1

Escaping the Revolution: Interpreting French
Migration after 1789

Anjan Saha
Assistant Professor of History, Maulana Azad College, Kolkata

Email: saha.anjan76@gmail.com

Abstract: The French Revolution of 1789 is regarded to be an epoch
making event – a watershed in history with ample justification.
However, the incident triggered a massive wave of political migration.
Émigré (French for emigrant) from all levels of French society dispersed
throughout Europe in the 1790s. Politically speaking, these ‘enemies’
of the Revolution belonging overwhelmingly to the Aristocracy and
Clergy, attempted to mobilize their host societies against the Revolution,
which grew increasingly radical as it spilled across French boundaries.
The response of the Revolutionary France was swift and brutal, as
the emigres were stripped of their titles, property, rights and promised
an immediate visit to guillotine should they dared to return. At the
same time they became agents in a multifaceted process of cultural
transfer, as part of their attempt to earn their livelihood in exile. They
had demonstrated that there were alternatives to the revolutionary
process outside of France, before most of them returned to their
motherland under Napoleon Bonaparte.

Keywords: Emigres, Jacobites, Directory, Huguenots, Ancien Regime, Third
Estate, Jacobin.

Introduction

The exile of 150,000 French people in the wake of the French Revolution
of 1789 constitutes the first instance of political emigration on a European,
if not indeed a global scale. Émigrés of the French Revolution left their
homeland because they eschewed the political development in France or in
reaction to the increasing pressure of political exclusion. They dispersed
throughout practically all European states from Sweden to Sicily and from
Portugal to Russia, as well as to the fledgling United States and to French,

SOCIAL TRENDS
Journal of the Department of Sociology of North Bengal University

Vol. 10, 31 March 2023; ISSN: 2348-6538
Peer-reviewed National Journal



Anjan Saha2

British, and Spanish colonial territories (Jasanoff 2009). They were a
politically active minority that made a very significant difference – simply
by not being defeated and being able to return. They fought to assume their
right to be French and to live safely in a hostile France, where the
Republicans used their majority vote to condemn the émigrés to death.
This group braved the perils of exile, experienced poverty and misery to
stand up for their right to belong in a Nation, determined to blame them for
all the evils of absolute monarchy. Some did not return from emigration,
dying from exhaustion, in childbirth, of old age and stress, or in war serving
with the armies of the allies against Republican troops.

On account of its political character and geographical scope, this migration
differs from two similarly large predecessors: the emigration of French
Huguenots1 after - the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and that
of the Scottish and Irish Jacobites2 following the Glorious Revolution of
1688/1689 (Ruymbeke 2006). Whereas confession was the decisive factor
for the Protestant Huguenots’ emigration, the Catholic Jacobites were more
strongly motivated by political considerations. Accordingly, both groups
sought exile in Europe and in part in the Atlantic world. Another difference
lies in the temporal dimension: whereas the Huguenots integrated relatively
quickly and enduringly into their host society, the Jacobites focused upon
their political activities until the mid-18th century more than on returning
home. Nevertheless, the latter’s initiatives missed the mark over many
generations, in part because they were linked to the restoration of the fallen
Stuart dynasty. In contrast, émigrés of the French Revolution succeeded
in large part in returning home - and not only on the coattails of the Bourbon
royal family, which returned in 1814 after having been overthrown in 1792,
but rather from the end of the 1790s in most cases.

The peculiarity of the emigration unleashed by the French Revolution should
not be overestimated when seen within a broader European and French
context. For French exiles were in no way the only political émigrés in
Europe between 1789 and 1814. When they sought refuge in Protestant
territories, émigrés of the French Revolution encountered local Huguenot
colonies. In Great Britain and in the British Empire, they met with American
Loyalists who had opposed the rebels in the American War of Independence.
In Hapsburg areas, French émigrés mixed with exiles from parts of the
Monarchical states that were also affected by the Revolution, such as the
Southern Netherlands, with the result that continuous streams of exiles
flowed until the late nineteenth century. As a result, émigrés of similar
origin met again in different places and often lived in a community of other
exile groups. These interrelations began to dissolve the individual characters



Escaping the Revolution: Interpreting French Migration after 1789 3

of the various revolutions and the emigrations they caused. Out of the
émigré societies arose a transnational space of political exile. Within the
common self-understanding as émigrés, the political motives of individual
groups lost their immediacy.

