the exiled French clergy while resident in Winchester. Despite his best efforts, it was as late as 1818 that an oath was imposed on all remaining French exiled priests in Britain, promising allegiance to the pope. William Poynter (1762–1827), vicar apostolic of the London District, was much involved in negotiations in France for the recovery of the confiscated property of the English colleges there and believed that there was ‘a heavy and general suspicion on the French Clergy in London of schismatical dispositions’,

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and that the formula of the oath gave ‘an opportunity of removing the suspicion’.35 Blanchard remained adamant that the French clergy in Britain were the ‘dernières colonnes’ [last columns] of the Church, its faithful remnant.36 Blanchardism remained a small movement and its backward-looking spirit did not attract new followers. Its central contentions that the episcopate was inviolate and that an unholy alliance between pope and emperor had attacked and put in peril the future of the Church seemed for a while to be given credence by the extraordinary clash between France and the Holy See in the years after the Concordat.37 The pamphlet war waged by the Blanchardists took place against a background in which the emperor was excommunicated and the pope imprisoned. To some it looked as if the last days were at hand and the ‘signs of the time’ suggested the ‘end days’. More prosaically, what seemed to be at issue was the pope’s temporal power and the very survival of the institution of the papacy: ‘on the lips of Napoleon the call for the pope to lay down his temporal authority and to rely solely on his spiritual authority had been blatant code for the enslavement of the papacy to French imperial ambitions’.38 The Blanchardists seeing spiritual rather than worldly power as the pope’s prerogative were, in this instance, prescient. The ultramontanism which was to prevail in the twentieth century had no temporal power beyond the walls of the Vatican but was dependent on faith alone. Britain, and specifically London, was the centre of articulate opposition to the Concordat rather than any other émigré centre for a variety of reasons. The presence of the largest number of bishops in any country of exile was crucial but so, too, was the unique concentration of lesser clergy who not only provided foot soldiers for the Church’s cause but a pool of theological learning and writing skills. The existence of a mature publishing culture was also significant. London provided the lion’s share of émigré publishers, journals and bookshops. The British government continued its moral, political and financial support of the émigrés. Other émigré centres fell victim to the expanding empire of Napoleon so that Britain, by the time of Napoleon’s fall, gave refuge to most of the surviving émigré leaders including Louis XVIII. In Britain Blanchardism faded away, but its ideas lingered in a ‘Petite Église’ in parts of France. This ‘Église’ was a lay movement of independent congregations who continued to reject the Concordat and were particularly numerous in areas like the Vendée where counter-revolutionary ideas predominated. The members of this sect lived a devout and

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­ isciplined life outside the sacraments of the Catholic Church. They were d inward looking and did not seek converts or recruits. They had no bishops and, after the 1840s, no priests. In the 1820s as many as 20,000 professed membership of the group but as the numbers of families involved declined, the Église became very select. The adherents were deeply traditional in their practices and to some extent were the heirs of the pre-revolutionary Church and its exiled clergy.39 It would be too simple to show a direct connection between Blanchardism, the Petite Église, and the contemporary schism of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1905–91) and his followers who call into question papal authority.40 The nuances of the influences on the development of the French Church are labyrinthine. Lefebvre, a devoted Frenchman, was no narrow Gallican. Indeed, his disagreement with the papacy was more about the papacy not being papal enough. In the complex background to the emergence of the radical Catholic right in France, Ultramontanism was as important, or more so, than the heroic Gallican survivalism of the Blanchardists. The most influential of all the French exiled writers in Britain was probably Augustin Barruel (1741–1820), a Jesuit propagandist who had a profound influence on the development of conspiracy theory, viewing the papacy as the instrument of the renewal of the French Church and the Concordat as the providential moment.41 More poetically, François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), who had rediscovered his faith in exile, saw in the resurgence of the papacy’s spiritual role an opportunity for growth and evangelisation.42 On 11 June 1817, a new Concordat was negotiated between the restored Bourbons and the Holy See. The chief negotiator on the papal side was the formidable Cardinal Ercole Consalvi (1757–1824) who had also taken part in the 1801 agreement. Most of what had been agreed in 1801 was repeated. The only concession to the Ancien Régime bishops was the resurrection of some of the suppressed sees of the Napoleonic version. The 1801 Concordat had effectively been made definitive. The opposition of the bishops seemed to have had little impact. The bishops’ influence, indeed, has been a small one. The French right since the French Revolution has been characterised by a monarchical, religious and paternalistic framework, which has much in common with the thinking of the bishops. Yet, the mindset of the bishops was one formed by an elitist social background and by a particular ecclesiology and theology which would mean little to the followers of Action Française.43 Gallicanism is often identified as the alternative to Ultramontanism but the Gallican Church,

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as defined in the 1682 ‘Declarationes Cleri Gallicani’, sanctified a particular kind of religious Frenchness which elevated the French State but also proclaimed the centrality of personal sanctification. That century of Church life ended with the French Revolution. It was the impact of the emigration on the leaders of the Church which was formative in defining dissident ideologies and moving the Gallican Church from its eighteenthto its nineteenth-century priorities. The exiled bishops, together with the lesser clergy, benefitted from the capital of this fallen Church. The bishops, in particular, rediscovered their spirituality and began to understand the force of soft power. Such power has little appeal to the hard right. It is, however, exactly what the bishops were able to exercise.

Notes 1. For the Concordat see Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France 1780–1804 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 316–51 and Owen Hufton, ‘The Reconstruction of a Church, 1796–1801’, in Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Regional and Social History, 1794–1815, G. Lewis and C. Lucas, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 21–52. See also Jean-­Pierre Chantin, ‘Anticoncordataires ou Petite Eglise? Les Oppositions religieuses à la Loi du 18 germinal an X’, Chrétiens et sociétés 10 (2003): 95–107. 2. Louis Kerbiriou, Jean-François de La Marche, évêque-comte de Léon, 1729– 1806 (Paris and Quimper: La Goaziou, 1924), 356. La Marche came to Britain in 1791: see Nigel Aston, The End of an Elite: The French Bishops and the Coming of the Revolution 1786–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 281. 3. For Dillon see ‘Arthur-Richard Dillon’, Bulletin de la Commission Archéologique et Littéraire de Narbonne, 51 (2008). See also Nigel Aston, ‘Dillon, Arthur Richard (1721–1806), Archbishop of Narbonne and Émigré Leader’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (2003, September 23). Accessed 6 August 2018, http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb9780198614128-e-7654. See also Dominic Aidan Bellenger, Fearless Resting Place (Bath: Downside Abbey Press, 2016), 85–95. CharlesMaurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), made bishop of Autun in 1789, one of the most colourful figures of his time and the subject of many biographies, was in exile in London on and off in the 1790s, but was an excommunicate. He was one of the negotiators of the Concordat on behalf of Napoleon. His excommunication was lifted in 1802 and he was laicised: see Alan Sked, ‘Talleyrand and England, 1792–1838: a Reinterpretation’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 17 (2006): 647–64.

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4. See Juliette Reboul’s chapter with reference to E. Burke in British private libraries, in Chap. 6. 5. Kirsty Carpenter’s develops for example the details of the collaboration between the French clergy and Burke in running the Penn school for émigrés boys in Chap. 5. 6. F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, vol. 2, 1784–1797 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 431–32. See also Colin Lucas, ‘Edmund Burke and the Émigrés’, in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 3. The Transformation of Political Culture 1789–1848, eds. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, (Oxford: Pergamon, 1990), 101–30. Juliette Reboul discusses regulation of English and French identities in French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 82–3. 7. Jean-François de La Marche, Lettre de M. l’évêque de Léon aux ecclésiastiques français en Angleterre (London, 1793). 8. Bernard Plongeron, La Vie quotidienne du clergé français au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1974), 92. 9. Kirsty Carpenter, ‘Secularization by Stealth? Émigrés in Britain during the French Revolution’, in The French Revolution and Religion in a Global Perspective: Freedom and Faith, eds. Bryan Banks and Erica Johnson, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 73–94. 10. Mémoire des évêques français (London, 1802). 11. Mémoire des évêques français, 10. 12. Ibid., 20. 13. Ibid., 28. 14. Ibid., 59. 15. Ibid., 106. For the bishops’ careers see Jean Armand, Les Évêques et archévêques de France depuis 1682 jusqu’à 1801 (Paris: A Picard, 1891) and the Catholic Hierarchy website: http://www.catholic-hierarchy. org/. [Accessed 6 August 2018]. An overview has been provided by John Mc Manners in the first volume of his Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: The Clerical Establishment and its Social Ramifications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and in ‘Aristocratic Vocations: French Bishops of the Eighteenth Century’, Studies in Church History 15 (1978): 305–25. For Dillon and La Marche see notes 2 and 3 above. The other bishops, all of aristocratic lineage and all resident in London, were in other respects varied. Philippe-François d’Albignac de Castlenau (1742–1814), bishop of Angoulême from 1784 and a delegate at the States General in 1789, spent a long and continuous exile in London, from 1791 to 1814. Louis-François-Marc-Hilaire de Conzié (1732–1805) became bishop of Saint-Omer in 1766 and was translated to Arras in 1769. He declined the offer of the archbishopric of

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Tours, which went to his brother. He acted as the chaplain to the exiled Prince of Condé (1739–1818) and came with him to Britain in 1800: see papers in Archives Nationales, Paris, T221, Papiers Conzié. PierreAugustin Godard de Belbeuf (1730–1808), bishop of Avranches from 1774, had a busy episcopate and a quiet exile: see Abbé Deschamps du Manoir, ‘Mgr Godart de Belbeuf, dernier évêque d’Avranches, et son épiscopat’, Mémoires de la société d’archéologie, de littérature, sciences et arts d’Avranches (1873): 399–438. Alexandre-Henri de Chauvigny de Blot (1741–1805), bishop of Lombez from 1787, came to Britain via Italy. Joseph-François de Malide (1730–1812), bishop of Avranches from 1766 and of Montpellier from 1774, was buried at St Pancras. Louis-André Grimaldi d’Antibes (1736–1804), of the house of Grimaldi of Monaco, became bishop of Le Mans in 1767 and of Noyon in 1777. He ordained Talleyrand to the priesthood and consecrated him as a bishop. Grimaldi was probably the most courtly of the prelates, if not the most devout. Emmanuel-­Louis de Grossoles de Flamerens (1736–1815) was, like La Marche, a former army officer and was bishop of Cornouaille (Quimper) in 1772, before translation to Périgeux the following year. Charles Séignely-Colbert de Castle-Hill (1735–1813)—born into the Cuthbert family of Castle Hill, Inverness, Scotland—bishop of Rodez from 1781, was a notable opponent of the Civil Constitution: in his area of Aveyron most of the clergy remained solidly refractory and after the Concordat the Petite Église was particularly strong there. Henri-BenoîtJules de Béthizy de Mézières (1744–1817) came to London after initial exile in Brussels, Germany and the Netherlands. He was in Paris in 1814– 1817 but returned to London where he died and was buried at St Pancras, next to Malide of Montpellier. 16. La Tour, having acted as almoner to exiled royalty in Trieste, was active pastorally in the years after the Concordat. He served as chaplain to the French prisoners of war at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire from 1807 to 1814, with a government stipend and a servant. See Paul Chamberlain, The Napoleonic Prison of Norman Cross (Stroud: History Press, 2018), 106–7. 17. Phillip Emery and Kevin Wooldridge, St Pancras Burial Ground (London: Gifford Monographs, 2011). Godart de Belbeuf, whose coffin breastplate survives, was reburied in Avranches in 2009: Emery and Wooldridge, St Pancras Burial Ground, 106, 210. Arthur Dillon, many of whose relatives had been interred at St Pancras, was exhumed and his remains translated with great ceremony to his cathedral at Narbonne in 2007: ibid., 103–5, 210. La Marche’s remains were returned to Léon in 1868 where there is a magnificent marble tomb and effigy by Louis-Léon Cugnot (1835–94): ibid., 195.

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18. La Laurencie had been a persistent opponent of both the Civil Constitution and the Concordat and returned to France without office in 1814: Aston, The End of an Elite, 280. 19. Amelot, as a young bishop—consecrated by Boisgelin in 1774—was one of the most determined episcopal critics of the Revolution. He was first exiled to Switzerland but came to Britain intending to go on the royalist invasion of Quiberon in 1795: Aston, The End of an Elite, 281. The failed Quiberon expedition cost the life of the bishop of Dol, Urbain-René de Hercé (1726–1795): see Charles Robert, Urbain de Hercé, dernier évêque et comte de Dol (Paris: Victor Retaux, 1900). 20. Archives Nationales, Paris, AF IV 1044. Rapports du ministre de l’intérieur, ans VII–XII. Dossier 1. 21. Noé had been a monarchical loyalist during the Revolution but accepted the Concordat. He came to Britain via Spain: Aston, The End of an Elite, 271. Osmond was born in Haiti of Norman parents. He succeeded his uncle to become the last bishop of Comminges. He was bishop of Nancy from 1802 to 1823, although he spent the years 1811–14 in Florence as an intruded Napoleonic archbishop. For the Florentine context see Michael Broers, Politics and Religion in Napoleonic Italy (London: Routledge, 2004). 22. Jérôme-Marie Champion de Cicé, a Breton, became bishop of Rodez in 1770 and was moved to Bordeaux in 1781. He was keeper of the seals for Louis XVI in 1789. Having accepted the Concordat he was quickly installed in Aix-en-Provence. He published a letter to his diocesans in Bordeaux in 1801 justifying his resignation. His brother Jean-Baptiste (1725–1805) was bishop of Auxerre before the Revolution and died in exile in Saxony: see François Cadilhon, ‘Jérôme-Marie Champion de Cicé: Vire en archevêque à la fin du XVIIIe siècle’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 202 (1993): 47–62. Like Champion, Fontagnes benefitted from the friendship and patronage of the finance minister Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne (1727–1794), later briefly a cardinal, who accepted the Civil Constitution and repudiated the Church. He died in prison. Fontagnes was successively bishop of Nancy (1783), archbishop of Bourges (1787) and archbishop of Toulouse (1788). 23. Boisgelin, a Breton by birth, was a scholarly administrator whose ‘Exposition des principes sur la constitution du clergé’, written in response to the Civil Constitution, was signed by all but four of the French episcopate. He became bishop of Lavaur in 1764 and archbishop of Aix-en -Provence in 1770. In London he was viewed as a politique by many of his colleagues. Burke, who had befriended Boisgelin, was warned by Rougane, a curé from the Auvergne, that the archbishop had been willing to support revolutionary legislation: see Nigel Aston, ‘Burke, Christianity, and the

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British State’, in Religious Change in Europe 1650–1914, ed. N.  Aston, (Oxford, 1997), 184–211, at 203n. He preached at Napoleon’s coronation: see E.  Lavaquery, Le Cardinal de Boisgelin (1732–1804), 2 vols. (Paris, 1920). 24. Barral, bishop of Troyes, appointed in 1791, emigrated to London via Switzerland. He was appointed to Meaux in 1802 and translated to Tours in 1805. An enthusiastic supporter of Napoleon, he preached at the Empress Josephine’s funeral. He wrote a spirited defence of Gallican liberties and an attack on the idea of papal infallibility published posthumously: Louis Barral, Défense des libertés de l’église gallicane (Paris, 1817). 25. Alexandre-Amédée-François-Adon-Anne-Louis-Joseph de Lauzières de Thémines (1742–1829), bishop of Blois, published a pastoral letter in 1810 and a collection of letters in 1811, both in London. His manuscript ‘Considérations’, in various redactions, is preserved in the Downside Abbey Archives (DAA). Thémines was an eloquent orator and devout despite a lavish lifestyle in Paris before the Revolution. His ‘constitutional’ successor at Blois was Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire (1750–1831), a leading advocate for the abolition of slavery and a fierce anti-monarchist who, as an opponent of Napoleon, was in London around 1810. Thémines was one of several late-arrival bishops in London. They included AlexandreAngélique de Talleyrand-Périgord (1736–1821), archbishop of Reims from 1777 and uncle of the more famous Talleyrand, who came to Britain with the future Louis XVIII in 1808. He did not resign his see until 1816 although he died as a cardinal and archbishop of Paris. The bishop of Boulogne, Jean-René Asseline (1742–1813), also came with the king, having previously been exiled in Münster. The bishop of Aire, SebastianCharles-Philibert de Cahuzac de Caux (1745–1817), and more surprisingly the bishop of Tarbes, François de Montagnac (1744–1806?), who was said to have died in Portugal, arrived about 1809: see Bernard Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, vol. 1 (London, 1911), 94. Ward quotes the contemporary diary of Bishop John Douglass for 11 March 1809 on Thémines: ‘The Bishop showed himself too warm in his observations and reasonings, seemed to require from me an obsequious deference to his opinions, and let fall some things which appeared to me pert or petulant and threatening.’ 26. Dominic Aidan Bellenger, The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after 1789 (Bath: Downside Abbey Press, 1986), 121. 27. Thémines’ financial affairs emerge in a Probate Lawsuit (1830)—Thomas de Merinville and Bishop de Thémines, ‘formerly of Edgware Road’—in the National Archives in Kew (PROB 18/124/42). Another document (dated 1827) refers to a trust intended to furnish funds for a publication of 1803 (TS 11/924/3246).

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28. DAA 717: ‘Considérations’, iii, 131. 29. Ibid., 715: ‘Letter to the King’, 15 March 1815. 30. Alongside Thémines stood for some years the bishop of La Rochelle, JeanCharles de Coucy (1746–1824), who resigned in 1816 and died as archbishop of Reims. 31. For the dissemination of Blanchardism, especially by means of émigré journals, and its critical impact on anti-Bonapartist feelings, see Simon Burrows, French Exile Journalism and European Politics 1792–1814 (Woodbridge, 2000), 190–96. The exile journal Ambigu lost interest in the religious policy of Napoleon: ‘By 1814 the religious issue had been reduced to an irrelevance and all but fizzled out’ (Burrows, 196). A full bibliography of Blanchard is provided by Bruno Gazave in his unpublished ‘mémoire de maitrise’: ‘Les Ouvrages imprimés des ecclésiastiques français exiles en Grande-Bretagne (1791–1815)’ (Unpublished Master diss., Université Paris IV, 1987), 144–47. Blanchard was probably the most prolific clerical writer of the emigration, outstripping the much more widely read Barruel. 32. Bellenger, The French Exiled Clergy, 119. 33. Gazave, ‘Les Ouvrages imprimés’, 88–123. 34. Ibid., 161. Saint-Martin was a vicar general of Thémines of Blois. He was one of seven clerics whose written support of Blanchard in 1808 caused difficulties with Bishop Douglas: see Ward, Emancipation, 92. 35. Archives of the Archbishop of Westminster, London, Bishop Poynter’s Papers, A63 Vicars General, Poynter to Hodgson, 30 November 1818. 36. Pierre-Louis Blanchard, Réponse à une brochure (London, 1816), 95. 37. Geoffrey Ellis, ‘Religion according to Napoleon: The Limitations of Pragmatism’, in Aston, Religious Change, 235–55. 38. Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners (London, 1997), 214. 39. Auguste Billaud, La Petite Église dans la Vendée et les Deux-Sèvres (1800– 1830), (Paris, 1962). 40. William D. Dinges, ‘Roman Catholic Traditionalism’, in Fundamentalisms Observed, eds. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, (Chicago, 1991), 66–101. 41. Augustin Barruel, Du Pape et ses droits religieux à l’occasion du Concordat (Paris, 1803). 42. The publication of Chateaubriand’s masterpiece, Génie du Christianisme, which evoked the glory days of the Medieval Church and its heritage and provided a powerful argument for an aesthetic and romantic Catholicism pre-dating the ‘grand siècle’ of the Gallican Church, as well as a critique of the Revolution and the Enlightenment, assisted the Concordat’s work. The Génie’s first edition appeared in 1802, two years after Chateaubriand’s return from Britain. 43. Eugen Webber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-­ century France, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962).

