Émigrés, Refugees and Emigrants

Abstract

This chapter offers a concise overview of the drastic transformations undergone by the French emigrant as a legendary and historical figure up to the twenty-first century. It aims to review two hundred years of revolutionary, anti-revolutionary and counter-revolutionary popular and scholarly approaches on a controversial population displacement. Avoiding partisan or national perspectives on the subject, the historian of French emigration must embrace new research angles made available by historiographical and epistemological advances in the study of transnationalism, connected histories and cultural transfers. This chapter highlights the existence of alternative French and British sources in writing about the history of the intricate relationships between the host society and the French exiled population.