Introduction

What was meant by "exile" in late-18th-century Europe? A dive into the dictionaries of the time allows us to answer – even if only partially – this terminological question that reveals the conceptual borders of the period's contemporaries. In 1798, the fifth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française implicitly defined the word "exil" as a punishment of political nature, in opposition to "bannissement", which was the result of court sentencing.¹ On the other side of the Channel, "exile" was a synonym of "banishment,"² designating both the obligation to leave one's country and the state in which those who have been obliged to seek refuge abroad find themselves.³ We could continue such a survey into other dictionaries and other languages; it would reveal the salience of the Latin word exilium and of the representations that have been associated with it since Antiquity. Exile is a forced removal that originates from a form of contrarian engagement in public life.

If the phenomenon of exile was not new at the time of the 1770–1800 revolutions, it remains nonetheless that, at the dawn of the contemporary period, the term was acquiring new meanings and, above all, that exiles were then not the only figures of uprooting, far from it. Beside "exiles", we also talk about "emigrants", "outcasts" (or "banished" – "proscrits" in French) and "deported". Can we consider these categories of individuals on a par with each other, all of them having to, in one way or another, leave their country in order to remain faithful to their ideas? How did the figure of the exile gradually become distinct from the other victims and actors of forced migration? This article endeavours to consider the way in which exile has been redefined in the 19th century, no longer as a geographical removal, some distance away from central power, the court and the capital, but as a form of international migration. Exile, by obliging its victims to cross the borders of their states, was thus a forced expatriation, often experienced as a rupture within a political, familial, and personal journey. If it was imposed, exile could also, at the same time, constitute an opportunity for outcasts in several respects. By living abroad, they were likely to pursue and even diversify their modes of engagement, they could also make their causes known to different audiences, by transcending the borders of nation-states, which were becoming more and more impervious. 

Exile at the time of the "Atlantic Revolutions" and the Napoleonic Wars

If, undoubtedly, exile was not unheard of at the end of the 18th century, the revolutionary caesura, and later the Napoleonic Wars, deeply transformed it. This type of political punishment became an essential tool in the repertoire of the repressive laws of Europe and the world. With the advent of the "Atlantic Revolutions" of the years 1770–1800, the new political era entrenched within the Western landscape the phenomenon of the forced emigration of free people.⁴

The modern period had admittedly witnessed important exile movements: exile could then be solely internal – affecting for instance disgraced individuals brutally removed from royal courts, centres of power – or imply the crossing of borders. Religious motives were then a decisive reason for the international mobility of exiles: take for instance the Huguenots' emigration from France before and after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV (1638–1715) in 1685.⁵

Nevertheless, the insurrections and revolutions of the 1770s–1800s changed the situation: where, before, religious motives were still the pre-eminent catalyst for the mobility of exiles, political causes started to dominate during this decade. The American Revolution and the War of Independence gave rise to mobilities of volunteers, but also of exiles defeated after 1783 – 60,000, or so, "loyalists" who left the young United States of America to take refuge in Great Britain and other colonies of the British Empire.⁶ Meanwhile, the European continent was coming to the boil. The canton of Fribourg thus witnessed the birth of a revolution, repressed by Bern, that led to the departure into exile of the insurgents, before it was the turn of the Republic of Geneva to enter a similarly tumultuous phase. The Genevans represented, after American loyalists, the first "exiles produced by the revolutionary upheaval of the end of the 18th century",⁷ as well as full-fledged revolutionary go-betweens.⁸

The French Revolution further amplified this phenomenon of spatial circulation brought about by political repression, whether it was revolutionary or counter-revolutionary in its origin. The most important collective movement of the revolutionary decade (1789–1799) was no doubt the one formed by "l'Émigration" – emigration with a capital "E" to identify and single out the particular exile of counter-revolutionaries and those in their wake.⁹ In summer 1789, the first departures of French Émigrés were already taking place, continuing up until the beginning of the 19th century and affecting some 150,000 people, scattered around various countries in Europe and even America and the Caribbean. Emigration constituted one of the most spectacular consequences of the French Revolution.¹⁰ To start with, it affected princes and aristocrats, even if they were undeniably not the only actors of this multifarious and gradual movement.