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Bibliography Archival Sources Archives of the Archbishop of Westminster, London Archives Nationales, Paris Downside Abbey Archives, Bath, Great Britain Public Record Office, National Archives, London

Printed Sources Barral, Louis. Défence des libertés de l’Église gallicane. Paris, 1817. Barruel, Augustin. Du Pape et ses droits religieux à l’occasion du Concordat. Paris, 1803. Blanchard, Pierre-Louis. Réponse à sa brochure. London, 1816. La Marche, Jean-François de. Lettre de M. l’évêque de Léon aux ecclésiastiques français en Angleterre. London, 1793. Mémoire des évêquesfrançais. London, 1802. Saint-Martin, Pierre-Michel de. Avis fraternels aux ultramontains concordatistes. London, 1809.

Secondary Works Armand, Jean. Les Évêques et archevêques de France depuis 1682 jusqu’à 1801. Paris: A. Picard, 1891. Aston, Nigel. The End of an Elite: The French Bishops and the Coming of the Revolution, 1786–1790. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———, ‘Burke, Christianity and the British State’. In Religious Change in Europe 1651–1914, edited by Nigel Aston. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ———, Religion and Revolution in France 1790–1804. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Bellenger, Dominic Aidan. The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after 1789. Bath: Downside Abbey Press, 1986. ———, Fearless Resting Place. Bath: Downside Abbey Press, 2016. Billaud, Augustin. La Petite Église dans la Vendée et les Deux-Sèvres (1800– 1830).Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1962. Broers, Michael. Politics and Religion in Napoleonic Italy. London: Routledge, 2004. Bulletin de la Commission Archéologique et Littéraire de Narbonne. Narbonne, 2008. Burrows, Simon. French Exile Journalism and European Politics 1792–1814. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2000.

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Cadilhon, François. ‘Jérôme-Marie Champion de Cicé: Vire en archevêque à la fin du XVIIIe siècle’. Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 202 (1993): 47–62. Carpenter, Kirsty. ‘Secularization by Stealth? Émigrés in Britain during the French Revolution’. In The French Revolution and Religion in a Global Perspective: Freedom and Faith, edited by B.  Banks and E.  Johnson. London: Palgrave, 2017. Chamberlain, Paul. The Napoleonic Prison of Norman Cross. Stroud: History Press, 2018. Chantin, Jean-Pierre. ‘Anticoncordataires ou Petite Église? Les Oppositions religieuses à la Loi du 18 Germinal an X’. Chrétiens et Sociétés, 10 (2003): 95–107. Deschamps du Manoir, Joseph. ‘MgrGodart de Belbeuf, dernierévêque d’Avranches, et son épiscopat’. In Mémoires de la société d’archéologie, de littérature, sciènces et arts d’Avranches, 399–438. Avranches, 1873. Dinges, William D. ‘Roman Catholic Traditionalism’. In Fundamentalism Observed, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991. Duffy, Eamon. Saints and Sinners. London: Yale, 1997. Ellis, Geoffrey. ‘Religion according to Napoleon: The Limits of Pragmatism’. In Religious Change in Europe 1659–1914, edited by Nigel Aston. 235–255. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Emery, Philip and Wooldridge, Kevin. St Pancras Burial Ground. London: Gifford Monographs, 2011. Gazave, Bruno. ‘Les Ouvrages imprimés des ecclésiastiques français exilés en Grande-Bretagne (1791–1815)’. Unpublished Masters diss. Paris IV, 1987. Hufton, Olwen. ‘The Reconstruction of a Church, 1796–1801’. In Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Legal and Social History, 1794–1814, edited by G. Lewis and C. Lucas. 21–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Kerbiriou, Louis. Jean-François de La Marche, évêque-comte de Léon, 1728–1806. Paris and Quimper: La Goaziou, 1924. Lavaquery, E. Le Cardinal de Boisgelin (1732–1804). 2 vols. Paris: Plongeron Nourrit, 1920. Lock, F.P. Edmund Burke. vol. 2. 1784–1797. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Lucas, Colin. ‘Edmund Burke and the Émigrés’. In The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture 3. The Transformation of Political Culture 1789–1848, edited by Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf. Oxford: Pergamon, 1990. McManners, John. ‘Aristocratic Vocations: French Bishops of the Eighteenth Century’. Studies in Church History, 15 (1977): 305–25. ———, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France. Vol. 1: The Clerical Establishment and its Social Ramifications. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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Plongeron, Bernard. La Vie quotidienne du clergé français au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Hachette, 1974. Robert, Charles. Urbain de Hercé, dernier évêque et Comte de Dol. Paris: Victor Retaux, 1900. Reboul, Juliette. French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution. London: Palgrave, 2017. Sked, Alan. ‘Talleyrand and England, 1792–1838: a Reinterpretation’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 16 (2006): 647–64. Ward, Bernard. The Eve of Catholic Emancipation. vol. 1. London: Longman, 1911. Webber, Eugen. Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962.

Websites Catholic Hierarchy. www.catholic-hierarchy.org/ [Accessed 6 August 2018] ODNB. www.oxforddnb.com/ [Accessed 6 August 2018]

CHAPTER 13

The Return of the Emigrés: Bordeaux, 12 March 1814 Philip Mansel

The entry of the Duc d’Angoulême into Bordeaux on 12 March 1814, amid applauding crowds, three weeks before the deposition of Napoleon I in Paris, was not only a rare success for the émigré government of Louis XVIII but also the only time in French history that a change of regime started in a provincial city. It suggests that the history of cities and diasporas can be as important as national histories. Louis XVIII later called it ‘the happiest event of my life’.1 On 29 September 1820, he named the heir to his throne, the posthumous son of his murdered nephew the Duc de Berry, not—like previous Bourbon heirs—Duc de Bretagne, or de Bourgogne, but Duc de Bordeaux.2 The economic factors behind Bordeaux’s welcome to Angoulême were confirmed by the words on a banner at a reception at the Chambre de Commerce in Bordeaux to honour the birth: ‘illo duce, quo non commercium?’ [‘With him as Duke, where will trade not reach?’].3 In the eighteenth century, thanks above all to the sugar, slave and wine trades with the Caribbean, England and the Baltic, Bordeaux had become the first port of France. The splendour of the quays and the Place Royale,

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constructed in 1743–1747, and of the Grand Théâtre from 1773 to 1780, is a tribute to its prosperity. The English economist Arthur Young wrote in 1787: ‘much as I had read and heard of the commerce, wealth and magnificence of this city, they greatly surpassed my expectations … the theatre … is by far the most magnificent in France. At Bordeaux they think it [the French commercial treaty of 1786 with England] a wise measure that tends equally to the benefit of both countries’.4 His words help explain the popularity of the Bourbons in Bordeaux in 1814. They were more than a dynasty. They were symbols of peace and prosperity. Bordeaux was also distinguished by the number and prominence of foreign merchants, often of English or Irish extraction, and sometimes Protestants. Some names are still famous in the wine trade: Hennessy, MacCarthy, Lynch.5 Bordeaux belonged to France, but also to Europe and the Atlantic. For Bordeaux as for many other French cities, the revolution was an economic catastrophe. The population fell from 100,000 to 60,000. A third of the houses were empty. The foreigners left. After 1806 Napoleon’s continental blockade worsened the situation. The French economy, and above all French ports, entered into a slump.6 Bordeaux was ready for change. In preparing the royalist journée of 12 March 1814, the three key characters were an émigré, the Duc d’Angoulême, nephew of Louis XVIII; a Bordelais and former émigré, Count Lynch; and a British general, the Duke of Wellington. Born in 1775, elder son of the Comte d’Artois, Angoulême had fought in émigré forces from 1792 until 1801. In 1795 he was serving in the hussards de Choiseul. In 1797, he commanded the Régiment noble à cheval in the Armée de Condé.7 At the exiled court of his uncle Louis XVIII at Mitau in Courland (now Latvia) in June 1799, he married his first cousin, the daughter of Louis XVI Marie Thérèse Charlotte. Then he returned to the Armée de Condé to command the Régiment noble à cheval again during 1800–1801.8 After the dissolution of the Armée de Condé, he shared the exile of Louis XVIII. From 1807, they lived in England, generously pensioned by the British government, which kept the Bourbons in reserve as a weapon against Napoleon. Almost his entire life had been spent outside France. Showing that the emigration was not a monolith but a diaspora in constant evolution, by 1804 he had become a moderate. He supported the grant of nobility to all officers; recognition of the sale of the biens nationaux; a general amnesty; the abolition of conscription; and a ‘rien qui dénote la haine ou la vengeance’ [‘nothing which denotes hatred or vengeance’].9

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The second key figure was Wellington. Partly educated before 1789 at the Ecole royale militaire d’Angers, he spoke French and knew how to avoid the unpopularity normally attached to foreign invaders. From the moment the British army, victorious from the Peninsular war, entered France on 31 October 1813, it rarely pillaged and always paid for supplies. Wellington wrote: ‘the French exert themselves to get us intelligence. In no part of Spain have we been better, I might say so well, received.’10 Count Lynch is the least known of the three. Of Irish and Jacobite origin, he was a rich landowner and former Président at the Parlement de Bordeaux. Imprisoned under the Terror, briefly an émigré in London, he had been appointed mayor of Bordeaux in 1808. His royalism was reinforced by the frequentation of royalists in Paris, by the degradation of the French economy, and by his detestation of Napoleon’s despotism.11 Filled with the ‘sacred fire of religion and loyalty’, Lynch would consider Louis XVIII, as he wrote in 1814, ‘the image of the divinity on Earth’.12 The entry of the Duc d’Angoulême into Bordeaux on 12 March 1814 teaches distrust of nationalist narratives and official documents. Until the deposition of Napoleon by the Senate on 2 April, Wellington frequently, and sometimes harshly, denied all commitment to the Bourbons.13 In London the official policy of the government was, with its allies, to make peace with Napoleon. Ministers would later claim that the Bourbons had left England against their consent. The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Castlereagh was present at the congress of Châtillon between the allies and the French Empire from 7 February to 11 March. The Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Bathurst had written to Wellington on 18 January that towards the Bourbons there was ‘no engagement whatsoever on the part of this country’.14 But these were letters written to be shown to Britain’s allies or to the Whig opposition in parliament; and in order to be able to drop the Bourbons with good conscience if events turned against them. The British government was playing a double game, a metaphor it often used. In a private letter to Castlereagh, the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool wrote of ‘the Bourbon game’.15 From the Foreign Office, Edward Cook also wrote to Castlereagh, after Bordeaux had declared for the Bourbons: ‘I have no doubt now that, were the whole game played, it would succeed … will you send to Monsieur?’16 The restoration of the Bourbons had been a secret ‘game’ of the British government, and the Prince of Wales (later George IV), at least since the arrival of the Comte d’Artois in London in 1799 and his first meetings

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with William Pitt. Only their restoration, believed Pitt and his colleagues, would restore the political balance in Europe and return France to its frontiers of 1789. On 19 June 1811, the entire French royal family, including Louis XVIII, had been the guests of honour of the Prince Regent at the stupendous party with which he inaugurated his regency. The British government helped finance the distribution of Louis XVIII’s 1813 declaration of Hartwell. Castlereagh had influenced its content in secret meetings with the king’s confidential advisor, and Grand Maître de la Garde-robe, another émigré former officer in the Armée de Condé, the Comte de Blacas.17 Liverpool and Castlereagh, like their predecessors, often saw Artois in London, and heard him renew his promises to return to the French frontiers of 1789.18 From the moment of his entry into France, Wellington utilized local royalists and former émigrés as sources of information. For example, Monsieur Mailhos, a Bordeaux royalist, came to his headquarters to advise him about the situation inside Bordeaux in December 1813. To encourage the arrival of a Bourbon in France, Wellington sent to London an émigré officer called the Comte de Gramont. Gramont was the grandson of Marie Antoinette’s detested favourite the Duchesse de Polignac, and had been brought up in England by the Polignacs’ friends the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. He had served in the émigré units the Régiment de Roll and the Chasseurs britanniques, before joining the British army, in the Prince of Wales’ favourite regiment the 10th Hussars, in 1805. The Gramonts, moreover, had possessed estates in Béarn, precisely the region invaded by Wellington’s army in January 1814. Gramont saw not only Liverpool and Castlereagh in London, but also Louis XVIII in Hartwell House, outside Aylesbury, where Gramont’s father served the exiled king as one of his capitaines des gardes.19 Thus Wellington in 1813–1814, like Castlereagh in London since 1812 or earlier, while claiming not to be interfering in French politics, was in reality pursuing a secret pro-Bourbon policy. He wrote to Lord Bathurst on 21 November 1813 that Bonaparte was detested: ‘if Great Britain would stand by him [a Bourbon] I am certain he would succeed’.20 He wrote again on 10 January: ‘if you cannot make peace with him [Napoleon] in the winter we must run at him in the spring; and it would be advisable to put forward one of the Bourbons in that case.’21 In 1808, and again in 1810 and 1811, the British government had prevented Artois and Angoulême from joining the war against Napoleon in Spain. In January 1814, however, after some hesitation,22 it gave them passports under assumed names; embarrassing in Spain, they could be useful in France. Furthermore, public opinion and the Prince Regent

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­supported them.23 On 16 January, a friend of the Regent better informed than most official dispatches, Lord Yarmouth, wrote: ‘Bunbury [Henry Bunbury, Under–Secretary of State for War and the Colonies] is gone to Lord Wellington … to arrange for the appearance of a Bourbon there, and to say much on this subject which Government are too much afraid of Whitbread [a Whig MP in the House of Commons] to put on paper.’24 Artois and his sons Angoulême and Berry left England with British passports, and full powers to act in Louis XVIII’s name, on 22 January.25 On 2 February, incognito under the name of Comte de Pradel, Angoulême arrived at Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the Atlantic coast, next to the Pyrénées. The mayor, described as ‘un homme tout à nous’ [a man totally on our side], received him well.26 On 10 February, Angoulême was officially received, as a prince rather than incognito, by Wellington at his headquarters. The Judge Advocate-General Francis Larpent attached to headquarters, was unimpressed by ‘the little duke’ (referring to his shortness), but noticed that he seemed ‘much pleased with his prospects’.27 Angoulême was accompanied by Gramont, who was received with joy on the former family estates near Bidache: ‘while some clasped his knees and others implored him to take possession of his heritage, others stood weeping with joy’, asking for ‘old times and old landlords’.28 Angoulême made contact with royalist agents. Emigration and distance had destroyed neither their networks nor their effectiveness. On 22 February, Angoulême sent Wellington two men from Bordeaux, praising ‘your attachment for our cause’.29 On 6 March, according to Angoulême, Wellington told him: ‘yes without difficulty, I will assign to you the government of the occupied territory.’ The alliance between Angoulême and Wellington was shown both by Angoulême’s coordination of his movements with Wellington, and by the political authority ceded by Wellington to Angoulême in areas occupied by the British army.30 Bordeaux was the third element, with the émigré government and the British government and army, which made Angoulême’s entry on 12 March 1814 a triumph. It had the dynamism and independence of an international port ready to defy the national capital, and an Anglophilia based on nostalgia for the city’s past trading links with England. In contrast, a royalist attempt at Rodez in Auvergne in February and the plots discussed at the château of Souffiron by Timothée de la Clergerie and the Chevalier de la Roche-Aymon led to nothing.31 In 1810, when the Napoleonic empire appeared to be at its apogee, a royalist network in Bordeaux created in 1798–1799, the Institut Philanthropique, had entered into contact with two émigré representatives

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of Louis XVIII, his envoy in London the Comte de La Châtre (commander of the Loyal Emigrant regiment in British service in 1793–1802) and his chief adviser the Comte de Blacas. The intermediaries were three merchants from Bordeaux: MM. Julien Péfaut de La Tour, Perrin and Rollac.32 Confirming the émigré government’s support, La Châtre paid Perrin £300 in travel expenses. Blacas saw the messengers from Bordeaux and remained in correspondence with them.33 Like the arrival of Mailhos at Wellington’s headquarters in December 1813, the initiative came from Bordeaux. In London on 12 March 1813, Taffard de Saint-Germain, a former parlementaire of ‘absolute devotion’, had been appointed Louis XVIII’s representative in Bordeaux.34 A royalist called Ferdinand de Bertier, according to his own account, helped coordinate the agents of Louis XVIII, Bordeaux royalists and former émigrés like Comtes Maxence de Puységur and Alexandre de Lur-Saluces, and his own Catholic royalist network, the Chevaliers de la Foi.35 In Bordeaux, Taffard and the royalists began to infiltrate the National Guard, as other royalists were doing in Paris at the same time. Like the director of a modern electoral campaign, Taffard prepared his party emblems: white cockades and white flags. In addition he enrolled 800 Bordelais (perhaps workers needing money), in a secret Garde Royale Bordelaise, distinct from the National Guard.36 On 11 November 1813, the prefect of the Gironde wrote to the minister of police, ‘workers are being enrolled for the king’. There were some arrests, but the chiefs were spared.37 The best known Bordelais royalist was Monsieur Lainé, born in Bordeaux in 1768. As a representative in the corps législatif in Paris, on 13 December 1813 he had launched an unprecedented attack on Napoleon, which angered the Emperor and impressed public opinion. Expressing the growing discontent which would help the Bourbons recover the French throne in 1814, he denounced the ‘odious scourge’ of conscription and continued: ‘commerce is destroyed, industry is dying and there is not one Frenchman who does not have in his fortune or his family a cruel wound to heal … It is time that nations breathed again.’38 Lainé retired to Bordeaux. For him as for many others in the city, as he wrote in private notes on 20 February, ‘the character and interest of the Bourbons guarantees to the French the free exercise of their industry and that fortunate freedom of trade, which before 1790 had brought prosperity to all the working classes of society’.39 Therefore, in some of the middle class, the period ‘before 1790’ had not left exclusively bad memories. Some remem-

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bered the booming international trade of the reign of Louis XVI. The Empire had become unpopular because of economic decline, as well as military defeat; even the Emperor had admitted in his furious reply to Lainé that the French had not forgotten ‘the Bourbons’. Events in Bordeaux would show that in 1814 French nationalism could be weaker than royalism and desire for peace with Europe. In February and March, Bordelais, émigrés and Wellington renewed contacts. On 19 February, another former émigré and Vendée leader the Marquis de La Rochejacquelin left Bordeaux in disguise with further news for Wellington. On 27 February, Taffard and Lynch met in Bordeaux. After his victory over the French army at Orthez on 27 February, Wellington wrote on 4 March from Saint-Sever to Lord Liverpool in favour of the Bourbons: ‘any declaration from us would, I am convinced, raise such a flame in the country as would soon spread from one end of it to the other and would infallibly overturn him. I cannot discover the policy of not hitting a man as hard as one can and in the most vulnerable place’.40 On 6 March at Saint-Sever, Georges Bontemps Dubarry, another former émigré and Bordelais royalist, and a friend of Taffard de Saint-­Germain, suggested to Wellington that he should advance on Bordeaux. On 7 March, Bontemps Dubarry wrote to General Beresford, who commanded Portuguese and British forces under Wellington, ‘there is a large party at Bordeaux in favour of the Bourbons’.41 Beresford often saw royalist agents and on 11 March wrote to Wellington: ‘the sentiments and opinions of the people of all classes in proportion as we advance are obviously stronger in favour of their ancient Princes and violent against Buonaparte.’ Wellington then ordered Beresford to advance on Bordeaux. He was ready to follow French royalists’ advice in deciding British army movements.42 Meanwhile between 4 and 10 March, French authorities and troops, most of whom remained loyal to Napoleon, had evacuated Bordeaux.43 On 12 March in Bordeaux, the city’s change of allegiance proceeded according to plan, without mistakes and without bloodshed. Towards midday, Beresford appeared at the head of his troops at the Porte Saint Julien of Bordeaux. The mayor was there to meet him. Seeing Beresford advance towards him, Lynch took off his tricolore cockade, put on a white cockade,44 and said: ‘It is in a city of His Majesty our King and the ally of yours that we have the honour to receive Your Excellency.’45Lynch had declared for Louis XVIII under the physical protection of a foreign army, supported by a ‘sacred band’ of royalists inside Bordeaux, to whom Taffard had given an ‘ample provision of white cockades’. The two sides had

