THE FRENCH ÉMIGRÉS in EUROPE and the STRUGGLE AGAINST REVOLUTION, 1789–1814 Also by Kirsty Carpenter * REFUGEES of the FRENCH REVOLUTION: Émigrés in London 1789–1802

THE FRENCH ÉMIGRÉS IN EUROPE AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST REVOLUTION, 1789–1814 Also by Kirsty Carpenter * REFUGEES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: Émigrés in London 1789–1802

Also by Philip Mansel LOUIS XVIII PILLARS OF MONARCHY: Royal Guards in History, 1400–1984 SULTANS IN SPLENDOUR: The Last Years of the Ottoman World THE COURT OF FRANCE, 1789–1830 LE CHARMEUR DE L’EUROPE: Charles-Joseph de Ligne CONSTANTINOPLE: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924

* from the same publishers The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution, 1789–1814

Edited by

Kirsty Carpenter School of History, Philosophy and Politics College of Humanities and Social Sciences Massey University Palmerston North New Zealand and

Philip Mansel The Society for Court Studies London First published in Great Britain 1999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-41024-8 ISBN 978-0-230-50877-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230508774

First published in the United States of America 1999 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978- 0–312–22381–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The French émigrés in Europe and the struggle against revolution, 1789–1814 / edited by Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0–312–22381–1 (cloth) 1. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Refugees. 2. Political refugees—Europe—Conduct of life. I. Carpenter, Kirsty, 1962– . II. Mansel, Philip. DC158.F74 1999 944.04'086'91—dc21 99–20923 CIP Selection and editorial matter © Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel 1999 Chapter 1 © Philip Mansel 1999 Chapter 3 © Kirsty Carpenter 1999 Chapter 7 © Lord Mackenzie-Stuart 1999 Chapters 2, 4–6, 8–14 © Macmillan Press Ltd 1999 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999 978-0-333-74436-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10987654321 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 Contents

List of Plates vii Acknowledgements ix Notes on the Contributors x Introduction by William Doyle xv

1 From Coblenz to Hartwell: the Émigré Government and the European Powers, 1791–1814 Philip Mansel 1 2 A European Destiny: the Armée de Condé, 1792–1801 Frédéric d’Agay 28 3 London: Capital of the Emigration Kirsty Carpenter 43 4 French Émigrés in Hungary Ferenc Tóth 68 5 Portugal and the Émigrés David Higgs 83 6 French Émigrés in Prussia Thomas Höpel 101 7 French Émigrés in Edinburgh Lord Mackenzie-Stuart 108 8 Le milliard des émigrés: the Impact of the Indemnity Bill of 1825 on French Society Almut Franke 124 9 French Émigrés in the United States Thomas C. Sosnowski 138 10 The Émigré Novel Malcolm Cook 151 11 Danloux in England (1792–1802): an Émigré Artist Angelica Goodden 165

v vi Contents

12 The Image of the Republic in the Press of the London Émigrés, 1792–1802 Simon Burrows 184 13 Burke, Boisgelin and the Politics of the Émigré Bishops Nigel Aston 197 14 ‘Fearless resting place’: the Exiled French Clergy in Great Britain, 1789–1815 Dominic Aidan Bellenger 214