The entry of the European continent into the war, in spring 1792, modified the equilibrium of the ebb and flow of Émigrés and outcasts who were increasingly restrained by the obligation to present their passports at borders,¹¹ and by the passing of laws that were aimed at controlling the arriving exiles. Such was the case in Great Britain with the Aliens Act adopted in 1793, at a time when the country was estimated to be harbouring some 12,000 French emigrants.¹² Thereupon, revolutionary France was not only a land of departure, it was also a land of asylum, where, during the Directory, were circulating: the Dutch "patriots" who had arrived since 1787 onwards;¹³ the Spaniards of the 1793–1795 war; and republicans from Mainz and Naples.¹⁴ Nonetheless, from summer 1793 onwards, foreigners in exile became more and more associated with the hate figures of the traitor or the spy. Like the French, they fell victim to repression, as exemplified by the execution of Anacharsis Cloots (1755–1794)[], the self-proclaimed "ambassador of human kind" during the Fête de la Fédération of 14 July 1790, guillotined in public some four years later.

"Exile" and "emigration" thus constituted two distinct yet indissociable realities, both products of the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary context that had prevailed in Europe since the mid-1770s. At the same time, "exile" was distinct from another form of forced mobility: "deportation", a sentence given to common law convicts and political opponents. In Great Britain, "transportation", employed essentially against common law convicts, was also used as a political weapon.¹⁵ And thus, in this way, Irish opponents were deported, following the 1798 United Irish Rebellion that ended in ferocious repression – martial law in Ireland gave officers the right to decide on the life and death of insurgents. Those who were left alive could be subjected to a sentence of "transportation". Hence 3,450 Irish political prisoners were deported to New South Wales in Australia between 1798 and 1802.

On the Continent, in France as in its neighbouring countries, the Napoleonic period intensified the forced mobilities of populations, not of outcasts primarily, but rather of Napoleonic armies' draftees, deserters, objectors who had to flee conscription, and prisoners of war.¹⁶ In certain cases, the retreat of French troops was marked by mass political exile, as in Spain, where the departure of King Joseph Bonaparte (1768–1844) led to the fleeing of no less than 12,000 Spaniards, compromised by association with the French regime and therefore compelled to seek refuge on the other side of the Pyrenees.

Banishment in Congress of Vienna Europe: "the century of the exiles"

In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, following the Congress of Vienna's Final Act, in 1815, the number of opponents banished from their country for political reasons grew and became more frequently qualified in French as "exilés" ("exile") or "proscrits" ("outcasts" or "banished"). As Victor Hugo (1802–1885)[] later wrote in Toilers of the Sea, the vocabulary itself contributed in distinguishing the displacements of patriots and liberals – "proscriptions" ("banishments") – from those of counter-revolutionaries during the French Revolution – "émigrations" ("emigrations").¹⁷ At the beginning of the 1820s, in the Europe of monarchical Restorations, and with Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) reaching the end of his life in exile on the island of Saint Helena, the revolutions that had taken place in meridional Europe cast out Greek, Italian and Spanish exiles onto the roads.¹⁸ In the following decade, the revolutions suppressed in Warsaw and central Italy, in 1831, amplified those movements. It was in the context of Polish patriots fleeing Russian repression arriving in France in their thousands – 7,000 of them were to be aided by the government in 1832 – that the July Monarchy passed a first law on "foreign refugees". This text, dated April 1832, still ambiguous in its definition of the term, was supplemented by an extensive set of ministerial regulations that outlined in more detail this particularly controlled group.¹⁹ "Refugee" became prominent in Western Europe as a new administrative category, which did not hinder those who had been forced to leave from claiming other designations: that of "exilé" in French, "exile" in English or "esule" in Italian.²⁰

Whereas the revolutions of the 1830s had merely shaken the European political order while provoking substantial population displacements, notably after the Congress Kingdom of Poland,²¹ the 1848–1849 revolutions created a much more profound commotion throughout the continent.  The near simultaneous outbreaks of revolutions between January and March 1848, in Naples, Paris, Berlin, Milan, Vienna and Budapest, using the same repertoires of actions, sparked new exile movements throughout the continent and beyond.

