the french Émigrés in europe and the struggle against...

The French Émigrés inEurope and the Struggle

against Revolution,1789–1814

Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel

Edited by

THE FRENCH ÉMIGRÉS IN EUROPE AND THESTRUGGLE AGAINST REVOLUTION, 1789–1814

carpenter/88445/crc 8/6/99 3:17 pm Page 1

Also by Kirsty Carpenter

REFUGEES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: Émigrés in London1789–1802

Also by Philip Mansel

LOUIS XVIII

PILLARS OF MONARCHY: Royal Guards in History, 1400–1984

SULTANS IN SPLENDOUR: The Last Years of the Ottoman World

THE COURT OF FRANCE, 1789–1830

LE CHARMEUR DE L’EUROPE: Charles-Joseph de Ligne

CONSTANTINOPLE: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924

from the same publishers

*

*


Kirsty CarpenterSchool of History, Philosophy and PoliticsCollege of Humanities and Social SciencesMassey UniversityPalmerston NorthNew Zealand

The French Émigrés inEurope and the Struggleagainst Revolution,1789–1814

Edited by

Philip ManselThe Society for Court StudiesLondon

and


First published in Great Britain 1999 byMACMILLAN PRESS LTDHoundmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and LondonCompanies and representatives throughout the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 0–333–74436–5

First published in the United States of America 1999 byST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC.,Scholarly and Reference Division,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

ISBN 0–312–22381–1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataThe French émigrés in Europe and the struggle against revolution,1789–1814 / edited by Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0–312–22381–1 (cloth)1. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Refugees.2. Political refugees—Europe—Conduct of life. I. Carpenter,Kirsty, 1962– . II. Mansel, Philip.DC158.F74 1999944.04'086'91—dc21 99–20923

CIP

Selection and editorial matter © Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel 1999Chapter 1 © Philip Mansel 1999Chapter 3 © Kirsty Carpenter 1999Chapter 7 © Lord Mackenzie-Stuart 1999Chapters 2, 4–6, 8–14 © Macmillan Press Ltd 1999

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v

Contents

List of Plates viiAcknowledgements ixNotes on the Contributors xIntroduction by William Doyle xv

1 From Coblenz to Hartwell: the ÉmigréGovernment and the European Powers, 1791–1814Philip Mansel 1

2 A European Destiny: the Armée de Condé, 1792–1801 Frédéric d’Agay 28

3 London: Capital of the Emigration Kirsty Carpenter 43

4 French Émigrés in Hungary Ferenc Tóth 68

5 Portugal and the Émigrés David Higgs 83

6 French Émigrés in Prussia Thomas Höpel 101

7 French Émigrés in Edinburgh Lord Mackenzie-Stuart 108

8 Le milliard des émigrés: the Impact of the Indemnity Bill of 1825 on French Society Almut Franke 124

9 French Émigrés in the United States Thomas C. Sosnowski 138

10 The Émigré Novel Malcolm Cook 151

11 Danloux in England (1792–1802): an Émigré Artist Angelica Goodden 165

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12 The Image of the Republic in the Press of the London Émigrés, 1792–1802 Simon Burrows 184

13 Burke, Boisgelin and the Politics of the Émigré Bishops Nigel Aston 197

14 ‘Fearless resting place’: the Exiled French Clergy in Great Britain, 1789–1815 Dominic Aidan Bellenger 214

Index 230

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List of Plates

1 Henri-Pierre Danloux, Monsieur, Comte d’Artois. (Privatecollection) Painted at Holyroodhouse in 1796, this portrait wasengraved for distribution as propaganda. Monsieur wasleader of the extremist wing of the émigrés until his returnto France in 1814. His residence in Edinburgh wasdescribed as ‘the honour of the nobility’.

2 Henri-Pierre Danloux, Mgr de la Marche, Bishop of Saint Polde Léon, 1797. (Private collection) The Bishop was the leading figure in French émigré char-ities, as the letters and lists of subscribers scattered on andaround his desk suggest. Danloux was a royalist who emi-grated in 1792 to London, where he lived until his returnto Paris in 1802. His diary is a valuable account of émigrélife in London.

3 Henri-Pierre Danloux, Lady Jane Dalrymple Hamilton as Bri-tannia. (Private collection) As this picture suggests, French émigré artists were notashamed to commemorate victories over the French re-public. At the sitter’s feet a British lion is pawing the flag ofthe French ally, the Batavian republic, in celebration ofthe British victory, under the command of the sitter’sfather, Admiral Duncan, over the Dutch fleet at Camper-down in 1797.

4 Mme. Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of Count Stroganov as a child.(Collection Tatiana Zoubov) Mme. Vigée Le Brun, a favourite artist of Marie Antoinette,emigrated in 1791 and earned large sums painting por-traits of members of royal and noble families in Vienna,Naples, Saint Petersburg and London until her eventualreturn to France in 1804.

5 Sophie de Tott, Louis Joseph de Bourbon, Prince de Condé.(Private collection) Although this print shows Condé as an émigré leaderfighting on the continent, it was engraved (by F. BartolozziRA) and published by the artist herself in London in October1802, a year after the final disbandment of the armée de

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Condé, and Condé’s arrival in England. The inscriptionbelow the portrait gives all the prince’s Ancien Régime titles:‘Prince de Condé, Prince du Sang, Pair et Grand Maîtrede France, Colonel Général de l’infanterie Française etétrangère, Gouverneur et Lieutenant-Général pour le Roidans la province de Bourgogne, etc. etc. etc.’

6 François Huet Villiers, Louis Antoine Henry de Bourbon, Ducd’Enghien, 1804. (Private collection) As the funeral urn above the prince’s head indicates, thisprint was published in London in 1804 to mourn the Ducd’Enghien’s kidnapping and execution on the orders ofNapoleon I. Enghien was Condé’s grandson and hadfought in the armée de Condé.

7 François Huet Villiers, Louis XVIII, 1810. (Private collec-tion) Huet Villiers, who lived in London from the beginning ofthe revolution until his death there in 1813, painted thisportrait of Louis XVIII, at Hartwell in 1810. This engraving,published by Colnaghi of Bond Street, was distributedfrom 1812 for purposes of propaganda.

8 Mlle de Noireterre, The Comte de Langeron, 1814. (Privatecollection) Born in Paris in 1763, a colonel in the French army by1788, Langeron had joined the Russian service in 1790,fought in the armée des Princes in 1792 and subsequentlyserved in the Austrian army before rejoining the Russianservice. He rose to be a Count and a general and foughtagainst the French Empire at Austerlitz and in the cam-paigns of 1812–14. For his successful command of theallied assault on Montmartre on 30 March 1814, he wasmade a Knight of the Order of Saint Andrew. Instead ofstaying in France, he remained in Russian service as MilitaryGovernor of south Russia and the commander and chiefof the Don Cossacks.

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to acknowledge the very generous sup-port they have received from the Institut Français in London,which provided a venue for the 1997 conference ‘Les ÉmigrésFrançais en Europe 1789–1814’, where all the contributions inthis volume originated. A second conference on 2–4 July 1999will also take place there continuing the work begun in 1997towards a wider picture of Emigration in Europe during theFrench Revolution. A further conference is planned, for Parisin the year 2002, to mark the anniversary of the return of thevast majority of émigrés from exile. Kirsty Carpenter andPhilip Mansel would particularly like to thank all the particip-ants at the first conference for their interest and enthusiasm,which made the event a memorable experience for all involved.A special thanks also goes to Kimberly Chrisman for her behind-the-scenes work. Finally, we would like to thank Tim Farmiloeand Macmillan Press for their support and recognition of theimportance of the Emigration in its European context.

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Notes on the Contributors

Frédéric d’Agay is an independent historian. Born in 1956,he is the author of Les grands notables du Premier Empire, Var(1987) and Cháteaux et Bastides de Provence (1991), and a special-ist on the history of the French nobility in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries. He has published editions of the Lettresd’Italie of the Président de Brosses (1986) and the Mémoires ofthe Baron de Frenilly. He collaborated in the DictionnaireNapoléon (1988) and the Dictionnaire du Grand Siècle (1990). Hereceived his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1996 for histhesis ‘Les officiers de marine provençaux au XVIIIièmesiècle’.

Nigel Aston is Senior Lecturer in History at the University ofLuton. His first book, French Revolution and Religion in France,1780–1804 will appear in 1999. He is the editor of ReligiousChange in Europe, 1650–1914 (1997) and he works on Church–state relations at the end of the Ancien Régime.

Simon Burrows is Lecturer in History at Waikato Universityin Hamilton, New Zealand. He has published several articleson the press of the London émigrés and his first book, Princes,Press and Propaganda: French Exile Journalism and European Polit-ics, 1792–1814, is due to appear in 1999. He is currently work-ing on the Ancien Régime journalist, Charles Theveneau deMorande.

Dominic Aidan Bellenger is a member of the community atDownside Abbey in Bath. He has published widely on the sub-ject of the French émigré priests and their leaders La Marcheand Carron who came to Britain during the Revolution. He isthe author of The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after 1789(1986). He is an Associate Lecturer of the Open University andregularly teaches at Bath Spa University College and at theUniversity of Bristol.

Kirsty Carpenter is Lecturer in European History in theSchool of History, Philosophy and Politics at Massey University,

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New Zealand. Her first book was Refugees of the French Revolution:Emigrés in London, 1792–1802 (1999). Her specialist interestsfocus on the political literature of the French Revolution. Sheis currently working on Marie-Joseph Chénier, a member ofthe Convention and the Revolution’s official poet.