Index 230 List of Plates

1 Henri-Pierre Danloux, Monsieur, Comte d’Artois. (Private collection) Painted at Holyroodhouse in 1796, this portrait was engraved for distribution as propaganda. Monsieur was leader of the extremist wing of the émigrés until his return to France in 1814. His residence in Edinburgh was described as ‘the honour of the nobility’. 2 Henri-Pierre Danloux, Mgr de la Marche, Bishop of Saint Pol de Léon, 1797. (Private collection) The Bishop was the leading figure in French émigré char- ities, as the letters and lists of subscribers scattered on and around his desk suggest. Danloux was a royalist who emigrated in 1792 to London, where he lived until his return to Paris in 1802. His diary is a valuable account of émigré life in London. 3 Henri-Pierre Danloux, Lady Jane Dalrymple Hamilton as Bri- tannia. (Private collection) As this picture suggests, French émigré artists were not ashamed to commemorate victories over the French republic. At the sitter’s feet a British lion is pawing the flag of the French ally, the Batavian republic, in celebration of the British victory, under the command of the sitter’s father, Admiral Duncan, over the Dutch fleet at Camper- down in 1797. 4 Mme. Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of Count Stroganov as a child. (Collection Tatiana Zoubov) Mme. Vigée Le Brun, a favourite artist of Marie Antoinette, emigrated in 1791 and earned large sums painting por- traits of members of royal and noble families in Vienna, Naples, Saint Petersburg and London until her eventual return to France in 1804. 5 Sophie de Tott, Louis Joseph de Bourbon, Prince de Condé. (Private collection) Although this print shows Condé as an émigré leader fighting on the continent, it was engraved (by F. Bartolozzi RA) and published by the artist herself in London in October 1802, a year after the final disbandment of the armée de

vii viii List of Plates

Condé, and Condé’s arrival in England. The inscription below the portrait gives all the prince’s Ancien Régime titles: ‘Prince de Condé, Prince du Sang, Pair et Grand Maître de France, Colonel Général de l’infanterie Française et étrangère, Gouverneur et Lieutenant-Général pour le Roi dans la province de Bourgogne, etc. etc. etc.’ 6 François Huet Villiers, Louis Antoine Henry de Bourbon, Duc d’Enghien, 1804. (Private collection) As the funeral urn above the prince’s head indicates, this print was published in London in 1804 to mourn the Duc d’Enghien’s kidnapping and execution on the orders of Napoleon I. Enghien was Condé’s grandson and had fought in the armée de Condé. 7 François Huet Villiers, Louis XVIII, 1810. (Private collection) Huet Villiers, who lived in London from the beginning of the revolution until his death there in 1813, painted this portrait of Louis XVIII, at Hartwell in 1810. This engraving, published by Colnaghi of Bond Street, was distributed from 1812 for purposes of propaganda. 8 Mlle de Noireterre, The Comte de Langeron, 1814. (Private collection) Born in Paris in 1763, a colonel in the French army by 1788, Langeron had joined the Russian service in 1790, fought in the armée des Princes in 1792 and subsequently served in the Austrian army before rejoining the Russian service. He rose to be a Count and a general and fought against the French Empire at Austerlitz and in the cam- paigns of 1812–14. For his successful command of the allied assault on Montmartre on 30 March 1814, he was made a Knight of the Order of Saint Andrew. Instead of staying in France, he remained in Russian service as Military Governor of south Russia and the commander and chief of the Don Cossacks. Acknowledgements

The editors would like to acknowledge the very generous support they have received from the Institut Français in London, which provided a venue for the 1997 conference ‘Les Émigrés Français en Europe 1789–1814’, where all the contributions in this volume originated. A second conference on 2–4 July 1999 will also take place there continuing the work begun in 1997 towards a wider picture of Emigration in Europe during the French Revolution. A further conference is planned, for Paris in the year 2002, to mark the anniversary of the return of the vast majority of émigrés from exile. Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel would particularly like to thank all the particip- ants at the first conference for their interest and enthusiasm, which made the event a memorable experience for all involved. A special thanks also goes to Kimberly Chrisman for her behind- the-scenes work. Finally, we would like to thank Tim Farmiloe and Macmillan Press for their support and recognition of the importance of the Emigration in its European context.

ix Notes on the Contributors

Frédéric d’Agay is an independent historian. Born in 1956, he is the author of Les grands notables du Premier Empire, Var (1987) and Cháteaux et Bastides de Provence (1991), and a specialist on the history of the French nobility in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has published editions of the Lettres d’Italie of the Président de Brosses (1986) and the Mémoires of the Baron de Frenilly. He collaborated in the Dictionnaire Napoléon (1988) and the Dictionnaire du Grand Siècle (1990). He received his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1996 for his thesis ‘Les officiers de marine provençaux au XVIIIième siècle’.