Composition and Leanings

The composition of the French émigrés is more difficult to track than the
paths they followed into exile. The reason is patchy record-keeping both
on the French side and in host countries. During the first years of the
Revolution, emigration was not yet regulated by law in France. On the
contrary, the Constitution of 1791 explicitly stipulated a right to freedom of
movement. Only after Louis XVI’s (1754-1793) brothers stepped up their
military activities in Koblenz, were the first laws passed threatening émigrés
with loss of property should they not return (Carpenter 2015). With the
outbreak of war and the overthrow of the monarchy in 1792, these regulations
became draconian: once an individual emigrated, all of his assets in France
were confiscated, and his property was nationalized and sold. At the apex
of the Jacobin Terreur (Terror), émigrés were declared dead for purposes
of civil law; if they returned from their perpetual banishment, the death
penalty awaited them. This also applied should émigrés fall into the hands
of revolutionary troops outside of France. Thus the high mobility of émigrés
within Europe is explained by the course of the war in the 1790s.

In order to enforce these laws, lists of émigrés were drawn up in their
home communities, in the newly created departements, and by the central
authorities in Paris. Yet these lists were anything but reliable. Gaps in
registration, the mistaken spelling of names, and duplicate names impeded
the quantification of the emigration. Even the documents of the reparations
commission, established in 1825, were of limited value, as they only included
émigrés with landholdings. Back in the 1950s, Donald Greer pioneered a
social and regional classification of the émigrés on the basis of these
sources. Greer’s statistics, despite their shortcomings, continue to provide
the basis for demographic conclusions about the French emigration that
resolutely contradict the contemporary commonplace that it was a royalist-
noble phenomenon. Of the 150,000 émigrés, only 17 per cent were nobles,
and 25 per cent were clergy; the majority were members of the Third
Estate (Greer 1951). This supposedly clear picture, however, should not
lure us into accepting the apologetic argument, according to which the
émigrés came primarily from plebeian social strata. On the one hand,
numerous members of the Third Estate followed the nobles for whom they



worked into exile. In addition, there were many artisans, cooks, and
musicians who lost the posts they had held in noble families in France and
likewise sought to secure their livelihood via emigration. On the other hand,
the considerable share (nearly 20 per cent) of farmers in particular can be
explained by short-term migration over the French border, such as happened
in 1793 in Alsace with the changeful course of the revolutionary wars. The
implication is that emigration in numerous host territories far from France
was clearly more socially exclusive than the aggregate numbers suggest.
As a portion of the overall population of about 25 million, émigrés totalled
0.6 per cent. If the first two Estates are considered separately, however,
roughly one tenth of the nobility and a whole quarter of the clergy emigrated.
Therefore, emigration represented a significant and relevant phenomenon
for the political and social elites of the Ancien Regime (Carpenter 2015).

The first émigrés to leave France, shortly after the storming of the Bastille,
were the king’s youngest brother, the Comte d’Artois (future Charles X,
1757-1836) and his inner circle, initially with the prospect of a short absence
and in the hope of a quick containment of the Revolution. In the coming
months, he was followed by many of the noble families affected by the
abolition of feudal rights, and then by royalist officers in the wake of the
army reforms. The ‘Civil Constitution of the Clergy’, which required an
oath to the constitution, was the main catalyst for the emigration of high
and lower clerics alike. The fundamental break has always been seen in
the year 1792. The outbreak of war and above all the fall of the monarchy
broadened the political spectrum of noble royalists and clerics to include
constitutional monarchists in particular, who field above all for humanitarian
reasons and not as a conscious repudiation of the Revolution.

