The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle

Transcription

Edited by
Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel
10.1057/9780230508774preview - The French Emigres in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution, 1789-1814, Edited by Kirsty
Carpenter and Philip Mansel
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to npg - PalgraveConnect - 2016-09-29
The French Émigrés in
Europe and the Struggle
against Revolution,
1789–1814
THE FRENCH ÉMIGRÉS IN EUROPE AND THE
STRUGGLE AGAINST REVOLUTION, 1789–1814
10.1057/9780230508774preview - The French Emigres in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution, 1789-1814, Edited by
Also by Kirsty Carpenter
* REFUGEES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: Émigrés in London
1789–1802
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
Also by Philip Mansel
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
The French Émigrés in
Europe and the Struggle
against Revolution,
1789–1814
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.
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 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 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
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
without written permission.
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accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
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11
From Coblenz to Hartwell: the Émigré
Government and the European Powers, 1791–1814
Philip Mansel
1
A European Destiny: the Armée de
Condé, 1792–1801
Frédéric d’Agay
28
London: Capital of the Emigration
Kirsty Carpenter
43
French Émigrés in Hungary
Ferenc Tóth
68
Portugal and the Émigrés
David Higgs
83
French Émigrés in Prussia
Thomas Höpel
101
French Émigrés in Edinburgh
Lord Mackenzie-Stuart
108
Le milliard des émigrés: the Impact of the
Indemnity Bill of 1825 on French Society
Almut Franke
124
French Émigrés in the United States
Thomas C. Sosnowski
138
The Émigré Novel
Malcolm Cook
151
Danloux in England (1792–1802):
an Émigré Artist
Angelica Goodden
165
vii
ix
x
xv
List of Plates
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
Introduction by William Doyle
v
12
13
14
Index
Contents
The Image of the Republic in the
Press of the London Émigrés, 1792–1802
Simon Burrows
184
Burke, Boisgelin and the Politics of the
Émigré Bishops
Nigel Aston
197
‘Fearless resting place’: the Exiled French
Clergy in Great Britain, 1789–1815
Dominic Aidan Bellenger
214
230
vi
1
2
3
4
5
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’.
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 charities, 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.
Henri-Pierre Danloux, Lady Jane Dalrymple Hamilton as Britannia. (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 Camperdown in 1797.
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 portraits of members of royal and noble families in Vienna,
Naples, Saint Petersburg and London until her eventual
return to France in 1804.
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
List of Plates
vii
6
7
8
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.’
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.
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.
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 campaigns 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.
viii
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 participants 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 behindthe-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.
Acknowledgements
ix
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 Politics, 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
xi
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 Languages 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 History of Modern Europe series.
Almut Franke is Assistant Lecturer at the Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität 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.
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.
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.
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 Frankreich 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 Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924. He is currently
working on a history of Paris from 1814 to 1848.
xii
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
xiii
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.
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.
. . . 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
Voyager est, quoi qu’on puisse dire, un des plus tristes plaisirs
de la vie.
(Mme de Staël, Corinne, 1807)
Introduction
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’ expelled 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
William Doyle
xv
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. Whatever 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 chronology 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
xvi
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 embarrassment. After all, they were the original casus belli in 1791–2.
Any ruler who lent them too visible hospitality risked antagonising 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 cavalier 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 naturalborn 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].
Introduction
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 [Sosnowski]. 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 February 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 concerned, and in its aftermath a greater realism set in. While the British 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.