Nigel Aston is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Luton. His first book, French Revolution and Religion in France, 1780–1804 will appear in 1999. He is the editor of Religious Change in Europe, 1650–1914 (1997) and he works on Church– state relations at the end of the Ancien Régime.

Simon Burrows is Lecturer in History at Waikato University in Hamilton, New Zealand. He has published several articles on the press of the London émigrés and his first book, Princes, Press and Propaganda: French Exile Journalism and European Polit- ics, 1792–1814, is due to appear in 1999. He is currently working on the Ancien Régime journalist, Charles Theveneau de Morande.

Dominic Aidan Bellenger is a member of the community at Downside Abbey in Bath. He has published widely on the subject of the French émigré priests and their leaders La Marche and Carron who came to Britain during the Revolution. He is the author of The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after 1789 (1986). He is an Associate Lecturer of the Open University and regularly teaches at Bath Spa University College and at the University of Bristol.

Kirsty Carpenter is Lecturer in European History in the School of History, Philosophy and Politics at Massey University,

x Notes on the Contributors xi

New Zealand. Her first book was Refugees of the French Revolution: Emigrés in London, 1792–1802 (1999). Her specialist interests focus on the political literature of the French Revolution. She is currently working on Marie-Joseph Chénier, a member of the Convention and the Revolution’s official poet.

Malcolm Cook is Professor of Eighteenth-Century French Studies in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Exeter. His most recent book is Fictional France: Social Reality in the French Novel, 1775–1800 (1993) and he is co-editor of Modern France: Society in Transition (1998). He is currently working on a critical edition of the correspondence of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. He is the General Editor of the Modern Lan- guages Review and serves on the editorial teams of many other scholarly reviews.

William Doyle has been Professor of History at the University of Bristol since 1986. A Fellow of the British Academy, he has also taught at the Universities of York and Nottingham. He is the author of The Oxford History of the French Revolution (1989). Among his other publications are Origins of the French Revolution (1980, 3rd edition, 1999), and most recently, Venality: the Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France (1996). He is currently working on a volume on France 1763–1848 in the Oxford His- tory of Modern Europe series.

Almut Franke is Assistant Lecturer at the Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität in Munich. Her Doctorate on the subject of ‘Le Millard des Emigrés’ entitled Die Entschädigung der Emigration im Frankreich der Restauration (1814–1830) will be published in 1999. She has written on the subject of the 1825 indemnity law in the area of Bordeaux and has contributed to two major publications on relations between France and Germany during the Revolution.

Angelica Goodden is a Fellow and Tutor in French at St Hilda’s College Oxford. Her most recent book is a biographical study of Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun, The Sweetness of Life. Other publications include Action and Persuasion: Dramatic Performance in Eighteenth-Century France and The Complete Lover: Eros, Nature and Artifice in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel. xii Notes on the Contributors

Thomas Höpel is Lecturer in the Centre of French Studies at Leipzig University. He works on Franco-German relations in the eighteenth century and has published on refugees and exiles during different waves of emigration between the two countries in the modern period. He was the co-organiser of a conference, ‘Emigrés and Refugies. Migration zwischen Frank- reich und Deutschland in der frühen Neuzeit’, which took place on 13–15 June 1997.

David Higgs is Professor of History and Fellow of University College at the University of Toronto. His books include Ultraroyalism in Toulouse from its Origins to the Revolution of 1830 (1973), A Future to Inherit: the Portuguese Communities of Canada (1976), an edited book, Church and Society in Catholic Europe of the Eighteenth Century (1979) and Nobles in Nineteenth-Century France: the Practice of Inegalitarianism (1987). His work combines French and Portuguese interests. His latest book, a volume of gay history entitled Queer Sites, will appear in 1999.