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obtained what both had long desired: French royalists won foreign protection from reprisals if their demonstrations failed; the British a royalist demonstration without a public official commitment on their part. Lynch later wrote that the cry of ‘Vive le roi!’ was repeated far beyond his hopes by the people. Another witness, M. Ferrère, wrote that they returned from the gate ‘in the middle of a diabolical noise [bruit d’enfer] from an innumerable populace and cries to the heavens of ‘Vive le roi’.’46 These royalist accounts are confirmed by British sources. On the same day, Beresford wrote to Wellington in a private letter: ‘the whole town came out to meet us … The mayor was very frequently interrupted in his short discourse with cries of ‘à bas les aigles!’, ‘vivent les Bourbons!’ and he finished by stripping himself of all the colours and insignia of Buonaparte and putting on the white cockade and scarf; and everybody appeared instantly in white cockades and they have declared openly against Buonaparte.’47 Beresford told Lynch in the Hôtel de Ville that he neither ordered nor forbade the display of white flags. He said that England was only waging war on Bonaparte, not on France. There were cries of ‘Vive le roi!’ and ‘Vivent les Anglais!’48 The proclamation published that evening by ‘the mayor of Bordeaux to his fellow citizens’ is a European, French, Bordelais and royalist document. It ignores issues of revolution, emigration and nationalism and emphasizes freedom, the economy and the benefits of international peace. ‘Bordelais! I can assure you that the firm intention of His Majesty is to favour industry and to bring back among us that impartial freedom of trade, which before 1789 had spread prosperity among the working classes … The sea which had been useless for you will bring friendly flags back to your port.’ The mayor cited the example of Amsterdam, which had also revolted against Napoleon in favour of its former dynasty, the House of Orange, on 15 November 1813, said that the ‘rivalry of nations should cease’, praised Wellington as ‘the liberator of peoples’ [Portugal and Spain as well as France] and denounced Napoleon as ‘the scourge of nations’. He assured that all liberal institutions would be maintained and the sale of national properties guaranteed. This day will make Bordeaux ‘forever famous and fortunate among cities’.49 Angoulême arrived at 4 pm, accompanied by Gramont and his Premier gentilhomme, Comte Etienne de Damas-Crux, who had commanded an émigré regiment, the Légion de Damas in 1792–1801 before entering his household. Acting like a political candidate in an election, Angoulême also, like Lainé, appealed to popular hatred of despotism, war and high taxation: ‘no more tyrant! No more war! No more conscription! No more

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vexatious taxes!’ After a Te Deum in the cathedral, he went to the town hall and finally to the royal palace, where Napoleon had stayed in 1808. According to M. Defermon, the inhabitants ‘are intoxicated with the joy of seeing him’. The ‘sacred band’ of royalists obliged them ‘without violence’ to wear the white cockade. ‘Not one balcony, not one window, which was not filled with women’, wrote another Bordelais, the young writer Edmond Géraud.50 The white flag flew above every building.51 There was little hostility to Angoulême as a Bourbon or an émigré. The issues of 1814 were more important than the divisions of 1789–1802. Lynch wrote of ‘this adorable prince. Everyone wants to see him, to touch his clothes, the harness of his horse’. In contrast to Napoleon and his ‘mameloucks’, Angoulême said ‘he could not be better guarded than by the people’. On 13 March, when Angoulême went to the Grand Théâtre, there was a ‘delirium of happiness’. The orchestra played both French and British tunes: ‘Vive Henri IV!’ and ‘God Save the King!’ In 1814 Bordeaux was reconnecting to Europe as well as the Bourbons. Doubtless the Anglo-Irish origin of the mayor (who spoke in English to British officers on 12 March52 and had a brother in London), helped his relations with Wellington and Beresford, who were also Anglo-Irish. In Bordeaux so detested were Napoleon’s wars that foreign soldiers and returning émigrés were more popular than French soldiers. In cabarets, according to the diary of Edmond Géraud, foreign troops drank and smoked with Bordelais ‘à qui mieux mieux’. For Géraud, Napoleon was not a man but a tiger. He preferred the English and Portuguese soldiers in Bordeaux, who were ‘as calm as nuns’, to the ‘brigands of the grande armée’.53 ‘The regularity and excellent conduct of the troops astonish the city and even myself’, wrote their commander Lord Dalhousie to Wellington.54 Bordeaux later presented him with a sword of honour, which is still in the possession of his descendants today.55 A royal guard was organized in 11 companies of foot and horse. In a white uniform, ‘emblem of the purity and fidelity of its sentiments’, it guarded the prince and maintained order.56 ‘But,’ wrote Angoulême to Wellington, ‘there is more ardour to be officers than soldiers’.57 Angoulême and Lainé, who became prefect, organized the civil administration. ‘Our little government’, as Lynch called it, also started its own newspaper, the Mémorial Bordelais.58 Angoulême issued a proclamation on 15 March renewing his promises of peace; the end of conscription and ‘odious taxes’; guaranteeing the sale of domaines dits nationaux and freedom of religion (there were many Protestants in Bordeaux); and asking for an end to ‘tout esprit de parti’.59

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Eyewitnesses, such as Edmond Géraud, Defermon, Ferrère, Lynch and Beresford, noticed three factors: • Following the joy of 12 March, fear of a peace treaty between Napoleon and the allies, after which the Emperor could have punished the royalists, returned. On 14 March, Beresford wrote to Wellington: ‘I am far from being sure that the majority of the respectable merchants and people have declared for the white cockade.’ A large part of the former National Guard continued to wear the tricolour cockade, suggesting that they preferred Napoleon to the Bourbons. Beresford wrote on 19 March: ‘the good example of Bordeaux does not spread at all and to judge by their long and sour faces I would imagine they had already repented the step. You cannot conceive the terrors and alarms under which all descriptions of people tremble at present.’60 It was these ‘terrors and alarms’, which had often paralysed action by royalists and émigrés before 1814. • The popularity of the duc d’Angoulême. He did not put a foot wrong. Among his ‘touching words’ were ‘to be a Bordelais is impressive enough’ and ‘since 12 March everyone is noble in Bordeaux’.61 When he invited merchants to dine with him at his table, ‘from that moment the entire city was royalist’.62 • Relative absence of class tension. Royalism attracted nobles, bourgeois and workmen. Philippe Ferrère spoke of the presence in the royalist crowd on 12 March of ‘the lowest class of society … they were workmen and labourers in the costume of their condition, most wearing the livery of their poverty’.63 Angoulême’s council included former émigrés, such as Etienne de Damas, Lynch, the comtes de Puységur and Lur-Saluces, and non-nobles who had not emigrated, such as Lainé and Ravez.64 Past loyalties were less important than present attitudes. The precise importance of Bordeaux in the restoration of the Bourbons is difficult to judge. On 17 March, Talleyrand wrote from Paris to the Duchesse de Courlande: ‘If peace is not made, Bordeaux becomes a factor of great importance in politics. If peace is made, Bordeaux loses its ­importance’.65 The entry of the Duc d’Angoulême on 12 March was the unequivocal event that the allies needed to dare to support the Bourbons publicly. At Dijon on 28 March, Metternich, Castlereagh and other European diplomats drank to the health of the mayor of Bordeaux before that of Louis XVIII.66

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Bordeaux, however, was not an isolated incident. The unpopularity of the Napoleonic Empire and the popularity of the returning Bourbons and their foreign allies were evident in Paris itself. The allied armies advanced on Paris when they were convinced, by intercepted letters of the strength of royalist feeling in the capital.67 On 31 March, after Napoleon’s army had been defeated and Napoleonic authorities had left the capital, foreign troops and sovereigns were acclaimed on the boulevards by crowds of Parisians. Many Russian officers considered they were watching a great people finally breathing freely.68 Some Parisians shouted: ‘A bas le Corse! A bas le tyran! Vive notre libérateur!’69A British eyewitness, Lord Charles Stewart, confirmed in part by accounts written on the same day by the French foreign minister Caulaincourt to Napoleon, described the allied entry to his brother, Lord Castlereagh: ‘All Paris seemed to be assembled and concentrated on one spot.’ Alexander I and Frederick William III were ‘positively devoured’ amidst cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur Alexandre! Vive le Roi de Prusse! Vivent les Rois libérateurs!’ Lord Charles Stewart also wrote: ‘Nor did the air alone resound with these peals; for, with louder acclamations, if possible, they were mingled with those of Vive le Roi! Vive Louis XVIII! Vive les Bourbons! A bas le tyran! The white cockade appeared very universally, many of the National Guards whom I saw wore them.’70 Russian accounts also confirm the frequency of cries of Vive Louis XVIII! Vivent les Bourbons! as well as Vive Alexandre Ier!71 Among the allies were more returning émigrés, such as Count Pozzo di Borgo, who had not seen France since 1792. He had become an Aide de Camp and councillor of Alexander I, had helped write his proclamations in France and, as Russian ambassador in Paris, would remain a key figure in French politics and European diplomacy from 1814 until 1831.72 For a time Alexander I and his solders, known to some as ‘les cupidons du Nord’, remained popular in certain quarters of Paris. Except in some of the poorer, outlying suburbs, nationalism was not as strong as love of peace.73 The sister of Chateaubriand, Madame de Marigny, praised the Tsar in her journal: ‘good, affable, generous … The Parisians are mad about him’ [en raffolent].74 As in Bordeaux, defeat was seen by some as a blessing, which reconnected France and Europe; her brother’s best-selling pamphlet of April 1814 was called: De Buonaparte, des Bourbons, et de la nécessité de se rallier à nos princes légitimes pour le bonheur de la France et celui de l’Europe. The former leaders of the emigration, the Comte d’Artois and Louis XVIII, were also welcomed back, although by no means unanimously, in 1814. On 12 April 1814, escorted by royalists (including former émigrés such as Chateaubriand), English diplomats and officers, and Napoleonic

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Marshals, Artois entered Paris, wearing the uniform of the Paris National Guard. Lady Burghersh, Wellington’s niece, claimed that he was cheered with ‘the most violent acclamations … a degree of enthusiasm which I never saw in England for anything’, although another English eyewitness called T. R. Underwood was more sceptical.75 In a state of extreme exaltation (‘non jamais on ne pourra peindre cette ivresse’), Madame de Marigny, who was present, thanked God for having preserved ‘the family of Saint Louis’, and the Allies who had returned them to France.76 On 3 May Louis XVIII himself, with his niece and their cousins the former émigré leaders the Prince de Condé and the Duc de Bourbon sitting in the same carriage (an honour which those princes would not have received before 1789), entered Paris in their turn. Although many French soldiers were hostile, the king and his party were acclaimed in the streets of Paris and in Notre-Dame by civilians with delirious cries of ‘Vive le Roi’. Desire for peace, lower taxes, freedom, prosperity and a constitutional regime (all promised the day before in the king’s Déclaration de Saint-Ouen) were stronger than nationalism, resentment at defeat, or memories of the divisions of 1789–1802.77 Like Bordeaux and Paris, Toulouse also welcomed foreign troops. When Angoulême had entered the city on 27 April 1814 with Wellington, followed by British, Spanish, and Portuguese officers, according to an English witness: Thousands of Country People crowded each side of the road for a League before we reached Toulouse and absolutely deafened us with acclamations so that we could hardly hear the thunder of Artillery or the bells of churches … windows and even the house tops were crowded full of ladies, waving handkerchiefs, clapping hands and calling with all their might Vive le Roi and Vive les Bourbons.78

Thus the events of 12 March in Bordeaux, 27 April in Toulouse and 31 March, 12 April and 3 May in Paris suggest that in 1814 emigration and nationalism were not dominating issues. Returning émigrés were cheered if they were thought to be bringing tangible political and economic benefits. Bordeaux in particular shows that returning émigrés, like Angoulême, Gramont and Damas, knew how to respond to the realities of the moment. It was not the return of the émigrés in 1814 which was unpopular but some émigrés’ subsequent actions and attitudes, and for some Frenchmen, the return of the King in 1815, after the defeat of Waterloo, ‘in the baggage-­train of the foreigners’ (Figs. 13.1 and 13.2).

Figs. 13.1  (r and v): The Brassard de Bordeaux. (All images are from the author’s private collection) The Order of the Brassard de Bordeaux was founded by Louis XVIII on 6 September 1814, at the request of his agent in Bordeaux Taffard de SaintGermain, to reward the royalists who had served in Bordeaux in March 1814. As a royalist rallying sign, they had worn a white ‘brassard’ or arm-band, which was probably a reminiscence of similar arm-bands worn by émigrés serving in the Armée de Condé in the 1790s. This illustration shows the insignia of the Order: a white armband decorated with a gold sun-burst enclosing two entwined L’s, for Louis XVIII, and the legend ‘Bordeaux 12 March 1814’. It comes from a ‘Précis historique du 12 Mars 1814’ composed by ‘Jacques Dejernon, ex-Maitre de Pension a Bordeaux, natif de Pau, volontaire royal du 12 mars 1814’ and printed by the Imprimerie de Moreau in Bordeaux. Angoulême and his court officials Guiche, Etienne de Damas-Crux and Comte Francois d’Escars, always wore the Brassard de Bordeaux in 1814–1815

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Fig. 13.2  Jacques Dejernon, Portrait of Louis XVIII between the Duc and Duchesse dAngoulême’. (All images are from the author’s private collection) This picture was reproduced above Dejernon’s lists of royalists in ‘Précis historique du 12 mars 1814’, who had served in Bordeaux in 1814 and 1815 either in the Garde nationale, or in the Garde royale, or as ‘Volontaires royaux’, with accounts of the events of those years. Angoulême revisited Bordeaux in March 1815 with his wife. They helped make it a bastion of popular royalism and opposition to Napoleon, but thereafter resided in and around Paris

Notes 1. Moniteur Universel, 4 October 1820, 1385 2. Ibid., 15 October 1820, 1389 3. Abbé Moulard, Le comte Camille de Tournon, 3 vols, (Paris: Publisher, 1927–1932), 3: 216. 4. Laurent Coste, Histoire des maires de Bordeaux (Bordeaux: Dossiers d’Aquitaine, 2008), 223; 238; Arthur Young, “Diary for 26 August 1787,” in Travels in France, second edition (London: Bohn, 1889), 67; 69.

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5. Camille Jullian, Histoire de Bordeaux, 2 vols. (Bordeaux: Feret et fils, 1895), 2: 541. 6. Paul Butel, Histoire de la Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Bordeaux, des origines à nos jours (Bordeaux: Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie, 1988), 142–48. 7. Vicomte de Guichen, Le Duc d’Angoulême (Paris: Émile Paul, 1909), 27–29. 8. Guichen, Duc d’Angoulême, 75–84. 9. Angoulême, “Note of 13 August 1804,” in Guichen, Duc d’Angoulême, 111. 10. Wellington to Lord Bathurst, 21 November 1813, in Duke of Wellington, Despatches, (13 vols. John Murray 1834–39), 11: 303; 305. 11. Comte Lynch, Correspondance relative aux événements qui ont eu lieu à Bordeaux dans le mois de mars 1814 (Bordeaux: Lavigne jeune, 1814), 13. 12. Lynch, Correspondance, 30, 41. 13. cf. Wellington to Angoulême, 29 March 1814, in Duke of Wellington, Supplementary Despatches and Memoranda, (15 vols. London: John Murray, 1858–72), 8: 609. 14. Charles Webster, The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh 1812–1815 (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1925), 488–90; Bathurst to Wellington, 18 January 1814, in Wellington, Despatches, 11: 519–20. 15. Liverpool to Castlereagh, 19 March 1814, in Webster, Foreign Policy, 528. 16. Edward Cook to Castlereagh, 22 March 1814, in Viscount Castlereagh, Memoirs and Correspondence, (10 vols. London: H. Colburn, 1848–53), 9: 382–83. 17. see Philip Mansel, “Un Adversaire de longue haleine: Louis XVIII et la maison de Bourbon en 1810,” in 1810: Le Tournant de l’Empire, ed. Thierry Lentz (Paris: Nouveau Monde Edition, 2010), 173. 18. Liverpool to Castlereagh, 29, 30 December 1813, in Webster, Foreign Policy, 510–13; Note by Brooklands, Private Secretary of Lord Liverpool, of conversation with the comte d’Artois, 4 January 1814, FO 27/105, National Archives, Kew. 19. John Mollo, The Prince’s Dolls: Scandals, Skirmishes and Splendours of the First British Hussars 1739–1815 (London: Leo Cooper, 1997), 38: 154–55. 20. Wellington to Bathurst, 21 November 1813, in Wellington, Despatches, 11: 303, 306; ‘Memorandum from the interior, 20 December 1813’, in ibid., 11: 381. 21. Wellington, Despatches, 11: 436. 22. On 6 January, the government had briefly refused to give passports to the princes: Blacas to Mailhos, 6 January 1814, Archives Privées.

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23. Elizabeth Sparrow, Secret Service: British Agents in France 1792–1815 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999), 399. 24. Lord Yarmouth to General Taylor, 16 January 1814, in The Taylor Papers, ed. Ernest Taylor (London: Longmans Green, 1913), 123. 25. Louis XVIII to Wellington 14 January 1814, in Guichen, Duc d’Angoulême, 130. He called Angoulême ‘un Bourbon armé contre l’oppresseur de la patrie’. 26. Comte de La Barthe to Comte de Blacas, 16 January 1814, in Ludovic de Contenson, “Un Agent royaliste en 1814”, Revue de Paris, 1 juillet (1910), 155. 27. Francis Seymour Larpent, “Diary for 10 February 1814,” in Private Journal (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2000), 384. 28. Mollo, Prince’s Dolls, 159. 29. Angoulême to Wellington, 22 February 1814, in Wellington, Supplementary Despatches, 8: 589. 30. Angoulême to Duchesse d’Angoulême, 6 March 1814 (intercepted), in Wellington, Supplementary Despatches, 8: 621–22. 31. Ferdinand de Bertier, Souvenirs inédits d’un conspirateur, (Paris: Perrin (1990), 159, 383; cf. Tableau de la garde royale du Périgord, 11 September 1816, Archives Privées. 32. Philip Mansel, Louis XVIII (Perrin, 2004), 175. 33. M. J. S. Rollac, Le Royalisme prouvé par les faits ou exposé authentique des causes et des résultats de la journée de Bordeaux au 12 mars 1814, Second ed. Paris: (Imprimerie d’Abel Lanoe, 1820), 25, 87–88. 34. Rollac, Royalisme prouvé, 28. 35. Bertier, Souvenirs inédits, 153; 177; 386; 389. 36. Rollac, Royalisme prouvé, 36, 44–46. 37. Laurent Coste, ‘Bordeaux et la Restauration des Bourbons’, Annales du Midi CV (1993), 34. 38. Emile de Perceval, Le Vicomte Lainé, (Paris: Librairie ancienne Honore Champion, 2 vols. 1926) 1:214n, 218–9n. 39. Laine, “Notes of 20 February 1814,” in Perceval, Vicomte Lainé, 1: 231–33. 40. Beresford to Wellington, 4 March 1814, in Wellington, Supplementary Despatches, 8: 637. 41. Bontemps Dubarry to Beresford, 7 March 1814, in Wellington, Despatches, 11: 558. 42. Rollac, Royalisme prouvé, 29: 41. 43. Coste, “Bordeaux,” 37. 44. The same gesture, but in reverse, as Lavallette removing his white cockade to put on a tricolour cockade at the beginning of the Hundred Days out-

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side the gates of Grenoble one year later, on 6 March 1815. The two cities represented two aspects of France, royalist and Bonapartist. 45. Lynch, Correspondance, 24–25. 46. Coste “Bordeaux,” 39; Rollac, Royalisme prouvé, 46, 48; cf. Jean Barennes, “Le 12 mars à Bordeaux d’après les souvenirs de Férrère,” Revue d’histoire de Bordeaux, no. 6 (November 1914), 376. 47. Beresford to Wellington, 12 March 1814, in Wellington, Despatches, 11: 577n. 48. Beresford to Wellington 13, 14 March 1814, in Wellington, Supplementary Despatches, 8: 646, 648–49. 49. Maire de Bordeaux [Comte Lynch] Proclamation, Bordeaux: Imprimerie André Brossier, 1814, passim. 50. Edmond Géraud, “Diary for 13 March 1814,” in Un Témoin des deux Restaurations: fragments de journal inédit (Paris: Librairie Marpon et Flammarion, 1893), 82, 84. 51. Jacques Defermon, Précis historique du 12 mars (Bordeaux, 1814). 52. The Hon. Claud Vivian, Richard Hussy Vivian, first Baron Vivian: a Memoir, (London: Isbister 1897), p. 218, Colonel Vivian to Mrs. Vivian, 16 March 1814. 53. Géraud, “Diary for 13 March 1814,” in Deux Restaurations, 81: 84. 54. Dalhousie to Wellington, 25 March 1814, in Wellington Supplementary Despatches, 8: 696. 55. Larpent, “Diary for 10 July 1814,” in Private Journal, 571. 56. Archives Privées. Tableau de corps désigné sous le nom de garde royale, à pied, de Bordeaux, 1814. 57. Angoulême to Wellington 16 March 1814, in Wellington, Supplementary Despatches, 8: 653; Dalhousie to Wellington, 18 March 1814, in ibid., 8: 668. 58. Perceval, Vicomte Lainé, 1:233, 246; Lynch, Correspondance, 33: 38. 59. Proclamation de Son Altesse Royale le Duc d’Angoulême (Bordeaux 1814), passim. 60. Beresford to Wellington, 14, 19 March 1814, in Wellington, Supplementary Despatches, 8: 649; 668; cf. Géraud, “Diary for 13 March 1814,” in Deux Restaurations, 85. 61. Géraud, “Diary for March 1814,” in Deux Restaurations, 88; 90–91; 98; 101. 62. Géraud, “Diary for 13 March 1814,” in Deux Restaurations, 87–88. 63. Barennes, ‘Souvenirs de Férrère’, 376 64. Perceval, Vicomte Lainé 1:266; ‘Précis historique du 12 mars 1814’, in Archives Privées.

