The Société de Poitou et du Loudunois, 1714–1812: A Huguenot Fund in the Refuge

Abstract

Abstract This article presents an overview of the philanthropic society set up in the first year of the Georgian era to assist Poitevin refugees in London: its records, housed at the Huguenot Library, offer colourful insights into refugee life in eighteenth-century London, with a broad canvas of wealthy donors and often desperately poor compatriots evolving alongside each other within a structure of annual sermons and general assemblies, benevolence and poor relief. Financial challenges and a major fraud were weathered, and the society played a significant role within the network of other Huguenot charities operating in London. Like similar organizations and indeed Huguenot churches in the capital, by the 1780s its existence was undermined by the very assimilation its strict rules had sought to avoid, and its closure in 1812, through a lack both of donors and recipients of relief, had become inevitable.