By Friedemann Pestel

This article is part of our series entitled “Exiled: Identity and Identification,” which explores the semantic evolution of exile and the lived experiences of people seeking refuge across the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century. It was presented originally at the conference “Who is a Refugee? Concepts of Exile, Refuge and Asylum, c.1750-1850”, which took place on 30 June – 1 July 2022 at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

This publication is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 849189).

The c. 150,000 émigrés leaving revolutionary France after 1789 and throughout the 1790s were the largest group of political migrants within the Age of Revolutions. Their number and their distribution across all of Europe and the Atlantic world but also the Ottoman Empire, India, or Australia significantly contributed to making this Age of Revolutions an Age of Refugees or an Age of Emigrations.[1] Over the last 30 years, and even more so in the last decade, research on French émigrés – though they are still far from being a mainstream topic – has considerably intensified as well as broadened geographically, politically, and socially.[2] This contribution sketches out how a closer dialogue between émigré and refugee studies provides fresh perspectives on the French emigration decentering it from a specifically French conceptual and historiographical heritage.[3] It also discusses to what extent the refugee paradigm allows for sharpening and refocusing the émigrés’ migratory profiles within the Age of Revolutions.

The category of “refugee” was already part of the discourse about French émigrés in the 1790s. Juliette Reboul has demonstrated that, after the most frequent British designation for new migrants coming from France, emigrant, the second most often occurrence at the time was refugee.[4] The term then still bore a vague religious connotation as it had referred to the accommodation of expelled French Huguenots in the Protestant parts of the Atlantic world in the late 17th century.[5] Within the late 18th-century revolutionary Atlantic world, the term réfugié also played an important role in sources about migrants leaving the revolutionary French Caribbean for Europe, neighboring colonies, or the North American mainland.[6] Using this term emphasized the persecution and violence committed by the insurrectionists rather than political allegiances, military commitment, or loyalty to the French royal family. It could refer to “dual” migrants such as listed émigrés from France with colonial possessions and cross racial boundaries with regard to free gens de couleur or enslaved people “fleeing” with their proprietors.

In recent historiography, these historical connotations of “refugee” have merged with 19th- and 20th-century migration experiences as well as contemporary resonances of “refugee movements” and “refugee crises.”[7] For French émigrés, these broader conceptual reverberations may contribute to overcoming the ambivalent traditional dichotomies of inside vs. outside France, present in vs. absent from France, political vs. humanitarian exile, or patriotic vs. treasonous attitudes, which resonate in both historical and historiographical émigré discourse. If we reconsider the émigrés as refugees, different features of their migratory experience stand out. First, the high number of émigré clergy highlights the ongoing relevance of religious exile at the end of the 18th century and points toward linkages of French émigrés with Protestant French Huguenots or Catholic Scottish and Irish Jacobites.[8] However, as the French authorities excluded the clergy mainly for political reasons, clerical exile after 1789 did not follow Europe’s religious divisions. Destitute as they often were, French clergy were often seen as victims of the Revolution in need of humanitarian support but also as a spiritual resource for pushing back republican secularism coming from France.[9]

Second, the refugee paradigm can make traditionally marginalized groups within the French emigration more visible. Against the still powerful image of a male, aristocratic, and military migration, the refugee category captures the enormous social differences within all three estates of the French ancien régime. Also, the role of women changed though exile: both those women remaining in France to safeguard family possessions and dealing with hostile political authorities and those emigrating, some with and some without their husbands, raising children, and contributing to their families’ material survival. Émigré children were facing new challenges between social expectations as members of pre-revolutionary French society, integration into the social and cultural environments of exile through education, and the expectation of returning to a changed post-revolutionary France.[10]

