French Refugees Research Articles

Banking Connects Trust and Anti-Trust: The English Clayton, American Clayton, French Refugee Turquandand British Native Bankers’ Wars in Banking-Cause Individual History

Banking Connects Trust and Anti-Trust: The English Clayton, American Clayton, French Refugee Turquandand British Native Bankers’ Wars in Banking-Cause Individual History

Enterprising Émigrés of the Channel Islands

During the French Revolution, thousands of French refugees migrated through the Channel borderlands. At least four thousand settled there. The Channel Island of Jersey served as the loci of migration where economic life operated under “refugeedom,” a polity both apart from and particular to state authority. Refugeedom—in its alterity—suggests a matrix of economic conditions, legal codes, and social relations that can explain the lives of people in the French Revolution’s emigration. This study of economic migration offers a way to reframe the French emigration as opportunism and resilience. Refugeedom serves as the analytic framework to understand economic migration, not only as a political crisis of displaced people in the midst of revolution—those seeking refuge from war, persecution, famine, and other hardships—but also as part of a strategy of survival, one that includes the economic migration of labor.

British Government Aid to French Émigrés and Early Humanitarian Relief during the French Revolution

Britain sheltered thousands of French refugees fleeing the Revolution. Relief organized on their behalf was unique at the time because it included both charitable and government-funded aid to temporary foreign residents. Resources were channeled through nongovernmental voluntary bodies in the French community and distributed by Jean-François de la Marche, the exiled Bishop of Saint Pol de Léon. The emigrants of the 1790s were agents of their own survival, but they also depended on diverse forms of support in host countries. That story has clear parallels in our own time. Eighteenth-century British relief also served as a precursor for subsequent humanitarian funding for victims of war and persecution.

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...

Between Charity and Protest. The Politicisation of Refugee Support Volunteers

This article examines how refugee support volunteers based in Britain and in France negotiate the boundaries between charity (or humanitarian) action and social activism since the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’. Scholarly literature has often separated charity and humanitarian action from social activism, as the former is seen as lacking the goal of social and political change that characterises the latter. The set of 147 in-depth interviews we conducted in different British and French refugee support charities and networks reveals the complex relationship between charity and protest. Through the focus on the moral dilemmas that participants encounter throughout their experience in the field, this article aims to highlight the ambivalences of their engagement as well as its transformative potential. Our analysis shows how participants develop new cognitive frames, emotions and interpersonal relations that transform their engagement and lead them to link charity/humanitarian action with broader objectives of social and political change. More generally, our analysis highlights the processes through which participants construct political narratives that aim to challenge state-driven policies and discourses of “migration management”. This article aims to contribute to the reflection about the informal character of the forms of participation analysed in this special issue, through the focus on the moral dilemmas and the “quiet” and “unexceptional” politics of volunteering.

Huguenot Contributions to English Pan-Protestantism, 1685-1700

Abstract Following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, hundreds of thousands of French refugees sought shelter in Protestant states like the United Provinces and England. In England, the influx of Huguenots contributed significantly towards the argument for greater pan-Protestant engagement with the European continent. Huguenot-authored pamphlets advertised Catholic barbarity, deepening pre-existing anti-Catholic sentiments and imbibing those sentiments with other anti-French concerns, such as Louis XIV’s supposed immorality and his striving for universal monarchy. Further, key Huguenot authors reinterpreted the Glorious Revolution as one synchronizing the country with its Protestant brethren. In so doing, the Huguenots supported William III’s commitment to the Nine Years’ War and increased the quantitative and qualitative arguments to carry out an expensive religious-ideological foreign policy, often against domestic criticisms in England that the outcomes of the war did not match the expense.

Refugees, Patriotism, and Hogarth’s The Gate of Calais (1748)

AbstractThe subject of this paper is a famous satirical painting of the French by the British painter William Hogarth (1697–1764). Hogarth’s The Gate of Calais has long proved to be an effective conduit for national sentiment. Deploying an inter‐disciplinary analysis, the paper argues that Hogarth’s satire draws on a cultural heritage that originated within French refugee communities writing to discredit politics ‘back home’. Understood from this perspective, the painting demonstrates how the cultural materials of a French ethnic minority can become woven into the meta‐narrative about Britishness and then, in turn, become generative of meaning for broader communities of transnationalized Protestants, not just for the British themselves.