Despite what would come to unite them, in particular on an average ten
years stay outside France that most endured, for many it was not a completely
free choice. They often had only one option that could be relied upon to
leave them alive, or to keep their family intact. For many individ-uals who
were not themselves heads of households, emigration had little of choice
about it at all. Dependence upon the decisions of others – fathers, husbands,
or other male relatives - was responsible for leaving many women and
children individually subject to revolutionary proscription (Hunt 1992). Priests
too, who were not officially classed as émigrés until the ‘Law of Suspects’
came into effect. There was a large cross section of people who found
themselves on these lists or trapped in emi-gration through no direct political
decision of their own, underscoring the point that emigration was
fundamentally violent. The Courier de Londres clarified in November of
1792:

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There are in England several thousand brave people who have not quitted
France because their courage was not equal to the events, but because
they were personally persecuted, against which their heroism served no
purpose (Burrows 2000: 206)

By 1789 September, the Court of Artois and his émigré cohort were based
in Turin (Italy) where they established a committee to organise and promote
counter-revolution. Artois spent the next two years trying to convince foreign
governments to raise an army and intervene in France. He also planned to
hire mercenaries to snatch the king and relocate him to a safer province,
where Louis could re-form “national government”. Neither of these plans
came to fruition. The focus of the émigrés political orientation was therefore
the king’s brothers, especially the Comte d’Provence. After Louis XVI’s
execution in 1793, he proclaimed himself regent for Louis XVII (1785-
1795), still a minor, and after the latter’s death in a Paris prison in 1795, in
the eyes of his supporters he ascended the French throne as Louis XVIII.
While these decisions may have seemed anachronistic and fictitious and
while Louis XVIII (Mansel 2005) failed to be recognized for long by the
great European powers, nevertheless in their self-understanding France
remained, at least until Napoleon Bonaparte’s (1769-1821) coup in 1799, a
kingdom with an absentee monarch.

By the summer of 1791, there were sizeable émigré communities in London,
Vienna, Hamburg, Aix-la-Chapelle and Coblenz. London was by far the
largest, holding around 40,000 refugees from the revolution. Most of the
London émigré community sought sanctuary and a return to high society;
they attempted to recreate the salons and balls they attended back home.
There were at least three French-language newspapers in London that
catered for émigrés; the pages of these newspapers were filled with ridicule
of the revolution and its leaders. The émigrés on the continent were more
interested in bringing an end to the revolution, facilitating their return home
and the reclamation of their wealth. Young nobles and former military officers
were at the forefront of counter-revolutionary émigré armies. One of the
first significant forces was La Legion Noire (The Black Legion), formed
in late 1790s by Andre Riqueti. Viscount Mirabeau, younger brother of the
National Assembly leader Honore Mirabeau. The German city of Coblenz
became a gathering point for Counter – revolutionary military activity.

Once formed, émigré armies adopted an organisational structure that
reflected the old society. Chateaubriand noted that one émigré army ‘was
composed of nobles, grouped according to [their] province. At the very
end of its days, the nobility was going back to its roots and to the roots of

Escaping the Revolution: Interpreting French Migration after 1789 5



the monarchy, like an old man regressing to his childhood’. Despite their
determination, most of émigré armies were failures. They were costly to
organise and supply, experienced problems with internal organisation and
military discipline and were not well led. The émigré armies reached their
peak in mid-1792 when their numbers approached 25,000. In July 1792,
émigré commanders persuaded the Duke of Brunswick to issue his famous
manifesto, threatening the people of Paris with devastation if any harm
came to the royal family. The émigré armies were supremely confident of
their ability but their first forays into battle proved disastrous. In late August
1792, a 16,000-strong émigré force laid siege to the French town of Thionville
but failed to capture it, despite outnumbering the defenders four to one. At
Longwy and Verdun, the émigrés achieved virtually nothing. At Valmy,
they arrived after the battle was over. Experienced Prussian and Austrian
generals lost confidence in émigré battalions, finding most of their leaders
militarily inept, cocky and unbearable to work with. To add to these military
failures, émigré leaders failed to demonstrate an understanding of events
in France. The revolution, for all its faults, was unlikely to be crushed with
by external force. As events in 1792 showed, external threats strengthened
revolutionary nationalism and provoked radical violence. They also believed
that once their armies swept into France, the peasantry would welcome
them with open arms and volunteer for military service. This was far from
true. While many peasants in north-eastern France opposed the revolution,
they had no desire to welcome back their former noble masters.