A particularly marginalized group among French émigrés, both in their experience of exile and in historiography, are probably lower-rank members of the Third Estate, in particular those coming from or remaining in a dependent situation. We still know far too little about how peasants living in a seigneurial system until 1789 and then uprooted by the revolutionary wars coped with their limited scope of action.[11] Many aristocrats or higher clergy went into exile with their servants, but former dependents employed by the privileged orders, such as cooks, artisans, or artists, emigrated on their own. As the emigration from metropolitan France overlapped with the emigration of Caribbean planters, slavery and race were also constitutive for the experience of exile.[12] The refugee perspective can help to make these groups demographically more visible, to highlight the humanitarian dimension of exile, and to locate sources that can make them speak.[13] In some parts of Germany, the number of French émigrés arriving in the 1790s was in relative numbers only topped by the arrival of expellees after the end of World War II and later the refugee crisis of 2015 or the arrival of Ukrainian refugees in 2022.[14]

Third, on a material level, considering French émigrés to be refugees shifts attention to the infrastructures of exile. Among these we can count forms and places of professional occupation such as businesses, shops, or commercial networks; frameworks of support such as the London Wilmot Committee setting up émigré relief after the model of British support for American loyalists; transnational charity such as the European-wide collection for émigré clergy; or the flows of capital and goods between la France intérieure and la France extérieure (François René de Chateaubriand).[15] These infrastructures of exile relate to what Sydney Watts calls “‘refugeedom,’ a polity both apart from and particular to state authority.”[16]

While the wide scope of actors and semantic breadth of the refugee paradigm provides important inspiration for French émigré studies, it also bears some conceptual costs when applied to les émigrés strictly speaking. Discussing the relation between émigré and refugee studies, therefore, helps to also see the émigrés’ distinct profile within a broader history of migration in the Age of Revolutions. One point to consider here is the normative baggage the category of “refugee” carries, in particular if seen from a 20th- and 21st-century viewpoint.[17] A challenge consists in defining the overlaps but also the limits between an emphasis on émigré agency, which helps to overcome the older dichotomy of voluntary vs. involuntary migration, a somewhat nostalgic victimization, and an emphatic perspective on émigré “activism.”[18] Indeed émigrés’ practices of political contestation, often framed as “counterrevolution,” tended to be more contingent, situational, and malleable than programmatic.[19]

Another risk of fully dissolving émigré studies into refugee studies might consist in leveling constitutive specificities of the French emigration. There are still good reasons for arguing that the émigrés represented the first clearly political group of exiles both regarding their motives and their choice of destinations of exile. Beyond the vital humanitarian challenges and the importance of legal questions both in France and the host territories, the large majority of émigrés aimed to return to France at their earliest convenience; and this convenience was largely a political one.

The conditions many émigrés linked to a possible return evolved considerably and somewhat lowered over the 1790s. Nevertheless, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, the reestablishment of social hierarchies, the open practice of Catholicism, or the conservation of property through restitution, the retention of property rights as well as certain marriage and heritage practices remained valid demands. In particular, émigrés who had previously been active in (pre-)revolutionary politics or the military were often involved in projects aiming at the downfall of the revolutionary regimes. They also cooperated with or tried to influence their host territories for achieving these aims, including military violence and scenarios of revenge. Other groups of migrants in the Age of Emigrations such as American loyalists, refugees from the Habsburg Netherlands, from Geneva and the Swiss Confederation, or the Order of Malta were welcome references or partners for French émigrés to increase their political relevance as an anti-revolutionary pressure group.[20]

Within such a large refugee and migration framework, it is important to note that French émigrés had a pivotal interest distinct from their fellow exiles: their return to France. Insofar as most émigrés ultimately succeeded in ending their exile, post-migration in post-revolutionary France is another constitutive, yet still understudied part of the French émigré-refugee experience.[21]

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Friedemann Pestel teaches Modern European History at the University of Freiburg. He has been a visiting fellow at the German Historical Institutes in Paris and London, the Universities of Vienna, Bordeaux, and Berkeley, and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. His research interests and publications cover the French and Haitian Revolutions, political migration, the history of international classical musical life and global musical mobility as well as memory studies.