At the same time as the number of people affected by forced displacement was swelling, the locations of their departure and reception were diversifying. 1849, a year that witnessed the triumph of repression, was crucial from this point of view: some 11,000 German republicans sought refuge in Switzerland, where they received financial aid before being impelled to find asylum across the Atlantic, in the United States. In the east of Europe, more than 5,000 Hungarian army soldiers defeated in Világos, to whom could be added numerous Italians and Poles who had fought alongside them, had temporarily settled in the Ottoman Empire,²² reinforcing in this way its already strong position as a territory of asylum. In contrast, the asylum function of other countries was withering away. Such was the case of France, a land of asylum that slowly became a land of exile, due to a conservative turn in 1849 and, most of all, to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's (1808–1873) coup against the Republic in December 1851.²³ During all these years, some 10,000 French outcasts were forced into exile, essentially towards Belgium, Switzerland, the Channel Islands, and the United Kingdom.

The 1850s–1860s: mass flows to Eastern Europe

In the aftermath of the 1848–1849 revolutions, the insurrectional after-shocks of the 1850s continued to fuel forced displacements, whether they were exiles, expulsions, or deportations. Nevertheless, outcasts who were fighting to build their homeland, while defending liberal or democratic ideas, no longer formed the majority of exiles. New motives of expatriation appeared in the mid-1850s: no longer linked to revolutions, but instead to the conflicts that were splitting powers apart, and to their ethnic and religious background. Thus, the Crimean War (1853–1856), which took place for the most part on the peninsula of the same name, annexed by the Russians in 1783, brought about important migratory flows, such as the mass exile of Crimean Tartars, a native Muslim population, considered hostile by the Russians and forced to take refuge in vast numbers, from 1854 onwards, in the zone occupied by the Anglo-French allied troops. In total, between 20,000 and 25,000 Tatars took part in these movements, lasting until 1857, a year after the end of the Crimean War, enacted by the Treaty of Paris. 

Russian repression was also the origin of new departures, in the subsequent decade, that can be defined as exile. In Warsaw, an insurrection broke out in January 1863, involving substantially more members of the working classes than during the previous uprising of November 1830, which had left its mark on the city at the time of Congress Poland. The Warsaw insurgents, defeated in 1864, left for the West, like Jaroslaw Dombrowski (1836–1871)[], a Polish outcast who, later on, would play a decisive military role in the Paris Commune, in spring 1871. The borders of Western Europe's traditional lands of refuge turned out to be much more closed to Poles than they had been ten years earlier, at the arrival of the "Great Emigration"²⁴ – arguably a consequence of the lower social status of the new Polish exiles, who were met with more suspiciousness.

From honourable exiles to potential criminals

The last third of the 19th century marked a turning point in the way in which people – constrained to leave their countries because of their ideas – were considered and treated across the European continent.²⁵ From this point of view, the repression of the Communards in Paris, following the Bloody Week of 21–28 May 1871, constituted a pivotal moment. 41,000 people were arrested in Paris,²⁶ including 1,554 who were born abroad.²⁷ Some of these men and women were sentenced, but many were condemned in absentia, as the convicts were in hiding or had fled abroad: such was the case of Jules Vallès (1832–1885), who first hid in Montparnasse, then reached Belgium in August 1871, before settling in London to escape a death sentence pronounced in absentia in July 1872. The several thousand men and women who had left the repression of the Paris Commune in the spring of 1871, were particularly badly received in countries of asylum that merely tolerated them – Great Britain and Switzerland most notably – and were sometimes denounced as potential terrorists. This trend became more entrenched at the end of the century, with the intensification of transnational anarchist circulations: political exiles were less and less welcomed and found themselves more frequently assimilated to the figure of the criminal than to that of the hero.

