French Refugees Research Articles

Femoral Hernia with a Twist

In England, there were 4500 cases of femoral hernia for the year 2005-2006, accounting for 3.5% of all herniae [1]. The femoral hernial sac contents may be varied: preperitoneal fat, omentum, small bowel, or colon. In rare instances, the appendix can be found in the hernial sac, a reported incidence of 0.8%. Whether inflamed or not, the finding of vermiform appendix inside a hernia sac is known as Amyand's Hernia, and it classically refers to an inguinal hernia. Claudius Amyand (1681–1740), a French refugee in England, was one of the leading surgeons of his day; and held the accolade of being surgeon to George II of England. In 1735 he was the first to note the presence of a perforated appendix within the inguinal hernia sac in an eleven-year-old boy, and he subsequently performed a successful appendicectomy (Hutchinson, 1993; Franko and Sulkowki, 2002). Acute appendicitis in a femoral hernia is a rare, potentially serious complication. The presence of a vermiform appendix in a femoral hernia sac is termed De Garengeot hernia after Rene Jacques Croissant de Garengeot, an 18th century Parisian surgeon, who is quoted in the literature as the first to describe an appendix in a femoral hernia sac. It presents as an incarcerated or strangulated hernia, and the surgical management is different for the two conditions. Prompt surgery is needed to avoid complications. Awareness of this condition may help to avoid delay in management. We report a case of a patient with an acute appendicitis in a right femoral hernia presenting with a painful groin mass.

Gli emigrati francesi negli Stati Uniti durante la seconda guerra mondiale: un'eccezione?

- The French case is always mentioned as an exception, in the existing literature on cultural migration. This consolidated judgment is based on the fact that the exile of French intellectuals was marked by a very high number of repatriations after 1945. Starting from a review of the general traits of this experience, the author aims at overcoming this common place, starting from a different methodological assumption: he considers the figure of the refugee as an entity having a weak national identity, always subject to modification. The essay concentrates on political activities carried out by French refugees in the United States and on the cultural and scientific contribution they offered to the nation.Parole chiave: esilio, identitŕ nazionale, attivismo politico, École libre, gollismo, ritorno exile, national identity, political activism, École libre, Gaullism, homecoming

Edward Watts.In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780–1860.:In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo‐American Imagination, 1780–1860;Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815–1835

Edward Watts.<i>In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780–1860</i>.:In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo‐American Imagination, 1780–1860;Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815–1835

Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815–1835

Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815–1835

Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835

Bonapartists in the Borderlands recounts how Napoleonic exiles and French refugees from Europe and the Caribbean joined forces with Latin American insurgents, Gulf pirates, and international adventures to seek their fortune in the Gulf borderlands. The U.S. Congress welcomed the French to America and granted them a large tract of rich Black Belt land near Demopolis, Alabama, on the condition that they would establish a Mediterranean-style Vine and Olive colony. This book debunks the standard account of the colony, which stresses the failure of the aristocratic, luxury-loving French to tame the wilderness. Instead, it shows that the Napoleonic officers involved in the colony sold their land shares to speculators to finance an even more perilous adventure - invading the contested Texas borderlands between Spain and the U.S. Their departure left the Vine and Olive colony in the hands of French refugees from the Haitian slave revolt. While they soon abandoned vine cultivation, they successfully recast themselves as prosperous, slaveholding cotton growers and gradually fused into a new elite with newly-arrived Anglo-American planters. Rafe Blaufarb examines the underlying motivations and aims that inspired this endeavor and details the nitty-gritty politics, economics, and backroom bargaining that resulted in the settlement. He employs a wide variety of local, national, and international resources: from documents held by the Alabama State Archives, Marengo County court records, and French-language newspapers published in America to material from the War Ministry Archives at Vincennes, the Diplomatic Archives at the Quai d'Orsay, and the French National Archives.

Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835 (review)

Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835 (review)

Bonapartists in the borderlands: French exiles and refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835

Bonapartists in the borderlands: French exiles and refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835

Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835

Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835

Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835 (review)

