Banished

Traveling the Roads of Exile in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Delphine Diaz, Sylvie Aprile, Delphine Diaz, Sylvie Aprile

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2021
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110732344
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This book aims to study the departure and reception of refugees in 19th-century Europe, from the Congress of Vienna to the 1870-1880s. Through eight chapters, it draws on a transnational approach to analyze migratory movements across European borders. The book reviews the chronology of exile and shows how European states welcomed, selected, and expelled refugees. In addition to presenting the point of view of nation-states, it reflects the experience of those migrating. The book addresses departure into exile, captured through the material circumstances of crossing borders in the 19th century, and examines the emergence of new ways to pursue political commitments from abroad. The outcasts are considered in all their diversity, with a prominent place accorded to women and children, many of whom also moved under duress. The book aims to shed light on the forced migrations of Europeans across Europe, while also considering the global dimension, looking at exile to the Americas or the French colonies. A final chapter examines the impossibility or difficulty of returning from exile to one's country of origin, as well as the a posteriori memorial constructs around that crucial experience.

Chapter 1 Times of exile

Sylvie Aprile

Delphine Diaz

Antonin Durand

In addition to providing an overview of the tides of exile around Europe, this chapter focuses on the role played by countries of origin, going over the political events and wars causing people to head into exile. It enters the world of nineteenth-century outcasts through the complex timeframes of their migrations.

In 1815, upheavals across Europe drove a flurry of military and civilian displacements. Some people headed home, others departed. But their journeys and circulations were characterized by uncertainty, and their paths crossed. One obvious example is the return of Louis xviii, followed by his precipitate departure during the Hundred Days, when Napoléon landed in France only to be exiled shortly after on St Helena. The about-turns of these great figures reverberated around Europe, and their effects were felt in the colonies even. After 1816 and the adoption of the misleadingly named “amnesty law” in France,¹ many members of the regicidal National Convention headed for Belgium, while certain remnants of the imperial army took refuge in America, at the Champ d’Asile.² On occasions, it was a matter of prudently slipping across the nearest border. During the Hundred Days, a young aristocrat who had rejoined King Louis XVIII’s military household went into refuge in Switzerland, then in Savoy, before returning to the French shore of Lake Leman in late June 1815, aboard a boatman’s rowboat, who rented him a little house, once used by douaniers, some quarter of an hour from the village. This fleeting far from glorious exile was the young Alphonse de Lamartine.³

The purpose of the Congress of Vienna was to establish new borders, but it in fact fueled the tensions and hopes of various monarchic branches, of military leaders who did not disarm, and of peoples subjected to victorious emperors. The history of migrations, which has largely accompanied the revived interest in the history of exile, has as a matter of convenience long proceeded by constructing successive logical sequences, suggesting a series of regular and continuous waves. But the changes and spatial frameworks are in fact more complex, for both migrations and exiles. Flows waxed and waned but never wholly dried up, while the early nineteenth century saw a “trickle” rather than great waves, to extend the aquatic metaphor. The destinations were also highly varied, illustrating the many reasons for departure – fleeing repression by a regime against which one had risen up, following once powerful leaders now cast down, or hatching plots and scheming revolutions from afar. The timeframes were complex too: the ten years Napoleon spent on St Helena are in no way comparable to Lamartine’s few days of exile lying low on the other shore of Lake Leman, more as a deserter than a refugee.

Is it possible to quantify European political exile during this period? Many researchers have addressed this question, often in monographs on a particular national group or place of refuge. Very reliable estimations are thus available for the number of foreigners in Paris under the July Monarchy,⁴ or in London in the aftermath of 1848.⁵ But broadening the focus to gauge the extent of the phenomenon throughout Europe poses methodological problems. First, not all places of refuge and all national groups have been studied equally, and much work remains to be done, for example, on central Europe, despite pioneering research by Heléna Tóth.⁶ Second, the heterogeneity of the available sources means that it can be hazardous to add new groups, for their contours change depending on whether they are apprehended via archives about assistance to refugees, or those about monitoring them, or whether they include or exclude women. Matters become even more fraught once we try to separate political exiles from economic migrations, for an infinite continuum of nuances exist between these two ideal types. Moments of political crisis together with the revolutionary episodes of 1820 – 1821, 1830, and 1848 obviously caused political exiles to depart in substantial though varying numbers. But these events often coincided with periods of recession and unemployment, making any separation between political and economic motives largely artificial.