Malcolm Cook is Professor of Eighteenth-Century FrenchStudies in the School of Modern Languages at the Universityof Exeter. His most recent book is Fictional France: Social Realityin the French Novel, 1775–1800 (1993) and he is co-editor ofModern France: Society in Transition (1998). He is currently work-ing on a critical edition of the correspondence of Bernardin deSaint-Pierre. He is the General Editor of the Modern Lan-guages Review and serves on the editorial teams of many otherscholarly reviews.

William Doyle has been Professor of History at the Universityof Bristol since 1986. A Fellow of the British Academy, he hasalso taught at the Universities of York and Nottingham. He isthe author of The Oxford History of the French Revolution (1989).Among his other publications are Origins of the French Revolution(1980, 3rd edition, 1999), and most recently, Venality: the Saleof Offices in Eighteenth-Century France (1996). He is currentlyworking on a volume on France 1763–1848 in the Oxford His-tory of Modern Europe series.

Almut Franke is Assistant Lecturer at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Her Doctorate on the subject of ‘LeMillard des Emigrés’ entitled Die Entschädigung der Emigrationim Frankreich der Restauration (1814–1830) will be published in1999. She has written on the subject of the 1825 indemnity lawin the area of Bordeaux and has contributed to two major pub-lications on relations between France and Germany during theRevolution.

Angelica Goodden is a Fellow and Tutor in French at St Hilda’sCollege Oxford. Her most recent book is a biographical studyof Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun, The Sweetness of Life. Other publi-cations include Action and Persuasion: Dramatic Performance inEighteenth-Century France and The Complete Lover: Eros, Natureand Artifice in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel.

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Thomas Höpel is Lecturer in the Centre of French Studies atLeipzig University. He works on Franco-German relations inthe eighteenth century and has published on refugees andexiles during different waves of emigration between the twocountries in the modern period. He was the co-organiser of aconference, ‘Emigrés and Refugies. Migration zwischen Frank-reich und Deutschland in der frühen Neuzeit’, which tookplace on 13–15 June 1997.

David Higgs is Professor of History and Fellow of UniversityCollege at the University of Toronto. His books includeUltraroyalism in Toulouse from its Origins to the Revolution of 1830(1973), A Future to Inherit: the Portuguese Communities of Canada(1976), an edited book, Church and Society in Catholic Europe ofthe Eighteenth Century (1979) and Nobles in Nineteenth-CenturyFrance: the Practice of Inegalitarianism (1987). His work combinesFrench and Portuguese interests. His latest book, a volume ofgay history entitled Queer Sites, will appear in 1999.

Lord Mackenzie-Stuart practised at the Scots bar until 1792when he was appointed judge of the Court of Session, Scotland’ssupreme court. He was the first British judge at the Court ofJustice of the European Communities, Luxembourg in 1973and its President 1984–88. On retirement he lectured widelyand acted as arbitrator in international commercial disputes.He was awarded the Prix Bech for services to Europe, 1989,and is the author of A French King at Holyrood. He shares histime between his native Scotland and his home in France.

Philip Mansel is an historian of courts and royal dynasties andeditor of The Court Historian, newsletter of the Society forCourt Studies. He is the author of biographies of Louis XVIIIand the Prince de Ligne and his other published works includeSultans in Splendour: the Last Years of the Ottoman World and Con-stantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924. He is currentlyworking on a history of Paris from 1814 to 1848.

Thomas Sosnowski is Associate Professor of History at KentState University, Stark Campus in Canton, Ohio. He has pub-lished articles on revolutionary Europe, émigrés and exilesand has given papers regularly at the conferences run by the

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Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, the Society for FrenchHistorical Studies and the Western Society for French History.As well as his European interests he is actively involved in localAmerican history.

Ferenc Tóth is Lecturer in History and Head of the FrenchDepartment at Berzsenyi Daniel College in Szombathely (WestHungary). He completed his Doctorate at the Université deParis IV, Sorbonne in 1996. His research interests focus onHungarian immigration to France and Turkey in the eighteenthcentury and the interplay of the themes of oriental despotism,Enlightenment and nationalism in Hungarian history.

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Voyager est, quoi qu’on puisse dire, un des plus tristes plaisirsde la vie.

(Mme de Staël, Corinne, 1807)

. . . la grande figure de l’Emigré, l’un des types les plusimposants de notre époque. Il était en apparence faible et cassé,mais la vie semblait devoir persister en lui, précisément à causede ses mœurs sobres et ses occupations champêtres.

(Balzac, Le Lys dans la Vallée, 1835)

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Introduction William Doyle

Political exile is as old as history; but the émigré was a creationof the French Revolution. Unlike the British Jacobite exiles,who offered a recent parallel, those who left France during theRevolution were not simply motivated by loyalty to a deposeddynasty. Almost a third of those who left France went beforethe fall of the monarchy.1 Nor were they ‘constructively’ ex-pelled for one overwhelming reason, like the Huguenots, whohad outnumbered them a century previously. The Emigrationbegan as a voluntary exodus, and until late in 1791 official policywas to urge the exiles to return. Later, indeed, their numberswere swelled by deportees and fugitives from revolutionarylaws, who had little or no alternative to leaving. The causes ofemigration evolved and expanded with the course of theRevolution itself. But, at whatever point they chose, or werecompelled, to leave the land of their birth, émigrés werepeople unable to live with the France the Revolution hadmade. Emigration reflected the comprehensiveness of thisrevolution of a new type, that left no aspect of life, and no areaof society, untouched. In so far as subsequent revolutions havemeasured their ambitions by this one, émigrés have become arecognised feature of modern political life.

The word had entered the English language by 1792.2 Bythe end of that year the French Revolution, anti-noble almostfrom the start, had also turned anti-clerical, anti-monarchicaland (with the September massacres) terroristic. It was there-fore scarcely surprising that at least two-thirds of those whohad left the country by the time of the king’s death were eithernobles or clerics. It seems likely that many of the rest weredependent in some way on these two categories. These werethe émigrés of legend. As with the noble victims of the Terror,the sight of the formerly mighty brought low has marked theconventional picture of the emigration ever since. But in 1951the legend was challenged by Donald Greer, with statisticswhich showed incontestably that most emigration took placeafter 1792, and that the vast majority of those leaving were not

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members of the former privileged orders. Most were ordinarypeople fleeing from the consequences of civil war. The officiallists which were Greer’s main source made no distinctions as totheir motivation. All had emigrated, all were subject to thesame penalties. But it is perfectly clear that the faceless major-ity were not exiles in the same way as the nobles and clerics.They would be much more accurately described in recent termsas refugees or displaced persons. True émigrés had acted onprinciple – however self-interested. Most had been persons ofauthority before 1789, and had turned their backs on arevolution which had diminished or dispossessed them. What-ever the intrinsic human importance of the humble, unsungmajority officially categorised as émigrés, those who gave theword its distinctive subsequent meaning would have acknow-ledged little in common with them. Legend still comes closer todefining the essence of emigration than the administrativecategories of revolutionary officials.

Yet legends also distort; and the main purpose of the pagesthat follow is to shed a less partial light on the lives and behaviourof a group too often reviled or admired uncritically. Some ofthis new light, it is true, tends to confirm old stereotypes. Littlein these essays offers us a prospect of émigrés less snobbish,quarrelsome or Francocentric in their attitudes than has alwaysbeen perceived. Nor is their melancholy stoicism in adversity,endless capacity for hoping against hope, and dogged loyaltyto ideals in any way diminished. The geography and chrono-logy of emigration is not much modified either. Great Britain,so close and yet so impregnable beyond the sea, was ultimatelythe most favoured destination [Carpenter]. Of more distantrefuges, only the United States, Sweden and Denmark werenot reached sooner or later by the armies of the republic or theusurper; so continental émigrés were almost always having tomove out of danger. And while émigré numbers, even amongnobles and clergy, continued to expand down to 1794, by thetime the official list of émigrés was closed in 1799, thousandshad already returned, and thousands more would do so as itbecame clear that Bonaparte had restored a world of stability,hierarchy and religious observance, even if there was not aBourbon to preside over it. Louis XVIII and his family, in fact,were the only émigrés for whom returning to France was notan option between 1799 and 1814. Ironically that strengthened

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his diplomatic position. From 1807 he was an honoured andsubsidised (if none-too-hopeful) guest in Great Britain ratherthan the helpless fugitive, not just from France, but sooner orlater from other states too, that he had been for most of thetime since 1791.

In this, Louis XVIII had shared the fate of most of thosewho did not cross the Channel to cluster in genteel penury inSoho or Marylebone. For governments generally found in thepresence of émigrés grounds for suspicion, irritation or embar-rassment. After all, they were the original casus belli in 1791–2.Any ruler who lent them too visible hospitality risked antago-nising a republic that by 1794 had marshalled unprecedentedmilitary power. Besides, it took a long time for populationsand even officials with a long-standing suspicion of thingsFrench to learn that not all Frenchmen abroad were agents oftheir country’s new ideology. The Prussians were notoriouslystingy with their residence permits [Höpel]; the Habsburgauthorities in Hungary suspected even Hungarians returningfrom France when foreign regiments were disbanded [Tóth].Never punctilious debtors, the émigrés were increasingly caval-ier towards their creditors because of dwindling resources;the only refuge of the Count d’Artois from British bailiffs inthe late 1790s was the grace-and-favour sanctuary of Holyrood.Foreign generals, meanwhile, found the posturings of regimentscomposed entirely of nobles regarding themselves as natural-born officers a liability. They were either kept prudently underforeign control, like Condé’s legions [d’Agay], or allowed totake the lead only on reckless ventures of their own dubiousdevising, like the catastrophic Quiberon expedition of 1795.Nor could the most patent martyrs to conviction, the non-jurorclergy, necessarily expect a less guarded welcome. Priests whohad given up all to obey the Pope were objects of suspicion forErastian princes hostile to the pretensions of Rome [Höpel].Orthodox hierarchies feared the contagion of Jansenism,improbable through this was among French non-juringpriests. Only in the Protestant confessional kingdom of GreatBritain, ironically enough, was the impact more benign. Herethe pious resignation and biblical poverty of the expatriateclergy helped to soften the visceral anti-Catholicism oftheir hosts, and so benefited their British co-religionists[Bellenger].

