French Protestants Research Articles

The singular French PCSK9-p.Ser127Arg gain-of-function variant: A significant player in cholesterol levels from a 775-year-old common ancestor

Background and aimsPCSK9 is a key regulator of LDL-cholesterol levels. PCSK9 gain of function variants (GOFVs) cause autosomal dominant hypercholesterolemia (ADH). The first described PCSK9-GOFV, p.Ser127Arg, almost exclusively reported in France, represents 67 % of the PCSK9 French GOFVs due to a founder effect. Few other carriers are reported in South Africa and Norway. This study aims to estimate when the common ancestor lived and to describe a cohort of p.Ser127Arg carriers. MethodsEight families and 14 p.Ser127Arg carriers were genotyped and phenotyped. Haplotypes were constructed using 11 microsatellites around PCSK9 and 6 intragenic single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). To add to the biological analysis, eight additional p.Ser127Arg carriers, 12 carriers of other PCSK9-GOFVs, 93 LDLR loss of function variant (LOFV) carriers and 49 non-carriers subjects were phenotyped. ResultsThe most common ancestor of p.Ser127Arg was estimated to have lived 775 years ago [95 % CI: 575-1075]. French Protestants exiled after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 AD likely brought the variant to South Africa and Norway. As expected for ADH subjects, carriers of LDLR-LOFV, the p.Ser127Arg, or other PCSK9-GOFVs showed significantly higher LDL-C levels than that of the non-carriers. Interestingly, LDL-C levels are higher for LDLR-LOFVs and for the reduced secreted p.Ser127Arg than for secreted PCSK9-GOFVs, suggesting a greater effect of the p.Ser127Arg. Conversely, HDL-C was significantly lower for LDLR-LOFV and p.Ser127Arg carriers. ConclusionsThis first report from a large cohort of PCSK9-p.Ser127Arg carriers provides observations suggesting a stronger hypercholesterolemic potential of the mutated pro-PCSK9 compared with the secreted mature protein. This work also provides additional data to support the association between PCSK9 and HDL metabolism, and molecular evidence that this variant appeared in France around 1248 AD (Graphical Abstract = Fig. 1).

Geneva’s entrepreneurial ecosystem: From historical roots to a sustainable future

ABSTRACT Geneva, renowned for its intellectual acumen, cultural heritage, and diplomatic influence, has become a globally recognized hub of innovation and entrepreneurship. This article explores Geneva’s evolution, highlighting Switzerland’s sustained economic relevance. The city’s entrepreneurial ecosystem exemplifies adaptability and resilience, presenting a narrative shaped by tenacity, religious innovation, and a commitment to fostering an environment conducive to business growth. Central to this development was John Calvin, a leading French Protestant reformer. His interpretation of Christianity established theological and social patterns in Geneva that profoundly influenced Protestantism and significantly shaped the modern world. By analyzing critical historical events and the strategic actions of Geneva’s leadership, this article argues that the city’s rise as one of Europe’s most entrepreneurial cities is rooted in these influences. It demonstrates how Geneva leveraged its distinct heritage and policy frameworks to create an environment where creativity, enterprise, and growth could thrive.

The legal boundaries of coexistence: reframing liberty of conscience as a tool of toleration in the French Wars of Religion

Abstract In histories of the Wars of Religion and narratives of rights and the rise of the state, ‘freedom of conscience’ is often treated as self-evident. However, this article demonstrates its contested meaning through French Protestant and Catholic reactions to liberty of conscience as granted by the monarchy in 1563, when its particular use as the legal framework for the toleration of Calvinists can be identified. As a malleable tool of toleration, this politicized liberty of conscience protected conscience in households, but separated it from the exercise of religion, a formula for pacification repeated in the 1598 Edict of Nantes. Not only did this usage conflict with theological interpretations of conscience, but it disrupted notions of French citizenship and reinforced royal power by framing heresy as sedition. Far from freeing individual consciences, this article concludes that royal liberty of conscience constrained the actions of Catholics and Protestants while enforcing their coexistence.

Warring Emotions: Anger, Settler Colonialism and Racecraft in Sixteenth-Century Florida

Abstract This is an emotional history of an emotional alliance of French and Indigenous warriors who united to avenge the Spanish massacre of the Huguenot Fort Caroline in Florida in 1565. In this alliance, Indigenous fury was normalised when it served French Protestant interests. However, Protestant representations of Spanish and Indigenous rage used for the black legend presently came to found racist arguments for structural violence in settler colonialism and American white supremacy that are gendered and rooted in bodies. To explain, this essay sets this revenge story within the logics of the sixteenth-century French emotional regime.