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65. Talleyrand to Duchess of Courlande, 17, 20 March 1814, in Talleyrand intime d’après sa correspondance avec la Duchesse de Courlande, (Paris: Ernest Kolb, 1894), 162; 170. 66. Webster, Foreign Policy, 239; 243. 67. Mansel, Louis XVIII, 174. 68. General Comte de Langeron, Mémoires (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1902), 478; Baron de Lowenstern, Mémoires (Paris: Albert Fontemoing, 2 vols. 1903), 2:373; 381; 388. 69. “Account by General Fabvier,” in Comte de Caulaincourt Mémoires (3 vols Paris: Plon, 1933), 3:91n.; Langeron, Mémoires, 478. 70. Charles Stewart to Castlereagh 1 April 1814, in Castlereagh, Memoirs and Correspondance, 9: 419–420; cf. Caulaincourt to Napoleon I, 31 March 1814, in Caulaincourt, Mémoires, 3: 88; 102n, and “Account by General Fabvier,” in ibid., 3: 90n–91n. 71. Alexander Mikarberidze ed., Russian Eyewitness Accounts of the Campaign of 1814 (London: Frontline 2013), 247, 276, accounts by S. Khomutov, Pavel Pushin. 72. Philip Mansel, Paris, capitale de l’Europe (Paris: Perrin, 2003). 73. Mansel, Paris, 51. 74. Madame de Marigny, “Diary for 5 April 1814”, in id., Paris en 1814, (Paris: Emile-Paul, 1907), 67. 75. Letter of Lady Burghersh, 13 April 1814, in The Letters of Lady Burghersh, ed. Lady Rose Weigall (London: J. Murray, 1893), 227–28. 76. Madame de Marigny, “Diary for 12 April 1814,” in Paris en 1814, 77–80; cf. T. R. Underwood “Diary, 12 April 1814,” in Marigny, Paris, 275–76. 77. Mansel, Paris, 39. 78. “Undated Account by Major Edwin Griffith,” in Mollo, Prince’s Dolls, 189.

Bibliography Barennes, Jean. “Le 12 mars à Bordeaux d’après les souvenirs de Férrère,” Revue d’histoire de Bordeaux, no. 6 (November 1914): 371–381. Bertier, Ferdinand de. Souvenirs inédits d’un conspirateur. Paris: Perrin 1990. Butel, Paul. Histoire de la Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Bordeaux, des origines à nos jours. Bordeaux: Chambre de commerce et d’industrie, 1988. Castlereagh, Viscount. Memoirs and Correspondence. 12 vols. London: H. Colburn 1848–53. Caulaincourt, Comte de. Mémoires. 3 vols. Paris: Plon, 1933. Contenson, Ludovic de. “Un Agent royaliste en 1814.” Revue de Paris (1 Juillet 1910): 140–160

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Coste, Laurent. “Bordeaux et la Restauration des Bourbons.” Annales du Midi CV (1993): 27–43. Coste, Laurent. Histoire des maires de Bordeaux. Bordeaux: Dossiers d’Aquitaine, 2008. Defermon, Jacques. Précis historique du 12 mars. Bordeaux, 1814. Géraud, Edmond. Un Témoin des deux Restaurations: fragments de journal inédit. Paris: Librairie Marpon et Flammarion, 1893. Guichen, Vicomte de. Le Duc d’Angoulême. Paris: Émile Paul, 1909. Jullian, Camille. Histoire de Bordeaux. 2 vols. Bordeaux: Feret et fils, 1895. Langeron, General Comte de. Mémoires. Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1902. Larpent, Francis Seymour. Private Journal. Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2000. Lowenstern, Baron de. Mémoires. 2 vols. Paris: Albert Fontemoing, 1903. Lynch, Comte. Correspondance relative aux événements qui ont eu lieu à Bordeaux dans le mois de mars 1814. Bordeaux, Lavigne jeune, 1814. Mansel, Philip. “Un adversaire de longue haleine: Louis XVIII et la maison de Bourbon en 1810.” In 1810: Le Tournant de l’Empire, Paris: Nouveau Monde Edition, 2010 edited by Thierry Lentz, 163–178. Mansel, Philip. Louis XVIII. Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 2004. Mansel Philip. Paris, capitale de l’Europe. Paris: Perrin, 2003. Marigny, Madame de. Paris en 1814. Paris: Emile-Paul, 1907. Mikarberidze, Alexander, ed. Russian Eyewitness Accounts of the Campaign of 1814. London: Frontline, 2013 Mollo, John. The Prince’s Dolls: Scandals, Skirmishes and Splendours of the First British Hussars 1739–1815. London: Leo Cooper, 1997. Moulard, Abbé. Le comte Camille de Tournon. Paris: 3 vols. 1927–1932. Perceval, Emile de. Le Vicomte Lainé. Paris: Librairie ancienne Honore Champion, 2 vols. 1926. Rollac, M. J. S. Le Royalisme prouvé par les faits ou Exposé authentique des causes et des résultats de la journée de Bordeaux au 12 mars 1814. Paris: Imprimerie d’Abel Lanoe, 2e ed. 1820. Sparrow, Elizabeth. Secret Service: British Agents in France 1792–1815. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999. Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de. Talleyrand intime d’après sa correspondance avec la Duchesse de Courlande. Paris: Ernest Kolb, 1894. Taylor, Ernest, ed. The Taylor Papers. London: Longmans Green, 1913. Vivian, The Hon. Claud, Richard Hussy Vivian, first Baron Vivian: a Memoir, London: Isbister 1897 Webster, Charles. The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh 1812–1815. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1925. Weigall, Lady Rose, ed. The Letters of Lady Burghersh. London: J. Murray, 1893). Wellington, Duke of. Despatches. 13 vols. London: John Murray 1834–9.

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Wellington, Duke of. Supplementary Despatches and Memoranda. 15 vols. London: John Murray 1858–72. Proclamation de Son Altesse Royale le Duc d’Angoulême. Bordeaux: Imprimerie de Lavigne jeune, 15 March 1814. Moniteur Universel, October 1820 Young, Arthur. Travels in France. Second ed., 1889.

Archival References FO 27/105, National Archives, Kew, Papers about the British government’s relations with Louis XVIIIin exile. Private archives. Papers of the Comte de Blacas. Documents relating to Bordeaux, March 1814. Private archives Jacques Dejernon‚ Précis historique du 12 mars 1814.

CHAPTER 14

Postface: Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of Emigré Studies Simon Burrows

When the editors of this volume invited me to deliver the opening keynote lecture to the conference on the émigrés that they convened at Radboud in June 2017, and later suggested it might serve as a postface to this landmark collection, I felt honoured and privileged.1 But I also felt something of an impostor. My main contribution to the field of émigré studies remains a doctoral thesis on ‘The French Exile Press in London, 1789– 1815’ submitted twenty-five years ago, and the book French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814 (Woodbridge, 2000), which followed eight years later. True, the thesis also provided material for a series of supplementary essays on the cultural politics of exile and the relations of the press with the exile community, the most recent of which appeared as recently as 2016.2 There has also been some new work on the émigré press across Europe and North America in the revolutionary and Napoleonic period; the émigré contribution to the anti-Napoleonic legend and propaganda warfare and on anti-revolutionary espionage and conspiracy.3 But since the turn of the millennium, the main focus of my studies has lain outside émigré studies. S. Burrows (*) Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Philip, J. Reboul (eds.), French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_14

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This is not to say that I have neglected the field entirely. Indeed, since 2000 I have supervised a number of theses on émigré topics at various levels, the most recent a path-breaking doctoral study written by Juliette Reboul, one of the editors of this volume, undertaken at the University of Leeds.4 I have been present, too, at the major conferences on émigré themes. In 1997 and 1999, I attended those organised by Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel, which sketched out the (frequently patchy) state of the field, and in 2012 I spoke at the more broadly focused Arrachés et déplacés conference organised by Karine Rance and her colleagues at Clermont-­ Ferrand.5 I believe I am the only scholar to have attended all three. As a result, I have maintained an insider’s view on the evolution of the field even while turning my attention to other topics addressed by my thesis— the study of print culture and media history.6 But while I have done so, the field has moved on. The scholarship has grown richer, deeper, more mature and, dare I say, intellectually sophisticated. The themes it tackles are more varied and challenging, and the central role of the émigrés in many aspects of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary drama is now taken as a given by scholars of the Revolution. All this is to be celebrated, and much of it was hard to imagine thirty years ago. A cynic might therefore be tempted to view the keynote and chapter invitations less as an honour and more as an act of carefully considered pragmatism by the editors. Because I had made the original proposal to hold a workshop/conference on the émigrés in Nijmegen to dovetail with the second Digitizing Enlightenment symposium, which we were all scheduled to attend, the editors were left with a diplomatic dilemma.7 How could they usefully deploy me? Their ingenious and generous response was to allow me to offer a personal retrospective of a field I have witnessed grow to maturity, but with which my recent active engagement is limited. So in this chapter, I hope to take up that challenge by exploring (1) my own engagement with the field of émigré studies, (2) my decision to develop other aspects of my work and (3) how the state of the field has been fruitfully transformed since I took that decision. Finally, I hope to offer a few ideas for how we might connect our work in the future while drawing on the foundational labour of two generations of émigré scholars. In doing so, I will not pretend to offer a comprehensive overview—I consider only what has crossed my horizon in the last twenty-five years. By taking this modest route, I hope to make a further small contribution to the field of émigré studies. * * *

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Whenever I explain to students my serendipitous and career-defining decision to study the French émigré press, I present it as an example of how NOT to choose a thesis topic. For in retrospect, it was mere luck that I blundered my way to selecting a historically and historiographically viable project. My tale usually begins with a conversation I had in my second year at Oxford with my friend, mentor and inspirational undergraduate tutor at Wadham, the late, much lamented Cliff Davies. When I told Cliff I wanted to do a PhD, he had just one word of advice: “Don’t”. Asked why, he added two more: “No jobs”. When I asked what would be his counsel were I to proceed regardless, he said, “Choose a foreign topic”. Confronted by my objection that I lacked advanced language skills, he retorted, “Your French is fine. You got a first on Tocqueville in Prelims [i.e. first year examinations]”. There was no answering such ruthlessly concise Oxonian logic. And thus was born my quest to find a topic in French history. In 1980s Oxford, no one thought to tell me how best to go about this—and I was too proud and independent-minded to ask. Instead, a throw away remark by Colin Lucas in a lecture on post-Napoleonic France gave me my topic area. “I don’t know how many émigrés returned in 1814 to 1815”, he pondered, “As far as I know, no one has ever counted them.” This sounded like virgin territory. So I did a bit of research and, finding the English historiography suitably limited, I chose to study the émigrés. I had a similar “close your eyes and hope for the best” approach to supervision. The Oxford History faculty at that time had three possible supervisors: Colin Lucas, Geoffrey Ellis and Laurence Brockliss. The first two were of course well-established scholars with powerful networks, while Laurence, whose reputation then rested on his masterful study of French higher education, had already taught and impressed me as an undergraduate. None was a specialist on my topic narrowly defined, and I could see advantages to working with each of them. So I left the choice of supervisor blank on my application form, figuring I would be allocated to the person most interested in supervising me. Fortunately, I was allocated to Laurence, for Colin Lucas left for Chicago at the end of my first year, and Geoffrey Ellis’s interests were perhaps too high political and too Napoleonic in focus for the topic I eventually chose. Laurence, however, was intellectually curious about my subject, forever bringing me snippets of his own reading on Chateaubriand, mesmerism and much else besides, and listening intently to reports on the British dimension of my work. He was even, I felt, fascinated by more mundane questions such as how we

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might best organise my material. He remains one of my role models. We had in common, too, though neither knew it at the time, that we would both become, in Laurence’s words, “database junkies”. In those unstructured days, a thesis proposal could be quite vague—I said I wanted to work on the French revolutionary émigrés and that was enough. So my first semester was spent exploring some of the classic works on the emigration—including the monumental turn of the twentieth-­ century works by Ernst Daudet, Henri Forneron, and the toweringly original 1924 study, still unsurpassed, by Fernand Baldensperger on the movement of ideas in the emigration.8 Laurence Brockliss’s initial suggestion was for me to undertake a study of the exiled Bourbon court, and for a few weeks I gathered data on courtiers in exile and high political circles. But my eureka moment came when reading what was then the only published general study in English, Margery Weiner’s winsome and uneven, if sometimes wide-ranging, The French Exiles, which was published in 1960 for a general audience.9 Irritating though I found Weiner, both in style and substance, there were two surprisingly colourful and informative pages of her book that caught my imagination. They concerned the publication of émigré newspapers and periodicals.10 Perhaps my enthusiasm was a response to Margery Weiner’s own passions, for she was herself a journalist and founder of the Daily Telegraph Information Service, a path-breaking woman of her day. She, too, had been piqued by the existence of the émigré publications, and even traced the descendants of the founder of the Courier de l’Europe newspaper, who had, she claimed, supplied her with new information. Sadly, she never got around to publishing that information and refused to share it with Hélène Maspero-Clerc, who also did some work on the paper.11 By the time I, too, tried to follow-up her leads, the trail had run cold: Weiner and her informant, Canon E. A. Swinton, took their secrets to the grave. I suspect Hélène Maspero-Clerc (who, of course, is my sole source for this anecdote) never forgave her. If so, she revenged herself in the most perfect way, by proving herself a model of scholarly generosity and sharing her research materials with me. She even gifted me her index card notes on one of several occasions when, despite blindness and advanced years (she was 90 at the time, and dependent on her maid), she welcomed me for afternoon tea, conversation and academic advice in her flat near the Luxembourg gardens. I still have them. They are—by some of the most expansive definitions—the oldest database I possess.

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Hélène Maspero-Clerc was one of the most important nodes in the little scholarly network I assembled through my doctoral studies. That is, I think, something worthy of note in itself. For although her biography of Peltier was published by the Société des Etudes Robespierristes, with a preface by Jacques Godechot, she never held an academic appointment and completed her monograph only in retirement.12 These observations serve to remind us just what a small and marginalised field émigré studies was at this point—if it should be considered a field at all. Its main practitioners did not occupy Chairs in major universities, and, in those pre-internet dark ages, when France’s Minitel technology briefly led the way, most of us worked in relative isolation. There may be some value, therefore, in explaining how I came to build this network. As my supervisor, one of the first things Laurence Brockliss did was put me in touch with Robert Griffiths, who had just published his study of the monarchiens, which by luck Laurence had been asked to review.13 I met Robert just a few weeks later, while he was attending a conference at the Maison française in Oxford, and he directed me to the work of Maspero-­ Clerc on Peltier and her related articles on émigré journalism.14 In contrast, it was Jonathan Clark, then a controversialist rising star within the Oxford history faculty, who put me in touch with Dominic Aidan Bellenger. I immediately wrote to Dominic and ordered his book on The French Exiled Clergy from Downside Abbey press.15 Dominic invited me to visit him at Downside a couple of times, and on the first occasion he introduced me—in person—to a young Frenchman called Bruno Gazave, who had recently written a mémoire de maîtrise on the published outputs of the émigré clergy.16 The mémoire remains, I believe, his sole contribution to our field, but for me it was useful in identifying publishers, and for Dominic Bellenger doubtless somewhat more so. Bruno also gave me a piece of basic research advice that has never left me: ‘Always begin with a list’. These days, as I undertake digital research in the age of big data, my lists seem to get longer and longer.17 But in those days my lists of émigré journals (thirteen titles), émigré journalists (between a handful and about sixty, depending on definition) and contributors to émigré periodicals (about three hundred) were quite manageable. The same could not be said of the next person Dominic Bellenger put me in touch with, Kirsty Carpenter, who like him ranks among my oldest and closest friends and collaborators in academia. Kirsty was then working on her thesis under Michel Vovelle and an early pioneer in what we would today call ‘Digital Humanities’, having compiled a database of some 5000 lay émigrés using

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(primarily) British government sources. It was, I think, a monumental achievement, and one to which I will return later. The same can of course be said of Dominic Bellenger’s similarly extensive working list of clerical émigrés, as published in his The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles. The primary purpose of this long digression about my early connections is to emphasise just how small the field was. Dominic Bellenger, Kirsty Carpenter and I were exploring new territory. The decision to do so was quite brave (or perhaps in my case, foolhardy). For as one of my closest friends and co-doctorants at Oxford (who we shall call ‘Cassandra’) remarked ‘Who cares about the émigrés?’ Much safer, like her, to choose a well-worn high political topic. But history came to our aid. The collapse of French communism and the end of the Cold War created new space for émigré studies. In my doctorate I pointed out that most French treatments of the émigrés were written either from a hostile, dismissive left-­ wing intellectual viewpoint, or by right-wing apologists or academicians, often descendants of émigrés, who had little sympathy for the revolution. Their focus was often more on the émigration militaire and the swaggering false glory days of Coblentz. This is a point echoed by Thomas Biskup, who notes: “For Historians of the French Revolution, only the politically active or morally reprehensible émigrés had long been relevant, and the same is true for much of the German historiography”.18 We might say the same of the British writings on the émigrés, for before Dominic Bellenger wrote there was barely enough to qualify as an academic historiography. On the social side of the emigration to Britain, besides Weiner, there were two major theses, Kim M. Berryman’s 1981 Australian National University thesis, which considered Britain’s administrative response to the refugees, and E. M. Wilkinson’s in 1955 Oxford thesis on the arrival and reception of the émigrés in Britain.19 The latter was awarded only a B.Phil. by her examiners, instead of a doctorate, a rather harsh but defensible judgement, which caused something of a scandal at the time. As social history, Wilkinson’s thesis was based on deep reading in official sources, particularly the records of the relief committees, and newspaper reports. But like much social history, it offered rich description at the expense of the sort of detailed analysis required by the most rigorous of examiners. It is a far more rounded work than Weiner’s book, which also looked at many of the same sources. It is also more detailed in places, though less analytical or insightful, than findings from the same sources in Kirsty Carpenter’s ­published study Refugees of the French Revolution: Emigrés in London, 1789–1802 (London, 1999). However, Kirsty’s doctoral thesis elaborates