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As Kirsty Carpenter stresses (pp. 59–60), there was a moralforce in the sight of exiles prepared to suffer rather than live ina homeland where they thought they had no place. Theirpresence lent sober reality to a revolution that could otherwiseonly be experienced through the newspapers. Accordingly theywere able to influence their hosts’ picture of conditions inFrance. This was particularly so in the United States, whereFrench visitors had been a rarity since independence [Sos-nowski]. The move towards Jay’s Treaty must have owed agood deal to the prospect and everyday propaganda of Frenchexiles, even if these same exiles mostly found the atmosphereof the first modern republic crude and rebarbative, and a brutalcorrective to the romantic illusions so widespread in the 1780sof life on the sylvan frontier. The ancestral enemy across theChannel, on the other hand, was a pleasant surprise. Most ofthe British proved welcoming and sympathetic; the Treasuryauthorised funds for the relief of the Godless revolution’s indi-gent victims; and tales of Jacobin horrors were eagerly absorbedin a political culture more anxious than it might like to admitfor reassurance about the superiority and durability of its ownways. Despite the struggles of Louis XVIII (shown here to bemore successful than previously thought) [Mansel] to maintainthe trappings of a court and government wherever his exiletook him, London was the true capital of the emigration, ifnot from the start, then certainly once war broke out in Feb-ruary 1793 [Carpenter]. The émigrés concentrated there, sosympathetically received in good society, were all the moreshocked to learn from the disaster of Quiberon how cynicallythey were regarded by George III and his ministers. YetQuiberon was the result of wishful thinking among all concern-ed, and in its aftermath a greater realism set in. While the Brit-ish government never again gave credence to émigré analysesof the situation in France, by grudgingly patronising effortsto relieve the plight of the more indigent exiles on its territory,it acknowledged a certain responsibility towards them.The émigrés, for their part, as an analysis of their press shows[Burrows], now made greater efforts to understand what hadhappened, and was still happening, across the Channel; andthe tissue of fantasies that had made up so much of émigréjournalism was increasingly cut through by commentaries ofreal, if unreassuring, insight.

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Although many émigrés, particularly the clergy, kept tothemselves, and many more were culturally ghettoised bytheir inability or unwillingness to learn languages other thantheir own, in general their capacity to adapt to their circum-stances is striking. For some, indeed, emigration was a positiveopportunity. Condé saw it as the chance to build a militarycareer worthy of his illustrious ancestor [d’Agay]; Danlouxfound a captive market for his paintings secure from the jealousmachinations of David [Goodden]. And whereas merchantsand craftsmen could practise their skills in exile much as before,distressed gentlefolk survived by teaching French as a foreignlanguage, or making straw hats. The ex-monk Dulau opened abookshop and a publishing business in Soho. Nobody, ofcourse, adapted more consistently to the vagaries and vicissi-tudes of changing circumstances than Louis XVIII himselfand his entourage, clinging doggedly to the métier du roi evenwhen there was scarcely any to perform [Mansel]. Enforcedadaptation to the world outside France, however, was noindication of a willingness to change if ever these nightmaredays should end. As the old order grew more remote, memoryoverlaid its more dynamic and nuanced features, and mindsset against anything deemed in retrospect to have precipitatedthe great cataclysm. The Declaration of Verona, which LouisXVIII spent two decades living down, was only the most noto-rious example of this growing rigidity. Condé’s determina-tion to exclude all but scions of the oldest noble stock from hisexile army (which he called simply La Noblesse) was another[d’Agay]. At Toulon in 1793, the only place where émigréswere able to establish more than a fleeting bridgehead inFrance, those who had invited them and their British protectorswere dismayed at the time they devoted, in a city besieged, tore-establishing noble and clerical precedence and preroga-tives.3 Emigration seemed to amplify the ‘cascade of disdain’that had marked old-regime social relations, as the political aswell as the social credentials of each new arrival were exhaust-ively scrutinised. And these attitudes were passed on to a youngergeneration which could recall little of pre-revolutionary life atfirst hand, through an education narrowed by the limitedmeans or censorious ambitions of their parents.

Yet by the time Napoleon fell, nine-tenths of the émigréshad already returned to France. Only those motivated

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overwhelmingly by loyalty to the Bourbon dynasty held aloof froman architect of unprecedented French power and glory whoinvited them back on the sole condition that they accept the legit-imacy of his regime. Their return opened new rifts among thosewho had taken the ‘honourable road’ in grimmer times. Whatcontinued to unite them was the cost of choosing to leaveFrance and not return when summoned to do so. In 1792 thegoods of all declared émigrés were confiscated and added tothe stock of biens nationaux. It is true that much was repur-chased by relations left behind, or by émigrés themselves ontheir return. Land still unsold was returned to its former ownersor their heirs at, or before, the restoration. Nevertheless thecost of repurchase was substantial, and hardly any émigrésrecovered all their former property. The compensationaccorded in the milliard des émigrés of 1825 never reached thatfabulous sum, and sometimes took many years to be assessedand awarded [Franke]. Émigrés and their descendants thuscontinued to suffer for what they had done long after emigra-tion became a myth-laden memory. And despite their implicitrecognition of the Revolution’s legitimacy by acceptance of theindemnity, their political enemies often failed to return thecompliment. Throughout the nineteenth century calls wereperiodically heard for the milliard to be repaid.

However much, therefore, and at however painful a cost,the émigrés and their families came to accept what the Revolu-tion had done, the custodians of its achievements could neveracknowledge the legitimacy of the emigration. As their lan-guage made clear, they drew little distinction between emigra-tion and treason. The language of republican intransigence,inherited from the Year II, implied that the émigrés had aban-doned their country in its hour of peril to give aid and comfortto its enemies. Émigrés for their part claimed that there waslittle choice; and for those fleeing from massacre and arrest in1792–94 that was obviously true. Those who left earlier hadless excuse. Alarming though the events of 1789–92 were tonobles and clerics, a large majority of both orders proved ableto live through them without leaving the country. The earlyRevolution was not so much a mortal threat to establishedélites, as a challenge. The émigrés were the ones who refusedit; and in doing so they played a fateful part in driving the Re-volution to the very extremes they later deplored and claimed

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to have foreseen. Their departure, and their noisy denuncia-tions from beyond the frontiers, only intensified revolutionaryparanoia and suspicion towards all ci-devants. Their attemptsto recruit the king to their cause, culminating in his disastrousflight to Varennes in June 1791, fatally undermined the pro-spect for a constitutional monarchy. Their appeals to foreignpowers to intervene in French internal affairs began the move-ment towards war in the autumn in 1791; and their willingnessto serve in arms under enemy command, once hostilities beganthe following spring, finally marked them out as betrayers oftheir country. Louis XVI’s attempts, meanwhile, to protectthem and their property in France with his veto helped sealthe fate of the monarchy itself.

All these machinations, it is true, were the work of a smallminority. One thing that stands out from the present collec-tion is the political passivity of most émigrés once they hadaffected their escape. They all lived in hope, but most weremore absorbed in the struggle for day-to-day survival than inthe struggle against the Godless popular republic. Apart fromthose who went early, their fortunes as yet unthreatened byovert political dissidence, most émigrés left their sources ofincome behind, inaccessible even before they were confiscated.They had to find new ways of sustaining themselves. Andalthough they usually found abroad, however grudgingly,the noble and clerical solidarity they obviously expected, theymostly had to find their own resources. As Gibbon remarked,‘These noble fugitives are entitled to our pity; they may claimour esteem; but they cannot, in the present state of their mindand fortune, much contribute to our amusement.’4 Therewas, indeed, little amusing about the emigration. The FrenchRevolution imposed unenviable choice on all who had to livethrough it. The émigrés’ choice was to sacrifice everythingbut their lives (and, if they went to Quiberon, even those)rather than accept a new order of things in the land of theirbirth. It was a futile sacrifice. None of them ever recovered allthey lost, and most would have lost less by staying. Notoriously,even the restored Bourbons inherited Napoleon’s throne, nottheir brother’s; and Charles X in 1830 threw that away, dyingin renewed emigration. But the story is no less tragic for itsfutility, and no less significant either. Without the betterunderstanding of the émigrés which this collection offers,

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xxii Introduction

the Revolution they rejected will also be less well under-stood.

NOTES

1. D. Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration during the French Revolution,Cambridge, Mass., 1951, p. 115.

2. The first use recorded by the OED is by no less a writer than EdwardGibbon, who a year earlier had already noted the presence in Lausanne,of ‘a swarm of emigrants of both sexes who escaped from the publicruin’. Memoirs of My Life, ed. G.A. Bonnard, London, 1966, p. 185.