Reviewed by: Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815–1835 Owen Connelly Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815–1835. By Rafe Blaufarb. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8173-1487-3. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xix, 302. $50.00. Rafe Blaufarb has written a remarkable book. It connects the small, frontier Vine and Olive Colony of French refugees and exiles near Demopolis, Alabama (granted land by Congress in 1817), to upheavals in Latin America, which were altering the power balance in the Atlantic world. The links are ex-Napoleonic officers seeking fame and fortune in the Americas. Thus it is both local and international history—serious and deeply researched, but containing bases for a dozen other histories and tales of adventure. Blaufarb has tapped all relevant archives and libraries, including the French Archives des Affaires Étrangères, Archives de la Guerre, and Archives Nationales: the Spanish Archivo Historico Nacional, the British National Archives (Foreign Office); and in the U.S., the Huntington Library, the American Philosophical Society, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the Presidential Papers of John Quincy Adams, and the Lefebvre-Desnouettes papers at the University of North Carolina Besides exiled Bonapartists, French immigrants included "Domingans," who had fled the slave revolution in the French one-third of Hispaniola (Haiti) in the 1790s, some regicides (who had voted for the death of Louis XVI), and others. Mostly resident in Philadelphia, the French formed the Society for Cultivation of the Vine and Olive and petitioned Congress for land on which to grow grapes and lay the groundwork for an American wine industry. In 1817, Congress gave them 144 square miles of land near the confluence of the Tombigbee and Black Warrior Rivers in Alabama. The government wanted a wine industry, but made the grant principally to populate the frontier and give added security to the Gulf coast—an area coveted by several great powers. What better buffer than a colony of Napoleonic soldiers? Unfortunately, few soldiers came to the colony, and all soon left. Nevertheless, a myth persists to this day that aristocratic Napoleonic officers and their wives founded the colony, but were defeated by the frontier conditions and left for more civilized places. In fact, the only prominent Napoleonic officer to settle there was General Count Charles Lefebvre-Desnouettes, who left after two years. The ranking Bonapartist exile, Marshal Emmanuel Grouchy, took a grant, but never visited the colony. However, for better or worse, the myth will almost surely survive, just as the images of Southern life in Gone with the Wind are imbedded in the minds of people the world over. Blaufarb shows that the French who established the colony were mostly Domingans. Two tables (p. 145) list the leading French and Anglo-American landholders in the 1830s. The former are all either Domingans or connected to them by marriage; the latter planters who had bought up grants, and ultimately intermarried with the French. Land was available because only 61 of 285 civilian grantees came to the settlement (p. 118), and most of them left, like the soldiers, beaten by the rough terrain, lack of roads or water transport, [End Page 1126] disease, blazing summer heat, and even a hurricane. Unable to grow grapes or olives—the soil and climate made it impossible—those who remained bought slaves and grew cotton. The failure of the colony made the Congress wary of such projects, and it refused similar requests from later immigrants, e.g., the Irish (p. 174). The author devotes a chapter to the Champ d'Asile (Field of Asylum or Refuge), in the disputed borderland between Spanish Mexico and the United States. The prime mover was the charismatic ex-cavalryman, General Charles Lallemand, who raised initial funds by persuading 33 of 65 soldier-grantees to sell their land for the benefit of his expedition. Perhaps 80 officers—French and others who had served Napoleon—Polish, Italian, German, et al.—established an armed camp in the Cayo de Gallardo, on the Trinity River. However, after a few weeks, food, water, and...

French-Caribbean Refugees and Slavery in German Protestant Maryland

The late eighteenth century saw the immigration of thousands of French refugees from France and its Caribbean colonies to the United States. An examination of one family of these refugees, Jean Payen de Boisneuf and his relatives the Vincendieres, reveals that the values that the refugees imported, such as plantation slavery and Catholicism, could be antagonistic to social norms in the regions they chose to settle.

The Macclesfield Silk Button Industry: The Probate Evidence

Most histories of the silk industry in England begin with the arrival of French refugees to Spitalfields in London, yet silk was prepared for embroidery in Macclesfield by the Middle Ages and the silk button trade was well-established by the early modern period. Through the study of probate evidence, this article aims to redress the imbalance in the historiography of the silk industry in England away from the focus on the activities of the Huguenots in the early modern period, and away from the silk weaving in order to show that the silk button industry succeeded not through technical innovation, but through marketing a luxury item in sufficiently small packages to make it accessible to a wide portion of the population. The silk button industry can be viewed as having laid the foundations in east Cheshire for the transformation of the silk industry into weaving cloth in the mid-eighteenth century.

Despotism without Bounds: The French Secret Police and the Silencing of Dissent in London, 1760–1790

AbstractThrough an examination of the policing of dissident French refugees in London between 1760 and 1790, this article contends that recent historians have tended to over‐emphasize the reforming nature of the Bourbon government in the decades prior to the French Revolution, especially under Louis XVI, and overlooked the more repressive and ‘despotic’ aspects of the regime. It reveals that the Paris police or French secret agents adopted a variety of clandestine methods in their attempts to silence dissident exiles, including attempts at kidnap, and allegedly murder. As much of this police activity was reported in the British press and French printed texts, both before and during the French Revolution, and several of the exiles were celebrated writers or future revolutionary leaders, it was widely known among informed contemporaries. The article therefore contends that the French revolutionaries’ allegations of despotism and suspicions of monarchic conspiracies were more deeply rooted in experience than recent historiography has tended to suggest. At the same time, reports of the attempts of the ‘despotic’ French government to suppress the activities of Frenchmen on British soil helped to reinforce a British national identity based on the celebration of the liberties France lacked.