“The Protestants here are very particular: they used to be Methodists”: A Historical Reflection on French Methodism

ABSTRACT This article traces the history of Methodism in France since its introduction in the 1780s. It was always a minority into the larger Protestant minority, probably hampered by its being intrinsically linked to British Methodism. In 1938, French Methodism merged into the Presbyterian Église réformée de France, leaving only a few communities which are today members of the U.S.-based UMC. This article will first present the birth and implantation of Methodism in France, then its consolidation and salient features before concluding on the enduring, albeit silent, influence of Methodism in French Protestantism since 1939.

Citizenship, Civil Rights, and Jewish Emancipation in Revolutionary France

The emancipation of France's Jewish communities at the National Assembly marked an unprecedented development in civil rights for religious minorities. This project focuses on the intersection of French and Jewish history in an effort to expand our understanding of the French Revolution's long-lasting effects on Europe. It also provides context for the political and social framework of Revolutionary France as it pertains to civil rights and religious outlier groups, seeking to contrast the differing paths to citizenship taken by French Protestants and French Jews, identify the ideological influence of the Enlightenment on proponents of Jewish emancipation, and compare the lives of French Jews after emancipation to that of other concurrent Jewish enclaves in Europe.

Do you hear the people sing? Comparison of synchronized URL and narrative themes in 2020 and 2023 French protests.

France has seen two key protests within the term of President Emmanuel Macron: one in 2020 against Islamophobia, and another in 2023 against the pension reform. During these protests, there is much chatter on online social media platforms like Twitter. In this study, we aim to analyze the differences between the online chatter of the 2 years through a network-centric view, and in particular the synchrony of users. This study begins by identifying groups of accounts that work together through two methods: temporal synchronicity and narrative similarity. We also apply a bot detection algorithm to identify bots within these networks and analyze the extent of inorganic synchronization within the discourse of these events. Overall, our findings suggest that the synchrony of users in 2020 on Twitter is much higher than that of 2023, and there are more bot activity in 2020 compared to 2023.

With Whom Should One Worship? A Fresh Perspective on John Calvin’s Liturgical Theology of Physical Proximity and Spiritual Epidemic

COVID-19 has taught us that whom one surrounds oneself with has a profound influence on one’s well-being. In that light, does whom we worship with matter as well? John Calvin would in fact argue that the people we physically worship with have a great impact on our spiritual life. According to Calvin, if you simply worship with (who he deemed to be) the unrighteous group of people, you will lose your spiritual health or even endanger salvation. This is why he was so insistent on asking the French Protestants to leave France and join him in Geneva. What is striking is that worshipping with the right kind of people does not have that automatic effect. Rather, they have to actively engage in many beneficial activities together, encouraging and empowering one another. This is because, for Calvin, while unrighteousness itself is highly contagious, growing in a nurturing community takes conscious and purposeful effort. In this sense, Calvin explains that idolatry and unrighteousness were a spiritual epidemic that is spread physically, while true piety is acquired through a communal practice of many forms of spiritual exercises. This article will have many important contributions to the field of worship and faith formation. Most notably, while scholars have long been addressing Calvin’s view of active practices during worship which help faith formation, I will show that that is not all there is. Instead, I will demonstrate how even simple physical proximity in worship can have an impact on one’s spiritual growth in Calvin’s thought. Another important contribution of this article would be offering a clearer presentation of Calvin’s sacramental theology of body and soul. Scholars have long been arguing that, for Calvin, the bodily participation in a Roman Catholic mass while believing in (what was for him) the true gospel was a serious sin of idolatry and hypocrisy. My article will further develop this idea by noting that, according to Calvin, not only is it wrong to do one thing with one’s body and another with one’s soul but having one’s body in a negative environment is harmful to one’s soul. If one’s body is surrounded by other people who do not believe in the true gospel, it would have a devastating impact on one’s soul. In other words, for Calvin, the body and soul influence each other in a way that has sacramental and developmental implications.

In the Dungeons of the Château d'If: French Protestant Galley Slaves under the Reign of Louis XIV

In the Dungeons of the Château d'If: French Protestant Galley Slaves under the Reign of Louis XIV

War for God or a War for the Godless?