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much further on her database evidence and is, in this respect in particular, much richer than her monograph.20 There also existed another statistical survey of the emigration: Donald Greer’s work on the Incidence of the Emigration in the French Revolution, which attempted to conduct a census and map those who left France during the revolution.21 A successor to his work on the Incidence of the Terror, Greer’s work was foundational in providing accurate numbers drawn from official sources, but equally limited by the drawbacks of relying on administrative archives. His quantitative work on the Terror could tell us how many died beneath the blade of the guillotine, for example, but was silent on extra-judicial killings, massacres, and deaths not captured in his key sources.22 Likewise, his work on the emigration tended to miss categories not captured by official reports and confiscation records: servants who departed with their masters and mistresses, children, and above all perhaps the German-speaking peasants who fled Alsace and Lorraine with the retreating allied armies in the autumn of 1792 after Valmy. For me, there were also a set of interesting works on the intellectual side of the emigration, and the political thought of the counter-­revolution. Some of the most interesting of these concerned the moderate monarchien group, particularly Malouet, Montlosier and Mallet du Pan. The most notable studies were written by Robert Griffiths, Frances Acomb and N.  Matteucci.23 Their work appealed to me particularly for its blend of political biography and intellectual history, and their subjects for the moderate revolutionary careers they pursued before the revolution’s radical lurch left-ward left them politically isolated with little option but to flee. I also found little reason to quibble with the general view that Mallet du Pan was one of the most perspicacious observers of the revolution, and loved the zany idiosyncrasy of many of Montlosier’s ideas—particularly his calls for a European gentleman’s crusade against revolution.24 But I also had a great deal of political sympathy with the leading figures of this ‘centre perdu’, ideological moderates who played a leading role in the National Assembly in 1789 before seeing their moderate and sensible policies and pronouncements rapidly marginalised. I could imagine finding myself in a similar position had I lived through revolutionary maelstrom. This brings us to another group of studies: the general surveys of counter-­revolutionary ideology that informed my study of émigré journalism. Intellectually the most impressive of these was Paul Beik on the French Revolution Seen from the Right, by far the most academically rigorous, though published as long ago as 1956.25 More accessible was Jacques

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Godechot’s foundational, though sometimes deeply flawed and error-­ strewn work, on The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action, and by the time I published, James Osen on French Royalist Thought, which considers several thinkers not included in Beik’s study.26 But none of these commentators considered the journalistic writings of the emigration, with which many émigrés came into regular contact on a frequent basis, and through which figures like Mallet du Pan, Montlosier, the Calonne brothers and Peltier maintained a regular contact with both their fellow exiles and European governments and francophone elites. It was this that created space for my study and to my mind at least lent it a certain importance. But once my book appeared, I was left with a dilemma. Where to go next? One option would be to explore the political thought (and action?) of the emigration and counter-revolution in a more rounded way than ever before, using the full range of available artefacts: books, pamphlets, journalism, correspondence and private papers. There was—and remains— space for this, and because only Godechot embedded doctrine and action, there was perhaps a need. But it seemed to me that we had a number of in-depth studies of counter-revolutionary action beginning to appear, including studies on espionage, a topic on which I had ample material, but considered notoriously treacherous. Besides, Elizabeth Sparrow and Mike Durey were light-years ahead of me in that area.27 Equally, I was not sure that an intellectual history of counter-revolution would hold my attention—nor sympathy—enough to make a career. I was also influenced, perhaps, by the appearance of the book I wish I had thought of writing: Darrin McMahon’s study Enemies of Enlightenment: The French Counter-­ enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001). This short, imaginative and wonderfully suggestive monograph treated some of the most reactionary émigré thinkers and Christian apologists—men such as the abbé Barruel—and traced their trajectories back into the pre-­ revolutionary era, and forward towards the modern French right. It showed, among other things, that Barruel’s train of anti-enlightenment thought—including dire warnings of an atheist-philosophe conspiracy against throne, altar and society—was already well developed before the revolution. Barruel’s celebrated Mémoires pour server à l’histoire du Jacobinisme français was, in fact, a case of “I told you so”.28 The breath-­ taking scope of McMahon’s thought-piece left me in a quandary. By broadening the scope of previous studies, he pointed to a daunting agenda for future studies of counter-revolutionary ideology. It is perhaps no surprise that no one has attempted a survey of both doctrine and action since.

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But I had a more over-riding concern. I will call it the ‘Cassandra objection’—who indeed would care about the émigrés? Because it seemed to me that despite all our efforts in the 1980s and 1990s, we had yet to fully define the importance of our subject. True, we had taken some important steps in that direction. For example, we had a well-developed view of what Harvey Mitchell styled ‘The Underground War Against Revolutionary France’29 and Dominic Bellenger had revealed the significance of the clergy to English Catholic history and, more unexpectedly, the emergence of Anglican monasticism.30 Likewise, Kirsty Carpenter had finally given us a rounded social, and to some extent literary history of the emigration31 and the two émigré conferences had highlighted the activities of émigrés in various countries (and in some cases just how shallow the existing scholarship remained).32 Finally, I had linked the émigré journalism to a pan-­ European propaganda war against the Revolution and Napoleon, even suggesting that combats and misperceptions around the journalists’ activities may have precipitated war in 1803.33 We knew also, and inescapably, that most émigrés returned in both 1802 and 1814, and many played leading roles in the Napoleonic and Bourbon governments, though we lacked any in-depth exploration of the topic. And yet I felt something still eluded us. For when called upon to explain how the experience of emigration shaped the culture, politics or societies of post-revolutionary Europe, especially after 1814, our answers seemed vague, abstract, speculative. We still had no answer to Colin Lucas’s musing about the number of returnees in 1814–1815, and little systematic view on their roles and how the exile experience changed, shaped and defined them. As a result, other scholars were perhaps too ready to accept the Chevalier Panat’s withering observation that the émigrés “n’[ont] su rien oublier ni rien apprendre”.34 Certainly the historiography and our own conclusions continued to suggest that the long-term cultural impact of the emigration was limited, particularly with regard to Britain (even if some wished to link it to the Entente Cordiale and 200 years of Anglo-­ French peace that have followed 1815). The implicit and inappropriate comparison was always with our celebrated over-stayers and co-religionists the Huguenots. This seemed to fly in the face of logic. Surely there must be more we could say? What was missing was a suitable approach and conceptual vocabulary for isolating and discussing this “influence”. But without it, for all the sterling efforts of Kirsty Carpenter, Philip Mansel and others, the field of émigré studies seemed likely to remain a little too limited, a little too marginalised, a curiosity within wider revolutionary

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studies. Our failure to find a publisher for émigrés-2, the conference Kirsty and Philip organised in London in 1999, seemed to me to underline the point. It also left some of us despondent. Yet even then, the conceptual vocabulary and new understandings that would help us to explore the émigrés’ wider impact was already being developed. The most important breakthrough here was the concept of “cultural transfers”, which unlocked multiple new possibilities. Pioneering work in this area was being undertaken in Germany already in the 1990s, led by Rolf Reichardt and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink.35 Ironically, a few years later, I became involved in a network looking at Anglo-French cultural transfers in the long-eighteenth-century organised by Ann Thomson and Sarah Hutton, which won AHRC and ANR network funding. In due course, I found myself serving as co-editor with Ann Thomson and Edmond Dziembowski of the SVEC volume that came out of it and organiser of one of our group workshops, which took place at Leeds.36 In my own chapter contribution, however, I did not write about émigrés or their journalism, though I did discuss them at one of our network workshops.37 Instead I discussed the pre-revolutionary Courier de l’Europe newspaper, an important French journal based in London, but one whose role in cultural transfer was relatively limited—in marked contrast, as we shall see in a moment, to the Hamburg-based Spectateur du Nord a couple of decades later.38 Others, however, did apply the ideas of cultural transfers to the émigrés. Historians of the revolution owe a debt to Matthias Middell for carrying German conceptual work on cultural transfers across linguistic frontiers in a 1999 article in the Annales historiques de la Révolution française, and to Karine Rance whose work on the emigration in Germany began to explore the new possibilities it raised, especially when stood alongside the indigenous German scholarship of Thomas Höpel and others, who began to treat the emigration as a cultural phenomenon in its own right.39 There was, of course, earlier work looking at the cultural exchange with Germany, though it lacked this new framework. I am thinking above all about the path-breaking early twentieth-century work of Fernand Baldensperger and Paul Hazard’s 1906 essay on the role of the Hamburg-based émigré journal the Spectateur du Nord in popularising knowledge of German culture among a French audience before de Staël’s De l’Allemagne.40 But the concept of cultural transfers helped Rance to explore such linkages in more depth. Rance’s work was particularly influential on one of her students at Clermont-Ferrand, Juliette Reboul, one of

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the co-editors of this volume. Reboul’s doctoral monograph to my mind marks a further milestone in émigré studies, particularly with regard to Britain, which uncovered many new or largely ignored sources for studying the emigration in Britain and in doing so highlights the limitations of administrative and memoir sources.41 Her most important contribution, in this regard, is a critical rereading of émigré memoir sources, which draws on recent developments in the study of life writing, and in which Rance’s influence is again evident. In particular, she stresses the political climate of the Restoration and post-Restoration world in which most émigré memoirs were written, and the political (frequently nationalistic), emotional and psychological motives of the writers. These in turn shaped the narrative accounts of the ego-documents they produced, and generally led them to under-play, or ignore entirely, the strengths of the links developed between the émigré refugees and their British hosts. As a result, the memory of the emigration as preserved in memoir sources is that the émigrés integrated poorly into British society and that cultural understandings, borrowings and transfers were surprisingly limited. Dr. Reboul’s work suggests that this was far from the case, and her close reading of a plethora of other documents substantiates this important historiographical claim.42 The more rounded, deep, critical social and cultural history of the emigration exemplified by the work of Karine Rance and Juliette Reboul permeates this volume, too, and is also typical of much recent scholarship. For example, we now have much fuller accounts of the émigré novel, primarily through the efforts of Malcolm Cook and Katherine Astbury; the contributors to Claire Jacquier, Florence Lotterie and Catriona Seth (eds.), Destins romanesques de l’émigration (Paris, 2007); and Laure Philip’s unpublished doctoral thesis.43 Similarly, in a confluence of political, social, cultural, educational and internationally comparative history unthinkable a generation ago, Friedemann Pestel has also given us a fascinating and important account of how émigrés in Britain, Germany and Russia educated their children—‘Educating Against Revolution: French Émigré Schools and the Challenge of the Next Generation’. When I took the bold decision to dedicate a doctoral thesis to the émigré press, I could not have imagined that thirty years later a mainstream journal would be publishing such innovative work in what would then have seemed a sub-topic of a marginalised field. Whilst the work of Rance, Reboul, Höpel, Carpenter, Cook, Astbury, Philip and Pestel and others has led to the emergence of a much deeper—

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and more sophisticated—understanding of the cultural role and impact of the émigrés, other scholars have broadened the discussion in other ways. In some of her most interesting work, including a paper at the second émigrés conference, Kirsty Carpenter began looking at the émigré legislation, and exploring its centrality in the formation and radicalisation of revolutionary thought about citizenship, nation, identity and counter-­ revolution. However, before this paper could be published, Ladan Boroumand made similar arguments in a piece in the Journal of Modern History in early 2000.44 Suddenly, the émigrés were being given centre stage in the revolutionary political drama. This became yet more visible, in some ways, in the noughties as revolutionary historians became obsessed with conspiracy phobia. For as I pointed out in an important collection of essays on Conspiracy in the French Revolution (2007), the émigré conspirator, implacable enemy of the revolution, haunted the revolutionary psyche for good reason. In an insight that ran counter to much of the scholarship that inspired or filled that volume, I showed how a cadre of die-hard counter-­revolutionaries in exile were indeed working tirelessly to subvert the revolution, and behind many revolutionary fantasies lay genuine conspiracies. Paranoia can have a rational basis.45 Culturally significant and no longer marginal to the dominant political narratives of the revolution, many scholars began to realise the émigrés were worth another look. This book, and the conference from which it arose, amply demonstrate that émigré studies is now a burgeoning, reinvigorated and self-confident sub-field of French revolutionary history, and that its leading scholars are often working at the forefront of the discipline. Whereas twenty years ago, the backbone of Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel’s edited collection on the émigrés was formed around different nationally based case studies, many essays in the current volume, in keeping with the ‘global turn’ in revolutionary studies, offer more cosmopolitan or internationalist perspectives. The émigré experience is here embedded in pan-European, imperial and global developments and cultural encounters are explored in all their dynamic complexity. From such considerations emerge new understandings of the role and centrality of the émigrés in helping to define notions of citizenship, nationhood and the modern refugee. Equally, the volume breaks open chronological boundaries, ranging well beyond the revolutionary period. And while it may not offer Colin Lucas his desired head-count of émigrés returning at the Restoration or a fully worked account of émigré political and cultural influence on Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic France, several contribu-

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tors engage with wider questions surrounding the return of the émigrés following the 1802 amnesty and 1814 Bourbon Restoration that first piqued my interest in the field. This flowering of émigré scholarship has been empowered no doubt by historical developments. Much of our present agenda in revolutionary studies is both informed and enriched by what we would recognise as “the cultural turn” in historical scholarship. A great early pioneering work of this cultural turn, Lynn Hunt’s Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution was once scathingly dismissed by Robert Darnton as having more in common with the concerns of 1970s’ campus politics than the lived experience of the 1790s.46 I would not dream of going so far, but I do want to consider the impact of generational shifts and how they may influence our scholarship. A quick look at the chapters in this book, as well as the programme for the conference where most of them were delivered, indicates an over-riding concern with ideologies, community, social identity, cultural politics, and global political entanglements. There is little or nothing here about Coblentz, emigration militaire, émigré involvement in counter-revolutionary activism, conspiracy or subversion in France. Even in comparison with the ‘proceedings’ volume of the first émigré conference, which opened, tellingly, with a chapter by Philip Mansel on the “Emigré Government and the European Powers, 1791-1814” (pp.  1–27) and continued with Frédéric d’Agay’s contribution on the “Armée de Condé” (pp. 28–42) before offering a series of national case studies, this marks a significant shift. In some ways, it may even reflect a better world. We certainly cannot be said to have ‘depoliticised’ our study of the emigration—a whole gamut of chapters engaging with ideology and imperial issues show that—but the political preoccupations have changed. As a result, scholars today are able to downplay or even ignore the personal urgency and pervasive intrusion of the political, and particularly political violence, in our émigré histories. Equally—now the long shadows of the Cold War and French communist party are dispelled—the scholar of the émigrés is no longer expected to take a position ‘for’ or ‘against’ their subjects. Darrin MacMahon tells how as late as 1994, when he first started researching the counter-enlightenment, a puzzled Parisian librarian asked, ‘Vous êtes royaliste, monsieur’. In scholarly circles, at least, this now seems a question from another era.47 Previous generations of historians did not have such liberty. Their entire lived experience reinforced the sense of the political as life and death struggle. Hélène Maspero-Clerc’s biography might serve as an example.

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Born Hélène Clerc on 14 June 1899, and the daughter of a distinguished Parisian cardiologist, she married Henri Maspero, a celebrated sinologist. Hélène Maspero-Clerc was a student of Fernand Baldensperger, with whom she began studying for a doctorate in the 1920s. However, in the early 1930s, she abandoned her studies to accompany her husband on research trips to China and Japan. She returned to France before the outbreak of World War II and remained in Paris during the occupation, where her flat served as a centre of the Resistance. However, Maspero-Clerc’s elder son Antoine’s involvement with the Resistance was discovered, and so on 26 July 1944, as allied armies closed in on Paris, she and her husband were rounded up by the Nazis. Hélène was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp; Henri perished in Buchenwald just three weeks before the liberation. Antoine escaped but died in September 1944 fighting near Metz. Hélène Maspero-Clerc survived Ravensbrück, and after the war took a job with UNESCO. On retiring in 1965, she took up her studies of the émigré journalist Jean-Gabriel Peltier once again. Her first and only book, a biography of Peltier, was published in 1973. The tale of the family’s struggles during the dark days of 1944–1945 is recounted by her younger son François Maspero in his autobiographical first novel of his war-torn adolescence, Le Sourire du Chat (1985). A littérateur and éditeur-­libraire, famous for his courageous opposition to the Algerian War, François’s premises were bombed more than once as a result. Hélène Maspero-Clerc’s story serves to remind us that when previous generations of historians wrote about revolution, violence and struggle, they knew the horrors of which they spoke in a way we can barely imagine. It is humbling to realise how far their preoccupations were shaped by the daily realities of bloodshed, repression and the everyday fight for physical survival. But this is not to suggest today’s historians are any less engaged and, of course, we do bring other relevant experiences to bear, to shape our writing and the questions that concern us. For many of us, the most important of these has been migration and the geographical dislocation that accompanies it. This is something many of us share with our subjects, the émigrés. It is notable how far many scholars of emigration have travelled for our careers, moving across borders and between national communities, and having to negotiate the challenges of integration. Of my own band of fellow travellers, Robert Griffiths lived and worked at different times in France, Britain, Canada and the US, leaving France (where his father played professional soccer for Racing Club de Paris) as a small child ahead of the Nazi invasion. Less dramati-

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cally, Kirsty Carpenter and I, both multiple migrants, have moved around the world twice and three times respectively. And the editors of this book, Juliette Reboul and Laure Philip have also relocated internationally twice each, between three countries. Several other contributors have done likewise. None of this, of course, makes us better writers or scholars than those who have not migrated across borders, but it does no doubt colour some of our writing and our comprehension of the challenges of migration, and it helps to create empathy with our subjects by personalising aspects of their experience. This is particularly important for my own engagement with the subject, for I confess my sympathy for most émigrés is humanitarian rather than political. From a humanitarian perspective, as a doctoral student, I saw most émigrés as victims of circumstance who had fled in shock and terror, but my political sympathies lay more with moderate Jacobinism of 1789–1791, and, at an earlier moment, the monarchien circle around Malouet, Mallet Du Pan and Lally-Tollendal. It is our common humanity, experienced particularly in our common experience of geographical dislocation, that continues to draw me to the émigrés, rather than a sense of social, cultural or political identification. This brings me to the future and promotion of émigré studies. In my capacity as the occupant of Australia’s oldest Chair in Digital Humanities, it is perhaps not surprising that I would call for us to develop our digital resources. Not surprising perhaps, but slightly incongruous. For compared to some contributors to this book, I am a relative latecomer to digitally empowered research. The real pioneers of the digital in émigré studies are Kirsty Carpenter, who created what was at the time a huge and, by anyone’s standards, impressive database of the lay émigrés, and, I surmise, Dominic Bellenger, whose working list of émigré clergy, each with unique multi-digit alpha-numeric identifiers, also hints at a digital approach. Between them, they prepared data on somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 émigrés on British soil. By contrast, my list of 300 émigré contributors and contributions to émigré journals, prepared during my doctoral work and technically, by some definitions, a primitive database, is a mere bagatelle. The problem with all this digital work, from a current perspective, is that it was conducted some time before the digital dark ages. Dominic Bellenger was working in the early 1980s; Kirsty Carpenter and I in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, both the software and the hardware have moved on. I jettisoned the collection of 3½ inch floppy disks on which I stored back-ups of everything important I did in the 1990s several

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house moves ago. But I do have printouts, and somewhere a digital copy of my table of contributors, too. It is the sole surviving file from my doctoral work and monograph. Aidan also has gifted us his working list of clergy, and Kirsty Carpenter has confirmed she still has printouts—and perhaps digital files—of her full working list. There is a particular urgency to track down what work we may collectively have, even if our digital versions are still stored in 1980s or 1990s software formats and storage devices. Even these might just be recoverable. This is not likely to be an easy job, but it could be feasible. At Western Sydney, we have done something similar for another research resource held in late 1980s’ software—a comprehensive database of the French novel to 1800 prepared by Professor Angus Martin and his late collaborators Vivienne Mylne and Richard Frautschi. This has not been an easy task—we have had to model workflows, capture Angus Martin’s thought-­ processes and overcome the numerous structural and presentational hurdles that arose both from the limitations of the original software and the creative ways that Martin and his collaborators devised to get around them. Shortly, however, we will be in a position to publish this database on line.48 Whether or not something similar is possible with the various British émigré materials, it does seem to me that the foundational work has been done for a unified émigré database, and other scholars have further datasets: for example, Clare Siviter has done work towards mapping French theatre in the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. The Archives Nationales’ new émigré series and printed émigré lists would be able to provide further riches. Such a database might record for each émigré we can identify, name, place(s) of origin, date of emigration, place(s) of emigration, with dates and addresses where known, social status, members of household, profession before during and after emigration, military service, means of support, works published (books/ pamphlets and journalistic contributions), key associates, date of return, known archival and printed sources, and any other indicators deemed useful (do they appear in the Sun Insurance company records, for example). Radboud University, where Juliette Reboul is based, and my own unit at Western have technical competencies in this area. This provides a wonderful opportunity to build on the work of the last thirty-five years. Given some of the more ill-considered critiques of digital humanities that have appeared in recent years, let me be clear, I am not suggesting a digital approach as a substitute for more traditional historical approaches, involving deep reading in the manuscript and print archive and imaginative

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reconstruction of the historic past. Identifying and capturing the émigrés in a database should instead be seen as a means of resting our work on more solid empirical foundations, identifying émigré networks and tracking individuals within them; exploring the demography and migration of émigré communities; establishing a broader view of the social, cultural, intellectual and political experience and realities of emigration; and interrogating the data we gather collectively in ways impossible without digital tools, to see patterns invisible to close reading and to frame and answer new questions. Such methods promise, among other things, to allow us to assess the emigration’s pan-European and even global significance, and, of course, they are far from new in émigré studies. As I have shown, we can, for now, draw upon the resources created and expertise gathered across two generations of remarkable and pioneering digital scholarship to connect our émigré histories in a way hitherto unimaginable. If we grasp that opportunity, the future for émigré studies, both as a field in its own right, and an exemplar of the transformative power of digital research, looks rosy indeed.