Legal Response of Revolutionary France

Penal legislation targeting the opponents of Revolution was an inevitable
product of the deposition of the king, and the property of émigrés had
already been the subject of penal taxation, then confiscation after the
outbreak of war. On 23 October 1791 émigrés were first banished in
perpetuity from French soil, and those caught on French soil were
condemned to death. Emigrés who had hoped to return to their homes
after only a short absence, were made brutally aware by the first two
articles of the legislation that their exodus was permanent. From 1793
onwards they could be condemned to death on the strength of a simple
identification test and put to death by local officials in complete accordance
with the law and without right of representation or appeal. Their predicament
was legally defined by their geographic movements, and the date they left
French soil, rather than by their taking arms against the state. The Republican
government made it a crime for a virtuous Frenchman not to reside on
French national soil and this posed many new administrative and political

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dilemmas. The codification of the émigré laws by the Convention between
28 March and 5 April 1793 marked a turning point. These émigré laws,
some 200 in all, affected not only émigrés but friends and relatives of
them, as well as public functionaries who were responsible for implementing
the law. The cumulative rigidity of these laws prevented a political
rapprochement taking place between émigrés and moderate ex-nobles within
France in the critical period 1795-97. This critical lost opportunity arguably
prevented the institution of a constitutional monarchy years before the
eventual Restoration (Carpenter 2015).

The 28 March 1793 legislation was unsurprising in the wake of the kings
execution, and amid massive alarm at provincial revolts. The émigrés had
been tarred liberally with accusations of treachery and desertion before
the outbreak of war and these had been further reinforced by the image of
émigré soldiers serving along side the Revolution’s enemies. Confusion,
panic and paranoia surrounded the legislation stripping the émigrés of their
political rights, possessions, families and friends. Exceptions were made
for children less than fourteen years old, as long as they had not taken
arms and as long as they returned within three months. In future, younger
children would have to return by their tenth birthday in order to avoid being
subject to the law. Persons banished and deportees were exempted as
were those whose absence pre-dated 1 July 1789, as long as they were not
living on enemy territory. The wives and children of government officials
and diplomats were exempted, but domestic servants had to be ‘habitually
employed by that functionary’ and had to be in the service of that employer
prior to his foreign appointment. Frenchmen whose purpose for being abroad
was the study of science, arts or crafts and the acquisition of new knowledge
were exempted provided they were ‘notoirement connus’ (publically
recognized) before their departure. The crime of emigration could also be
applied by association to those who had aided the émigrés or furthered
their hostile projects; those who had sent their children abroad; those who
had supplied arms, horses, munitions or financial assistance to them; those
who had solicited them by promises or financial rewards; those who had
knowingly hidden them or helped them to return to France; those who
were respon-sible for false certificates of residence (Ibid.). The law itself
initiated its own contradictions because an émigré was a criminal more
because of what he or she had chosen not to do – return to France in the
designated, brief, amnesty period – than for what any émigré had consciously
or deliberately done in person to harm the French nation. As early as 1793,
while asserting the need to bring to justice those Frenchmen prepared to
take arms against the Republic, concerns were raised for those to whom

Escaping the Revolution: Interpreting French Migration after 1789 7



the leg-islation might be applied unjustly and without provision for appeal
(requiring, as it did the execution of the sentence within twenty-four hours
of the judgment). Jean-Baptiste Michel Saladin, a Jacobin and a lawyer,
was one such individual who flagged the potential abuses. He argued
fiercely for the premise of the presumption of innocence which he felt was
taken away by a law which prematurely condemned the accused:

Because, if it is true that to condemn an individual to a punishment no
matter which, there needs to be a moral certitude that he has violated the
law, that he has commit-ted the crime against which the law has established
this punishment. Without this moral certitude, the condemnation is an
injustice, and its execution an act of violence (Burgess 2008: 158).

Saladin’s plea to have émigrés whose crimes were not conclusive,
transferred for trial in the ordinary courts did not gain a majority, but it
echoed across the Revolutionary years. The bureaucratic haste, the euphoria
of victory and the impending trial of the king, whose death Saladin voted
for, all compounded to set reason and law to one side. In 1792, the Convention
was already acting on the premise that Robespierre enumerated (that the
government owes national protection to good citi-zens; to enemies of the
people it owes only death) and he dismissed those who coun-selled caution
as stupid or perverse sophists.