A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis

Reviewed by: A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis Douglas R. Egerton (bio) A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World. By Kay Wright Lewis. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. Pp. 281. $64.95 cloth; $28.95 paper; $27.50 ebook) Even before the arrival of large numbers of enslaved Africans into the British mainland colonies, English colonists were experienced in the tactics of exterminatory warfare. In battles against Irish Catholics and Indigenous Americans, settlers learned how to eradicate some enemies while enslaving others. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Kay Wright Lewis argues in this provocative study, Americans mastered the rhetoric of race war, and a good many of both races, she convincingly demonstrates, regarded it as a serious threat. Even after emancipation, African American fears of racial extermination continued, reemerging in the writings and speeches of W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X. Southern whites and Caribbean masters learned that racially based conflicts often cut in both directions. As French refugees fled the revolt in Saint Domingue and settled in Charleston, they carried with them stories of the formidable capacity of Black soldiers. Those fears [End Page 341] nearly became reality in South Carolina in 1822 when former bondman Denmark Vesey orchestrated a plot to liberate the enslaved through bloodshed before sailing for Haiti. When questioned by one of his lieutenants over the necessity of wholesale slaughter, Lewis observes, Vesey replied by remarking that "nits make lice," a term earlier used by white settlers regarding southern Indians. These mainland revolts were initially isolated and quickly failed, the author notes, but thanks to the internal slave trade, stories of Vesey and Nat Turner traveled across the South and were passed from one generation to the next, keeping alive ideas of a war to the death. On occasion, Lewis's determination to fit all of her data into her larger theory appears forced. When discussing the late antebellum efforts of lower South fire-eaters to reopen the Atlantic slave trade, the author suggests that the debates—which in fact divided Carolina planters from their Virginia brethren, who wished to sell their surplus laborers to the fresh lands of the frontier South—"set the stage for future ideas about Black labor and Black disposability" (p. 141). Although it was true enough that white southerners united in claiming that abolition would result in a race war and the extermination of freedmen, advocates of the traffic in Africans insisted that it would reduce the price of enslaved labor enough for middle-class farmers to buy and carry bondmen into the western territories. Far from thinking in terms of "disposability," writers such as Louisianan James De Bow argued that modern steamships could quickly ferry captured Africans to the South with little loss of life. De Bow's editorials embraced the language of paternalism and insisted that Africans were better off enslaved by Christian masters than left on their own in the old world, a ghastly argument shared by a good many white Americans regardless of section. Lewis returns to form in her final chapters, however, as the Civil War years witnessed a rebirth of the language of extermination. Northern Democrats, who worried that Black military service would lead to demands for citizenship and voting rights, warned their Black neighbors that Confederates planned to chop captured African [End Page 342] American soldiers into "mincemeat, or [be] quartered and pickled" (p. 179). Conservative Democrats had their agenda, of course, but they were right enough in thinking that Jefferson Davis and his Congress threatened to enslave or execute Black prisoners of war. Even without orders from Richmond, Confederates at Fort Pillow in Tennessee and Marks Mills in Arkansas slaughtered both Black combatants and civilians. Lewis's prose is clear and strong and only rarely lapses into jargon. Although most of her sources are published rather than archival, her dense footnotes reveal both secondary literature and often obscure pamphlets and newspaper editorials. Wisely, Lewis lets these past voices speak for themselves through ample quotations, demonstrating the centrality of fears of mass extermination among both...

Impact of EU Refugee and Immigration Policy on National Law of the Member State: A Case Study of France