3. M. Crook, Toulon in War and Revolution: from the Ancien Régime to theRestoration, 1750–1820, Manchester, 1991, p. 142.

4. Memoirs of My Life, p. 185.

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1

1 From Coblenz to Hartwell: the ÉmigréGovernment and the European Powers,1791–1814 Philip Mansel

When the Comte de Provence arrived in Brussels on 26 June1791, after his flight from France, he found himself at the headof what he termed, in the memoir he wrote later that summer,‘une des plus grandes machines qui aient jamais existé’,namely the émigré government.1 The émigré government wasof a different nature to its rival under the Queen’s favourite, theBaron de Breteuil, or to any government in exile maintainedby later French pretenders, Bourbon, Orléans or Bonaparte.In its council of Ministers sat such notable former ministers ofLouis XVI as Calonne, the Maréchaux de Broglie and de Cas-tries. By early 1792 it had established its own diplomats intwelve capitals,2 including London, Vienna and Saint Peters-burg, where émigré representatives remained until 1814. Therewas chaos in the émigré government’s finances.3 Nevertheless,by the summer of 1792 it had organised an army of 14 249.One sign of the émigré government’s readiness both to dis-obey even those acts of Louis XVI dating from before 1789, andto strengthen links between the Crown and the nobility, was theinclusion in its army of the Compagnies Nobles d’Ordon-nance. They were a revival, under another name, of the MaisonMilitaire du roi as it had been before the reforms of 1775.4

The émigré government justified its independence on thegrounds that, as Provence wrote to Marie Antoinette, the Prin-ces were the ‘seuls organes légitimes du roi de France, retenuen captivité par ses sujets rebelles’.5 The Comtes de Provenceand d’Artois also represented themselves as leaders of a crusadeto save Europe. This was in part a result of geography: from

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2 The French Émigrés in Europe

7 July they established their court and government in the smalltown of Coblenz at the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle.They were there at the invitation, and under the protection, ofone of their mother’s brothers, Prince Clemenz of Saxony,Archbishop and Elector of Trier, whose principal residence itwas. They had to justify their government’s existence to theElector and the Holy Roman Empire.

However, while alarmed by the progress of what they calledle mal français, most foreign governments saw the Frenchrevolution as a specifically French phenomenon which didnot directly threaten – in some cases could be exploited tostrengthen – their authority in their own countries. The Princesfailed to persuade European powers to withdraw their ambas-sadors from Paris in July 1791.6 The sole result of the Confer-ence held at Pillnitz in August 1791 between the Holy RomanEmperor, the King of Prussia, the Elector of Saxony and theComte d’Artois was the anodyne declaration that the fate ofLouis XVI was ‘un objet d’intérêt commun à tous les souver-ains de l’Europe’. Only Gustavus III, a personal friend of Pro-vence who had conferred with the Princes at Aix-la-Chapellein early July, made plans to attack France.7 But Sweden wastoo distant and impoverished to be an effective ally.

The émigré government had more success with Russia.Catherine II had three motives: monarchical outrage at therevolution; geopolitical desire to keep the western Europeanpowers occupied while Poland was destroyed; and personalhatred for the Baron de Breteuil, head of the rival govern-ment in exile, who as a young French diplomat had opposedher coup d’état in 1762. In the autumn of 1791 the Russianambassador to the Circles of the Upper and Lower Rhine, CountRomanzov, and the Swedish ambassador to the Imperial Diet,Baron Oxenstierna, were also accredited to the Princes atCoblenz. So important was such foreign recognition that, oneach occasion, the émigré nobility at Coblenz en corps was sentto compliment the ambassador.

‘La scene a été des plus brillantes et des plus riches enintérêt . . . ’ wrote the Baron de Bray, the representative of theGrand Master of Malta at Coblenz, of Romanzov’s reception.8Further proof of the émigré government’s European dimen-sion was the presence of both the Russian and Swedish ambas-sadors, the Baron de Duminic first minister of the Elector of


Philip Mansel 3

Trier, the Baron de Bray and the Prince of Nassau-Siegen, aGerman prince in Russian service, in the Princes’ council.9Thereafter the Princes, always eager to internationalise theirsituation, addressed frequent confidential letters to Catherine II,requesting both funds and advice.10 Indeed, without the émigrégovernment’s foreign subsidies, it would not have survived. In1791, for example, Catherine II and Frederick William II ofPrussia sent the Princes 1 591 037 livres and 1 888 874livres respectively.11

The greatest ally of the émigré government, however, wasFrench aggression. The French government declared war onAustria on 20 April 1792. Thereafter, the demands of war fur-ther Europeanised the émigré government. As the allied armies(which the Princes hoped would include Spain and Sardinia)12gathered for the invasion of France, the Princes and their min-isters had frequent conferences with the allied commander-in-chief, the Duke of Brunswick. They helped to compose theDeclaration of Brunswick and followed his military dispositions.The King of Prussia, thanks in part to the persuasion of thePrinces’ councillor, the Prince of Nassau-Siegen, gave them afurther 800 000 francs to equip their army, reviewed it, andspent an hour discussing policy with the Princes on 21 July.13Despite the closeness of relations with Austria and Prussia,however, the Allies refused Provence’s request to be recognisedas Regent of France in September 1792.

During the allied retreat in October and November after thedefeat at Valmy, the émigré government remained dependenton Prussia and Austria. Having dissolved their army at theinsistence of the King of Prussia on 23 November, the Princesinstalled themselves, their government and archive on Prus-sian soil in the small town of Hamm in Westphalia in lateDecember.14

They remained dependent on foreign governments for sub-sistence as well as asylum. Russia remained generous: theEmpress sent 1 144 689 livres in 1793. The Russian ambassadorRomanzov, still officially accredited to the Princes, resided atHamm, determined, as he wrote to the Maréchal de Castries,the leading minister of the émigré government, to serve ‘lacause de la Monarchie française avec zèle’.15

Russian assistance was so important that in late 1794 theRussian ambassador in Venice, Count Mordvinov, secured



permission from the Venetian government for Provence toestablish himself in Verona. After Provence became King ofFrance as Louis XVIII on his nephew’s death in 1795, Mordvi-nov was formally accredited to him, followed by Baron Simolin,formerly Russian ambassador in Paris, in 1796–97.16

The years between 1792 and 1798, however, saw a low pointin the émigré government’s relations with the European powers,and therefore in its success in France. Artois admitted thatthe only hope lay in ‘l’appui des grandes puissances’ but that allwere hostile.17 The diplomatic system of the French mon-archy had collapsed at the same time as the monarchy itself.Austria, the ally of 1756, possibly out of dynastic hatred of theBourbons, was actively ill-intentioned and in 1793 wantedterritorial gains in northern France. Echoing the views of LouisXVI’s ministers in the 1780s, Castries wrote in 1794: ‘la courde Vienne considère la France comme une puissance qu’il fautabattre’.18

In 1799 a British diplomat noticed in Baron Thugut, theAustrian chief minister,

a stronger inclination to divide France and perpetuate thedistractions of that country than to re-establish either Mon-archy or any other steady government . . . he has a strongprejudice against the King of France and the French princeswhom he considers as personally obnoxious to the Frenchnation.

In August 1804 Thugut’s successor, Count Ludwig Cobenzl,burnt Louis XVIII’s protest against the proclamation of theFrench empire, in the presence of Napoleon’s ambassador.19

Their Bourbon cousins showed little more sympathy for theémigré Princes. Charles IV of Spain sent them a million francsin 1792 and, until 1807, small subsistence pensions to the dif-ferent members of the French Royal Family.20 However hegave no political or military support and in 1794 refused Pro-vence asylum, as did the Bourbon Duke of Parma, the recipi-ent of the largest single annual pension awarded by Louis XVI(and the Bourbon King of Naples in 1802). Between 1798 and1808 the King of Spain was an ally, first of the French Republic,then of the French Empire.21

Despite the disasters of 1792–98 the émigré governmentsurvived. Wherever he happened to be – between August


Philip Mansel 5

1796 and February 1798 in Blankenburg in the Duchy ofBrunswick, thereafter moving to Mittau in Russia – LouisXVIII held council two or three times a week. In 1795–96 atVerona, according to the unofficial British ambassador LordMacartney, ‘ever since the death of Louis 17th the king’s resid-ence here has been assuming more and more the air of a Court’,not through outward splendour, but ‘by the numerous corres-pondences, the arrival and departure of couriers from time totime’.22 Ministers in attendance included Castries, Flasch-landen, La Vauguyon, Jaucourt and, as representative of theComte d’Artois, the Bishop of Arras.23

The calibre of the émigré government is shown by its use ofa skilled bureaucrat called M. Hermann, to run some of itscyphers from 1793 to 1801. Former Agent général de la Marinede France and Consul-General in London under Louis XVI,he later became a senior financial official of Napoleon I andfinally sous-secrétaire d’état aux affaires étrangères in 1822.24The principal minister in 1798–1800 was the Comte de Saint-Priest, a former minister of Louis XVI who advocated a recon-ciliation with the constitutional monarchists. In exile, someMinisters retained the arrogance of Versailles. When the Ducde Noailles resigned as Capitaine des Gardes in 1795, hiscousin the Prince de Poix, himself dismissed as Capitaine desGardes by Louis XVIII the same year on the suspicion of mod-eration, wrote to the Maréchal de Castries:

M.de Flaschlanden nous a écrit par un Secrétaire, ce queLouis XIV ne se seroit pas permis dans sa toute puissancepour la démission d’une telle charge.25