In the United Kingdom, the anarchist presence led to heightened questionings regarding the reception of foreign potential "terrorists". The Conservatives considered that the system protecting political exile was too generous but, in fact, police archives show the existence of an "efficient and discreet surveillance system, poles apart from the 'liberal myth' disseminated by the British authorities of the time".²⁸ Between 1880 and 1914, thanks to surveillance reports, we can estimate that around 450 French-speaking anarchists were living in exile in London, where they had settled in Soho and Fitzrovia. It was in this context, marked also by the presence, in much larger number, of Jewish emigrants originating from the tsarist Empire and fleeing the antisemitic persecution of the pogroms, that the British Parliament resorted to put forward, as early as 1894, some legal restrictions that would have limited the influx of foreigners. The project only came to fruition with the 1905 Aliens Act. The text aimed at establishing a clearer differentiation between economic migrants and persecuted refugees: the law laid out that foreigners should be a priori considered undesirable unless they were seeking to "flee criminal proceedings or punishments on the basis of religion or politics".

At the beginning of the 20th century, the protection of refugees was thus hotly debated in Europe. Not only had Jewish migrations from Central and Eastern Europe contributed to the blurring of the "refugee" and "emigrant" identity, but the circulation of anarchists also tended to call into question the protection offered to exiles of left and far-left leaning in Europe's traditional lands of asylum (Great Britain, France, Belgium and Switzerland).

Towards an international treatment of refugees

With the two Balkan Wars (1912–1913), and later the two World Wars, the 20th century thrust the Continent into an era in which armed conflicts became the main cause of forced departure to a foreign country, to a greater extent than with the suppression of insurrections and revolutions. Exile was no longer the lot only of political opponents per se, but of entire groups of civilians targeted by the progressing of battles or by mass political deportation. The Balkan Wars inaugurated a time when mass forced migration – suffered by civilians compelled to flee under threat from persecution, confiscation or rape – was not per se a form of political exile. Similarly, at the onset of the Great War, the exodus of Belgian civilians, provoked by the German invasion of a yet neutral "Poor Little Belgium", set in motion around 1.5 million people – roughly twenty percent of the country's population – dispersed for the most part between France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.²⁹ But the fact that Belgium symbolically relocated its government in exile to France, in Sainte-Adresse (near the Port of Le Havre), was not trivial, politically speaking, and its defence of Belgian refugees in France and in Europe fully participated in the so called "anti-Kraut crusade", "la croisade anti-boche".³⁰

The Armistice of 11 November 1918 did not entirely put an end to conflicts in Europe and to forced migrations that, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, affected, for the most, people persecuted for their ideas and, more and more commonly, deprived of their nationality of origin. In Bolshevik Russia, where civil war was raging, hundreds of thousands of exiles were pushed outside of the borders of the former tsarist Empire, well into the early 1920s.³¹ Often transiting first via Constantinople and then through the Balkan States, many of them were to continue their journey towards Germany – notably Berlin where the main part of the intellectual bourgeoisie settled – and towards Paris. While white Russians, stemming from the elites of the former Empire, were warmly welcomed in Western Europe, working class civilians, who were fleeing war and/or the pogroms' antisemitic persecution, were commonly designated as "bad" or "false" refugees.³² 

These distinctions carried out among exiles, directly mirroring their social status, were not entirely new. By contrast, the phenomenon of statelessness, to which many Russian exiles had fallen victim, was more unusual. A first Soviet decree on the forfeiting of citizenship rights for Russians abroad was enacted in December 1921, more than a year after the retreat of the white armies from southern Russia. In fact, it was in response to the growing number of stateless people from the former Russian Empire that the League of Nations (LN), a new international organisation with a global scope, fixed in Geneva in 1919, took hold of the issue by creating the High Commission for Refugees. Presided over by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930)[], this authority, the fruit of a collaboration between the LN, states and private organisations, contributed to the creation of the "Nansen passport", a certificate of identity and travel, first valid for Russian refugees, but progressively extended to other nationals. This document was of capital importance in the history of international protection: thanks to it, refugees would receive a form of identification allowing them to escape – admittedly partially – the consequences of statelessness.