프랑스는 대표적인 이민·난민 수용 국가로 알려져 있으며, 난민의 경우 2015년 난민위기 당시 독일과 함께 난민을 적극적으로 수용하기 위해 이민할당제도를 주도했다. 이는 프랑스가 다른 EU 회원국에 비해 난민 수용에 더 적극적이며, 더 관대한 난민 정책을 실행할 것이라 짐작하게 한다. 하지만 프랑스의 총 인구 대비 연간 유입이민자 수나 최초 난민신청자 수 비율은 유럽 32개 국가의 평균에 미치지 못하는 상황이다. 2000년대 들어 EU 공동난민정책이 28개 회원국 난민정책에 대한 기준 역할을 하고 있으며, 각 회원국은 EU 결정, 규칙, 지침에 따라 국내법을 신설, 폐지, 혹은 개정하고 있다. 하지만 국가별로 국내법 개정에 차이를 보이고 있으므로, EU 난민정책에 따른 회원국의 국내법 개정 내용을 분석하면 해당 국가의 난민정책 변화를 살펴볼 수 있다. 본고는 EU 난민정책을 주도하고자 하지만 난민 수용에는 적극적이지 않은 프랑스의 경우, EU 공동난민정책의 국내법 적용 시 EU난민지침에 비해 난민에게 더 관대한 정책을 채택하는지, 혹은 더 엄격하게 법을 개정했는지 살펴보는 데 목적을 둔다. 이를 위해 프랑스가 EU 공동난 민정책에 부합하도록 국내 난민법을 개정한 결과와 개정 전의 내용을 비교 분석한다. 이를 위해, 첫째, 난민절차지침(2013), 수용조건지침(2013), 난민자격지침(2011) 등 EU의 주요 난민지침과 더블린 체제, 유로닥, 재정지원 관련규칙과 결정 등 EU의 주요 난민정책을 통해 EU 공동난민정책의 내용을 파 악한다. 둘째, 프랑스 사례 연구를 위해, 난민절차지침에 따른 프랑스의 국내법 개정을 전후 내용을 비교함으로써 프랑스의 난민 관련법이 EU 난민법에 비해 더 관대한 정책을 운용하는지, 혹은 더 엄격한 입장을 취하는지 알아본다. 분석 결과, 프랑스의 난민 관련법은 EU 절차지침에 부합하도록 개정되었으며, 개정된 내용은 EU 난민법에 비해 더 관대한 입장을 취함을 알 수 있다.France is considered as a country which is ready to accept immigrants and refugees, taking the lead of the ‘European relocation scheme’ with Germany during refugee crisis in 2015. Yet, proportions of the number of annual immigrant influx and first application for refugee status in total French population don’t reach the average of 32 European countries, including 28 Member states of the EU. French Refugee policy was considerably influenced since 2000s by the Common European Asylum System which made the Member States of the EU modify and amend their national law. This paper aims at searching for the impact of European refugee policy on French national law. Firstly, European refugee policies, such as Asylum procedures Directive, Reception Conditions Directive, Refugee qualification Directive, Dublin Regulation, EURODAC and financial assistance, are analysed. Then, Asylum procedures Directive and French national law, modified by this Directive, are compared and analyzed in order to know if French refugee law is more generous or more rigorous than European refugee policy. Findings are that French refugee laws are modified in confirmity with Asylum procedures Directive and more generous than European refugee policies.

III.2. La Croix-Rouge suisse, Secours aux enfants. Les grandes figures de Justes et le sauvetage

By recommendation of the government, the Swiss Red Cross merged with the volunteer organisation Secours aux enfants (Children’s Aid Society) at the end of 1941, even though it had been involved in this issue since 1917. Between 1933 and 1939, Mathilde Paravicini, on behalf of the Comite suisse d’aide aux enfants d’emigres (Swiss Emigrant Children’s Assistance Committee), gave approximately 5,000 children of emigrants safe haven in Switzerland. Young Swiss men and women sided with the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War alongside the Comite neutre de secours aux enfants d’Espagne (Neutral Assistance Committee for Spanish Children), a popular organisation known as Ayuda suiza. During the winter of 1939, they took care of Catalan, Spanish, French, and later Jewish children in southern France. By January 1940, they oversaw, as part of the Cartel suisse de secours aux enfants victimes de la guerre (Swiss Aid Association for Child War Victims), ten children’s homes, two infant care centres, and a nursery for mothers and young children. In the 1940s, nurses started setting up temporary health clinics in prison camps, where they took care of children and the elderly. The directors of the Swiss Red Cross, specifically the top officers in Bern, tried to stop young activists from saving Jews. Until the summer of 1944, Switzerland’s official policy did not accept refugees “solely for racial reasons”. The result was the tragic conflicts that occurred in southern France. The Red Cross and Children’s Aid Society failed to fulfill their humanitarian mission. The officers even refused to save 500 Jewish children from deportation to extermination camps. The organisation’s workers, however, stepped in to usher them to safety.The founder of the nursery in Elne, Elisabeth Eidenbenz, was recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem, alongside the nurse Friedel Bohny-Reiter, who saved Jewish children and adults at the Rivesaltes Camps, and her eventual husband, August Bohny, who protected Jewish refugees in the children’s homes in Chambon-sur-Lignon. Rosa Naf, Anne-Marie Im Hof-Piguet, Gret Tobler, and Sebastian Steiger, who saved adults and children in the La Hille children’s home, were also honoured at Yad Vashem, as well as Maurice Dubois, the director of the Swiss Aid Association for Child War Victims in southern France. The administrators of Yad Vashem declined to recognise the children’s home directors Ruth von Wild, Elsa Ruth, and Emma Ott, even though they also saved Jewish children and adults. In honour of her efforts to protect French refugees and children and bring them to safety in Switzerland, Mathilde Paravicini was awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government after the end of WWII.