Another sign of the calibre of the émigré government is pro-vided by the archives deposited in the Ministère des AffairesÉtrangères in 1814, some of which had followed the exiledcourt through every stage of its European odyssey, fromCoblenz to Hartwell. It is primarily a political archive, contain-ing constitutional projects, despatches by the King’s agents inParis, London, Madrid or Saint Petersburg, or bulletins issuedby the King’s cabinet for the press.26 However, the FondsBourbon is only part of the archives of the émigré government.Much of the personal correspondence of Louis XVIII, and suchdynastic relics as the seal of Louis XVI, remain in the archivesof the Blacas family, descendants of the last chief minister of



the émigré government. They provided material for the manybooks and articles by Ernest Daudet on the Emigration. Thevoluminous archives of the émigré Ministers, the Maréchal deCastries and the Comte de Saint Priest, can be consulted in theArchives Nationales in Paris (306 AP and 395 AP); those ofCalonne in the Public Record Office in London (PC1). Anotherarchive of the émigré government and army, mainly emanatingfrom the Comte d’Artois, with detailed records of pay, ranksand decorations, was removed from the French embassy inLondon in 1816 and is now in the Archives Nationales (O32558–2681).27

In addition to an administration, a diplomatic service andan archive, the émigré government had an army. For althoughthe armée des Princes had been disbanded, the armée deCondé survived as a force of about 5000 men (see Chapter 2).Louis XVIII continued to promote officers and award themhonours as if he were an independent sovereign. As late asNew Year’s day 1812, Louis XVIII promoted the Marquisd’Autichamp and the Comtes de Coigny and de Cély Lieuten-ant Generals.28 The émigré government’s Minister of War until1795 was the Maréchal de Broglie, who was succeeded by theBaron de Flaschlanden, a member of the Princes’ Councilsince 1791; he in turn was succeeded on his death in 1798 bythe Comte de La Chapelle, former Major-Général of l’arméedes Princes in 1792; he died at Hartwell in March 1810.29In addition to the armée de Condé, émigré or émigré-commanded units, with which the émigré government main-tained contact, served in the Austrian, British, Sardinian andSpanish armies. Lieutenant-Colonel de Durler, commander ofthe Regiment de Roll, which served in the British army from1794 to 1816, for example, paid court to Louis XVIII at Veronaon 25 January 1796.30 In 1796 the King thought of joining theLoyal Emigrant Regiment, which fought for Britain in theAustrian Netherlands, Brittany and Portugal under his friendthe Comte de La Chatre.31

The émigré government also had its own subjects. Over129000 émigrés, perhaps as many as 200000,32 formed an entiresociety on the move, with its own public opinion, culture andstyle, simpler than what Louis XVIII’s favourite the Comted’Avaray called, in 1804, ‘la dignité crapuleuse et empruntéequi aujourd’hui règne en France’.33


Philip Mansel 7

For many émigrés, the government of Louis XVIII remainedthe focus of loyalty and patronage. For the government, theémigrés remained a source of agents – and political pressure:in 1794 Provence wrote to Castries of his fear that a deal withrevolutionaries would open ‘une source intarissable de dis-corde et de guerres civiles’.34 Thus one reason why Bonaparteencouraged émigrés to return to France after 1802, accordingto Talleyrand, was

afin d’isoler davantage Louis XVIII et lui ôter, comme ildisait, l’air de roi qu’une nombreuse émigration lui donnait.35

However, many émigrés remained outside France, rising topositions such as Marshal General of Portugal (Comte deVioménil); military commander of Madrid (the Comte d’Es-pagne); Commander-in-Chief of the Neapolitan army (Rogerde Damas); Austrian general (Comte E. de Pouilly); Governorof Odessa and Minister of the Marine in Russia (the Duc deRichelieu and the Marquis de Traversay). Even if they adoptedanother nationality, an act for which some first asked the King’spermission,36 in contrast to Jacobite officers in foreign servicewho rapidly lost their links with the Jacobite government,many such émigrés remained royalist ‘sleepers’, as the eventsof 1813–14 would show.

Thus the Revolution of 1789 had committed two errors, notrepeated by those of 1830 or 1848. First, by making Francephysically dangerous, it encouraged the emigration of royalistswho, once they had risen in the service of foreign govern-ments, were likely to be in a position to influence them againstthe French government. Second, its policy of territorial expan-sion, more than its revolutionary excesses, obliged the Euro-pean powers in the end to league against it. Louis XVIII, onthe other hand, stuck to the Bourbon policy which had madeFrance, for the first time, renounce European territorialexpansion. Established by Louis XV at the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), it had been maintained by Louis XVI on thegrounds that, as Vergennes wrote to him in 1777, ‘la Franceconstituée comme elle l’est doit craindre les agrandissementsbien plus que les ambitionner’.37 In accordance with this tradi-tion Louis XVIII committed himself not to profit from the‘conquêtes faites par la prétendue république’.38 It was theBourbons’ commitment to the former frontiers of France, not



their rights to the throne, which won them the support ofEuropean governments.

The émigré government was at the height of its effectivenesswhen Louis XVIII took up residence in the former palace ofthe Dukes of Courland at Mittau, as a guest of Tsar Paul I,from February 1798 to January 1801. The Tsar took the arméede Condé into his service, awarded Louis XVIII a pension of200 000 roubles a year, paid the salary of the King’s officialrepresentative in Saint Petersburg, the Comte de Caraman,and even paid one hundred former gardes du corps du roi toserve as Louis XVIII’s guards – a symbol of sovereignty whichhad been denied to Louis XVI in the Tuileries after October1789.39 Within four months the King’s court and guard, at firstconfined to one floor of the main wing of the palace, had obligedthe city’s prison, law-court and archives to move out of thepalace and had themselves begun to expand into the town.40

By 1801 the Maison civile du Roi numbered 108 individuals;in all about 300 French émigrés lived in Mittau.41 At one stageLouis XVIII even suggested that his gardes du corps take overthe police of Mittau. Although the Pretender was never al-lowed to see Paul I in Saint Petersburg as he requested, PaulSchroeder’s allegation of the Bourbon court’s ‘pitiful exist-ence’ is clearly not the whole truth.42 At Mittau, Louis XVIIIwas both figuratively and literally on the main road to SaintPetersburg. ‘Placé sur la route de tous les courriers’,43 he rece-ived Russian and British diplomats, General Dumouriez, theGrand Duke Constantine, and Marshal Suvorov himself, whostopped in Mittau in March 1799 to obtain the King’s blessingbefore the Second Coalition’s attack on France that summer.44

In addition to Louis’ government and court at Mittau, therewas a rival court under Artois, whom Provence had appointedLieutenant Général du Royaume on 8 November 1793.45 IfRussia protected Louis XVIII, Britain supported Artois. In1793 Lord Grenville had forbidden Provence to land at Toulon– despite its inhabitants’ request for his presence – and Artoisto land in England.46 In 1799, in a change of heart probablydue to the realisation that the Directory was even more expan-sionist than the Convention, Grenville wrote:

Europe can never be restored to tranquillity but by the res-toration of the monarchy in France.


Philip Mansel 9

Despite Austrian hostility, the Prime Minister, William Pitt,declared in Parliament in January 1800:

The Restoration of the French monarchy . . . I consider as amost desirable object because I think it would afford thestrongest and best security to this country and to Europe.47

In August 1799, at the height of British confidence in theEuropean coalition, Artois accepted an official invitation toleave the palace of Holyrood outside Edinburgh, where he hadresided since January 1796, and move to London. Presentedto George III at court, often meeting the Prime Minister,48 hebecame Britain’s protégé, someone whom Britain preferred toLouis XVIII to accompany an invasion of the south or east ofFrance at the head of a Swiss force.49 Louis XVIII, whom Artoishad not consulted, was furious but impotent.50 In fact Artoisnever reached France and for the next 14 years remained inLondon.

The war of the Second Coalition marked the émigré gov-ernment’s long-anticipated breakthrough with the British andRussian governments or, as Artois wrote, the moment when‘les souverains commencent à ouvrir les yeux’.51 ThereafterRussia and Britain kept the Bourbons as a reserve card in theirEuropean plans. The reconciliation of the Duc d’Orléans withhis Bourbon cousins provides proof of the émigré govern-ment’s European status. Artois insisted that Orléans’ letter ofsubmission to Louis XVIII of 13 February 1800 be at onceshown not only to senior émigré officers in London but also toBritish ministers and the Russian ambassador. Only afterOrléans had made his submission did he receive a British pen-sion, the honour of presentation to George III and the oppor-tunity to meet, at dinner in Artois’ house in 46 Baker Street,the Foreign Secretary and the Austrian, Russian and Neapol-itan ambassadors.52

While Britain turned to Artois, the Tsar turned againstLouis XVIII. Disabused by the defeats of the Second Coalition,having quarrelled with the Bourbon supporter Gustavus IVof Sweden, and having dismissed the pro-Bourbon Vice-Chancellor and joint Minister of Foreign Affairs Count N.P.Panin, Paul I established close relations with the First Consul.On 14 January 1801, possibly as a result of reading a despatchfrom D’Avaray to the Duc d’Havré the émigré representative



in Madrid, with mocking portraits of himself and his ministers,Paul I ordered the expulsion of Louis XVIII, his family andfollowers from Mittau.53 Louis XVIII’s agent in Berlin, thegreat counter-revolutionary writer, Rivarol, helped obtainpermission from the King of Prussia for the Bourbons to live inWarsaw.54 From March 1801 until the summer of 1804, underconsiderable restrictions, enjoying occasional subsidies fromsympathetic Polish nobles, Louis XVIII and his court stayed inrented houses in Warsaw.55

Soon after the King’s installation in Warsaw, Paul I was mur-dered (one of the original conspirators had been Count Panin,the former joint Foreign Minister sympathetic to the Bour-bons). Although no longer recognising the Pretender officiallylike his father and grandmother, Alexander I re-established asmaller pension that summer, renewed the offer of asylum inMittau and assured Louis XVIII:

Vos vertus brillent d’un nouveau lustre dans l’adversité etvous assurent des titres imprescriptibles.56

In January 1802 Alexander I addressed a circular to his ambas-sadors in Madrid, Naples, Paris, London, Berlin and Vienna toask the governments of Europe, including the French, to pro-vide financial support for the Bourbons. The Tsar claimed that

La situation à laquelle se trouve réduit M. le comte deLille . . . ne peut être indifférente à tous les souverains del’Europe.