Lord Mackenzie-Stuart practised at the Scots bar until 1792 when he was appointed judge of the Court of Session, Scotland’s supreme court. He was the first British judge at the Court of Justice of the European Communities, Luxembourg in 1973 and its President 1984–88. On retirement he lectured widely and acted as arbitrator in international commercial disputes. He was awarded the Prix Bech for services to Europe, 1989, and is the author of A French King at Holyrood. He shares his time between his native Scotland and his home in France.

Philip Mansel is an historian of courts and royal dynasties and editor of The Court Historian, newsletter of the Society for Court Studies. He is the author of biographies of Louis XVIII and the Prince de Ligne and his other published works include Sultans in Splendour: the Last Years of the Ottoman World and Con- stantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924. He is currently working on a history of Paris from 1814 to 1848.

Thomas Sosnowski is Associate Professor of History at Kent State University, Stark Campus in Canton, Ohio. He has published articles on revolutionary Europe, émigrés and exiles and has given papers regularly at the conferences run by the Notes on the Contributors xiii

Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, the Society for French Historical Studies and the Western Society for French History. As well as his European interests he is actively involved in local American history.

Ferenc Tóth is Lecturer in History and Head of the French Department at Berzsenyi Daniel College in Szombathely (West Hungary). He completed his Doctorate at the Université de Paris IV, Sorbonne in 1996. His research interests focus on Hungarian immigration to France and Turkey in the eighteenth century and the interplay of the themes of oriental despotism, Enlightenment and nationalism in Hungarian history. Voyager est, quoi qu’on puisse dire, un des plus tristes plaisirs de la vie. (Mme de Staël, Corinne, 1807)

. . . la grande figure de l’Emigré, l’un des types les plus imposants de notre époque. Il était en apparence faible et cassé, mais la vie semblait devoir persister en lui, précisément à cause de ses mœurs sobres et ses occupations champêtres. (Balzac, Le Lys dans la Vallée, 1835)

xiv Introduction William Doyle

Political exile is as old as history; but the émigré was a creation of the French Revolution. Unlike the British Jacobite exiles, who offered a recent parallel, those who left France during the Revolution were not simply motivated by loyalty to a deposed dynasty. Almost a third of those who left France went before the fall of the monarchy.1 Nor were they ‘constructively’ ex- pelled for one overwhelming reason, like the Huguenots, who had outnumbered them a century previously. The Emigration began as a voluntary exodus, and until late in 1791 official policy was to urge the exiles to return. Later, indeed, their numbers were swelled by deportees and fugitives from revolutionary laws, who had little or no alternative to leaving. The causes of emigration evolved and expanded with the course of the Revolution itself. But, at whatever point they chose, or were compelled, to leave the land of their birth, émigrés were people unable to live with the France the Revolution had made. Emigration reflected the comprehensiveness of this revolution of a new type, that left no aspect of life, and no area of society, untouched. In so far as subsequent revolutions have measured their ambitions by this one, émigrés have become a recognised feature of modern political life. The word had entered the English language by 1792.2 By the end of that year the French Revolution, anti-noble almost from the start, had also turned anti-clerical, anti-monarchical and (with the September massacres) terroristic. It was therefore scarcely surprising that at least two-thirds of those who had left the country by the time of the king’s death were either nobles or clerics. It seems likely that many of the rest were dependent in some way on these two categories. These were the émigrés of legend. As with the noble victims of the Terror, the sight of the formerly mighty brought low has marked the conventional picture of the emigration ever since. But in 1951 the legend was challenged by Donald Greer, with statistics which showed incontestably that most emigration took place after 1792, and that the vast majority of those leaving were not