The French Civil Wars, or ‘Wars of Religion,’ were set primarily in the sixteenth century and enveloped France in a religious conflict. The Civil Wars were a series of violent periods between the French Protestant Huguenots and the Roman Catholics, Catholicism being the official religion of the French Kingdom. The ongoing struggle resulted in an escalation of civil violence and polarity between the religious affiliations, creating a divided French populous that carried out many atrocities, such as the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. The violence subsided in 1598 when King Henry IV enacted the Edict of Nantes, granting substantial conditions and support to the Huguenot population in France. However, this paper argues for the importance of categorizing the wars as ‘civil’ and not ‘religious.’ The dynamic situation involves more than religious differences, including a central reliance on community-based disputes, group association based on mass paranoia, and even political gain for those of the French nobility. It is important to understand the complexity of the Civil Wars. Denoting them as a religious conflict ignores the other civil implications which provoked aggression between French communities and forces.

The French Response to the Actions of the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches Commission on World Mission and Evangelism

AbstractSince 1822, French Protestantism has been engaged in world mission through the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (SMEP). In 1971, this mission society was succeeded by two organizations – the Community of Churches in Mission (CEVAA) and the French Evangelical Department of Apostolic Action (DEFAP), created by the French Lutheran and Reformed Churches. French delegates of SMEP or DEFAP were present at the six missionary conferences organized by the International Missionary Council (IMC) and the seven held by WCC Commission on World Mission and Evangelism (CWME) since 1910. This article offers a short description of each conference and the French delegation, analyzes the communication around the conferences in the French Protestant press, and reflects on the influence these conferences had on the practice of SMEP and then DEFAP. The authors show that it was during the 1960s, the transition period between SMEP and CEVAA, that the work of IMC/CWME had the biggest impact on the way French churches conceived of and practised mission work. Prominent church leaders played a key role in passing missionary ideas between French Protestantism and the IMC/CWME. But the difficulty of fully integrating world mission issues into the mindset of French churches prevented a deeper reception of the main mission concepts developed by the missionary conferences, especially in the last decades, in which the very significance of the French mission service DEFAP has been questioned.

The Huguenot Global Diaspora

The Huguenot Global Diaspora Rebecca K. McCoy (bio) Owen Stanwood, The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. xii + 300 pp. Notes and index. $40.95. Owen Stanwood's examination of the Huguenot refuge follows the historiographical trend of placing events, once viewed mainly as European, in a global context. Many studies have examined the impact of the Huguenots in specific national contexts in Europe: Switzerland, the Netherlands, the German states, and England. Others have focused on the Huguenot diaspora in specific regions of overseas empires, including the American colonies and South Africa.1 Edited volumes have addressed the issue of integration by including nation- or colony-specific articles but offer little direct comparison.2 Another approach that does move beyond national borders has been analyses of Huguenot networks, such as financial, mercantile, or familial networks.3 Stanwood integrates these approaches into an account that emphasizes the connections among the Huguenots "on the edges of empire" as well as within Europe. Stanwood sets his research in the context of an age of overseas expansion and mercantilism, one in which religious tensions informed international rivalries. His argument compliments recent revisionist examinations of the Refuge by challenging the image created by the Huguenots themselves, one that portrays them as emigrating primarily for religious reasons.4 He argues that empire builders, particularly the Dutch and English, were, indeed, horrified by the persecution of fellow Protestants and saw the Huguenots as victims. But he also demonstrates that they viewed the French refugees as industrious workers who could people and develop their overseas empires, particularly by producing wine and silk. The Huguenots promoted themselves as God's chosen as shown by their resistance to intolerance, but were far from responding only to religious imperatives, because they needed powerful patrons to survive. Driven by pragmatism, they also styled themselves as people with special skills in order to attract patrons. Stanwood argues against the idea, promoted in later memory, that the Huguenots were simply martyrs for religious liberty. Instead, he suggests they had had multiple motives as they parlayed their international mercantile and family ties across the globe to survive in an age of empire. [End Page 257] Stanwood organizes his book thematically, escaping the national framework that has characterized much of the historiography on the Refuge. His thematic arrangement also proceeds roughly chronologically, capturing continuities and discontinuities over the period from 1685 to the revolutionary period. Chapter 1, "The Beginning of the End of the World," chronicles the immediate impact of the Revocation and the ways in which the Huguenots shaped their image from the outset. Stanwood uses the pastor Pierre Jurieu, to illustrate the intersection of the creation of an engaging story of the French Protestants, an appeal to Protestants to aid the refugees, and the mobilization of an international Protestant network, one that linked merchants, pastors, publications, and families.5 Jurieu, based in Rotterdam, immediately emphasized the religious reasons for leaving France. He emphasized their martyrdom in leaving all behind for the faith, characterizing those who stayed and abjured as less true to God. Those who left had a special status and were among the elect. This is the image that persisted until recent revisionist accounts began to show the complexity of the Huguenot experience in the Refuge. Jurieu, however, had the immediate practical goal of inspiring Protestants around Europe to aid the Huguenots by providing safe havens and monetary assistance. Jurieu and other apologists were successful in raising awareness of the dangers presented by Catholicism. The political situation contributed; the 1680s were also the period of the Glorious Revolution in England and the victory of William III, who helped make England a leader in the Protestant world. Stanwood traces the movements of the Huguenots as they used existing networks to migrate from cities on the French Atlantic coast to Dutch and English ports, or overland to Geneva and from there to other Swiss cantons and onto the Netherlands, Brandenburg, and England. In so doing, they expanded the networks that were crucial to their survival and to the idea of a Protestant International. Jurieu also provides the ideological link between religious refuge and colonization. The goal was...