Title Image: Henri Pierre Danloux: Jean François de la Marche (1729‒1805), comte-évêque de Saint-Pol-de-Léon, émigré en Angleterre en 1791, Paris, Musée du Louvre, https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010063629 (accessed March 31, 2023).

Further reading:

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.

Kramer, Lloyd, ed. “Émigrés and Migrations during the French Revolution.” Special forum: Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 48, no. 3 (2022): 1–68.

Pestel, Friedemann. “French Revolution and Migration after 1789,” European History Online, 7 November 2017, http://www.ieg-ego.eu/pestelf-2017-en.

Pestel, Friedemann. “The Colors of Exile in the Age of Revolutions: New Perspectives for French Émigré Studies.” Yearbook of Transnational History 4 (2021): 27–68.

Philip, Laure, and Juliette Reboul, eds. French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe: Connected Histories and Memories. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Reboul, Juliette. French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Endnotes:

[1] 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 and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 37‒58; Jan C. Jansen, “Flucht und Exil im Zeitalter der Revolutionen: Perspektiven einer atlantischen Flüchtlingsgeschichte (1770er–1820er Jahre),” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 44, no. 4 (2018): 495‒525; Friedemann Pestel, “The Age of Emigrations: French Émigrés and Global Entanglements of Political Exile,” in French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe: Connected Histories and Memories, ed. Laure Philip and Juliette Reboul, 205‒31 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). This reflection develops some points I first sketched out in Friedemann Pestel, “The Colors of Exile in the Age of Revolutions: New Perspectives for French Émigré Studies,” Yearbook of Transnational History 4 (2021): 27‒68.

[2] On émigré historiography, see Karine Rance, “L’historiographie de l’émigration,” in Les noblesses françaises dans l’Europe de la Révolution, ed. Philippe Bourdin, Histoire, 355‒68 (Rennes, Clermont-Ferrand, 2010); Laure Philip and Juliette Reboul, “Introduction,” in Philip and Reboul, French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, 1‒26.

[3] Important contributions to the history of refugees in the wake of recent migration crises include Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Phillip Ther, The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1492 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); Andreas Kossert, Flucht: Eine Menschheitsgeschichte (Munich: Siedler, 2020); Delphine Diaz, En exil: Les réfugiés en Europe de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 2021); Bettina Bannasch, Doerte Bischoff, and Burcu Dogramaci, eds., Exil, Flucht, Migration: Konfligierende Begriffe, vernetzte Diskurse (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022); Delphine Diaz and Sylvie Aprile, eds., Banished: Traveling the Roads of Exile in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022).

[4] Juliette Reboul, French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 73–80.

[5] Owen Stanwood, The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Caroline Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–14.

[6] Carl Brasseaux and Glenn R. Conrad, eds. The Road to Louisiana: The Saint-Domingue Refugees, 1792–1809 (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1992); Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007).

[7] On the concept of “refugee,” see Sylvie Aprile and Delphine Diaz, “Les réfugiés et l’asile dans l’Europe du XIX^e siècle,” in Définir les réfugiés, ed. Michel Agier and Anne-Virginie Madeira, 29‒45 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2017); Delphine Diaz and Alexandre Dupont, “Introduction: Les mots de l’exil dans l’Europe du XIX^e siècle: Dire, pratiquer, représenter les migrations politiques,” Hommes & migrations 1321 (2018): 6‒11.

[8] Pestel, “The Age of Emigrations”; Nigel Aston, “Survival Strategies: Jacobite Adaptability, 1689–1789, and Counter-Revolutionary Prototypes,” in Cosmopolitan Conservatisms: Countering Revolution in Transnational Networks, Ideas and Movements (c. 1700–1930), ed. Matthijs Lok, Friedemann Pestel, and Juliette Reboul, 175‒96 (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

[9] Kirsty Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution: Émigrés in London, 1789–1802 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); Bernward Kröger, Der französische Exilklerus im Fürstbistum Münster (1794–1802) (Mainz: von Zabern, 2005); Matthias Winkler, Die Emigranten der Französischen Revolution in Hochstift und Diözese Bamberg, (Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2010).

