French revolutionary émigrés

French revolutionary emigration was a long-running phenomenon from 1789 to 1815. Political emigration began immediately after the fall of the Bastille, when fear of the events of July 1789 prompted nobles to leave France voluntarily; the comte d'Artois, the king's brother, and the duc de Condé were among the first émigrés. Louis XVI's aunts Madame Adélaïde and Madame Victoire, who left for Rome on 19 February 1791, were prominent émigrés, and their departure raised fears that the royal family would soon follow, provoking debate in the National Assembly.

Emigration was concentrated largely in 1791-1794 and in 1792, when war broke out and the Revolution radicalised. It was counter-revolutionary at first, but as the Revolution radicalised it drew in figures who had supported the changes of 1789, such as Lafayette, declared a traitor to the fatherland in August 1792; after 10 August 1792, the September massacres and the early Terror, opponents of the Republic from every social stratum emigrated. Nobles and clergy predominated at 44 per cent, but officers made up 4 per cent, the bourgeoisie 17 per cent, peasants 20 per cent and workers, artisans and shopkeepers 15 per cent, while those displaced by the war were lower-status people with little or no property. Non-juring clergy who refused the oath to the Civil Constitution also emigrated or were deported to French Guiana under property confiscation and the decrees of August 1792. Destinations included Britain, mainly London and Soho, British North America, such as Montreal and Quebec City, and the United States; arrivals in Britain peaked in the autumn of 1792, with about 4,000 refugees in September alone, and the Aliens Act of 1793 restricted and reduced immigration. Émigrés had to make a living abroad, and poor émigré communities in Britain and elsewhere consisted of widows, wounded soldiers, the elderly, clergy, provincial nobles and servants.

Outside the borders émigrés formed counter-revolutionary units that supported the coalition war against France from 20 April 1792. They were organised into a variety of heterogeneous formations, and the émigré force under the duc de Condé fought alongside Austria in the War of the First Coalition in 1792-1797, initially joining the Duke of Brunswick's invasion of France, and received support from Spain, Portugal, Naples, Britain and Russia until it was disbanded in 1801. French governments responded with increasingly severe measures: in November 1791 a law required all noble émigrés to return by 1 January 1792, on pain of confiscation and sale of their lands, with later attempts to enter punishable by death. In 1802 First Consul Napoleon proclaimed a general amnesty for all remaining émigrés, excluding about 1,000 who had served as officers in émigré units or in European armies fighting the French Republic.

Diplomatically too, the émigré nobility is linked to the direct causes of the French Revolutionary Wars. Gustav III of Sweden appealed to the powers to form a counter-revolutionary crusade in concert with émigré nobles after the flight to Varennes in June 1791, and Leopold II, urged on by the émigré comte d'Artois, issued the Declaration of Pillnitz with Prussia on 27 August 1791 near Dresden, declaring joint support for Louis XVI. The French National Assembly read this as a threat, and it led to the declaration of war on Austria on 20 April 1792. On 25 July 1792 the Duke of Brunswick issued to the people of Paris a manifesto largely drafted by the duc de Condé, threatening to execute opponents of the restoration of the monarchy; the king and queen approved a copy two days before it was published. The manifesto was intended to intimidate Paris into submission but instead radicalised the Revolution, leading to the storming of the Tuileries on 10 August and the suspension of the monarchy, a widely held view, though recent scholarship sees its impact as more limited.