The same issues of guilt and innocence would receive fuller treatment
under the Directory, but then too the political circum-stances dictated a
negative response. ‘The revolutionary tribunal made equality triumph by
showing itself as severe for the porters, and for servants as for the
aristocrats and financiers’ (Greer 1951). Throughout the latter years of the
Revolution the émigré laws could not be repealed, in part due to the
immediate political threat they posed, but essentially because any re-
examination of the validity of the laws questioned the foundations of the
Revolution itself. If the émigrés were unjustly accused then the injustice
was not a mat-ter of Girondin versus Jacobin or confined to the Terror, but
it undermined the more universal claims of Revolution going back as far as
the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 17893. After the fall of Robespierre
the laws against émigrés were still in force, they were still registered on
the police lists, but there were few deaths. A revision of November 1794
scaled down the punishment of émigrés to banishment in perpetuity and
the forfeiture of their possessions to the state, but still referred to them as
‘atrocious men who breathed only the ruin of their country’. This perhaps
had more to do with revulsion for bloodshed in the aftermath of the Terror
than any revision of policy on émigrés. Yet while all émigrés were declared
to be enemies of the state, as time went on, more and more people were

Anjan Saha8



prepared to argue that this was not so. Les fugitifs francias was a term
adopted in an attempt to disentangle the former from the émigrés or les
royalistes-aristocrates. The term ‘French fugitives’ was designed to provide
a category of émigré where the crime was less severe and previous good
service to the Revolution taken into account.

Roederer, a lawyer and a former member of the Constituent Assembly
argued that, a state cannot condemn her citizens to perpetual banishment
who fled their country only because the social guarantee was insufficient
to protect them from violence. Arguments like this gave rise to a certain
re-examination of the crime of emi-gration and to questions about what
exactly the émigrés were guilty of. Roederer did not convince the majority,
but he made it clear that the émigré, he was pleading for, was a modern
political refugee:

The émigré only left his country to seek war against it, the Refugee only
quit-ted it when it had made war on him. The émigré has not ceased to turn
his arms on France – the Refugee unarmed in France did not take up arms
outside it. The émigré wanted to shed blood in our homes, the Refugee
only sought an asylum – the one has brought us death, the other tried to
defend himself against it (Carpenter 2015: 342).

This sort of analysis made little difference to the actual legislative condition
of the émigrés, but in the long term it did matter. It showed in many cases
that what was miss-ing was conclusive proof against the émigré not caught
red handed and in that circum-stance the date of emigration was the only
indicator of intent-and that was arguably a rather flimsy one.

Emigres and Host Societies

At first, the émigrés were largely tolerated by the authorities; for the most
part, Comprehensive rules of admission did not yet exist. A special case
within this practice was the Electorate of Trier, where Archbishop Clemens
Wenceslaus (1739-1812) allowed Louis XVI’s brothers, his nephews, to
create an émigré army. Furthermore, he provided money and
accommodations in Koblenz, where the number of émigrés approached
that of local residents, and he even put a part of the city’s administration
into their hands.

A change occurred in admission practice in 1792. The émigré army
dispersed after the coalition troops’ failed autumn campaign, and its members
increasingly headed eastwards through the Holy Roman Empire. In
response, a series of German territories issued strict regulations for admission
and passage through. As the case of Prussia shows, however, these orders

Escaping the Revolution: Interpreting French Migration after 1789 9



could barely be enforced, especially in areas along the borders. Thus, with
local differences, a wide-ranging practice of toleration was established.
Although the Imperial Diet (Reichstag) decreed no regulations for the
Empire as a whole, Prussia, for example, chosen to follow the admission
regulations of the Hapsburg Monarchy, which predicated émigrés’ long-
term residency on their ability to provide for their own subsistence. London’s
rapidly growing émigré colony, with numbers in the five digits, the largest in
Europe, made the domestic security situation increasingly unmanageable.
Thus in 1793 British Parliament passed the Aliens Act. This law allowed
suspicious individuals to be expelled - a practice that among émigrés
especially affected the constitutionnels and caused a number of them to
move on to the USA (Carpenter 1999). The Russian Empire tested their
views to determine whether they qualified for residency, and in 1793 it
required a loyalty oath to Louis XVII and to religion. This was extended to
French people who had long resided in Russia as well.