Austria, Prussia and Spain refused to provide any more thanthey were already. Britain sent £5000 at once and thereafter£6000 a year.57

In 1802 Britain and Russia were at peace with the FrenchRepublic, and appeared to have abandoned the Bourbon cause.The Pope himself had signed a Concordat with the Republic.Louis XVIII experienced a period of despair (at the same timeArtois, possibly intending to leave London, bought an estate atWittmold in Holstein). Moreover, the dynasty was losing itsbiological base. The daughter of Louis XVI, who had beenmarried to her cousin the Duc d’Angoulême at Mittau in 1799,showed no sign of bearing an heir. Louis XVIII had failed inhis efforts to marry the Duc de Berri either to the widowedElectress of Bavaria, or to Princesses of Savoy, Saxony, Parma or


Philip Mansel 11

Naples. He wrote to Artois that he feared that Berri would notbe accepted even by a daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar:‘la terreur est à l’ordre du jour . . . notre temps est passé oupour mieux dire il dort’.58 Through d’Avaray he spoke ofretiring to Naples where he would deposit his crown in the heartof his cousin the King and live as a private person.59 Havingfailed in his negotiations for a restoration with Bonaparte,Louis XVIII even considered, to Artois’s horror, accepting asubsidy from the First Consul, provided that it came via theRussian government.60

However in 1803 and 1804, having forgotten his despair,Louis XVIII made two famous protests of his right to thecrown of France. In February 1803 in Warsaw, to a Prussianofficial sent to urge a renunciation of the throne in return for‘de grands avantages’, he replied with the famous lines:

J’ignore les desseins de Dieu sur ma race et sur moi, mais jeconnais les obligations qu’il m’a imposées par le rang ou ilLui a plu de me faire naître. . . . Successeur de François Ier,je veux au moins pouvoir dire avec lui, ‘Nous avons toutperdu hors l’honneur’.

To the rage of Talleyrand, who pursued a personal vendettaagainst the Bourbons, British boats circulated the King’s replyalong the coast of France.61

A year later Louis XVIII called the assumption of the imper-ial title by Napoleon ‘les circonstances les plus graves et les pluscritiques ou je me suis trouvé depuis le commencement de nosinfortunes’.62

After a meeting at Kalmar on the Swedish coast with KingGustavus IV Adolphus and Artois (the only prince who hadobtained a British passport) in late September 1804, LouisXVIII moved to the house of sympathetic nobles at Blanken-feld in Courland, having been refused permission to return toWarsaw by the King of Prussia at Napoleon I’s request.63 Thusit was at Blankenfeld that Louis XVIII finished the Declara-tion to which he gave a fictitious date – 2 December 1804, theday of what he called ‘l’horrible farce’ in Notre Dame de Paris– and address – ‘au sein de la Baltique, en face et sous la pro-tection du ciel’.64

In its final form the Declaration endorsed a general amnestyand the broad outlines of the post-1789 settlement, including



careers open to the talents, and the post-1789 administrativerevolution. While not explicitly renouncing all conquests, italso criticised France’s expansion in Europe:

Un système perfide de violence, d’ambition sans limites,d’arrogance sans frein, vous livre à d’interminables guerresdont la lassitude seule suspendra le fléau.

Despite the opposition of Artois, the British government andAlexander I, the King insisted on the Declaration’s publica-tion, writing to Gustavus IV that it was ‘destiné pour la France,fait pour la France’ and should be sent there in as great aquantity as possible. With Swedish help, it was printed inStockholm and Berlin in 1805, but its circulation in France isdoubtful.65

After five months at Blankenfeld, in February 1805, the Kingwas readmitted to Mittau by Alexander I. Alexander remainedmore sympathetic to the Bourbon cause than is generallybelieved. His court, like the Swedish court, went into mourningfor the Duc d’Enghien in 1804 and refused to recognise Napo-leon’s imperial title. Although opposed to fighting a war forthe sole object of the restoration of the King of France, Alex-ander I still favoured putting a Bourbon on the French throneprovided he accepted a constitution.66 In 1805 both Russiaand Britain considered

the restoration of the Bourbon family on the throne . . .highly desirable for the future both of France and Europe.67

In 1806–7 the Russian government planned to help a royalistattack in the west of France. On 31 March 1807 Alexander Icame to Mittau and saw Louis XVIII for one and a half hours.68

However later that year Louis XVIII left Russia for England.Again, like his arrival in Russia in 1798 or the Declaration ofCalmar in 1804, this move, planned since March 1806, wasmade on his own initiative. Dislike of the distance of Mittaufrom France, and jealousy of Artois’s control of what the Kingcalled ‘cette multitude d’agens non avoués et d’agences noncommandées’, helped determine Louis XVIII. Money mayhave been the most important factor of all. The Swedish ambas-sador in Saint Petersburg, Count Stedingk, an old friend fromVersailles, claimed to know ‘de science certaine’ that the movewas designed to stop Artois monopolising British subsidies.69


Philip Mansel 13

Certainly in April 1807 d’Avaray had written to Orléans (LouisXVIII’s secret intermediary with the British government inorder to keep Artois and Alexander I in ignorance), that theSpanish and Portuguese pensions had stopped, that the Kinghad given up his personal table and his carriage, and that,‘l’heritier de Saint Louis n’a pas de quoi vivre’.70

After a second visit to Gustavus IV, the King travelled acrossSweden to Gothenburg, where he embarked on a Swedishship, at Swedish expense, for England. They arrived off GreatYarmouth on 30 October 1807.

D’Avaray announced to Canning, who had replaced Gren-ville as Foreign Secretary that year, the arrival of, ‘l’ennemi leplus redoutable du perturbateur du monde . . . le pacificateurfutur de l’Europe’. The King and d’Avaray had hoped to conferwith British ministers in London about the future of Europe,in particular of British relations with Russia and Sweden.71The British government, however, which was consideringpeace negotiations with Napoleon I, and the Comte d’Artoisand his followers, wanted his boat to leave for Leith andordered Holyrood to be prepared.72 However, Canning was alife-long ‘anti-Jacobin’, who feared criticism for his treatmentof the King of France. Lady Elizabeth Foster, a friend of theFrench royal family since the 1780s, wrote:

never, I think, was the public feeling more strongly expressedthan it has been against the incivility and want of respectand attention to Louis XVIII.73

Finally, with the help of Orléans, Louis XVIII received per-mission to land on the condition that he resided at a distanceof fifty miles from London.74

In Britain, although his hopes for formal recognition, resid-ence in London or meetings with ministers were not recog-nised, the King began to return to official life after the hiatus of1801–7. His British pension was increased from £6000 a yearto £16 000 and he also received the equivalent of £1600 fromPortugal (through British intervention) and £4000 from Rus-sia.75 As a capital reserve he had his aunts’ diamonds and by1797 the côte de bretagne ruby from the French crown jewels.76 InVerona and Blankenburg he had been forbidden to holdcourt; in Mittau and Warsaw, despite his local connectionsthrough his grandmother Marie Leczinska, daughter of King



Stanislas Leczynski of Poland, he saw local nobles on greatoccasions such as the day of Saint Louis, but otherwise received‘few visits . . . (for they do not make any) and those very short’.77

In England, the centre of the Emigration, both French émi-grés and British sympathisers (particularly Roman Catholics)paid him court at Hartwell House, near Aylesbury, to which hemoved in 1809. In 1809, on a visit to the Prince de Condé atWanstead House near London, he received ‘les femmespresentées . . . et tous les émigrés máles sans distinction’.