[10] Maike Manske, “Femmes émigrées: Exil und Gender am Beispiel adliger Emigrantinnen der Französischen Revolution (1789–1812),” in Migration – Geschlecht – Lebenswege: Sozial- und geisteswissenschaftliche Beiträge, ed. Hella Ehlers et al., 101‒22 (Münster: Lit, 2015); Véronique Church-Duplessis, “Aristocrats into Modernity: French Émigrés and the Refashioning of Noble Identities” (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2016); Friedemann Pestel, “Educating against Revolution: French Émigré Schools and the Challenge of the Next Generation,” European History Quarterly 47, no. 2 (2017): 229‒56.

[11] Sabine Diezinger, Französische Emigranten und Flüchtlinge in der Markgrafschaft Baden (1789–1800), (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991); Jort Blazejewski, “Émigrés an der Grenze: Flucht, Exil und Migrationsregime in Frankreich und Nordwesteuropa im Zeitalter der Revolutionen (1789‒1815)” (PhD dissertation, University of Trier, 2023).

[12] Dessens, From Saint-Domingue; Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

[13] See Kirsty Carpenter, “British Government Aid to French Émigrés and Early Humanitarian Relief during the French Revolution,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 48, no. 3 (2022): 51‒68.

[14] For Hamburg and Altona, see Katherine Aaslestad, Place and Politics: Local Identity, Civic Culture, and German Nationalism in North Germany during the Revolutionary Era (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 131; for Erfurt, Friedemann Pestel, “Revolution im Deutungsstreit: Deutsch-französische Perspektiven auf die Emigranten am Beispiel der kurmainzischen Gebiete Thüringens 1794/1795,” Zeitschrift für Thüringische Geschichte 64 (2010): 215‒44, here 219.

[15] Maike Manske, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Kulturtransfers: Emigranten der Französischen Revolution in Hamburg, Bremen und Lübeck (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008); Friedemann Pestel, “‘Das Exil hat, wie alle Lagen des menschlichen Lebens, sein Gutes’: Französische Revolutionsemigranten in Hamburg und Altona,” in Fluchtpunkt Hamburg: Zur Geschichte von Flucht und Migration in Hamburg von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Nele M. Fahnenbruck and Johanna Meyer-Lenz, 157‒76 (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018); Jasanoff, “Revolutionary Exiles”; Hannah W. Muller, “The Wilmot Committee: Redefining Relief and National Interest in Britain during the French Revolution,” Journal of British Studies 61, no. 2 (2022): 343‒72; Julie Ollivier-Chakhnovskaia, “Les dons en faveur du clergé français émigré, collectés dans l’Empire de Russie en 1794 et 1798,” Histoire, économie et société 25, no. 4 (2006): 45‒59.

[16] Sydney Watts, “Enterprising Émigrés of the Channel Islands,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 48, no. 3 (2022): 31‒50, here 32.

[17] See the parallel between French émigrés arriving in South England in 1792 and Ukrainian refugees arriving in Poland made by Carpenter, “British Government Aid,” 63.

[18] Kirsty Carpenter, “Securalization by Stealth? Émigrés in Britain during the French Revolution,” in The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective: Freedom and Faith, ed. Bryan A. Banks and Erica Johnson, 73‒94 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), here 73.

[19] Friedemann Pestel, “On Counterrevolution: Semantic Investigations of a Counterconcept during the French Revolution,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 12, no. 2 (2017): 50‒75.

[20] Pestel, “The Age of Emigrations.”

[21] See Kelly Summers, “Healing the Republic’s ‘Great Wound’: Emigration Reform and the Path to a General Amnesty, 1799–1802,” in Philip and Reboul, French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, 235‒55.