Around 1800, French émigrés became prominent intermediaries in
European cultural transfer processes for many reasons. As French exiles
seeking to return home quickly, they had a political interest in mobilizing
their host societies against revolutionary France. Nevertheless, after various
military defeats - such as the 1792 campaign in which émigré troops played
a leading role, the short-lived British capture of Toulon in 1793, and the
disastrous landing of émigré troops on the Quiberon Peninsula in Brittany
in 1795 - the question of securing a livelihood became more and more
pressing (Mori 1997). In addition to the clergy, often living in precarious
conditions, and the less affluent members of the Third Estate, now noble
families increasingly fell into a financial position that made them dependent
on support or forced them to take up a profession. In their favour was
French culture’s traditional high prestige abroad, which despite all resentment
towards émigrés made them attractive suppliers of cultural products. Then
again, locals friendly to émigrés, such as Edmund Burke (1729-1797),
defined European exile against the background of a common civilization.
‘From all those sources arose a system of manners and of education which
was nearly-similar in all this quarter of the globe. When a man travelled or
resided for health, pleasure, business or necessity, from his own country,
he never felt himself quite abroad’ (Burke 1991).

A close collaboration between French and Genevan émigrés developed in
a totally different area, namely journalistic activity. Together they criticized
the expansive character of the Revolution, which was republicanizing Europe,
and implored the European powers to act more decisively against advancing
revolutionary troops (Burrows 2000). French émigrés of all political

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persuasions drew parallels between the French Revolution and 17th century
British history - pointing to civil war, regicide, dictatorship, restoration, and
the renewed overthrow of the ruling dynasty. Different émigré groups sought
to make predictions for further developments in France on the basis of
fixed points in the English revolutionary cycle, utilising them variously for
their own propaganda purposes. Whereas the royalistes interpreted the
English Restoration of 1660 as a return to the ancienne constitution, the
monarchiens were more eager to stress that it was a constitutional
monarchy that had been re-established.

French émigrés took on various functions in exile according to their own
political and economic interests, keeping in view the needs of their territories
of exile. For Britain and Australia, it can be shown on the political level,
that émigrés partially replaced diplomatic structures once war broke out
and embassies were withdrawn from Paris. They advised and sought to
influence the various governments, always with an eye to their political
competitors among the émigré community. That this input was ascribed a
high informational value can be seen in its transmission in diplomatic
correspondences, in the archives of foreign ministries. Thanks to their
networks across various parts of Europe as well as their connections to
revolutionary France via relatives, friends and agents, émigrés provided
information relevant to the war that otherwise would have been hard to
come by (Ibid).

The longer exile lasted, the more pressing became the issue of securing a
livelihood, as noted above. This applied first to émigrés of the lower Third
Estate and of the lower clergy, but increasingly to the upper Third Estate
and to noble émigrés as well. The fact that the last group took up professions
is noteworthy, since in the French understanding they would have been
punished with derogeance, the loss of their noble privileges. Nobles working
as shoemakers, at times under assumed names, were as common as women
and children involved in commercial activity. In sectors where state interests
existed, manufactories and factories were created. In Prussia, for example,
this happened in silk production but also for the purpose of agricultural
innovations, as on the model estate of Chevalier de Boufflers (1738-1815)
(Carpenter 1999). Officers, in contrast after the disbandment of the émigré
army, sought employment with the coalition forces in émigré regiments and
later in regular army units, especially in Austria. The Armee de Conde,
part of the émigré army of 1792, spent the 1790s in close formation in
foreign service, relocating from the Upper Rhine to Volhynia before being
set loose in Austria. Emigrés with professional qualifications like architects,
painters and artisans established themselves in their proven milieus. Thus

Escaping the Revolution: Interpreting French Migration after 1789 11



the musical instrument maker Sebastien Erard (1752-1831) had his harp
design patented in London and thenceforth, after his return to France, built
his pianos with English action mechanisms. The much more famous
Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun (1755-1842) spent her exile between Naples
and St. Petersburg painting the portraits of the European high nobility.
Conversely, émigrés in Weimar learned painting in the local drawing school
and swapped techniques and motifs (Price 2007).