Notes 1. This chapter began life as the Opening Keynote Address at the ‘Connected Histories and Memories: French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe’ conference held at Radboud University, Nijmegen (Netherlands), 19–20 June 2017. I thank conference participants for their comments. 2. Burrows, ‘Journaux des émigrés’; ‘The Image of the Republic in the Press of the London Emigrés’; ‘The Cultural Politics of Exile’ and ‘Reviewing in the Journalism of the London Emigrés, 1793–1815’. 3. Burrows, ‘The Cosmopolitan Press’ in Burrows and Barker (eds.), Press, Politics and the Public Sphere, 23–47; Burrows, ‘The War of Words’; ‘The Black Legend of Napoleon’; ‘British Propaganda and anti-Napoleonic Feeling in the Invasion Crisis of 1803’ and ‘Émigrés and Conspiracy, 1789–1799’. 4. Reboul, ‘French emigration in Great-Britain’; Pennycook, ‘Debates Concerning French Émigré Legislation’. There was also much émigré related material in de la Huerta’s dissertation, ‘French Counter-Espionage under the Directory’. Both Reboul and de La Huerta have published books based on their research: Reboul, French Emigration in GreatBritain; de la Huerta, The Great Conspiracy. 5. The first and last of these conferences resulted in the published volumes: Carpenter and Mansel (eds.), The French Émigrés in Europe; Beaupré,

314 

S. BURROWS

Bourdin and Rance (eds.), Arrachés et déplacés. We were unable to find a publisher for essays from the 1999 conference, a reflection of the way the field was seen as having limited publishing mileage. 6. The further monograph studies emerging from this work are Burrows, Enlightenment Bestsellers; Blackmail, Scandal and the French Revolution; and Barker and Burrows (eds.), Press, Politics and the Public Sphere. 7. The first Digitizing Enlightenment symposium was held at Western Sydney in 2016, with further symposia at Radboud (2017), Oxford (2018), and Edinburgh (2019). A collection of essays, Digitizing Enlightenment, edited by Burrows and Glenn Roe, will appear in 2020. 8. Daudet, Histoire de l’émigration; Forneron, Histoire générale des émigrés; Baldensperger, Le Mouvement des idées pendant l’émigration. 9. Weiner, The French Exiles. 10. Ibid., 119–20. 11. Maspero-Clerc, ‘Une Gazette Anglo-française’, and ‘Montlosier, journaliste de l’émigration’. 12. Maspero-Clerc, Un Journaliste contre-révolutionnaire: Jean-Gabriel Peltier. 13. Griffiths, Le Centre perdu. 14. In addition to the works by Maspero-Clerc cited above, see also ‘Journaux d’émigrés à Londres (1792–1818)’. 15. Bellenger, French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after 1789. 16. Gazave, ‘Ouvrages imprimés des écclesiastiques’. 17. For example, the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe database prepared under my guidance records details on some 4188 authors and 2985 clients of a Swiss bookseller. 18. Biskup, ‘German Court and French Revolution’. 19. Wilkinson, ‘French Émigrés in England’. Berryman, ‘French émigrés and refugees in Great Britain and Ireland’. 20. See Carpenter’s unpublished thesis: ‘Les Émigrés à Londres, 1793–1797’. 21. Greer, Incidence of the Emigration. 22. Greer, Incidence of the Terror. 23. Griffiths, Le Centre perdu; Frances Acomb, Mallet du Pan (1749–1800); Matteucci, Jacques Mallet du Pan. 24. This view of Mallet du Pan can be traced back to Lord Acton: Lectures on the French Revolution, 212. Montlosier propounds a gentleman’s crusade in the Courier de Londres, vol. 46, no. 16 (22 February 1799) and subsequent numbers. 25. Beik, French Revolution seen from the Right. 26. Godechot, The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action; Osen, Royalist Political Thought during the French Revolution.

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27. Sparrow, Secret Service; Durey, William Wickham, Master Spy. 28. Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme françois. 29. Mitchell, The Underground War against Revolutionary France. For other works on the underground war see especially: Durey, William Wickham, Master Spy; Fryer, Republic or Restoration in France? 1794–1797; Godechot, Counter-Revolution; Hutt, Chouannerie and CounterRevolution; de La Heurta, Great Conspiracy; Sparrow, Secret Service; and Burrows, French Exile Journalism. Perhaps due to the difficulty of the material, some works, notably those of Godechot and de La Huerta, have high error rates. 30. Bellenger, French Exiled Clergy. 31. Carpenter, Refugees. 32. For essays from the first conference see Carpenter and Mansel (eds.), The French Émigrés in Europe. 33. On misperception see Burrows, ‘Culture and Misperception: The Outbreak of War in 1803’. 34. Letter of the Chevalier de Panat to Mallet Du Pan, January 1796, reproduced in A.  Sayous, Mémoires et Correspondance de Mallet du Pan, II, 195–197, at p. 197. 35. Lüsebrink and Reichardt, Kulturtransfer im Epochenumbrach. 36. Thomson, Burrows, and Dziembowski (eds.), Cultural Transfers. 37. My position paper on ‘The Emigrés and Cultural Transfers’ was given at the first cultural transfers network symposium in Paris in December 2005. 38. Burrows, ‘The Courier de l’Europe as an agent of cultural transfer, 1776– 1791’, in Thomson, Burrows and Dziembowski (eds.), Cultural Transfers, 189–201. 39. Middell, ‘La Révolution française et l’Allemagne’; Rance, ‘Mémoires de nobles français émigrés en Allemagne’; and ‘L’émigration française en Allemagne’; Höpel, Emigranten der Französischen Revolution. 40. Hazard, ‘Le Spectateur du nord’. 41. Reboul, French Emigration in Great-Britain. 42. Ibid., ch. 2. 43. Jaquier, Lotterie, Seth, (eds.), Destins romanesques de l’émigration; Laure Philip, ‘The Novels of French Noblewomen Emigrées in London in the 1790s’. 44. Boroumand, ‘Emigration and the Rights of Man’. 45. Burrows, ‘The Emigrés and Conspiracy’. 46. Darnton, ‘Revolution sans Revolutionaries’. 47. McMahon, Enemies of Enlightenment, p. vii. 48. The project website is at http://fbtee.uws.edu.au/mpce/. Last consulted 17 November 2018.

316 

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Bibliography Acomb, Frances. Mallet du Pan (1749–1800): A Career in Political Journalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1973. Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord, Lectures on the French Revolution. London: Macmillan, 1910. Astbury, Katherine. ‘The Trans-National Dimensions of the Émigré Novel during the French Revolution’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 23 (4), (2011): 801–32. Baldensperger, Fernand. Le Mouvement des idées pendant l’émigration 2 vols. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1924. Barruel, Augustin. Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme françois 4 vols. Hamburg: P.-F. Fauche, 1797–1798. Beik, Paul. ‘The French Revolution seen from the Right: Social theories in Motion, 1789–1799’. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Volume XLVI, Part 1. Philadelphia: The Society, 1956. Bellenger, Dominic Aidan. The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after 1789: a historical introduction and working list. Downside: Downside Abbey Press, 1986. Berryman, Kim M. ‘French émigrés and refugees in Great Britain and Ireland, 1789–1815. Great Britain and the French refugees 1789–1802: the administrative response’, Unpublished PhD thesis, The Australian National University, 1981. Biskup, Thomas. ‘German Court and French Revolution: Émigrés and the Brunswick Court around 1800’, Francia 34 (2), (2007): 61–87. Boroumand, Ladan. ‘Emigration and the Rights of Man: French Revolutionary Legislators Equivocate’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 72, no.1 (2000): 67–108. Burrows, Simon. Enlightenment Bestsellers: The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe vol. 2. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. ———. ‘Les Journaux des émigrés et la communauté française des exilés’, in Nicolas Beaupré, Philippe Bourdin and Karine Rance, eds, Arrachés et déplacés, 1789–1918, Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2016, 237–53. ———. ‘Émigrés and Conspiracy, 1789–1799’ in Peter Campbell, Marisa Linton and Thomas Kaiser, eds., Conspiracy in the French Revolution, Manchester University Press, 2007, 150–71. ———. ‘The Black Legend of Napoleon’ in Mark Philp, ed., Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1798–1815, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, 141–57. ———. ‘The War of Words: French and British Propaganda in the Napoleonic Era’, in David Cannadine, ed., Trafalgar in History: A Battle and its Afterlife, Palgrave, 2006, 44–60. ———. Blackmail, Scandal and the French Revolution, Manchester: MUP, 2006.

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———. ‘The Cultural Politics of Exile: French Émigré Literary Journalism, 1793– 1814’, Journal of European Studies 29 (June 1999): 157–177. ———. ‘British Propaganda and anti-Napoleonic Feeling in the Invasion Crisis of 1803’ in Nelson and Napoleon: Exhibition Catalogue, London: National Maritime Museum, 2005, 120–5. ———. ‘The Image of the Republic in the Press of the London Émigrés’, in Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel (eds.), The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle Against Revolution, 1789–1814, Macmillan, 1999, 184–196. ———. ‘Culture and Misperception: The Outbreak of War in 1803’, International History Review 18 (November 1996): 793–818. ———. ‘Reviewing in the Journalism of the London Émigrés, 1793–1815’ in Adcock, Chester and Whiteman, eds., Revolution, Society and the Politics of Memory: Proceedings of the Tenth George Rudé Seminar on French History and Civilisation, Melbourne: Department of History, University of Melbourne, 1996, 77–85. ———. and Hannah Barker (eds). Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and America, c. 1760–1820, Cambridge: CUP, 2002. Carpenter, Kirsty. Refugees of the French Revolution: Émigrés in London, 1789– 1802, London, 1999. ———, ‘Les Émigrés à Londres, 1793–1797’, Unpublished thesis, Université de Paris I, 1993. Darnton, Robert. ‘Revolution sans Revolutionaries’, New York Review of Books, 31 January 1985. Daudet, Ernest. Histoire de l’émigration pendant la révolution française, 3 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1905–7. Durey, Michael. William Wickham, Master Spy: The Secret War against the French Revolution. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009. De la Huerta, Carlos. The Great Conspiracy: Britain’s Secret War against Revolutionary France, 1794–1805. Stroud: Amberley, 2016. ———. ‘French Counter-Espionage under the Directory’. Unpublished MA by research dissertation, University of Leeds, 2012. Forneron, Henri. Histoire générale des émigrés, 3 vols. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1884–1890. Fryer, W. R. Republic or Restoration in France? 1794–1797. Manchester, 1965. Gazave, Bruno. ‘Les Ouvrages imprimés des ecclésiastiques français exiles en Grande-Bretagne (1791–1815)’, unpublished Mémoire de Maîtrise, Paris, 1987. Godechot, Jacques. The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action, transl. Salvator Attanasio. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Grainger, John. The Amiens Truce: Britain and Bonaparte, 1801–1803. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004.

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Greer, Donald. The Incidence of the Emigration in the French Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951. ———. The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution; a Statistical Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935. Griffiths, Robert. Le Centre perdu: Malouet et les ‘monarchiens’ dans la révolution française. Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1988. Hazard, Paul. ‘Le Spectateur du nord’, Revue de l’histoire littéraire de France (1906): 26–50. Höpel, Thomas. Emigranten der Französischen Revolution in Preussen 1789–1806. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2000. Hutt, Maurice. Chouannerie and Counter-Revolution. Puisaye, the Princes and the British Government in the 1790s, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Jaquier, Claire, Florence Lotterie and Catriona Seth (eds). Destins romanesques de l’émigration. Paris: Desjonqueres, 2007. Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen and Rolf Reichardt (eds), Kulturtransfer im Epochenumbrach—Deutschland 1770 bis 1815. 2 vols, Leipzig 1997. Maspero-Clerc, Hélène. ‘Montlosier, journaliste de l’émigration’, Bulletin de l’histoire économique et sociale de la Révolution française, 1975 (1977): 81–103. ———. ‘Une Gazette Anglo-française pendant la guerre d’Amérique, Le Courier de l’Europe, 1776–1788’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française xliv (1976): 572–94. ———.‘Journaux d’émigrés à Londres (1792–1818)’, Bulletin d’histoire sociale et économique et sociale de la révolution française, 1972–3 (1974): 67–79. ———. Un Journaliste contre-révolutionnaire: Jean-Gabriel Peltier. Paris: Société des Etudes Robespierristes, 1973. Matteucci, N., Jacques Mallet du Pan. Naples: Il Mulino, 1957. Middell, Matthias. ‘La Révolution française et l’Allemagne: du paradigme comparatiste à la recherche des transferts culturels’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française (1999): 427–54. Mitchell, Harvey. The Underground War against Revolutionary France. Oxford: OUP, 1965. Osen, James. Royalist Political Thought during the French Revolution. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995. Pennycook, Meg. ‘Debates Concerning French Émigré Legislation in the French Revolution’. Unpublished MA by Research dissertation, university of Leeds, 2005. Pestel, Friedemann. ‘Educating against Revolution: French Émigré Schools and the Challenge of the Next Generation’. European History Quarterly, 47 (2), (April 2017): 229–56. Philip, Laure. ‘The Novels of French Noblewomen Emigrées in London in the 1790s: Memory, Trauma and Female Voice in the Emigré Novel.’ Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Warwick, 2016.

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Reboul, Juliette. French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. ———. ‘French emigration in Great-Britain in response to the French revolution: memories, integrations, cultural transfers’. Unpublished doctorate thesis, University of Leeds, 2014. Rance, Karine. ‘Mémoires de nobles français émigrés en Allemagne pendant la Révolution française: la vision rétrospective d’une expérience’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (1954–), 46 (1999): 245–62. ———. ‘L’émigration française en Allemagne: une migration de maintien’, Genèse, 30 (1998): 5–29. Sayous, A. Mémoires et Correspondance de Mallet du Pan pour servir à l’histoire de la Révolution française, 2 vols. Paris: Amyot and Cherbuliez, 1851. Sparrow, Elizabeth. Secret Service. British Agents in France, 1792–1815. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999. Thomson, Ann, Simon Burrows, and Edmond Dziembowski (eds.). Cultural Transfers. Britain and France in the long eighteenth century, SVEC 2010:4. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010. Weiner, Margery. The French Exiles, 1789–1815. London: John Murray, 1960. Wilkinson, E. M., ‘French Émigrés in England, 1789–1802, their Reception and Impact on English Life’. Unpublished B. Litt. Dissertation, Oxford, 1955.

Index1

A Abrial, André-Joseph, 242 Ackermann, Konrad Ernst, 156 Adams (theatrical family), 162 Adaptability, 70, 81, 148, 211 Adaptation, see Assimilation Administration, 13, 14, 37–39, 48–52, 68, 69, 71–78, 92, 95, 185, 188, 209, 237, 238, 241, 243, 245, 246, 249, 260, 285, 302, 303 Administrative, 307 Advertisement, 118, 120, 124, 163, 165, 166 Aguisi, Ferdinand d, 101 Aiguille, Madame de, 93 Aix, archevêque d, see Boisgelin, Jean de Dieu-Raymond de Albignac de Castelnau, Philippe-­ François d, 262 Alexander I of Russia, 287 Aliens Act (1793), 76, 213, 260 Aliens Act (1798), 68, 71, 80

Aliens Act (1800), 68 Alterity, see Otherness Ambroise, Jeanne, 79 Amelot, Sébastien-Michel, 262 America (North), 112, 206, 208, 297 American Revolution, 15, 205–207, 213, 214, 217, 220 Amiens, Treaty of (1802), 75, 118, 236, 245, 247, 249 Amnistie des Emigrés (1800), 242–244 Amnistie des Emigrés (1802), 16, 30, 39, 47, 68, 75, 120, 212, 235, 246–248, 250, 278, 309 Anglomania, 143, 144 Angoulême, évêque d, see Albignac de Castelnau, Philippe-François d Angoulême, Louis-Antoine duc d, 16, 277–281, 284–286, 288 Anné, Louis, 12, 29–31, 35–39

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 L. Philip, J. Reboul (eds.), French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1

321

322 

INDEX

Annexation (French) Geneva, 214, 215 Annexed territories, see Occupation (French) Anonymity, 2, 3, 115–117, 159, 218 Anti-clericalism, 9, 10, 257, 258 Anti-Jacobinism, 52, 122–124 Antilles, see West Indies Anxiety, 38, 141, 142, 145, 235, 243 Argens, Olivier d, 72, 76 Armée de Condé, 73, 278, 280, 309 Armée des émigrés, 48, 50, 57 Arnold, Benedict, 213 Arras, évêque d, see Conzié, Louis-­ Hilaire de Artois, comte d, see Charles X Asia, 192 Assemblée Constituante, 182, 183, 239 Assemblée Legislative, 38 Assemblée Nationale, 31, 35, 46, 48, 189, 208, 222, 247, 303 Assimilation, 5, 6, 12, 59, 80, 148, 209, 220 Atlantic, 71, 75, 191, 192, 195, 205, 206, 216–220 Atlantic, Crossing of the, 70 Australia, 4, 206, 207, 216, 218, 219, 221 Austrian Netherlands, 30, 35, 45, 46, 48, 50, 52 Avignon, 35 Avranches, évêque d, see Godart de Belbeuf, Pierre-Augustin B Barruel, Augustin, 266, 304, 315n28 Bastille, Storming of the (1789), 47, 159 Bathurst, Henry Earl, 279, 280 Beauvoir, de (family), 74 Belgium, 12, 30, 31, 34–37, 136, 162, 185

Brussels, 12, 29, 30, 35, 37, 46, 48–50, 162, 168, 262 Grammont, 36 Ypres, 36 See also Austrian Netherlands; Habsburg monarchy Bellegarde, baron de, 97, 101 Benevolence, 249 See also Charity Beresford, William Viscount, 283–286 Berry, Charles Ferdinand d’Artois duc de, 277, 281 Bertier, Ferdinand de, 282 Berwick (family), 210 Béthizy de Mézières, Henri Benoît Jules de, 262 Biens Nationaux, 48, 59, 75, 222, 239, 259, 278 Blacas d’Aulps, Pierre Louis Jean Casimir de, 280, 282 Blanchard, Pierre-Louis, 263–265 Blanchardism, 16, 263–266 Blois, Alexandre de Lauzières de Thémines évêque de, 263 Boigne, Adèle d’Osmond comtesse de, 136, 137, 140–142, 144, 147, 148 Bois de Maquillé, Charles-André du, 102 Boisgelin, Jean de Dieu-Raymond de, 263 Bombelles, Marc Marie marquis de, 54 Bonaparte, see Napoléon Bonaparte, Joseph, 240 Bonaparte, Josephine, 240 Bonaparte, Lucien, 212, 237 Bonapartism, 123, 222, 235, 245 Bontemps Dubarry, Georges, 283 Book trade, 8, 112, 113, 115, 119, 120, 122, 125, 168, 169, 207, 214, 258, 261, 263, 265, 300 Boosey, Thomas (bookshop), 120