xv xvi Introduction members of the former privileged orders. Most were ordinary people fleeing from the consequences of civil war. The official lists which were Greer’s main source made no distinctions as to their motivation. All had emigrated, all were subject to the same penalties. But it is perfectly clear that the faceless majority were not exiles in the same way as the nobles and clerics. They would be much more accurately described in recent terms as refugees or displaced persons. True émigrés had acted on principle – however self-interested. Most had been persons of authority before 1789, and had turned their backs on a revolution which had diminished or dispossessed them. What- ever the intrinsic human importance of the humble, unsung majority officially categorised as émigrés, those who gave the word its distinctive subsequent meaning would have acknowledged little in common with them. Legend still comes closer to defining the essence of emigration than the administrative categories of revolutionary officials. Yet legends also distort; and the main purpose of the pages that follow is to shed a less partial light on the lives and behaviour of a group too often reviled or admired uncritically. Some of this new light, it is true, tends to confirm old stereotypes. Little in these essays offers us a prospect of émigrés less snobbish, quarrelsome or Francocentric in their attitudes than has always been perceived. Nor is their melancholy stoicism in adversity, endless capacity for hoping against hope, and dogged loyalty to ideals in any way diminished. The geography and chrono- logy of emigration is not much modified either. Great Britain, so close and yet so impregnable beyond the sea, was ultimately the most favoured destination [Carpenter]. Of more distant refuges, only the United States, Sweden and Denmark were not reached sooner or later by the armies of the republic or the usurper; so continental émigrés were almost always having to move out of danger. And while émigré numbers, even among nobles and clergy, continued to expand down to 1794, by the time the official list of émigrés was closed in 1799, thousands had already returned, and thousands more would do so as it became clear that Bonaparte had restored a world of stability, hierarchy and religious observance, even if there was not a Bourbon to preside over it. Louis XVIII and his family, in fact, were the only émigrés for whom returning to France was not an option between 1799 and 1814. Ironically that strengthened Introduction xvii his diplomatic position. From 1807 he was an honoured and subsidised (if none-too-hopeful) guest in Great Britain rather than the helpless fugitive, not just from France, but sooner or later from other states too, that he had been for most of the time since 1791. In this, Louis XVIII had shared the fate of most of those who did not cross the Channel to cluster in genteel penury in Soho or Marylebone. For governments generally found in the presence of émigrés grounds for suspicion, irritation or embar- rassment. After all, they were the original casus belli in 1791–2. Any ruler who lent them too visible hospitality risked antago- nising a republic that by 1794 had marshalled unprecedented military power. Besides, it took a long time for populations and even officials with a long-standing suspicion of things French to learn that not all Frenchmen abroad were agents of their country’s new ideology. The Prussians were notoriously stingy with their residence permits [Höpel]; the Habsburg authorities in Hungary suspected even Hungarians returning from France when foreign regiments were disbanded [Tóth]. Never punctilious debtors, the émigrés were increasingly caval- ier towards their creditors because of dwindling resources; the only refuge of the Count d’Artois from British bailiffs in the late 1790s was the grace-and-favour sanctuary of Holyrood. Foreign generals, meanwhile, found the posturings of regiments composed entirely of nobles regarding themselves as natural- born officers a liability. They were either kept prudently under foreign control, like Condé’s legions [d’Agay], or allowed to take the lead only on reckless ventures of their own dubious devising, like the catastrophic Quiberon expedition of 1795. Nor could the most patent martyrs to conviction, the non-juror clergy, necessarily expect a less guarded welcome. Priests who had given up all to obey the Pope were objects of suspicion for Erastian princes hostile to the pretensions of Rome [Höpel]. Orthodox hierarchies feared the contagion of Jansenism, improbable through this was among French non-juring priests. Only in the Protestant confessional kingdom of Great Britain, ironically enough, was the impact more benign. Here the pious resignation and biblical poverty of the expatriate clergy helped to soften the visceral anti-Catholicism of their hosts, and so benefited their British co-religionists [Bellenger]. xviii Introduction