As for the clergy in exile, its ancestral domain became teaching. Beginning
with positions teaching French at universities like Oxford, Gottingen, and
Jena; émigrés then worked as home teachers and private tutors, and
ultimately founded large schools such as those run by the Abbe Guy
Toussaint Julien Carron (1760-1821) in London or by the Abbe Dominique
Charles Nicolle (1758-1835) and Frederic Francois Xavier de Villers
(1770-1846) in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa. If what has been
said so far suggests that émigrés consciously exploited the locals’
Francophile predisposition, such becomes even clearer in the example of
the French restaurants that sparked a boom in Hamburg’s gastronomy
sector, or the émigré theatre troupes that successfully established
themselves in Brunswick and Hamburg (Mori 1997). In urban centres like
London, Hamburg, Vienna, and Philadelphia, émigré salons, schools,
bookstores and publishers developed quickly that, at the same time, acted
as forum for discussion about events in France and helped émigrés affirm
their identity. It was especially the émigré publishers and journals - in part
with older roots - that turned the emigration into a component of the
communications and media event that the French Revolution had become.
It was described as follows by the young Francois Rene de Chateaubriand
(1768-1848): ‘Exiles resulting from human persecution is not nearly as
disadvantageous to the human spirit as one might think. The healthiest
honey is the one that a bee, chased from the hive, sometime produces in
the desert’ (Burrows 2000). Gazettes like the London Mercure Britannique
and the Hamburg Spectateur du Nord found an audience among émigrés
in Great Britain and, ultimately all over Europe, within the Republique des
lettres (Ibid).

There is no question that the vast majority of the émigrés wanted to live in
a France governed by a Bourbon king. The sympathetic reception of the
memoirs of Clery, Louis XVI’s confessor, when they appeared in Britain
in 1793 provides proof of the horror that both the British and the French
felt at the king’s execution. Emigrés provided the written proof that the
Revolution could not eradicate all trace of the aristocracy and its supporters,
or their habits and ways, simply by killing the king (Doyle 2009). In the

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European cities of London, Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Madrid, and
Lisbon; émigrés waited patiently imagining a better France. This imagination
and hope for a different political future was the life-blood of the Emigration.
It was expressed in all forms of literature from the writings of the exiled
deputies of the constituent assembly like Montlosier, to the novels of
Madame d’Stael, Madame d’Souza and Senac d’Meihan. It can also be
found in the work of another later generation, affected by those who had
known the experience of emigration, and written their memoirs, Émigré
authors were not so much seeking to give a sense to the explosion of
violence as to understand how the destruction of a political regime, a system
of State, had been possible. A significant proportion never saw their homes
again, and the only trace they felt was their writings, giving proof of a
patriotic French counter-identity without which the Revolution would not
have been such a truly European event. Madame de Stael wrote of her
hero Le Comte d’Erfeuil:

This man had borne the loss of a very large fortune with perfect serenity.
He lived by his musical talent and supported an old uncle, whom he cared
for, until his death. He constantly refused the offer of money that others
pressed upon him. He showed the most brilliant valour, French valour, during
the war, and the most unshakable good humour in the midst of adversity
(Carpenter 2015: 343).

Anatole France in Les dieux ont soif portrayed the émigré from the point
of view of Evariste; Jacobin, judge, and someone who prided himself on
the sincerity of his commitment to revolutionary ideals. He was one of the
first authors to point to the fact that it was the abuse of the legal system
which was significant both in the cases of the émigrés and of Dreyfus –
and importantly what was being protected by such abuse was the political
establishment. Programmatic émigré writings like Jacques Mallet du Pan’s
(1749-1800) Considerations sur la nature de la revolution de France
(1793) were translated into various languages, sometimes more than once,
and even read in France itself. Trophime-Gerard de Lally-Tollendal’s
(1751-1830) Defense des emigres, for example, appeared in Paris in 1797
in an edition of 40,000 copies. Key literary works included Gabriel Senac
de Meilhan’s (1736-1803) novel L’Emigre (1797) and Stephanie Felicite
de Genlis’s (1746-1830) Les petits émigrés (1798). Conversely, émigrés
became a beloved subject especially in German and English fiction. As
reviews and critical responses also show, the emigration had a substantial
presence in the European public sphere, corresponding with situation on
the ground in the host countries.