French Protestant Attitudes to the First World War: Pieces to Add to the Puzzle, A Response to Andrew Mein

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Kuyper en de laïcité

The article deals with Kuyper’s reaction to the French law on the separation between state and church (1905). Kuyper considered this law rather harmful to the Protestants’ interests and blamed the French Protestants for having agreed with this law. His reaction gave rise to a debate with French counterparts that revealed considerable cultural differences between the Dutch and French ways of conceiving the relationship between state and church. The French insisted on religious freedom, Kuyper insisted on the independence of the church. Moreover, the French considered the church as an integral part of the democratic structure of the state, whereas Kuyper considered the church as a sovereign body that represents an autonomous structure. The neutrality of the state is of primordial importance to Kuyper, whereas the French counterpart accepts that the state is neutral when it comes to the churches, but nevertheless has its own morality when it comes to the public domain. The original debate between Kuyper and his French opponents highlights therefore a cultural difference that is still very much present in modern times. The question arises therefore which of the two approaches is the most fruitful in the modern debates about the role of religion in the public sphere.

The Copy Room: Imagining a Huguenot Library in Early Modern London

This essay illuminates an unexplored intersection between recent work on early modern networks, book history, and the history of libraries. It focuses on a letter book, a continuous record of the French Protestant Church of London's correspondence from 1643 to 1650. The church officials who kept this unusual record found themselves imagining their library and its books as working parts in a vibrant information hub for the Huguenot churches in England. Using methods from microhistory (i.e., plausible inference) and literary criticism to uncover an alternative reading of the letters copied into the letter book, as distinct from the original letters, the article traces the beginnings of a lending library in the church officials’ thinking. In illuminating the letter book's impact, the essay places Huguenots, long treated as a marginalized minority, in the spotlight of a global history, which traces the movements of people, ideas, and goods across newly imagined spaces.

Feeding the Community: London’s Immigrants and Their Food, 1650–1800

Abstract Early modern London was a diverse metropolis, but we know little about the social lives of its migrant communities, especially how they fed themselves. Influenced by recent anthropology and sociology of food, migration, and ethnicity, this article examines specific communal food practices of two minority communities in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sephardic Jews and French Protestant refugees. Rather than studying how unusual foods marked these migrants as different, it explores how mundane food matters shaped social relations within these communities. The first section analyzes the system of shechita, the ritual slaughter of meat by Jews, by drawing on records of community leadership, account books, and printed texts on the subject. The second section examines two institutions established to feed the Huguenot poor, a soup kitchen in Spitalfields and the hospital known as “La Providence,” both of which left extensive records of administration. Though different, the case studies show how migrant groups, through specific food practices, constructed and experienced community within the capital. The article adds to our knowledge of migrant lives in the city and highlights the richness of institutional records from within these communities. It also suggests how food history can connect minority stories to British history more broadly.