He also revived the Bourbon tradition of dining in public.78In addition, like Artois and Orléans, he frequently correspond-ed with both Canning and his successor as Foreign SecretaryLord Wellesley. In 1807, continuing the émigré government’spolicy to internationalise its cause, he wrote to Canning thatFrench interests ‘sont inséparables de ceux de l’Angleterre’.In 1809 he told Lord Wellesley that ‘la cause de FerdinandVII et la mienne sont communes’ and that

je considère les intérêts de son pays [Britain] comme insépa-rables de ceux de la France.79

Indeed one Spanish Junta described itself as fighting for,

the Sacred Rights of the Most August House of Bourbon,whereof His Most Christian Majesty is the Worthy and Illus-trious Chief.80

The British Government refused to allow any French Bourbonto serve in Spain. However, it was eager to preserve the Bour-bons as a political weapon in France. In 1810 it agreed, at therequest of the Comte d’Artois (no doubt alarmed by the mar-riages, that year, of both Napoleon I and the Duc d’Orléans,and by his son’s long liaison with an Englishwoman called AmyBrown), to send a frigate to collect a Sardinian princess for theDuc de Berri, and to provide her with a pension of £3000 perannum.81 Artois, who by 1807 lived in the fashionable addressof South Audley Street, held regular levers and often receivedthe Foreign Secretary Canning and his successor the MarquessWellesley.82 The King of Sardinia, however, reiterated therefusal made in 1805, when he had written:

ce serait marier la faim et la soif et faire devenir ma fille uneperpétuelle bohémienne sans pain ni gîte.83


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The British government also paid part of the cost of the statefuneral of ‘the Queen of France’, Louis XVIII’s wife MarieJosephine of Savoy, in Westminster Abbey, on 26 November1810. The funeral was a European occasion, attended by theambassadors of Sardinia, Sicily, Spain and Portugal, as well asby eleven émigré bishops.84

Another supporter of the Bourbons was the Prince of Wales,who visited Louis XVIII on 20 October 1808 and swore torestore him at a time when nobody else believed it possible.85 On19 June 1811 the King and his family were the guests of honourat the sumptuous fête for 3000 by which the Prince inauguratedhis Regency. The Regent welcomed him, in a room hung withfleurs de lys tapestries and a portrait of Louis XV, with thewords: ‘Ici Votre Majesté est Roi de France’.86

The defeat of Napoleon in Russia in 1812 strengthenedBritish enthusiasm for the Bourbons. There were more meet-ings between the royal families. In London on 19 December,an occasion ignored by British historians like Charles Web-ster (who do not consult émigré sources), Blacas promised aBritish minister that the King will support ‘the present orderof things’. In accordance with the King’s evolution sincebefore the declaration of 1804, the Declaration of Hartwell of1 March 1813 promised ’union’, ‘bonheur’, ‘paix’ and ‘repos’;the maintenance of ‘le Code dit Napoléon’ except in mattersof religion, and of ‘les corps Administratifs et Judiciaires’and guaranteed ‘la liberté du peuple.’ Thereafter the Britishgovernment provided the King with the financial means toprint the Declaration and to have it distributed on the Con-tinent by

des serviteurs devoués qui puissent faire connaître auxFrançois les intentions du Roi et au Roi les dispositions del’intérieur.87

After December 1812 the secret British policy to support theBourbons is revealed by its agents’ acts. In early 1813 the Brit-ish minister in Stockholm had copies of the Declaration ofHartwell printed, while a British officer, Sir Neil Campbell,had 2000 copies printed at Provins in France in mid-February1814.88 Despatches from Hartwell to Vienna were carried bythe couriers of the Regent’s Hanoverian Minister in London,Count Munster.89 Thus the support which Louis XVIII won



in France through the Declaration of Hartwell was due in partto the actions of the British government.

In his letters to Bonnay in Vienna, Blacas confirmed theémigré policy of renunciation of territorial expansion and ofrepresenting Louis XVIII not as a legitimate monarch but as aEuropean necessity (there is no proof, however, that these let-ters influenced the Austrian Foreign Minister, Metternich).Napoleon himself, whose insistence on retaining the ‘naturalfrontiers’ convinced the allies not to make peace with him in1814, felt that a return to the anciennes limites was ‘inséparabledu rétablissement des Bourbons’.90

At the same time the King despatched a volley of émigréofficers from his reserve of supporters, on missions to thediferent powers of Europe. Alexis de Noailles was sent to Alex-ander I and Bernadotte in the summer of 1812; the Comte deLa Ferronays to Saint Petersburg and allied headquarters inearly 1813; the Comte de Bruges to allied headquarters inSilesia in the summer of 1813; Comte Louis de Bouillé to Berna-dotte’s headquarters in October 1813; and the Comtes de Nar-bonne, de Trogoff, Wildermeth and de Chabannes to Spain,Austria and northern France.91

The powers’ reaction was mixed. However, such missionsshow that a Bourbon Restoration, far from being a surprise in1814, had been frequently discussed at government level sinceearly 1813. In April 1813 Count Romanzov, the former Russianambassador to the Princes in 1791–93, now chancellor of theEmpire, who even after the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807 hadremained sympathetic to the émigré government and its agents,informed Count Lieven, Russian ambassador in London, ofthe Russian government’s interest in a restoration. Lieven hadalready visited Hartwell that January.92 However the Tsarprovided neither formal recognition, nor support for an inva-sion in the West, nor permission for Angoulême to serve withthe Russian army, as Louis XVIII requested. In July 1813 theComte d’Artois and the Duc d’Angoulême were forced toreturn to England from Pomerania where they had hoped tojoin allied headquarters.93

One explanation for this policy is revealed in the memoirsand letters of La Ferronays and Rochechouart, an émigré whohad become one of the Tsar’s aides de camp. When La Fer-ronays finally obtained two audiences of the Tsar in May 1813,


Philip Mansel 17

the latter, according to La Ferronays, expressed support forroyalism, mitigated by fear of alienating Austria which was stillneutral:

Si nous parvenons à jeter Napoléon de l’autre côté du Rhinet qu’alors, comme je n’en doute pas, il se manifeste enFrance quelque mouvement en faveur du roi, croyez que jesaurai profiter de ce moment pour faire entendre à l’Autricheque, mon seul but ayant été de rendre la liberté aux nations,le voeu du peuple français qui réclame ses anciens maîtresrend nul tout espèce d’engagement pris avec elle . . . je saismieux qu’un autre, croyez-le, que le rétablissement de lalégitimité partout est la seule base sur laquelle on puisseasseoir la paix et la tranquillité de l’Europe.94

In a letter to Louis XVIII Alexander I assured him of the ‘sen-timents invariables que je vous conserve’ and promised to actonce the armies had crossed the Rhine and royalist movementshad shown themselves: ‘il faut de la patience, une grandecirconspection et le plus profond secret’.95

The calculated wait for French soil and royalist risings, ratherthan opposition on principle, explains the allies’ failure openlyto support a Restoration before March 1814. In early 1814,once the allies had arrived on French soil after a string of vic-tories over Napoleon I, the Comte de Rochechouart wrote toask the Tsar to support the Bourbons, not because they werelegitimate but because their restoration would guarantee the‘independance et repos’ of Europe. The Tsar replied cautiously:

vous ne pouvez douter des sentiments qui m’animent enfaveur de l’auguste famille de vos anciens rois mais je nepuis agir sans mes alliés . . . en attendant, que la France seprononce.

In February, while the allies were discussing peace with Napo-leon at the Congress of Chatillon (thereby paralysing mostFrench royalist initiatives), Alexander I opposed an armis-tice.96 The Tsar was undecided. At one time he declared Louispersonally incapable; a decision should be postponed untilthey reached Paris. A week later Nesselrode received royalistagents on the Tsar’s behalf, telling them that he planned to fol-low ‘le voeu des français’, and requesting the creation of royalistmovements.97



While it was widely believed at the time that Austria tried tosave Napoleon and his empire as a counterbalance to Russia,98Metternich also considered a Restoration a possibility fromJanuary 1814. On 30 January 1814 he wrote to the Austriancommander-in-chief Prince Schwarzenberg:

Si un parti se déclare, – si ce parti détrône Napoléon – siLouis XVIII est proclamé par la grande majorité de la nationon traitera avec lui. Nous serons enchantés de l’y voir.

Castlereagh thought Metternich had no objection in principleto the Bourbons, whom he regarded as ‘likely to be too weakfor years to molest any of them’.99

Meanwhile, Artois was refused access to allied headquarters,and advised to remain at Vesoul in eastern France and to‘soutenir l’esprit du parti pour le Roi’.100 Rochechouart con-tinued to work for a restoration, meeting royalists from Paris,sending an agent to Hartwell, distributing copies of LouisXVIII’s Declaration.101 Other royalist ADCs of the Tsar were aformer officer of Napoleon’s rival General Moreau, GeneralRapatel, and the earliest and most implacable enemy of Napo-leon, Count Pozzo di Borgo. The latter had been in correspon-dance with the émigré government since at least 1804, hadvisited Mittau in 1805 and had met Blacas and Artois in Londonin 1811 and 1813.102 Émigrés’ role in Napoleon’s downfallshows why, even at the height of his glory, he had been eagerto persuade other monarchs to dismiss them from their serviceand had issued a decree confiscating the goods of émigrés whoserved against France.103

While the attitude of Alexander I remained ambiguous, theBritish government was pro-Bourbon, encouraged by a publicopinion described as ‘insane’, and ‘nearly unanimous’ in itsopposition to peace with Napoleon. Through the Comte deGramont, a son of the King’s Capitaine des Gardes serving inthe Tenth Hussars, Wellington invited a Bourbon prince tohis headquarters in South-West France in December 1813.104In January 1814 conferences took place between Louis XVIII,Blacas, the Princes, the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool andEdward Cook of the Foreign Office. Artois was so confident ofpublic support that, if the government refused him a passport,he threatened to publish the fact ‘to the whole world . . . toFrance and to Europe’. In fact Liverpool, who had visited


Philip Mansel 19

Coblenz as a young man in 1791, and had many émigré friends,was personally sympathetic to the Bourbon cause.105 On 16January an intimate of the Prince Regent, Lord Yarmouth,wrote:

Bunbury is gone to Lord Wellington . . . to arrange for theappearance of a Bourbon there, and to say much on thissubject which Government are too much afraid of Whit-bread [a Whig MP] to put on paper.106

