British expatriates in late eighteenth-century France

Gro up e de
re ch erch e en
h istoire des
so cia bilit és
S oc iabi li tés
en révo lutio ns,
1650-1850
VOUS PRÉSENTE
French connections:
British expatriates
in late eighteenth-century France
Une conférence de Simon Macdonald
Le jeudi 23 octobre, 16h-18h
Thomson House 404
McGill University
En collaboration avec le Montreal British History Seminar (MBHS)
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The diverse British presence in late eighteenth-century France is extraordinarily
well documented because of the seizure during the French Revolution of expatriates’
personal papers, private collections and other assets. These exceptional and largely
untapped sources reveal the activities of numerous British groups, especially workers,
leisured travellers, government agents, international financiers, and expatriate
Catholic institutions. Each had very different relationships with France,
with Britain, and with the wider world; this paper examines these, and how they were
changing. Franco–British relations during the eighteenth century are often reductively
characterised as a simple matter of antagonism: but this paper argues that Paris, in
particular, as a nexus for European elites, sociability, and commerce, constituted a key
sorting-house for the maintenance and enactment of varied British links with the wider
Continent, and expatriates formed essential intermediaries in these processes.
La conférence sera offerte en anglais, mais les échanges seront menés
dans les deux langues, conformément au bilinguisme passif du GRHS.
Simon Macdonald est chercheur postdoctoral Banting à l’université McGill. Il a reçu son doctorat en Histoire
à l’université de Cambridge en 2011 et a fait des études postdoctorales à l’University College London, à l’Institute
for Advanced Studies in the Humanities de l’université d’Edimbourg, et à la British School at Rome. Il a été aussi
déteneur de bourses de recherche aux bibliothèques Beinecke et Lewis Walpole de Yale, et à la bibliothèque
Houghton de Harvard. Ses publications récentes incluent, par exemple, ‘English-language newspapers
in revolutionary France’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2013); et ‘Identifying Mrs Meeke: Another
Burney Family Novelist’, Review of English Studies (2013).
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