As Kirsty Carpenter stresses (pp. 59–60), there was a moral force in the sight of exiles prepared to suffer rather than live in a homeland where they thought they had no place. Their presence lent sober reality to a revolution that could otherwise only be experienced through the newspapers. Accordingly they were able to influence their hosts’ picture of conditions in France. This was particularly so in the United States, where French visitors had been a rarity since independence [Sos- nowski]. The move towards Jay’s Treaty must have owed a good deal to the prospect and everyday propaganda of French exiles, even if these same exiles mostly found the atmosphere of the first modern republic crude and rebarbative, and a brutal corrective to the romantic illusions so widespread in the 1780s of life on the sylvan frontier. The ancestral enemy across the Channel, on the other hand, was a pleasant surprise. Most of the British proved welcoming and sympathetic; the Treasury authorised funds for the relief of the Godless revolution’s indigent victims; and tales of Jacobin horrors were eagerly absorbed in a political culture more anxious than it might like to admit for reassurance about the superiority and durability of its own ways. Despite the struggles of Louis XVIII (shown here to be more successful than previously thought) [Mansel] to maintain the trappings of a court and government wherever his exile took him, London was the true capital of the emigration, if not from the start, then certainly once war broke out in Feb- ruary 1793 [Carpenter]. The émigrés concentrated there, so sympathetically received in good society, were all the more shocked to learn from the disaster of Quiberon how cynically they were regarded by George III and his ministers. Yet Quiberon was the result of wishful thinking among all concern- ed, and in its aftermath a greater realism set in. While the Brit- ish government never again gave credence to émigré analyses of the situation in France, by grudgingly patronising efforts to relieve the plight of the more indigent exiles on its territory, it acknowledged a certain responsibility towards them. The émigrés, for their part, as an analysis of their press shows [Burrows], now made greater efforts to understand what had happened, and was still happening, across the Channel; and the tissue of fantasies that had made up so much of émigré journalism was increasingly cut through by commentaries of real, if unreassuring, insight. Introduction xix