 INDEX 

Bordeaux, archevêque de, see Cicé, Jérôme Champion de Border, 5, 30–32, 34–39, 46, 48–52, 69, 70, 81, 112, 125, 237, 247 Botherel, René-Jean du Plessis comte de, 74 Boucher, Jonathan, 117 Bouillé, François-Claude-Amour marquis de, 115, 188, 216 Bouillé, Marie Louise Guillemette marquise de, 193 Bouillon, Philippe d’Auvergne prince de, 75–77, 80, 94, 104n24 Bourbon, House of, 16, 39, 53, 182, 184, 210, 212, 259, 266, 278–280, 282, 283, 285–287, 305 Bourbon, Louis-Henri duc de, 288 Bournon, Jacques-Louis de, 116, 123 Bouthillier-Chavigny, Charles-Léon de, 248 Brazil, 141 Bricquer, Guillaume, 76 British Army, 97, 279–281, 283 British government, 15, 16, 78, 101, 107n76, 117, 142, 181, 208, 211, 214, 216–218, 260, 265, 278–281 Alien Office, 77 Foreign Office, 68, 69, 73, 279 Home Office, 77 Whitehall, 69, 186, 191, 261 See also British Isles British Isles, 4, 10, 14, 71, 75, 76, 91, 92, 102, 118–120, 124, 141– 144, 169, 182–184, 186, 188, 190–192, 195, 206, 210, 211, 213–215, 245, 259–266, 279, 280, 302, 305, 307, 311 See also England; Scotland Brumaire, Coup of 18 (1799), 212, 235–239, 244, 259

323

Buckingham, George Nugent-Temple-­ Grenville Marquess of, 94, 96, 99, 103n3 Bulkeley, Céleste, 79 Burdon, William, 117 Bureau des émigrés, 240 Bureaucracy, see Administration Burghersh, Priscilla Anne Fane Countess of Westmorland, Lady, 288 Burke, Edmund, 4, 14, 91–96, 103n3, 103n15, 103n18, 103n20, 104n32, 104n36, 105n37–41, 124, 144, 187, 260 Burney, Frances, 147 Bursays (theatrical family), 162 Business, 30, 48, 56, 74, 77, 208, 220 C Calonne, Charles-Alexandre de, 2, 3, 115, 304 Calonne, Jacques Ladislas Joseph, 304 Cambacérès, Jean-Jacques-Régis de, 239 Canada, 4, 214, 221 Upper Canada, 214 Caribbean, see West Indies Cartwright, Richard, 214 Cassier, Jacques, 79 Cassimier, Jacques, 68 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart Viscount, 279, 280, 286, 287 Castries, Charles Eugène Gabriel de La Croix marquis de, 182 Catholicism (English), 211, 264, 305 Catholicism (Roman), 70, 98, 118, 210, 257–259, 266, 282 Caulaincourt, Armand-Augustin-Louis marquis de, 287 Cazalès, Jacques Antoine Marie de, 99 Cazenove, Théophile, 208

324 

INDEX

Chalmers, George, 118 Chamisso, Adalbert von, 209 Channel, 10, 69, 72, 140, 142 Channel, crossing of, 68, 70, 73, 79, 140–143 Channel Islands, 67, 70, 72, 73 Chardonnay, Jérôme de, 95 Chardonnay, Robert de, 95 Charity, 10, 11, 52, 53, 55, 69–71, 74–77, 80, 91, 92, 94, 95, 101, 102, 118, 124, 208, 213, 260, 302 Charles II, 212 Charles X, 45, 46, 99, 211, 212, 218, 221, 226n68, 226n69, 278–281, 287, 288 Charrière, Isabelle de, 139 Chateaubriand, François-René vicomte de, 2, 7, 74, 136, 138, 143, 145, 212, 266, 287, 299 Chauvigny, Comte de, 72 Chavigny de Blot, Alexandre-Henri de, 262 Cheronnet, Charlotte, 72 Cheronnet, François-Joseph, 72 Chevalier, abbé, 97 Chevalier, Louise (actress), 162, 163 Children, 2, 13, 34, 67–69, 72, 74–80, 91–96, 98–102, 103n7, 103n8, 103n10, 104n35, 105n59, 136, 144, 243, 303, 307 China, 4 Choiseul, Octave de, 95 Choiseul, Xavier de, 100 Choiseul-Gouffier, Marie-Gabriel de, 219 Christianity, 147, 217, 257, 304 Cicé, Jérôme Champion de, 262 Citizenship, 12, 30–38, 78, 79, 160, 169, 208, 215, 222, 236, 237, 239, 243, 244, 247, 308 Classicism, 138

Clavière, Etienne, 214 Clergerie, Timothée de la, 281 Cléry, Jean-Baptiste, 112, 121 Cloots, Anacharsis, 38 Coatgoureden, Ange de, 100 Colbert de Seigneley de Castelhill, Charles, 262 Collé, Charles, 166 Collinet, Rose (actress), 163 Colonies, see Imperialism Comminges, évêque de, see Osmond, Antoine Eustache, baron d Commission des émigrés, 239–244, 246 Compassion, 55, 147, 148 Concert, see Entertainment Conchy (bookshop), 120 Concordat (1801), 16, 58, 236, 245–247, 258, 259, 261–263, 265, 266, 267n1, 267n3, 269n15, 269n16, 270n18, 270n21, 270n22, 272n41, 272n42 Concordat (1817), 266 Condé, Louise de, 55 Condé, Louis-Joseph prince de, 288 Condorcet, Nicolas de Caritat marquis de, 32 Connection, 1, 3, 5, 6, 11, 113, 207, 218, 220 Consalvi, Ercole, 266 Conservatism, 122–124, 148, 187, 189, 261 Conspiracy, 194, 247, 266, 297, 304, 308, 309 Constant, Benjamin, 10, 145 Constitutional Church, 259 Constitutionalism, 9, 118, 182, 208 Constitution Civile du Clergé (1790), 48, 259, 260 Constitution of Year III (1795), 33, 238

 INDEX 

Constitution of Year VIII (1799), 235, 238, 239, 244, 246 Constitution of Year X (1802), 250 Consulat, 16, 187, 206, 236, 238, 239, 242, 246, 248 Contact, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13, 54, 59, 169 Continental Blockade, 141, 278 Convention, 30, 33, 183, 187, 248 Conzié, Louis-Hilaire de, 262 Cook, Edward, 279 Corps Condé, 57 Cosmopolitanism, 38, 39, 69, 159, 195, 308 Counter-enlightenment, 4, 304, 309 Counter-revolution, 1, 2, 4, 9, 10, 13, 14, 29, 31, 71, 73, 78, 79, 81, 91, 93, 103n11, 104n21, 112–114, 116, 117, 120–125, 137, 181, 182, 189, 195, 214, 221, 236, 239, 240, 247, 258, 265, 303, 304, 308, 309 Cuba, 208 Cultural transfers, 2, 5, 6, 11, 13, 47, 112, 113, 119, 121–123, 144, 209, 306 D Daily life, 46, 55 Dalberg, Wolfgang Heribert von, 158 Dalhousie, George Ramsay Earl of, 285 Dallas, Robert Charles, 121, 122 Damas-Crux, Etienne comte de, 284, 286, 288 Dames Anglaises, Couvent des, 241 Damoiseau, François-Louis, 243, 244 Darnaudat, Louis-Jean-Henri, 32 De Boffe (bookshop), 120 Death Penalty, 29, 48, 91, 95 Debrett (bookshop), 120

325

Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, see Human rights Defermon, Jacques, 285, 286 Delille, Jacques, 115, 117 Deportation, 50, 52, 207, 218, 219, 239, 242 Desforges, Jean-Baptiste, 165 Desplatz, August, 72 Devonshire, Georgiana Cavendish Duchess of, 280 Devonshire, William Cavendish Duke of, 280 Diaspora, 4, 15, 69, 70, 80, 81, 185, 197n22, 212, 215, 220, 235– 237, 240, 242, 278 Diderot, Denis, 156 Dillon (family), 210 Dillon, Arthur Richard, 260 Directoire, 10, 29, 30, 35, 37, 187, 188, 190, 210, 235, 238–241, 246, 248 Foreign Office, 210 Disconnection, 146 Disillusion, 139, 147, 148, 222, 246 Displacement, 69, 76, 81, 112, 139 See also Emigration, Waves of Emigration Dittersdorf, Carl Ditters von, 165 Dufour (Family), 209 Dulau (bookshop), 115, 120 Dumont, Etienne, 214 Dumouriez, Charles-François, 115, 120 Dundas, Henry, 185, 186, 188 Dundas, Thomas, 196n18, 197n24 Duras, Amédée-Bretagne-Malo de Durfort duc de, 136 Duras, Claire de, 136, 137, 140, 144–149 Dutch Republic, 208, 221 Amsterdam, 284 Dutour, Monsieur, 97 Duval, Jean-Pierre, 37

326 

INDEX

E Eden Agreement, 278 Edgeworth, Henri Essex abbé, 112 Education, 7, 13, 14, 52, 53, 56, 57, 74, 76, 77, 91–95, 99, 101, 114, 209, 257 Edwards, Mary, 98 Egerton Brydges, Samuel, 124 Ellis, George, 188 Ely, Bishop of, see Yorke, James Emigration, 303 aristocratic myth, 9, 47, 68 categorisation, 9, 12, 13, 33, 34, 39, 48, 52, 69, 81 clergy, 2, 16, 46, 52, 53, 55, 56, 59, 68, 70, 72, 74, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 118, 208, 218, 242, 247, 249, 259–261, 263–267, 305, 311, 312 criminalisation, 31–33, 37, 39, 51, 52, 69, 75 departure from France, 1, 9, 29–31, 33–37, 47, 48, 55, 57, 68, 69, 77, 79, 80, 112, 114, 117, 136, 137, 168, 206–208, 237, 241, 243, 303 incidence of emigration, 1, 12, 53, 68, 70, 71, 74–76, 161 military emigration, 2, 46, 48, 49, 73, 76 nobility, 6, 9, 46, 54, 59, 68–70, 72–75, 79, 80, 91, 92, 95, 116, 141, 143, 147, 148, 161, 165, 219, 240, 242, 249, 264, 286 as a public security threat, 49, 51, 53, 71 return to France (see Return) servants in Emigration, 2, 10, 72, 73, 75, 78, 80 terminology, 9, 10 Third Estate, 34, 56, 59

waves of emigration, 9, 46–48, 50, 57, 69, 74, 79, 124, 182, 209, 211, 213, 237 will to emigrate, 12, 31, 33, 34, 80, 247 working in emigration (see Business; Employment) Employment, 7, 46, 52, 53, 56, 74, 76, 80, 98, 209, 241, 264 Encounter, see Contact England, 68, 74–76, 117, 120, 121, 136, 137, 140–143, 157, 159, 160, 208, 215 Aylesbury, 280 Bath, 117, 119 Buckinghamshire, 98 Dover, 193 Falmouth, 213 Liverpool, 121 London, 3, 14, 50, 74, 76, 77, 80, 92, 93, 97, 102, 113, 115–121, 123, 136, 137, 142, 147, 155, 181–183, 185, 186, 194, 205, 208, 214–218, 241, 259, 261–265, 279, 280, 282, 285, 297, 302, 306 Manchester, 121 Penn (see School, Penn school) Portsmouth, 188 Southampton, 76, 80 Warrington, 121 Winchester, 264 York, 121 See also British Isles Entertainment, 15, 162 concert, 164, 167 dance, 167 reading, 112, 113, 117, 119, 121–125, 167, 168 theatre, 15, 157, 159–166, 168 Episcopalianism, 16 Errancy, 145, 146

 INDEX 

Erskine, Charles, 259 Espionage, 49, 52, 73, 297, 304 Europe, 2–4, 6–8, 13–15, 17, 46, 47, 49, 50, 54, 56, 59, 71, 75, 92, 112, 115, 125, 137, 141, 144, 146, 156, 161, 182, 185, 189, 190, 192, 194, 205–207, 210, 216–219, 245, 257, 260, 278, 280, 283, 285–287, 297, 305 F Family, 14, 29, 34, 56, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73–75, 78, 79, 93, 94, 103n8, 122, 136, 137, 140, 141, 143, 147, 148, 208, 243, 260, 269n15, 280–282, 288 baptism, 74 birth, 68, 74, 78 children (see Children) death, 74 divorce, 78, 136 fatherhood, 34, 94, 95, 136, 147, 148, 243 marriage, 8, 59, 74, 78 motherhood, 78, 136, 147 orphan, 68 patriarchy, 8 widowhood, 68, 75, 78, 79 Fatherland, 1, 11, 15, 17, 34, 38, 39, 81, 116, 142, 166, 211, 215, 238, 241, 243 Fauche, Pierre-François, 168 Ferrère, Philippe, 284, 286 Fitzjames (family), 210 Flahaut, Adèle de, 136, 140, 142–144, 147, 148 Flahaut de la Billarderie, Charles-­ François de, 136 Flanders, see Belgium Fleury, abbé, 68 Fontagnes, François de, 262 Fonton, Joseph, 220

327

Foreigner, 69, 73, 74, 76, 79, 81 Foreignness, 38 Fouché, Joseph, 238–240, 242, 246 Fox, Charles James, 124 France, 1, 3–5, 9, 10, 16, 29–31, 33–37, 39, 45–50, 52, 53, 55–59, 68–77, 80, 81, 91, 93, 95, 96, 98, 101, 102, 112, 114–118, 123, 125, 136, 137, 140–142, 148, 156, 157, 160–162, 164, 168, 181–184, 186–193, 195, 206–208, 210, 212, 214–223, 236–239, 241, 243, 246–248, 258–266, 277–280, 284, 287, 288, 303, 305, 308, 309 Angoulême, 72 Auvergne, 281 Avesnes, 222 Avranches, 71 Béarn, 280 Bidache, 281 Bordeaux, 16, 277–288 Brittany, 68, 69, 71–74, 76, 81, 95, 185 Caen, 68, 71 Cayenne (French Guiana), 72 Dijon, 286 Dinan, 71 Dol, 68 Gascony, 72 Lamballe, 71, 72 Languedoc, 72 Lyon, 72, 243 Nantes, 71 Normandy, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 81 Orthez, 283 Paris, 16, 49, 80, 102, 115, 120, 136, 137, 142, 148, 149, 162–164, 168, 182, 185, 187, 188, 194, 215, 218, 221, 235, 238, 241, 277, 279, 282, 286–288 Rennes, 71

328 

INDEX

France, (cont.) Rouen, 96 Saint Brieux, 71 Saint-Jean-de-Luz, 281 Saint-Malo, 71, 73 Saint-Onge, 72 Saint-Sever, 283 Strasbourg, 72 Toulon, 185 Toulouse, 288 Vannes, 71, 93 Vendée, 75, 76, 79, 185, 236, 247, 265, 283 Versailles, 57 Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, 36, 53 Frederick William III of Prussia, 287 Freemasonry, 157, 161 French Republic, 9, 12, 15, 35, 37, 48, 182, 192, 210, 211, 215, 217, 220, 238, 242, 245, 246, 248, 250 French Republican Army, 34, 113, 214, 216, 220 Froger, Hippolite de, 100 Fructidor, Coup of 18 (1797), 242, 244 G Gallicanism, 16, 258, 262, 263, 266, 267 Gaschet, François, 264 Gastronomy, 7, 57 Gauthier de Brecy, Charles-Edme, 123 Geddes, Alexander, 118 Gender, 2, 6, 8, 14, 34, 78, 135–140, 143–149, 242 Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest comtesse de, 114, 115, 118, 121, 162 George III, 210, 211, 263

George IV, 279 Géraud, Edmond, 285, 286 Germanic states, 4, 6, 15, 34, 53, 120, 156, 169, 208, 209, 306, 307 Berlin, 161, 209 Bremen, 30, 31, 39 Coblenz, 3, 72, 73, 241, 302, 309 Cologne, 50 Constance, 46, 50, 53, 56, 57 Frankfurt, 50 Freiburg, 48–50 Göttingen, 219 Hamburg, 14, 30, 31, 39, 120, 155–157, 161–169, 208, 221, 241 Leipzig, 209 Mannheim, 14, 155–162, 166, 167, 169 Prussia, 209 Regensburg, 51 See also Holy Roman Empire Gifford, John, 122, 124 Gifford, William, 124 Girondism, 34, 136, 214 Glorious Revolution, 4, 206, 210 Godart de Belbeuf, Pierre-Augustin, 262 Goldoni, Carlo, 158 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 156 Gouyon, Adélaide-Emilie comtesse de Marcé, 73 Goyon, Amaury-Hyacinthe comte de Marcé, 73 Gramont, Antoine-Louis-Marie duc de, 280, 281, 284, 288 Granvelle, Charles de, 100 Great Britain, see British Isles Grenville, George, 183, 184, 188, 196n16 Grenville, William Lord, 208, 225n65 Grétry, André, 159, 160, 162, 164, 168

 INDEX 

Grimaldi, Louis-André de, 262 Grossoles de Flamarens, Emmanuel-­ Louis de, 262 Guadeloupe, 183, 222 Guernsey, 72 See also Channel Islands Guillonit d’Orvillier, Justine-Hélène-­ Elizabeth, 72 H Habsburg Army, 50, 58 Habsburg Emigrant Decree (1793), 49, 50 Habsburg government, 53 Police Ministry, 50–52, 57 Habsburg monarchy, 12, 45–54, 58, 59, 165 Bohemia, 57, 58 Brno, 55 Duchy of Luxemburg, 48 Further Austria, 46, 48, 49 Hungary, 46, 51, 52 Linz, 46, 51 Lower Austria, 57 Moravia, 46, 55 Prague, 46, 56, 57 Trieste, 46, 56, 57 Tyrol, 50 Upper Austria, 50 Vienna, 46, 50–56, 156 Vorarlberg, 53 Haiti, 15, 192, 193, 222 Hanover, House of, 210 Harcourt, François Henri duc d, 183 Hardenberg, Karl August von, 216, 225n59 Harleville, Jean-François Collin d, 165 Hartwell, Declaration of (1813), 280 Hastier de Jolivette, Joseph, 95 Hereditary lands, see Habsburg monarchy

329

Heroism, 9, 136, 137, 141, 142, 144–148, 160, 248, 266 Holland, 136, 140 Holy Roman Empire, 35, 46, 162 Electorate of Trier, 48 Holy See, see Pius VII Home, see Fatherland Homeland, see Fatherland Honour, 98, 99, 147, 205, 283, 285, 288 Household, see Family Huguenots, 10, 15, 70, 206–214, 220–222, 223n10, 223n16, 243, 305 Humanitarianism, see Charity Human rights, 32, 33, 194 Huon de Kérilliau, Gabriel Louis Marie, 219 Huskisson, William, 188 Hybridity, 5, 7, 13, 92, 144, 183, 221 Hyde de Neuville (family), 210 I Identity, 9, 12, 14, 15, 38, 79, 92, 149, 263, 308, 309 Catholic, 260 construction, 5, 10, 12–14, 79, 80, 142–144 counter-revolutionary, 125 emigré identity, 5 literary, 136 national, 124, 143, 144, 161, 166, 258, 260 Ideology/ideologies, 1, 2, 4, 30, 31, 34, 52, 144, 219, 257, 258, 267, 303, 304, 309 Iffland, August Wilhelm, 158, 160, 161 Imperialism, 15, 182, 190, 192, 195, 213, 214, 216–219, 265 India, 4, 185, 206, 218

330 

INDEX

Influence, 1, 2, 6, 13, 14, 16, 55, 93, 96, 112, 117, 119, 125, 155, 168, 182, 186, 189, 190, 215, 257, 259, 261, 263, 264, 266, 305, 308 Institut Philanthropique, 281 Integrated, 307 Integration, 6, 12, 17, 39, 47, 58, 59, 208–210, 221, 310 See also Reintegration Intent, see Emigration, will to emigrate Interaction, 11–13, 47, 54, 55, 58, 59, 169, 220, 222 See also Contact Interconnection, 5 Interdependency, 1 Interpenetration, 13 Interrelation, 11–13, 15, 47, 58, 217 Ireland, 214 Israeli, Isaac d, 124 Italy, 53, 102, 157, 169, 210, 258 Rome, 50 Turin, 46, 50 Tuscany, 155 Venice, 50 Ivernois, François d, 214 J Jacobinism, 10, 48, 121, 132n45, 239, 304, 311 Jacobitism, 70, 206, 210–213, 220–222, 279 Jamaica, 186, 193, 194 Kingston, 186 James II, 212 Jansenism, 258 Jersey, 13, 67–81, 94, 142 Saint Helier, 68, 70, 76 Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, 56, 159