International solidarity for the Anti-Fascist movement and ‘Raised Fist’: From the expression of the left-wing’s Anger in the Weimar Republic to the Symbol of French protest movements

적기 그리고 인터내셔널가, 노동절 집회와 함께 ‘치켜 뻗은 주먹’은 좌파의 집단 정체성을 표현하는 상징으로 자리 잡았다. 1920년대 나치에 대항하는 독일공산당의 상징적 행동이 반파시즘 국제연대를 통해 확산되는 과정에서, ‘치켜 뻗은 주먹’은 국경을 넘어 유럽의 여러 국가들로 확산되었으며, 프랑스 노동자 사이에 퍼지면서 좌파의 정체성을 표현하는 행동으로 자리매김했다. 1921년 3월 봉기(März Aktion) 직후 게오르게 그로츠가 표현한 독일 노동자의 분노는 노동자들의 집단적 동작으로서 ‘치켜 뻗은 주먹’의 영감을 불러 일으켰다. ‘치켜 뻗은 주먹’은 ‘붉은 전선’이라는 구호와 함께 나치 경례에대항하는 상징으로 사용되면서, 1920년대 독일 공산주의자들과 나치 사이의‘상징 전쟁(symbol war)’을 대표했다. 이 상징적 제스쳐가 프랑스에서 확산되는 계기는 파시스트들이 주도한 1934년 2월 유혈 사태에 대응하는 반파시즘운동이었다. 반파시즘 시위 중 희생된 노동자들을 추모하는 과정에서 ‘치켜뻗은 주먹’은 공산주의자들의 혁명적 열정을 상징하는 동작으로 자리 잡았다. 파시즘의 위협이 현실화된 상황에서 ‘치켜 뻗은 주먹’의 이미지가 묘사된노동절 집회 삽화가 공산당의 기관지에 실리면서, 이 동작은 프랑스에서 노동 계급의 정체성을 담은 상징적 제스쳐로 공인되었다.The ‘Raised fist’ became a symbol which represents the collective identity of the left-wing, with other emblems such as the Red Flag, the Internationale – a left-wing anthem –, and the May Day demonstrations. Developped by the German Communist Party against Nazis in 1920s, the ‘Raised fist’ crossed the border and spread out in several European countries. Finally, this symbolic gesture got popular among the French Workers. George Grosz who described the Anger of German Workers just after the March Action in 1921, had an effect on the shape of the ‘Raised fist’ as a collective gesture. Opposing the Nazi salute, the ‘Raised fist’ which accompanies a slogan ‘Red Front’ represented the symbol war between Nazis and communists in Germany in 1920s. In the course of its proliferation in France, the pivotal moment was the anti-fascist movement against the bloodshed in which fascists were involved in February 1934. In conducting a funeral for the victims of the violent demonstrations against the fascism, the ‘Raised fist’ became a gesture which symbolizes the revolutionary passion of communists. In the actualized threat of fascism, the May day illustration describing the image of the ‘Raised fist’ was published in the official organ of the French Communist Party and then this gesture was approved officially in France as an action which expresses the identity of the Working Class.

We Will Remember That We Came Together in Protest and Mutual Aid

The year of COVID-19 social distancing is a reminder that people can and will gather in person in mass acts of resistance and community care, even in a pandemic. This year highlights how theatres, theatre skills, and theatrical techniques can be a key part of community building and dissent. The examples of the Twin Cities in summer 2020; Portland, Oregon, in 2020–1; and France in spring-summer 2021 showcase the potential for theatre artists to use their skills and spaces to support protest work. I highlight these three examples due to my personal connections (I am from the Twin Cities; live in Portland and serve as a legal observer during the Protests; and, in my scholarship, specialize in French theatre and protest), due to the scale of these actions, and in order to amplify the pandemic protest and performance work happening in these places. Together, the efforts of Twin Cities, Portland, and French activists and artists showcase how, against a backdrop of mourning and anxiety, the pandemic has been a time of invigoration in mass protest, mutual aid, and coming together to try to build better worlds.