Escaping the Revolution: Interpreting French Migration after 1789 13



Return to Homeland and the Aftermath

With the end of the Terreur, the emigration had passed its apogee. Under
the Directory (1795-1799), the first émigrés returned after their names
were struck off from the émigré lists. This meant primarily constitutionnels,
who were best able to come to terms with the Republican regime. Alter
the Coup of 18 Brumaire in 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul,
swiftly had the émigré lists closed. Removal from the lists, however, still
required an official proceeding. Only in 1802 was a wide-ranging amnesty
declared; only 1,000 émigrés, especially the exiled monarchy and its orbit,
were exempted from repatriation. Accordingly, the vast majority of émigrés
returned to France under the Consulate, including groups supposedly loyal
to the Bourbons such as the royalistes. As long as it had not been sold,
they recovered their confiscated property. Former émigrés quickly found
employment in the Napoleonic administration and army. After the return of
the Bourbons, the emigration remained a controversial topic in both foreign
and domestic politics. On the one hand, the period of emigration seemed to
repeat itself during Napoleon’s Cent-Jours4 in 1815, as the royal family
and several thousand supporters settled in Flemish Ghent as an émigré
colony with clear parallels to the 1790s. On the other hand, the property
transfers of the Revolution, embodied in what had been done with émigré
property, contributed decisively to political polarisation in the 1820s. In 1825,
both legislative houses passed a law that renounced property restitution but
still recognized the émigrés material claims in the form of indemnification
payments.

Along with the historical analysis of the Revolution and its dissemination in
media, and along with the wide-reaching political mobilisation of European
societies and the effects of the Revolution’s wars, French emigration is
one of the decisive factors in Europe’s experience with revolution in the
final decade of the 18th century. For European societies, the impact of the
French Revolution was immediately felt at home. The émigrés had to secure
their everyday survival. They acted as politicians and diplomats, as agents
in cultural transfer. As part of larger migration movements in the “Age of
Revolutions”, they established networks with other émigré groups. They
thus cannot be reduced to the role of historical losers, as they were seen by
adherents of the Revolution and have been seen by some historians. On
the contrary, exile provided an alternative to the ever radicalising Revolution
and presented a mutual challenge to émigrés and their host societies alike.

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Notes

1.  French Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who followed the
teachings of John Calvin.

2.   Supporters of exiled Stuart Monarch James-II and his descendants
after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

3.   This was made explicit in the Constitution of 1791 which promised
freedom of movement. This was not the only article of the 1789
declaration which was infringed. Article(s) 9 (a man is presumed
innocent until proven guilty) and 17 (the right of property is inviolable
and sacred) were blatantly ignored in regard to emigres.

4.  Napoleon’s return to the imperial throne following his exile to the
principality of Elba.

References

Burgess, Grey. 2009. Refugee in the land of liberty, France and its
Refugees from the Revolution to the End of Asylum, 1787-1939.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Burke, Edmond. 1981. The writings and speeches of Edmond Burke,
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Burrows, Simon. 2000. French Exile Journalism and European Politics,
1792-1814. Woodbridge (UK): Royal Historical Society.

Carpenter, Kirsty. 1999. Refugees of the French Revolution, Emigres in
London, 1789-1802. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Carpenter, Kirsty. 2015. ‘Emigrations in Politics and Imaginations’. In David
Andrers (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution.
London: Oxford University Press: 330-345.

Doyle, William. 2009. Aristocracy and its enemies in the Age of
Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Greer, Donald. 1951. The Incidence of Emigration during the French
Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Hunt, Lyn. 1992. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. London:
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Jasanoff, Maya. 2009. ‘The American Loyalist and French Émigré
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in Global Context, 1700-1840. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave
Macmillan: 37-58.

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Mansel, Philip. 2005. Louis XVIII. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Mori, Jennifer. 1997. ‘The British Government and Bourbon Restoration,
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Price, Munro. 2007. The Perilous Crown, France between Revolutions
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Ruymbeke, Bertrand Van. 2006. ‘Refugies or Émigrés? Early Modern
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