Success in a Failed Campaign: The French Refugees of Jersey and the Making of an Abstract “Right to Refuge”

AbstractHistories of human rights tend to focus on defining moments, clear instances of universalism triumphant. If we hold to this model, the 1855 campaign on behalf of French republican—or democratic socialist—refugees was a failure. The refugees, expelled from Jersey in the Channel Islands for a libel of the queen, were little liked, and the campaign on their behalf did not yield the desired results, enabling them to return to Jersey. Yet, as this article argues, the failed campaign ought to be judged by different measures than the campaigners’ desired results, for we see in it the dynamics of refugee crises down to the present: an ongoing attempt to make refuge a universal norm in the face of persistent doubt that the refugees in question were “worthy” of staying. The French refugees and their supporters drew public attention to a right that they claimed derived from precedent, the British constitution, and moral principle. Though they did not succeed in their immediate cause, campaigners drew the admission even from naysayers that there was a “right to refuge”—but one the naysayers would not agree must be upheld at all costs.

Huguenot Refugees and the Meaning of Charity in Early New England

Huguenot suffering inspired fast days, prayer meetings, and collections among Congregationalists in Massachusetts and Plymouth in the 1680s. Ministers used a variety of frameworks to motivate compassion for the French refugees. Some preachers considered the French plight to be the result of an Antichristian attack, one that might soon spread to New England. Others assumed Huguenot suffering generally was a result of their sinful neglect of the Sabbath, and that compassion and honor should extend to those who suffered cheerfully while upholding disciplined purity. As suspicions mounted that there were French Catholic spies within the refugee communities and local harassment increased, the prominent Huguenot minister Ezekiel Carré advocated an alternate framework for Christian charity. In his remarkable sermon,The Charitable Samaritan, Carré shifted the meaning of charity from an apocalyptic framework to one centered on active mercy for the wounded regardless of sect or nationality. A friend of Carré’s and Huguenot supporter, Cotton Mather incorporated Carré’s interpretation of the Samaritan story into his magisterial Bible commentary. Though always contested, Huguenot practices and rhetoric broadened the conversation over the meaning of charity in early New England.

Welcome to Europe! Linking the EU Parliament LUX Film Prize and the impact of migration films to the emergence of a European public sphere

Abstract Migration films represent an emerging genre of film-making that is increasingly influencing European citizens and policy-makers alike. Through them, we are able to deconstruct negative attitudes about migrants and how they fit into an increasingly cosmopolitan and diverse Europe. In 2008, the EU Parliament created the LUX Film Prize, an award that recognizes European films that embody European traditions, values and integration. In 2009, the prize was awarded to French Director Philippe Lioret’s film Welcome, the story of a Kurdish migrant in France hoping to reach Britain by swimming the English Channel. Despite its fictional scope, it was highly politicized and controversial due to its critical approach of French refugee policies, specifically the L622-1 law prohibiting citizens from offering assistance to undocumented migrants. Following the EU Commission’s acknowledgement of the need to further involve citizens in debates on European issues, this article argues that the LUX Prize is an innovative medium to foster debate and discussion on matters of migration within a wider European public sphere. It has also provided a platform for those outside the political landscape to help shape the discourse on migration, thus reinforcing a more inclusive European civic participation on matters directly affecting them as citizens.

Interpretation, translation and intercultural communication in refugee status determination procedures in the UK and France

This article explores the interplay between language and intercultural communication within refugee status determination procedures in the UK and France, using material taken from ethnographic research that involved a combination of participant observation, semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis in both countries over a two-year period (2007–2009). It is concerned, in particular, to examine the role played by interpreters in facilitating intercultural communication between asylum applicants and the different administrative and legal actors responsible for assessing or defending their claims. The first section provides an overview of refugee status determination procedures in the UK and France, introducing the main administrative and legal contexts of the asylum process within which interpreters operate in the two countries. The second section compares the organisation of interpreting services, codes of conduct for interpreters and institutional expectations about the nature of interpreters' activity on the part of the relevant UK and French authorities. The third section then explores some of the practical dilemmas for interpreters and barriers to communication that exist in refugee status determination procedures in the two countries. The article concludes by emphasising the complex and active nature of the interpreter's role in UK and French refugee status determination procedures.