On 22 January 1814 Artois, Angoulême and Berri left for theContinent, with British passports. On 25 January, breakingBritish constitutional proprieties with the knowledge of LordLiverpool, the Regent summoned the Russian ambassador toCarlton House and informed him that peace with Napoleonwould only be a breathing-space. His entire life was ‘une sériede mauvaise foi, d’atrocité et d’ambition’: in the interests ofEurope, a restoration of the Bourbons, in whom the Regentpersonally took ‘un vif intérêt’, should be proposed to theFrench nation.107

What Louis XVIII had called the ‘vicious circle’ of royalistfear and allied inactivity was finally broken. In fact he had un-derestimated the strength of French royalism. In 1814 it neededonly allied victories and sympathy, rather than a public com-mitment to a restoration, to manifest itself. On 12 March theretreat of Napoleonic forces and the arrival of Wellington’sBritish and Portuguese troops, gave Bordeaux royalists thecourage to declare for Louis XVIII. The Duc d’Angoulême’striumphant entry into the city was decided in consultationwith, and following the orders of, the Duke of Wellington.108

On 17 March 1814 another former émigré, the Baron deVitrolles, arrived at allied headquarters in eastern France witha secret message from Talleyrand, urging a quick march onParis.109 By 23 March, Napoleon’s defeats and intransigence(he still demanded that Antwerp remain French), combinedwith the persistence and moderation of the émigré govern-ment, helped the allies decide publicly to support a restoration.On 31 March allied troops entered Paris. As at Bordeaux, theirarrival led, in some districts, to cries of ‘Vivent les Bourbons!Vivent nos libérateurs! Vive le Roi!’110

One émigré in Russian service, the Comte de Langeron, hadled the allied attack on Montmartre. Rochechouart commanded



the Russian-occupied zone of the capital, while an émigré inAustrian service, Baron von Herzogenburg, commanded theAustrian zone. The Tsar issued a declaration that he would nolonger treat with Napoleon I or any member of his family. On12 April, Artois, whose movements in eastern France, likeAngoulême’s at Bordeaux, had been decided in consultationwith allied commanders, re-entered Paris.111

In conclusion, while its policies and actions inside Francewere generally disastrous, the émigré government succeededin remaining an active element in European politics between1791 and 1814. Louis XVIII and Artois saw European rulerssuch as the King of Sweden (in 1791, 1804 and 1807); theKing of Great Britain and the Prince of Wales (after 1800);and the Tsarina and Tsar of Russia (in 1794 and 1807). Theywere actively, if not always consistently, supported by leadingEuropean statesmen such as Grenville, Canning, Romanzov,Panin, Armfeld, de Maistre, Gentz,112 Stein, as well as by émi-gré officers in foreign service such as Pozzo di Borgo, Rochec-houart, Gramont, and by public opinion in London andSaint Petersburg. The émigré government frequently tookthe initiative, for example, over the Pretender’s movementsin 1796, 1798 and 1807 and his Declarations in 1795 and1804. During the emigration, particularly after 1798, Russiaand Britain, enemies of the French Bourbons before 1791,replaced Austria and the Bourbon monarchies as theirsupporters: in letters and speeches Blacas and Louis XVIIIopenly attributed the restoration in 1814 to Russia andBritain.113

By consciously Europeanising the Bourbon cause, renoun-cing French territorial expansion, and taking the advice ofthe British and Rusian governments, the émigré governmenthelped ensure its survival and the restoration in 1814. It alsoanticipated the European dimension in French politics andculture in the period 1814–48, and the emergence of Britainas France’s principal ally. It is not surprising that, in his speechof 4 June 1814 to the Chamber of Deputies, Louis XVIII men-tioned the reconciliation of France with Europe before theconstitutional charter.114 Nor is it surprising that the Restora-tion government employed, not the ministers or the generals,but the diplomats, of the émigré government.115 In 1816 theFrench ambassadors in London, Berlin, Vienna and Naples (La


Philip Mansel 21

Chatre, Bonnay, Caraman, Blacas) were all former diplomatsof the émigré government. The Restoration government hadlittle choice, for there were few suitable Napoleonic diplomatsin 1814, on account of the French Empire’s policy of war andannexation. This was also the main reason for the return of theBourbons to France.

NOTES

1. Récit d’un Voyage de Paris à Coblenz, 1822, p. 132. 2. PRO PC 229/558 précis de la situation des affaires des Princes tant au-dehors

qu’au dedans February 1792. 3. See, for example, Baron F.S. Feuillet de Conches, Louis XVI, Marie

Antoinette et Madame Elizabeth, 6 vols. 1864–1873, VI, 239 Prince deNassau-Siegen to Catherine II, 30 July 1792.

4. AN ABX1X 196 Armée des Princes 1792. 5. Ernest Daudet, Histoire de l’Emigration 3 vols 1904–7, I 172, Provence

to Marie Antoinette, 20 February 1792. 6. Archives des Affaires Etrangères Mémoires et Documents France,

Fonds Bourbon (Henceforward referred to as AAE Fonds Bourbon)588 f. 2 Mémoire of the Princes to Gustavus III, early July 1791.

7. R. Nisbet Bain, Gustavus III and his Contemporaries, 2 vols. 1894, II, 122. 8. Comte de Bray, Mémoires, 1911, p. 219 Bray to the Grand Master, 30

September 1791. 9. Daudet, I, 97; AN 306 AP (Castries papers) 1721 f 21vo Calonne to

Castries, 6 March 1792. 10. See Baron F.S. Feuillet de Conches Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette et Madame

Elizabeth, VI, 82, 241, 398, letters of 8 June, 30 July, 1 August, 31October 1792.

11. PRO PC (Public Record Office, Calonne papers) 126/45 Bordereau desdifférentes sommes réçues . . . pour le compte de Leurs Altesses Royales lesPrinces Frères du Roy.

12. F7 6255 (papers of the Marquis de Lambert) Mémoire of Provence andArtois, 27 August 1792.

13. Feuillet de Conches VI 82 Provence and Artois to Catherine II, 8 June1792; Duc de La Force Dames d’Autrefois, 1933, p. 207, Provence toMadame de Balbi, 22 July 1792.

14. Feuillet de Conches VI 410 Provence and Artois to Catherine II, 29November 1792; Comte de Vaudreuil, Correspondance Inédite . . . avec leComte d’Artois, 2 vols 1896, II 116 Artois to Vaudreuil, 28 December1792.

15. AN O3 Papers of the Emigration government 2667, Etat au vrai desrecettes et dépenses; 306AP 1722 f 88 Romanzov to Castries 1/12 August1793.



16. Gérard Walter, Monsieur Comte de Provence, 1950, p. 226; Correspon-dance inédite du Baron Grimm au Comte de Findlater 1934, 208, letter of 15December 1796. In 1795 Russia asked Austria also to recognise LouisXVIII, see Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics,Oxford 1995, p. 148n.

17. AN 306 AP 30 Artois to Provence 27 April 1794. 18. AN 306 AP 30 Reflexions sur le parti à prendre par M le Régent, 1794 cf.

Comte V. Esterhazy (émigré representative in Saint Petersburg),Mémoires, 1905, 387 referring to Austrian ministers who ‘regardentl’abaissement de la Maison de Bourbon comme le plus sûr moyend’élèver celle d’Autriche’.

19. Earl of Minto, Life and Letters, 3 vols. 1874, III 92; cf. Karl A. Roider,Baron Thugut and the Austrian Reaction to the French Revolution, Princeton1987, pp. 88–9; Louis Wittmer, Le Prince de Ligne, Jean de Muller,Friedrich de Gentz et l’Autriche, 1925, p. 117n.

20. L.J.A. de Bouillé, Souvenirs, 3 vols. 1908–11, II, 33, Jaucourt to Bouillé27 June 1792. Mesdames Victoire and Adélaïde died in the house ofthe Spanish consul in Trieste in 1799 and 1800 respectively.

21. André Fugier, Napoléon et l’Espagne, 2 vols. 1930, I 70, 145n. In 1806Louis XVIII returned his insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece,which he had held in 1767, since Charles IV had appointed Napoleon Ia Knight.

22. Philip Mansel, Louis XVIII, 1981, p. 91. 23. André Lebon, L’Angleterre et l’Emigration Française de 1794 à 1801,

1882, p. 337 Lord Macartney to Grenville 27 September 1795. 24. Daudet, I 220. 25. Archives de Mouchy, A4 23, 5 Prince de Poix to Maréchal de Castries

30 August 1795. 26. Robert de Grandsaigne d’Hauterive, Inventaire des Mémoires et Docu-

ments France. Fonds “Bourbon”, 1960, passim. It was clearly an activelyacquisitive archive, since it contains papers of such enemies of LouisXVIII as Madame Gourbillon, his wife’s friend, and the Comted’Antraigues, purveyor of inaccurate information to the émigré gov-ernment, Spain, Austria, Russia, Naples and finally the United King-dom. The émigré government acquired their papers after theirdeaths in London.

27. Georges Bourgin, ‘Les Papiers de l’Emigration dans la sous-Série O3des Archives Nationales’, La Révolution Française 1933, LXXXVI, pp.311–16.

28. AN O3 2586 f 173 decision of 8 February 1798 re Comte de LaChapelle, ff. 2, 29 decisions of 1 January 1812. In 1813 the Comte deBruges, a Colonel in the British army, was promoted in the émigréarmy to be Colonel with rank from 1 January 1797: BM. Add. Mss.26669 f 15 Blacas to Bruges 25 September 1813. After the restoration,the f