The Identities of Emigration: The Circulation and Reintegration of French Revolutionary Émigrés

Among the many groups of people crossing borders during the period of the French Revolution, perhaps none are as notorious as the émigrés, the roughly 100,000 individuals who fled the French nation between 1789 and 1802. While the stories of dedicated royalists and aristocrats have dominated histories of the emigration, countless servants, merchants, laborers, and political refugees also fled France during the Revolution.   Traveling to places as diverse as London, Louisiana, Hamburg and Cuba, these individuals carried with them their own memories and understandings of revolutionary events; they built new lives amidst new communities, and in many cases learned new trades and languages.  Strikingly, ninety percent would eventually return to France and seek to rebuild their lives there, striving to reintegrate with a nation that was profoundly different from the one they remembered and that had an entirely different lived experience of the 1790’s and 1800’s than those individuals who had moved beyond France’s borders.  This presentation reflects on the way that movement challenged both the identities of the émigrés themselves, and the identity of the post-Revolutionary nation. In these émigrés’ reinsertion into French society, we see a microcosm of the challenges to uniting a nation after an event as transformative and often traumatizing as the French Revolution.  The émigrés’ narratives and their histories demonstrate the fragility of any definition of French identity in the post-revolutionary period, and reveal the hazards of memory in a nation that was often seeking both to forget its past and recreate its future.