Beside the exiles from the former Russian Empire, the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, persecuted and forced to flee abroad, found themselves in the same situation of statelessness and were able to benefit from the Nansen certificate from 1924. Many of them settled in the south-east of France, in particular Marseilles, where the overcrowding of refugees at Camp Oddo was not met without hostilities from the Marseilles population; the journalist Albert Londres (1884–1932) describing it, in his startling report, as this "corner of the kingdom of driftwood".³³

If the reception of exiles in Western Europe in the 1920s was not without difficulties or tensions, the ways in which refugees were categorised in the inter-war period constituted a real "historical hiatus". A legal definition of "refugee", based on the criteria of nationality, was then elaborated with the help of the League of Nations and its High Commission for Refugees. It was the status of belonging to a given group that determined whether exiles could or could not be granted the Nansen certificate. The attribution of the certificate was entrusted, in the countries of refuge, to powerful bureaus managed by refugees themselves, like the Zemgor, representing Russians abroad, founded in 1921 and established in 17 countries. However, not all political exiles could benefit from this preliminary form of international protection: Russian and Armenians refugees of the 1920s were treated more advantageously than other national groups in exile – antifascist Italians fleeing Benito Mussolini's (1883–1945) regime and the Spaniards who had escaped Primo de Rivera's (1870–1930) dictatorship, for instance, did not benefit from it.

Exile, deportation and forced displacement

The 1930s have been described as new times of crisis during this "century of refugees" that was the 20th century.³⁴ In 1933, Nazism's access to power provoked, until the outbreak of the Second World War, the departure of 500,000 Germans who were forced into exile for political motives and/or to escape the racist laws aimed at eliminating the "non-Aryans" from public and economic life.³⁵ At the inception of Nazi repression, France became the first country for the reception of German fugitives in Europe – already about 25,000 of them arrived in 1933. The choice of France could be explained by its geographic proximity, the openness of the country at the time and the relations formed between friends and parents who had established themselves there, in particular in Paris and in Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by Germany between 1871 and 1918.³⁶ Moreover, the reaction of the French government to those refugees was, at first, welcoming. However, French rules regarding refugees hardened considerably in the second half of the 1930s. On 6 February 1935, a law reinforcing the regulations on the residence of foreigners was passed, its restrictive dispositions also affecting refugees. If their situation in France improved, later on, under the Front Populaire government, it became much more precarious with the passing of the 1938 Daladier decree-law (2 May and 12 November). These texts considered foreign refugees as "undesirables" who, by nature, were likely to cause a breach of the peace and of national security, thus destined them to suffer administrative internment in "concentration camps".

From then on, such tightening of the conditions under which asylum was granted to refugees could be observed throughout a Western Europe stricken by economic crisis. For instance, as early as 1933, Switzerland had, via a 31 March circular, required German refugees to declare their arrival at the border and request residence permits of extremely short length. Similarly, though slightly out-of-phase chronologically with Switzerland, it was the year 1936 that marked a significant hardening in the treatment of Jewish refugees of German origin in Great Britain, as the country was putting an end to their resettlement in Palestine, a territory under British mandate since 1920.

During that same year, as the policies in place in European states were becoming increasingly frosty in terms of their reception of German refugees, the League of Nations decided to tackle this question once again and in July 1936 signed an international arrangement allowing them to receive the Nansen certificate.³⁷ But the attribution of this asylum status came with a restrictive definition of "refugees" that excluded all Germans who had fled for personal convenience. Yet, the line between personal reasons and political motives per se was very difficult to trace in the context of Nazi Germany.