The purpose of this chapter is thus to periodize, spatialize, and quantify political exiles in nineteenth-century Europe. In terms of chronology, it is a matter of showing that while major political changes caused fluctuations in pace and scale, these should not hide the complexity of individual itineraries or the diversity of national cases. Looking at the geography of exile flows should help untangle this complexity, with particular attention to the paths taken by exiles, often not a straightforward transfer from country of departure to country of arrival. In terms of quantities, rather than gathering numbers which are far too disparate to yield any overall estimate of the number of exiles, the objective is to make the flows commensurable, and to map individual and collective trajectories within the European circulations of exiles.

1 The Congress of Vienna: restoring powers and controlling the vanquished

The representatives of the victorious powers did not specifically debate the question of exile and asylum, but they were committed to stabilizing populations and confining or else expelling those who had collaborated with the now defeated Napoleonic order. The Final Act of the Congress of Vienna simplified the map of Europe. The German mosaic of 350 states was pared down to just 39, united in a Germanic Confederation. The Italian peninsula was hence divided into seven states. Russia now encompassed most of the former Duchy of Warsaw, transformed into a Kingdom of Poland in personal union with the Tsar. Prussia received Swedish Pomerania, northern Saxony, Westphalia, and most of Rhineland. Austria gained control of Lombardy, Venetia, the Adriatic coast (Illyria and Dalmatia), the Tyrol, and Salzburg. Spain and Portugal were reunited with their sovereigns, though their colonial empires were gradually broken up. These territorial annexations did not take aspirations to unity into account, and the return of monarchs quite clearly caused abrupt or negotiated departures. Aspirations to unification (in Italy, and partly in German states) went ignored, as did those to a constitutional regime, as called for by progressive bourgeois swathes. Many of the young Germans who had been called to arms in 1813 by sovereigns promising them a free and united Germany, to the battle cry of “Vivat Teutonia!” (“Long live Germany!”), were bitterly disappointed. Secret societies, particularly the carbonari in the Italian peninsula, started to develop and nourish new ideas.

Thus most of the circulations of exiles in the early nineteenth century, echoing those of earlier political circulations, arose from dissent with the order of Vienna. The exiles of the beginning of the century were necessarily marked by the displacements of émigrés during the French Revolution and by the exodus of planters from Saint-Domingue. All these experiences, to which should be added the passage of armies through Europe and the Atlantic, carved out deeply bedded routes, shaped representations, and profoundly marked the policies introduced. The French Revolution had occasioned the first mass exile of the late modern period, that of the “counterrevolutionaries”, which was not comprised solely of migrating aristocrats, no doubt numbering around 150,000 people in all. There was nothing comparable in the rest of the nineteenth century, but this initial emigration influenced exiles and authorities in lands of departure and arrival.

Other even older memories were also reactivated, such as that of the 200,000 Huguenots who had fled the kingdom of France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 for Germany, Britain, and the Netherlands, or the less studied departure of 45,000 English and Irish military and civilian Jacobites who left Britain after James II fled in 1689.⁷ But the phenomenon did not solely draw inspiration from the past; exiles innovated at times, as did the government’s taking them in and casting them out. Exiles borrowed from the paths taken by international volunteers journeying throughout Europe, while governments wondered how best to control and monitor the newcomers, or else relegate them to a distance. Was exile a civilized sentence? This topic was debated by the powers at the Congress of Vienna who, without forsaking execution for political convicts, preferred to keep them at a distance. As Caroline Shaw has shown, this humanitarianism went hand-in-hand with the abolition of the slave trade and slavery.⁸ The geography of European exile was thus not solely continental, and played a role in establishing a British empire in the Mediterranean with the taking of Malta in 1800, the Ionian Isles in 1809, and the occupation of Corfu from 1815 to 1864.⁹ It is also important to have an overall vision, and consideration of the paths taken by exiles encourages us to take the broad picture into account: Garibaldi, for instance, was a revolutionary circulating between the two worlds of Europe and...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1  Times of exile
• Chapter 2  Taking in and casting out
• Chapter 3  Travel and transit
• Chapter 4  Living far away
• Chapter 5  Politics in exile
• Chapter 6  Gender and exile
• Chapter 7  European homelands, global vistas
• Chapter 8  Returns and memories
• Conclusion
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Index