xviii
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 vicissitudes 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 notorious example of this growing rigidity. Condé’s determination 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 prerogatives. 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 exhaustively 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
Introduction
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 repurchased 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 Revolution 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 abandoned 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 Revolution to the very extremes they later deplored and claimed
xx
xxi
to have foreseen. Their departure, and their noisy denunciations 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 movement 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,
Introduction
xxii
Introduction
the Revolution they rejected will also be less well understood.
1.
2.
3.
4.
D. Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration during the French Revolution,
Cambridge, Mass., 1951, p. 115.
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.
M. Crook, Toulon in War and Revolution: from the Ancien Régime to the
Restoration, 1750–1820, Manchester, 1991, p. 142.
Memoirs of My Life, p. 185.
NOTES
Philip Mansel
When the Comte de Provence arrived in Brussels on 26 June
1791, after his flight from France, he found himself at the head
of what he termed, in the memoir he wrote later that summer,
‘une des plus grandes machines qui aient jamais existé’,
namely the émigré government.1 The émigré government was
of a different nature to its rival under the Queen’s favourite, the
Baron de Breteuil, or to any government in exile maintained
by later French pretenders, Bourbon, Orléans or Bonaparte.
In its council of Ministers sat such notable former ministers of
Louis XVI as Calonne, the Maréchaux de Broglie and de Castries. By early 1792 it had established its own diplomats in
twelve capitals, 2 including London, Vienna and Saint Petersburg, where émigré representatives remained until 1814. There
was chaos in the émigré government’s finances.3 Nevertheless,
by the summer of 1792 it had organised an army of 14 249.
One sign of the émigré government’s readiness both to disobey even those acts of Louis XVI dating from before 1789, and
to strengthen links between the Crown and the nobility, was the
inclusion in its army of the Compagnies Nobles d’Ordonnance. They were a revival, under another name, of the Maison
Militaire du roi as it had been before the reforms of 1775.4
The émigré government justified its independence on the
grounds that, as Provence wrote to Marie Antoinette, the Princes were the ‘seuls organes légitimes du roi de France, retenu
en captivité par ses sujets rebelles’.5 The Comtes de Provence
and d’Artois also represented themselves as leaders of a crusade
to save Europe. This was in part a result of geography: from
1 From Coblenz to
Hartwell: the Émigré
Government and the
European Powers,
1791–1814
1
The French Émigrés in Europe
7 July they established their court and government in the small
town of Coblenz at the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle.
They were there at the invitation, and under the protection, of
one of their mother’s brothers, Prince Clemenz of Saxony,
Archbishop and Elector of Trier, whose principal residence it
was. They had to justify their government’s existence to the
Elector and the Holy Roman Empire.
However, while alarmed by the progress of what they called
le mal français, most foreign governments saw the French
revolution as a specifically French phenomenon which did
not directly threaten – in some cases could be exploited to
strengthen – their authority in their own countries. The Princes
failed to persuade European powers to withdraw their ambassadors from Paris in July 1791. 6 The sole result of the Conference held at Pillnitz in August 1791 between the Holy Roman
Emperor, the King of Prussia, the Elector of Saxony and the
Comte d’Artois was the anodyne declaration that the fate of
Louis XVI was ‘un objet d’intérêt commun à tous les souverains de l’Europe’. Only Gustavus III, a personal friend of Provence who had conferred with the Princes at Aix-la-Chapelle
in early July, made plans to attack France.7 But Sweden was
too distant and impoverished to be an effective ally.
The émigré government had more success with Russia.
Catherine II had three motives: monarchical outrage at the
revolution; geopolitical desire to keep the western European
powers occupied while Poland was destroyed; and personal
hatred for the Baron de Breteuil, head of the rival government in exile, who as a young French diplomat had opposed
her coup d’état in 1762. In the autumn of 1791 the Russian
ambassador to the Circles of the Upper and Lower Rhine, Count
Romanzov, and the Swedish ambassador to the Imperial Diet,
Baron Oxenstierna, were also accredited to the Princes at
Coblenz. So important was such foreign recognition that, on
each occasion, the émigré nobility at Coblenz en corps was sent
to compliment the ambassador.
‘La scene a été des plus brillantes et des plus riches en
intérêt . . . ’ wrote the Baron de Bray, the representative of the
Grand Master of Malta at Coblenz, of Romanzov’s reception.8
Further proof of the émigré government’s European dimension was the presence of both the Russian and Swedish ambassadors, the Baron de Duminic first minister of the Elector of
2
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The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle

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