Lincoln Brigaders: Firsthand Accounts of French Camps, 1939

About 2,800 volunteers of the American contingent of the International Brigades, generally known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, served in Spain from 1937 to 1939. After the fall of Barcelona at the end of January 1939 many ended up in French refugee camps. This article draws on first-hand eye-witness accounts to paint a picture not only of the withdrawal from Spain after the fall of Barcelona in January 1939 but also of conditions within the camps in France.

Do the Facts Speak for Themselves? Country of Origin Information in French and British Refugee Status Determination Procedures

This article examines the place of Country of Origin Information (COI) in the British and French refugee status determination processes. It demonstrates that COI is crucial throughout those processes in both countries, and that there are important differences as well as similarities in the way it is treated. Following an overview of the refugee status determination process in each country, the article discusses different sources of COI and compares the uses of such information in both administrative and judicial procedures. It then compares the evaluation of COI in the UK and France, the role of COI in decision making, and the measures taken in both countries to try to improve the consistency of that decision making. More direct comparisons between the two national systems are then drawn with respect to their contrasting attitudes towards the Common EU Guidelines for Processing Country of Origin Information, and the different styles of field visit report generated by their official COI-producing organizations.

Reborn in America: French Exiles and Refugees in the United States and the Vine and Olive Adventure, 1818-1865

Reborn in America: French Exiles and Refugees in the United States and the Vine and Olive Adventure, 1818-1865

Reborn in America: French exiles and refugees in the United States and the vine and olive adventure, 1815-1865

Reborn in America: French exiles and refugees in the United States and the vine and olive adventure, 1815-1865

Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action by Susan J. Wolfson

Susan J. Wolfson. Romantic Interactions: Social Being and Turns of Literary Action. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. xiv+381. $70.00 cloth/$30.00 paper. pace of Susan Wolfson's editorial and scholarly contributions to our field belies what has emerged over course of a distinguished career as implicit motto governing everything she writes: Not so fast! There is much more going on in what we read, she claims, and much more of value, than our critical hay-bailers and mechanical threshers know how to reap. What is stubble and chaff for agribusiness of theory is for Wolfson where really valuable stuff is stashed. Like Wordsworth's solitary reaper, she gathers her harvest one armful at a time and, oe'r her sickle bending, spots all those violets half hidden from eye that had to be left behind by big engines of criticism because, when gathered in multitudes, violets gum up machinery. Unlike Wordsworth's solitary singer, however, Wolfson--a virtuoso of contextual close reading--doesn't need an interpreter: her message has been clear since publication of Formal Charges more than a decade ago, although its militancy seems to have diminished a bit as her audience of willing listeners has grown. From courtroom combativeness of that title to ghostlier demarcations traced in Borderlines to more reciprocal give and take of Romantic Interactions, Wolfson's polemic has moderated while her argument remains same. As she puts it in Borderlines, speaking of Mary Wollstonecraft's methodology of cultural interrogation, we ourselves diminished, as readers and critics and students, whenever we relax our commitment to proving (testing, uncovering) large points in local sites, and reading local events into registers (xix). Meanwhile, she has shown that even solitary reapers can fine-tune big critical machines traversing those wider registers to harvest violets without crushing them. No enemy to theory, Wolfson has proven to be one of its most knowledgeable technicians. Romantic Interactions carries on project of Borderlines in exploring subtle paradoxes of gender identification, both self-affirmed and imposed From without, informing work of long-canonical Romantic writers as well as more recent arrivals to our standard anthologies and syllabi. It is less a coda to its predecessor than a second volume of essays on similar themes. Divided into three parts, book examines, first, two female writers' engagements with male poetic tradition, next, close and mutually formative of William and Dorothy Wordsworth as siblings and writers, and last, infatuations, disenchantments, recriminations, rebuttals, apologies, and celebrity apotheoses of Byronism in aftermath of the Separation, before and after Lord Byron's death. Part 1 examines poetry of Charlotte Smith--chiefly Emigrants--and writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as Wollstonecraft's contentious afterlives in poetry extending from her death to present day. By interactions Wolfson means, largely, textual allusions and reworkings of male precursors rather than exchanges of contemporary coteries or literary sororities. Smith, for instance, finds her strongest political and gender allies among canonical poets, but reapplies, and sometimes transforms, men's best known lines for her own purposes. allusions her argument, says Wolfson (52). In bringing these interactions to light, author not only takes issue with some feminist critics' tendency to flatten gender politics of Emigrants, but also calls attention to continuous beat of Smith's republican heart: The urgent divisions, she writes, are not of nation but of class (44). These divisions most prominently displayed in Smith's ambivalence toward French refugees of revolution who, demanding compassion, had been so stingy with it while sitting atop ancien regime. …

