From the Rhine to the Atlantic

Abstract

From the winter of 1762 to the autumn of 1765, nearly 17,000 men, women, and children traveled successively across the provinces of Alsace, Lorraine, Burgundy, Champagne, Orleans, Berry, and Poitou. Successive waves of emigrants rolled westwards. They cut through forests, breathing in the smell first of pine, then of oak. They trudged through the mud and on the hard, winter soil. They left behind the high, timbered houses and pointed roofs of Sélestat for the stretched- out, low-lying farms of Saintonge. They left a resolutely Medieval Germany, cut straight through Renaissance France, and arrived in the arsenals of the Enlightenment.

A stranger arrives in the capital and in less than twenty-four hours, at rue Neuve-St-Augustin, we can tell you who he is, his name, where he comes from, why he came, where he is staying, with whom he corresponds, and with whom he lives ... Diderot, Letter to Catherine the Great¹