The Biblical Image of the Providential Ruler in the Protestant Propaganda on the Eve of the French Wars of Religion

French Protestantism has remained famous in the history of political thought mostly for its theories regarding popular sovereignty and the right of the people to resist and replace a tyrannical ruler. However, before the civil wars pushed them on this revolutionary path, French Protestants stressed the duty of obedience even in the face of manifest tyranny. The reasons for this were ideological, due to the significance placed on St. Paul’s assertion that all political power was divinely ordained, but also pragmatic, as Calvin and his followers were acutely aware of the danger of antagonizing the secular authorities. More importantly, they were fervently hoping for the conversion of France to the Reformation and, in their mind, the surest way such a process could take place was through the conversion of the king and the royal family. Therefore, Protestant propaganda of that time constantly urged the most important French royals to convert to the Reformation, and, for this purpose, they deployed a language full of references to the pious Biblical rulers who led their people towards the true faith—whom the addressees of these propaganda texts were advised to emulate, lest they incur God’s wrath. This paper aims to analyze the occurrences and the role of these references in the Protestants’ dialogue with the French monarchy.

The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1492 by Philipp Ther, and: Die Außenseiter. Flucht. Flüchtlinge und Integration im modernen Europa by Philipp Ther

Reviewed by: The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1492 by Philipp Ther, and: Die Außenseiter. Flucht. Flüchtlinge und Integration im modernen Europa by Philipp Ther Brent Peterson The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1492. By Philipp Ther. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. vii + 342. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-0691179520. Die Außenseiter. Flucht. Flüchtlinge und Integration im modernen Europa. By Philipp Ther. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017. Pp. 437. Cloth €26.00. ISBN 978-3518427767. Although Philipp Ther's The Outsiders is not, strictly speaking, centered on Germany, the book is filled with information and insights that make it extremely valuable to those of us who focus our attention more narrowly. Among other things, by looking at the much longer history of refugees in Europe, including refugees who arrived in Germany long before the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, Ther explodes the myth that migration began in 1955 when the first Gastarbeiter began arriving from southern and eastern Europe to keep the Wirtschaftswunder thriving. For Germany, the crucial date might be 1685, when some 50,000 French Protestants, confronted by demands to convert or flee, ended up settling in German lands. In addition to pushing the clock back on the history of people seeking refuge in Germany, Ther notes that it was this group, the Huguenots, who gave French and English the word refugee. The book starts considerably earlier, and the English version has the date that Ther regards as the original refugee crisis in its subtitle: 1492. Americans associate this year with Columbus, who set out from Spain, reached the Americas, and launched untold horrors on the indigenous population after 1492, but his voyage was only one result of the expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. The Jews of Spain and Portugal faced the same demands as the Huguenots, and, rather than converting to Catholicism, hundreds of thousands of Sephardic Jews fled to the Ottoman Empire, including to territory that became Turkey, the Balkans, and Greece, while others ended up in Amsterdam, Hamburg, various Italian cities, and even North Africa. The loss of its Muslim and Jewish communities impoverished newly united Spain culturally and intellectually, but the expulsion allowed Jewish communities to flourish in much of the Mediterranean basin for centuries, albeit with periodic outbreaks of antisemitism. In other words, despite what we might hear today, refugees have been [End Page 169] with us for centuries, and they almost invariably enrich the countries where they settle and impoverish those they flee. In a nutshell, The Outsiders is filled with histories that remain little known, especially to the general readers who could easily profit from the book, but also to scholars who might appreciate the broader context that national histories seldom provide. Ther not only sheds light on the history of refugees to and from Europe, but he also stitches these otherwise scattered historical accounts into a coherent whole and concludes with a reasoned plea for action. Rather than presenting a chronological overview, The Outsiders divides refugees into three sometimes overlapping categories: refugees who fled religious intolerance, those who were forced out or attracted by extreme nationalism, and political or ideological refugees. Of course, since religiously motivated flight began much earlier, since nationalism only reared its ugly head in the eighteenth century and since politically motivated flight mostly began with the French Revolution and reached new heights in the twentieth century, the book contains an implicit chronology. It also links and explains movements that might otherwise seem disparate. For example, the "exchange" of Greek and Turkish populations in the aftermath of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, part of what Ther calls "the 'long' First World War" (2) turns out to be strikingly similar to the flight and expulsion of Russian, German, Polish, Hungarian, and other populations when Europe's borders were redrawn after World War II. And, in addition to exploring the reasons behind refugees' flight, Ther's book differentiates itself from other broad treatments by playing close attention to how well refugees integrated themselves into the communities where they found shelter, if seldom a warm welcome. Ther is well aware that integration is a concept that requires considerable unpacking and, as a...