Juigné, Antoine-Eleonor-Léon Leclerc de, 56 K Karl Theodor, Prince-elector of Mannheim, 158 Kaunitz-Rietberg, Wenzel-Anton Prince of, 46, 50 Kersaint, Claire de, see Duras, Claire de Kina, Jean, 193 King, Walker, 97, 99 Kotzebue, August von, 165 Kübeck von Kübau, Carl Friedrich, 57 L La Belinaye, Henri de, 102 La Boutetière, Louis comte de, 96 La Cartrie de la Villenière, Toussaint Ambroise Talour comte de, 79, 80 La Châtre, Claude-Louis comte de, 282 La Fare, Anne-Louis-Henri de, 53 La Laurencie de Cressac, Charles-­ Eutrope de, 262 La Marche, Jean-François de, 95, 96, 99, 102, 260–262, 264 La Rochejacquelin, Louis du Vergier marquis de, 283 La Rouërie, Armand-Charles Tuffin marquis de, 73 La Salle, Henri, 241, 242, 246 La Tour du Pin, Frédéric marquis de, 241 La Tour du Pin, Henriette Lucy marquise de, 240, 241, 249 La Villéon, René, 100 Labrosse, Joseph, 57 Laïcité, see Secularism

 INDEX 

Lainé, Joseph-Henri-Joachim vicomte, 282–286 Lally-Tollendal (family), 210 Lally-Tollendal, Gérard-Trophime de, 10, 115, 118, 122, 208, 210, 211, 222, 223n12, 224n33, 224n34, 311 Language, 92, 144 adaptation, 15, 165, 169 bilinguality, 101, 165 English, 14, 95, 96, 100, 102, 120, 121, 144, 260 French, 15, 48, 54, 56, 70, 77, 100, 117, 120, 144, 157, 158, 162, 167, 169, 209 German, 158, 303 translation (see Translation) Larpent, Francis Seymour, 281 Laurence, French dr., 96 Le Breton, Jean, 68 Le Fruglays, Marie Anne Charlotte, 75 Le Fruglays, Vincent, 75 Lefèbvre, Marcel, 266 Legislation (French) against Emigration (1792), 48 Legislation (French) against Emigration (1793), 33, 34 Legislation (French) against Emigration (1794), 33 Legislation (French) against Emigration (1795), 35–38 Legislation (French) against Emigration (1800), 34 Legislation (French) on Emigration, 3–5, 9, 12, 32–34, 36, 38, 48, 74, 218, 239 Legislation (Host Country) on Emigration, 5, 12, 13, 47, 49, 51–54, 69, 76, 308 See also Aliens Act (1793); Aliens Act (1798); Aliens Act (1800);

331

Habsburg Emigrant Decree (1793) Legitimism, 1, 118, 213 Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor, 49 Lescar, évêque de, see Noé, Marc-­ Antoine de Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 156, 166 L’Estrade, Odon de, 100 L’Homme (bookshop), 120 Library catalogue, 113, 122 lending library, 123 private library, 14, 112, 113, 115, 118, 124 subscription library, 124 Liège, 36, 160 See also Habsburg monarchy; Sister Republics Ligne, Charles Joseph prince de, 54 Liminality, 13, 70, 80 Liste générale des émigrés, 9, 16, 29, 30, 35, 39, 48, 219, 235–238, 241–244, 248 Literature, 112, 113 anti-Jacobin novel, 124 emigré book, 114 emigré memoirs (see Self-narratives) emigré novel, 7, 14, 114, 136–140, 146, 149 fiction, 7, 14, 135, 141 literature of emigration, 2, 5, 13, 14, 114–119, 125 reception, 14, 112, 114, 115, 125 review, 122 sentimental novel, 140, 142, 147, 149 social novel, 8, 149 Liverpool, Robert Jenkinson Earl of, 279, 280, 283 Loi des otages (1799), 239 Lombez, évêque de, see Chavigny de Blot, Alexandre-Henri de

332 

INDEX

Loughborough, Alexander Wedderburn Baron, 94, 96 Louis XVI, 3, 45, 46, 55, 57, 112, 159, 160, 183, 283 Louis XVIII, 2, 97, 98, 102, 107n76, 192, 194, 212, 236, 240, 246, 265, 277–283, 286–288 Louis-Philippe, 221 Louverture, Isaac, 192 Louverture, Placide, 192 Louverture, Toussaint, 181, 187, 191, 193 Loyalist (American), see American Revolution Lur-Saluces, Alexandre comte de, 282, 286 Lynch, Jean Baptiste comte, 278, 279, 283–286 Lys, Gabriel de, 100 M Macdonald (family), 210 Mackintosh, James, 124 Mac-Mahon (family), 210 Macpherson, John, 210 Mailhos, Monsieur, 280, 282 Maitland, Thomas, 187, 191 Malaise, see Melancholia Malide, Joseph François de, 262 Mallet du Pan, Jacques, 115, 118, 121, 122, 190, 214–216, 224n24, 224n34, 224n36, 225n54, 225n58, 225n59, 303, 304, 311, 314n23, 314n24, 315n34 Malmesbury, James Harris Earl of, 187, 191 Malouet, Pierre-Victor, 15, 118, 181–195, 196n9, 196n10, 196n17, 197n25, 197n31, 197n34, 197n37, 197n38,

197n39, 197n41, 198n45–47, 198n49, 198n50, 198n53, 198n56, 198n60, 216, 217, 222, 224n24, 225n64, 225n65, 303, 311 Mandell-Ficquelmonts (family), 59 Maquillé, Charles de, 100 Maraine, Jean-Marin abbé, 92, 96–102, 104n23, 105n40, 105n45, 105n46, 105n54, 105n56, 105n57, 106n62, 106n63, 106n66, 106n69 Marat, Jean-Paul, 79 Marengo, Battle of (1800), 247 Maret, Hugues-Bernard, 243 Marginalisation, 5, 9, 217, 220, 239 Marginality, 145 Marie Antoinette, 55, 57, 280 Marigny, Marie-Anne Françoise de Chateaubriand comtesse de, 287 Martinique, 183 Marty, Jeanne Marie, 76 Matthias, Thomas James, 118 Maurville, Charles-Alexandre Bidé comte de, 75 Mees (theatrical family), 162, 168 Mees, Joseph Henri, 168 Melancholia, 14, 55, 136, 144–149 Memory, 7, 11–17, 102, 113, 125, 140–142, 144, 282, 288, 307 Mensdorff-Pouillys (family), 59 Mentality, 14 Mercier, Sébastien, 156 Mercy-Argenteau, Florimond-Claude comte de, 46 Merlin, abbé, 97 Metternich, Klemens von, 49, 286 Milliard des émigrés, 3, 236 Milner, John, 264 Modernisation, 92, 304 Modernity, 17, 99–101, 147, 149, 168, 216, 282, 308

 INDEX 

Moleville, Antoine-François Bertrand de, 115, 118, 121 Monarchien Group, 1, 9, 182, 191, 212, 216, 301, 303, 311 Montaigne, Maurice de, 95 Montlosier, François Dominique de Reynaud comte de, 303, 304, 314n11, 314n24 Montpellier, évêque de, see Malide, Joseph François de More, Hannah, 124 Moré de Pontgibaud, Charles Albert comte de, see Labrosse, Joseph Moreau, Jean Victor Marie, 212 Moulins, Jean-Baptiste des Gallois de La Tour evêque de, 262 N Nagle, Mr., 97 Nancy, évêque de, see La Fare, Anne-Louis-Henri de Nantes, évêque de, see La Laurencie de Cressac, Charles-Eutrope de Napoléon, 16, 30, 39, 58, 118, 120, 124, 193, 206, 211, 212, 220, 222, 235–250, 259, 263, 265, 277–280, 282–287, 305, 313n3 Napoleonic Army, 222, 238, 283, 285, 287 Napoleonic wars, 285 Narbonne, archevêque de, see Dillon, Arthur Richard Nation, 5, 11, 12, 30–39, 79, 93, 144, 156, 162, 169, 191, 210, 237, 243, 245, 247, 282, 284, 308 enmity to the French nation, 38 French, 12, 69, 101, 211, 212 Nationalism, 5, 11, 92, 102, 144, 156, 157, 166, 169, 279, 283, 284, 287, 288, 307 Nationhood, see Nation

333

Nation-state, 5 Necker, Jacques, 115 Netherlands, see Dutch Republic Neuilly, Ange Achille Charles comte de, 162, 166 Nice, 35 Nivelle de La Chaussée, Pierre-Claude, 156 Noé, Marc-Antoine de, 262 Nostalgia, 1, 8, 11, 138, 144, 164, 168, 281 Novelty, see Modernity Noyon, éveque de, see Grimaldi, Louis-André de O Occupation (British) West Indies, 186–188, 191, 195n2 Occupation (French), 31, 35, 38, 39 Flanders and Brabant, 36 Mannheim, 157, 160 Occupation (Russian), 222 Orvelliers, Madame d, 75 Osmond, Antoine Eustache, baron d, 262 Otherness, 5, 12, 13, 15, 38, 55, 69, 81, 143, 145–147 Ottoman Empire, 4, 207, 219, 220 Aleppo, 219 Constantinople, 219, 220 Salonika, 219 Smyrna, 219 P Paine, Thomas, 124 Palatine court, see Germanic states, Mannheim Panat, Antoine-Léopold chevalier de, 1, 305 Papal authority, 261

334 

INDEX

Papalism, 257 Paris, Archevêque de, see Juigné, Antoine-Eleonor-Léon Leclerc de Passport, 48, 50, 51, 76, 221, 244 Patrie, see Fatherland Patriotism, 5, 94, 159, 248 Péfaut de La Tour, Julien, 282 Peltier de Jolivette, Antoinette, 94–95 Peltier de Jolivette, Charles, 95 Peltier, Jean-Gabriel, 115, 304, 310 Penal Code (1791), 245, 247 Périgueux, évêque de, see Grossoles de Flamarens, Emmanuel-Louis de Perrin, Monsieur, 282 Petite Église, 265 Pichegru, Jean-Charles, 212 Pillet, René-Martin, 221 Pitt, William the younger, 15, 94, 96, 118, 181, 183, 185–187, 191, 280 Pius VI, 257 Pius VII, 245, 257, 259, 261, 262, 265, 266 Poland, 51, 206 Police, 37, 39, 49–53, 57, 73, 76, 190, 193, 238, 239, 243–246, 248, 249, 282 police state, 16, 49 Polignac, Héraclius de, 222 Polignac, Jules de, 53 Polignac, Yolande de Polastron duchesse de, 280 Pontcarré, Elie de, 100 Portland, William Cavendish-Bentinck Duke of, 94, 96, 104n25 Portugal, 222, 284 Poverty, 53, 56, 69, 78, 80 Poynter, William, 264 Pozzo di Borgo, Carlo Andrea Count, 287 Pradel, comte de, see Angoulême, Louis-Antoine duc d

Premier Empire, 8, 114, 141, 144, 249, 279, 281, 283, 287 Press Anti-Jacobin, 124 Anti-Jacobin Reviews, 124 Bregenzer Wochenblatt, 53 Courier de l’Europe, 300, 306 Critical Review, 122 emigré journalism, 48, 102, 118, 120, 122, 187, 190, 214, 265, 297, 300, 301, 303–306, 310 Hamburg, 163 Hamburger Nachrichten, 163, 164, 166 Mercure Britannique, 121, 122 Spectateur du Nord, 161, 306 Priestley, Joseph, 124 Prieur de la Marne, Pierre Louis, 32, 33 Prisoners of war, 52, 72, 73, 93, 220, 222 Private sphere, 113, 168 Property, 29 Protestantism, 206, 208–210, 215, 278, 285 Prussian Army, 221 Puisaye, Joseph-Genevieve comte de, 214 Puységur, Maxence comte de, 282, 286 Q Quarré, Dorothée Antoinette, 35, 36 Quesnay, Casimir de, 100 Quiberon, expedition of (1795), 73, 79, 92, 93, 101 R Radiation, 16, 238, 240, 241, 244 Radicalisation, 47, 55, 303, 308

 INDEX 

Radicalism, 37, 52, 124, 194, 221 Ravez, Auguste-Simon-Hubert-Marie, 286 Reaction, 10, 37, 192, 221, 236, 304 Reading, see Entertainment Refugee, 9, 10, 15, 69–71, 74–78, 81, 91–93, 102, 112, 118, 128n1, 128n2, 205, 206, 208, 216, 217, 225n61, 237, 239, 243, 248, 302, 307, 308, 314n19 Régnier, Claude-Ambroise, 245 Reintegration, 11, 16, 210, 222, 239, 242, 243 Relief, see Charity Religiosity, 74, 79, 96, 259, 267 Re-migration, see Return Repatriation, see Return Republicanism, 69, 187, 210, 216, 218–221, 237, 244, 248, 258, 260 Restoration, 16, 58, 97, 98, 148, 183, 191, 193, 210, 212, 214, 222, 246, 263, 266, 279, 280, 286, 307–309, 315n29 Retour, Louise, 75 Return, 1, 3, 6, 10, 11, 13, 16, 30, 33, 35, 37–39, 46–48, 54, 55, 57–59, 68, 69, 75–77, 91, 93, 96, 102, 107n74, 116, 118, 120, 125, 136, 137, 143, 147–149, 158, 159, 164, 183, 189, 193, 195, 206–208, 210, 212, 215, 219, 221, 222, 235–240, 242, 244–246, 248–250, 262, 264, 269n15, 269n17, 270n18, 285–288, 299, 305, 308, 309, 312 Revolutionary wars (1792–1802), 11, 48, 56, 71, 72, 162, 211, 220 French annexations, 12 Rewbell, Jean-François, 32 Riviere, Paul de, 100 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 187, 247

335

Rocquefeuil, Gustave de, 102 Rodez, évêque de, see Colbert de Seigneley de Castelhill, Charles Roederer, Pierre-Louis, 10 Rohan, de (family), 58 Rollac, Jacques-Sébastien, 282 Romanticism, 8, 136–138, 147, 209 Roquefeüil, Joseph de, 100 Royalism, 16, 39, 57, 70, 79, 101, 102, 107n82, 123, 159, 160, 185, 186, 188, 189, 191, 205, 207, 211–215, 217, 240, 278–284, 286, 287, 289, 290, 304, 314n26 Russia, 51, 220, 222, 307 Saint Petersburg, 156, 163 Siberia, 4 Russian Army, 222 S Saint-Domingue, 15, 72, 181–194, 206, 208, 214, 216, 217, 221, 222 Port-Au-Prince, 191, 194 Saint-Martin, Pierre-Michel de, 264 Saint-Ouen, Declaration of (1814), 288 Saint-Pol-de-Léon, abbé de, see La Marche, Jean-François de Saladin-Egerton, Charles, 205, 214, 215, 223n1, 225n50, 225n58 Salzburg, Prince-Bishopric of, 209 Savoy, 34, 35 Schiller, Friedrich, 156, 158 Schmieder, Heinrich Gottlieb, 166 School, 13, 52 émigré school, 56, 73, 307 Penn school, 13, 91–102, 104n32, 105n44, 105n59, 106n62, 107n80, 107n85, 144 teacher, 98–101 Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig, 163, 166

336 

INDEX

Scotland, 211, 213 Edinburgh, 155, 211 Secularisation, 261 Secularism, 257, 258 Ségur-Cabanacs (family), 59 Self-narratives, 5–8, 14, 53, 70, 72, 79, 80, 123, 137, 140–142, 147, 148, 155, 307 Sénac de Meilhan, Gabriel, 54 September Massacres (1792), 10, 48 Settlement, 68, 78 buying properties in emigration, 58, 78 Sever de Genouillac, Monsieur, 100 Seyler, Abel, 158 Shakespeare, William, 158 Simon, Giuseppe, 76 Sister Republics, 12 Slavery, 15, 181, 182, 187–194, 217 Smith, Charlotte, 117 Sociability, 13, 15 coffee house, 167 intercultural, 7, 46, 54, 55 See also Contact Social contract, 12, 31–34, 36–39 Solidarity, 49, 57, 81, 148, 194, 206, 207, 209, 259 South Africa, 208 Souza, Adèle de, see Flahaut, Adèle de Sovereignty, 30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 181, 183, 184, 187, 190, 192–194, 247 Spain, 217, 263, 279, 280, 284 Galicia, 46 Stäel, Germaine de, 10, 115, 306 Stendhal, Marie-Henri Beyle, 136, 145 Stewart, Charles Lord, 287 Stuart, Charles Edward, 213 Stuart, House of, 210 Sumeraw, Joseph Thaddaus von, 49 Suriname, 208

Surveillance, see Emigration, criminalisation Suspicion, see Emigration, criminalisation Switzerland, 34, 168, 208, 219, 241 Berne, 215 Geneva, 205, 214, 215 Neuchâtel, 168 Symbolism, 1, 5, 9, 278 T Taffard de Saint-Germain, 282, 283 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles-Maurice de, 136, 213, 224n42, 224n43, 240, 249 Terror, 10, 11, 47, 48, 74, 142, 162, 163, 183, 237, 240, 242, 247, 248, 279, 303 Theatre, 114, 155, 312 audience (see Entertainment) emigré theatre, 14, 15, 157–159, 161–165, 167–169 revolutionary theatre, 159 Thermidorian Reaction, 11, 75, 237, 242, 243, 245, 247, 248 Toulouse, archevêque de, see Fontagnes, François de Transculturality, 157 Transimperialism, 182, 186, 187, 190, 194, 195 Translation, 80, 119–123, 125, 156, 158, 159, 163, 165, 166, 169, 261 Transnationalism, 4–6, 13, 113–115, 120, 121, 125, 157, 161, 162, 167, 206 Trauma, 6, 7, 13, 14, 113, 116, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141–149, 155, 164 Troyes, Louis Mathias de Barral évêque de, 263

 INDEX 

U Ultramontanism, 1, 258, 259, 264–266 Ultra-royalism, 9, 10, 58, 236, 247, 248 Underwood, T. R., 288 United States, 4, 75, 140, 147, 155, 206, 213, 214 Alabama, 222 Charleston, 208 New York, 241 Philadelphia, 208 Uprooting, 141, 146, 148, 206, 220 Usez, évêque d, see Béthizy de Mézières, Henri Benoît Jules de V Vacquier-Limon, Pierre-Salomon, 116 Vaillant, Cécile de, 68 Vaillant, Constance de, 68 Vaillant, Jeanne de, 68, 79 Valmy, Battle of (1792), 50 Vannes, évêque de, see Amelot, Sébastien-Michel Varennes, Flight to (1791), 48, 159, 182 Vatican, 265 See also Pius VII Vautier, Jeanne, 68 Verdier de Genouillac, Marie André Paul Louis du, 95 Vergniaud, Pierre-Victurien, 34, 37 Victimhood, 7, 10, 31, 35, 55, 79, 80, 93, 102, 136, 137, 142, 149, 162, 208, 213, 217, 221, 237, 241, 260, 265, 311

337

Vigée-Lebrun, Elisabeth, 54 W Wales, Prince of, see George IV Walpole, Horace, 211, 224n27 Walsh (family), 210 Walsh, Joseph-Alexis vicomte, 213 Waterloo, Battle of (1815), 288 Weber, Joseph, 121 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley 1st Duke of, 278–286, 288 West Indies, 4, 15, 72, 75, 136, 181, 185, 186, 206, 207, 214, 216 Whitbread, Samuel, 281 Whitehall, see British government William III, 212 Williams-Wynn, Frances, 112 Wilmot, John, 213 Windham, William, 94, 96, 99, 103n3, 106n66 Women, 2, 5, 8, 14, 67–69, 72, 76–80, 93, 95, 120–122, 125, 135, 138, 142, 144–148, 236, 240, 242, 243 See also Gender X Xenophobia, 49, 52, 54 Y Yarmouth, Francis Seymour-Conway Earl of, 281 Yorke, James, 93 Young, Arthur, 278