The so-called "Kristallnacht" (9–10 November 1938) intensified even more the process of departure and pushed into exile numerous German and Austrian Jews, but the difficulties they encountered on their way to a place of haven in Europe was not easing. At the beginning of 1939, the Reich's refugee crisis was showing no signs of abating.³⁸ Quite on the contrary, in March, the Nazis invaded what was left of Czechoslovakia, sparking the departure of new exiles towards the west: "in Prague, after 15 March 1939, many anti-Nazis and Jews who had not been able to leave until then, found themselves in a fish-trap and, from then on, had to live in hiding, while still attempting to leave the country".³⁹

While in 1939, the situation of Jewish and anti-Nazis was far from settled, the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) opened, in Europe, "an entirely new front in the refugee crisis"⁴⁰ that was once again fuelled by the departures of hundreds of thousands of individuals – men, women and children – who had to seek refuge to save their lives. The conflict that had begun in July 1936 was won by Spanish nationalists, with the decisive help of Nazi and fascist regimes who supplied men – around 50,000 Italians and 15,500 Germans – and military equipment. The defeat of Spanish republicans against the troops of Francisco Franco (1892–1975) contributed, in turn, in the "making" of refugees, started since after the First World War. This new mass exile, which culminated with the Retirada (retreat) in January–February 1939, involved no less than 500,000 Spanish republicans forced to leave their country, now in the hands of insurgent military officers.⁴¹ The crossing of the border took place in dramatic circumstances: the populations were weakened by three years of fighting and privations, the Pyrenees passes were covered in snow and Francoist aviation was bombarding refugees on the roads of Catalonia. Civilians and soldiers had often left in a hurry, with few possessions, and were reaching France in utter destitution, often with only a blanket thrown over their shoulders against the cold of winter. The type of asylum reserved for Spanish republicans in the French Republic has been described as "recalcitrant",⁴² so harsh were the conditions of internment – in "concentration camps" for men old enough to fight, in "hosting centres" for the elderly, women and children. From a symbolic point of view, Spanish refugees embodied the figure of the refugee par excellence, as can be seen in the numerous photographs taken as they crossed the border; the iconic images of Robert Capa (1913–1954) and David Seymour (1911–1956), for instance, come to mind.

Conclusion

The Second World War set in motion millions of people: displaced or deported civilians, forced labourers, expellees and refugees probably constituted a total of around ten per cent of the European population.⁴³ In 1945, the migratory crisis provoked by World War II was not brought to an end by the Armistice; far from it. In Western Europe, forced migration then represented a mass experience, to which millions of "displaced persons" (DPs) were subjected. This category, forged by the Allies, allowed them to designate individuals finding themselves in situations of uprooting after the war: concentration camp survivors in transit, former forced labourers, freed prisoners of war, but also expellees from eastern territories. Among those so-called "displaced" people, were also entire groups who, for political reasons, were refusing to go back to their home countries, as was the case of countless Russians who objected to returning to the USSR. More and more, they began to argue that they had to live in exile in Western Europe, because returning home would mean arrest or deportation to the Gulag.

While immediately after the war, the category of "displaced persons" (DPs) became prevalent, it was in the context of the Cold War that new international laws on refugees were elaborated. The creation by the United Nations of the "High Commission for Refugees" in 1950, and the signing of the Geneva Convention the following year, once again contributed to placing in the centre stage the refugee in a situation of exile. The 1951 Convention was the first to put forward a legal and internationally recognised definition of the status, based on the central criterion of persecution. Contrary to the attribution system of the Nansen certificate, progressively elaborated in the 1920s and for which the criterion of belonging to a national community in a situation of statelessness was decisive in the granting of the asylum status, the touchstone of the new international status became individual persecution. In practice, the granting of the status of refugee was generous in Western Europe during the Cold War,⁴⁴ and did not always follow the Geneva Convention to the letter.

Delphine Diaz