This Bright Era of Happy Revolutions: French Consul Michel-Ange-Bernard Mangourit and International Republicanism in Charleston, 1792–1794 (review)

Reviewed by: This Bright Era of Happy Revolutions: French Consul Michel-Ange-Bernard Mangourit and International Republicanism in Charleston, 1792–1794 David Nichols (bio) This Bright Era of Happy Revolutions: French Consul Michel-Ange-Bernard Mangourit and International Republicanism in Charleston, 1792–1794. By Robert J. Alderson, Jr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. Pp. 288. Cloth, $39.95.) The age of revolution was the culminating phase in the history of the Atlantic world. The American, French, and Haitian revolutions drew their ideas and inspiration from transoceanic intellectual channels that Europeans, Africans, and American creoles had created over three centuries. Throughout the Atlantic community, thousands of obscure people spread a gospel of liberation, in the process fatally undermining the institutions (New World empires and the African slave trade) that had defined the Atlantic world since 1500.1 Among this group of "lower-level revolutionaries," as Robert Alderson calls them (173), were diplomats from revolutionary nations like France, who carried liberal ideas with them to their foreign posts. One of the more significant members of this cadre was Michel-Ange-Bernard Mangourit, French consul to Charleston, who served as a nodal point between the French and American revolutions. This revolutionary context, as much as Mangourit himself, forms the principal subject of Alderson's biography, a work solidly [End Page 335] grounded in French archival research and published American primary sources. Mangourit was a lawyer, Freemason, and journalist who in 1789 became an influential member of the French National Assembly. By 1792, when Louis XVI appointed him consul-general for the Carolinas and Georgia, Mangourit had also become a committed republican. Among his first actions in the United States was to help found Republican societies in Savannah and Charleston, which inspired the formation of other Democratic–Republican clubs in the lower South. The consul's intent was to counter the influence of antirevolutionary émigrés from Saint Domingue, but the societies would also become nuclei of an American "oppositional public sphere" (x, 2) whose constituents openly criticized their nation's elected officials, especially the Washington administration and its neutrality policy. While he was cheered by the Republican societies' toasts, speeches, and other professions of Franco–American friendship, Mangourit had a more substantial goal during his American sojourn than generating good feeling: He planned to open up a new front in the French Republic's war with European monarchies. In spite of the American proclamation of neutrality, Mangourit commissioned privateers to attack British and Spanish shipping, and in June 1793, on the orders of Minister Edmond-Charles Genet, he began planning a French–American invasion of Spanish East Florida. The projected attack, employing American gunmen and a few French warships, would have as its goal the creation of a new republic in Florida that could offer land to poor American farmers and ports to French privateers. In Mangourit's Florida both Americans and Frenchmen could merge republican solidarity with self-interest. However, despite the support of local American leaders, the Florida expedition ultimately depended on official French support. It collapsed shortly after the rise of France's Jacobin government, which, needing American grain (and thus good relations with the U.S. government) more than it wanted Spanish colonies, recalled Genet and Mangourit. During his twenty-month stay in Charleston, Mangourit came to view "aristocrats," whether émigrés from Saint Domingue or wealthy American supporters of the administration in Philadelphia, as his principal adversaries. He argued that the French Revolution offered the American masses greater opportunities for advancement and equality than did their own revolution, which had left the United States in the hands of a monarchical [End Page 336] president and his "degenerate" courtiers (166). The consul did, however, exclude one important group from the disaffected poor with whom he sided: African American slaves. While Mangourit personally opposed slavery, he found he could not win the support of local whites without repressing these views. Thus Mangourit refused to visit a quarantined French refugee ship from Cap Français, the Maria, because he feared the Charleston émigré community would accuse him of plotting with Saint Dominguan rebels, and he removed an antislavery clause from his plan for the proposed Floridian republic. While the...