Although many émigrés, particularly the clergy, kept to themselves, and many more were culturally ghettoised by their inability or unwillingness to learn languages other than their own, in general their capacity to adapt to their circumstances is striking. For some, indeed, emigration was a positive opportunity. Condé saw it as the chance to build a military career worthy of his illustrious ancestor [d’Agay]; Danloux found a captive market for his paintings secure from the jealous machinations of David [Goodden]. And whereas merchants and craftsmen could practise their skills in exile much as before, distressed gentlefolk survived by teaching French as a foreign language, or making straw hats. The ex-monk Dulau opened a bookshop and a publishing business in Soho. Nobody, of course, adapted more consistently to the vagaries and vicissi- tudes of changing circumstances than Louis XVIII himself and his entourage, clinging doggedly to the métier du roi even when there was scarcely any to perform [Mansel]. Enforced adaptation to the world outside France, however, was no indication of a willingness to change if ever these nightmare days should end. As the old order grew more remote, memory overlaid its more dynamic and nuanced features, and minds set against anything deemed in retrospect to have precipitated the great cataclysm. The Declaration of Verona, which Louis XVIII spent two decades living down, was only the most noto- rious example of this growing rigidity. Condé’s determina- tion to exclude all but scions of the oldest noble stock from his exile army (which he called simply La Noblesse) was another [d’Agay]. At Toulon in 1793, the only place where émigrés were able to establish more than a fleeting bridgehead in France, those who had invited them and their British protectors were dismayed at the time they devoted, in a city besieged, to re-establishing noble and clerical precedence and preroga- tives.3 Emigration seemed to amplify the ‘cascade of disdain’ that had marked old-regime social relations, as the political as well as the social credentials of each new arrival were exhaust- ively scrutinised. And these attitudes were passed on to a younger generation which could recall little of pre-revolutionary life at first hand, through an education narrowed by the limited means or censorious ambitions of their parents. Yet by the time Napoleon fell, nine-tenths of the émigrés had already returned to France. Only those motivated xx Introduction overwhelmingly by loyalty to the Bourbon dynasty held aloof from an architect of unprecedented French power and glory who invited them back on the sole condition that they accept the legitimacy of his regime. Their return opened new rifts among those who had taken the ‘honourable road’ in grimmer times. What continued to unite them was the cost of choosing to leave France and not return when summoned to do so. In 1792 the goods of all declared émigrés were confiscated and added to the stock of biens nationaux. It is true that much was repur- chased by relations left behind, or by émigrés themselves on their return. Land still unsold was returned to its former owners or their heirs at, or before, the restoration. Nevertheless the cost of repurchase was substantial, and hardly any émigrés recovered all their former property. The compensation accorded in the milliard des émigrés of 1825 never reached that fabulous sum, and sometimes took many years to be assessed and awarded [Franke]. Émigrés and their descendants thus continued to suffer for what they had done long after emigration became a myth-laden memory. And despite their implicit recognition of the Revolution’s legitimacy by acceptance of the indemnity, their political enemies often failed to return the compliment. Throughout the nineteenth century calls were periodically heard for the milliard to be repaid. However much, therefore, and at however painful a cost, the émigrés and their families came to accept what the Revolu- tion had done, the custodians of its achievements could never acknowledge the legitimacy of the emigration. As their language made clear, they drew little distinction between emigration and treason. The language of republican intransigence, inherited from the Year II, implied that the émigrés had aban- doned their country in its hour of peril to give aid and comfort to its enemies. Émigrés for their part claimed that there was little choice; and for those fleeing from massacre and arrest in 1792–94 that was obviously true. Those who left earlier had less excuse. Alarming though the events of 1789–92 were to nobles and clerics, a large majority of both orders proved able to live through them without leaving the country. The early Revolution was not so much a mortal threat to established élites, as a challenge. The émigrés were the ones who refused it; and in doing so they played a fateful part in driving the Re- volution to the very extremes they later deplored and claimed Introduction xxi to have foreseen. Their departure, and their noisy denuncia- tions from beyond the frontiers, only intensified revolutionary paranoia and suspicion towards all ci-devants. Their attempts to recruit the king to their cause, culminating in his disastrous flight to Varennes in June 1791, fatally undermined the prospect for a constitutional monarchy. Their appeals to foreign powers to intervene in French internal affairs began the move- ment towards war in the autumn in 1791; and their willingness to serve in arms under enemy command, once hostilities began the following spring, finally marked them out as betrayers of their country. Louis XVI’s attempts, meanwhile, to protect them and their property in France with his veto helped seal the fate of the monarchy itself. All these machinations, it is true, were the work of a small minority. One thing that stands out from the present collection is the political passivity of most émigrés once they had affected their escape. They all lived in hope, but most were more absorbed in the struggle for day-to-day survival than in the struggle against the Godless popular republic. Apart from those who went early, their fortunes as yet unthreatened by overt political dissidence, most émigrés left their sources of income behind, inaccessible even before they were confiscated. They had to find new ways of sustaining themselves. And although they usually found abroad, however grudgingly, the noble and clerical solidarity they obviously expected, they mostly had to find their own resources. As Gibbon remarked, ‘These noble fugitives are entitled to our pity; they may claim our esteem; but they cannot, in the present state of their mind and fortune, much contribute to our amusement.’4 There was, indeed, little amusing about the emigration. The French Revolution imposed unenviable choice on all who had to live through it. The émigrés’ choice was to sacrifice everything but their lives (and, if they went to Quiberon, even those) rather than accept a new order of things in the land of their birth. It was a futile sacrifice. None of them ever recovered all they lost, and most would have lost less by staying. Notoriously, even the restored Bourbons inherited Napoleon’s throne, not their brother’s; and Charles X in 1830 threw that away, dying in renewed emigration. But the story is no less tragic for its futility, and no less significant either. Without the better understanding of the émigrés which this collection offers, xxii Introduction the Revolution they rejected will also be less well under- stood.

NOTES

1. D. Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration during the French Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1951, p. 115. 2. The first use recorded by the OED is by no less a writer than Edward Gibbon, who a year earlier had already noted the presence in Lausanne, of ‘a swarm of emigrants of both sexes who escaped from the public ruin’. Memoirs of My Life, ed. G.A. Bonnard, London, 1966, p. 185. 3. M. Crook, Toulon in War and Revolution: from the Ancien Régime to the Restoration, 1750–1820, Manchester, 1991, p. 142. 4. Memoirs of My Life, p. 185.