The Presence and Participation of Laypeople in the Congrégations of the Company of Pastors in Geneva

The congregations in Geneva, held on Fridays, were instituted for the ongoing training of the ministers of the word and for the preservation of unity in doctrine. The sources reveal also that lay members of the church were present on a regular basis in the biblical study meetings. This essay is intended to identify as many individual lay participants as possible and to evaluate their social and economic status in the city as well as their relation to the leading ministers.The sources disclose that some artisans attended the biblical study group. More prominent, however, are the schoolmasters and physicians, lawyers and printers. Both Geneva-born citizens and French refugees attended the meetings. Although the lay members did not have a leading role, their presence and participation in the congregations helped shape lay understanding of Reformed theology.

The angle of incidence of Paul Roux's catechism - a study on the theology of a French refugee at the Cape: research

With the Belijdenis of Paul Roux we have an indigenous document of early eighteenth century theological reflection among some French refugees of the first generations at the Cape. It provides us with useful opportunities to analyse the theology of an important part of the history of the Huguenots. In this study, attention is given to the matter of the introductory question of this catechism book with regard to its importance as well as its content. It is argued that the angle of incidence of this catechism is pointing to a shift away from the reformed heritage towards the Aufkl?rung and Rationalism. Whether this applies to the rest of the Belijdenis in its entirety is not object of this analysis, though. Keywords: South African Church History, Suid-Afrikaanse kerkgeskiedenis, Paul Roux, Huguenots, Hugenote, Catechism book, Kategismusboek Acta Theologica Vol.22(2) 2003: 26-42

France and the German Refugee Crisis of 1933

Initially liberal in its response to refugees from Nazism in 1933, France soon closed its borders to them. Thereafter, refugees encountered a regime of exclusion and antipathy. Historians confront the problem of explaining the reasons for exclusion. Anti‐Semitism is often alleged to be motive‐force, but this misleadingly imposes on an earlier period our understanding of the Vichy regime and its anti‐Jewish legislation. This article investigates the nature of the French responses to those in flight from persecution in Nazi Germany in 1933, and questions whether it is proper to study this period in the context of events after 1940. It argues instead that French refugee policy in the 1930s emerged from the context of anti‐foreign measures implemented in response to the economic stress of the late 1920s. Its study of the crisis in 1933 identifies the pressures that shaped France's exclusionary policies and its antipathy to the plight of the refugees.

Keeping Up Appearances: Dress, Architecture, Furniture, and Status at French Azilum

Situated in northern Pennsylvania, French Azilum was a late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century community of elite French refugees escaping the French Revolution. Inhabitants of the isolated community expressed the need to reconstitute themselves as the privileged class of the ancien regime by attempting to dress, build their homes, and furnish them in a certain fashion to distinguish themselves as elites and to reestablish the social hierarchy of the ancien regime in a frontier outpost. In this paper, we explore how the settlers at French Azilum used architecture, furnishings, and dress in an attempt to “keep up appearances.”

Paul Vignaux; inspirateur de la « Deuxième gauche » : récits d'un exil français aux Etats-Unis pendant la Seconde guerre mondiale

Laurent Jeanpierre, Paul Vignaux, an Inspirator of the "Second Left": Perspectives on a French Refugee in the United States during World War II. Paul Vignaux's exile in the United-States during WWII is a decisive event in the genesis of the French New Left. With the assistance of American unions, the Jewish Labor Committee and German left dissident groups, Vignaux developed a network of information and funds between the United-States and French socialist resistance movements. He became a propagandist and an OSS agent. He deeply renewed his thought on labor unionism by studying the American paradigm of social relations. His trajectory shows that a constellation appears as soon as 1942 between social Catholicism, anticommunism and pro-americanism, which has transformed the French political field since then.

The Ghosts of Sigmaringen

There seem to be two ways to write about Sigmaringen, the German town where an incapacitated Vichy government landed in September 1944... This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol23/iss1/4 The Ghosts of Sigmaringen Philip Watts University of Pittsburgh There seem to be two ways to write about Sigmaringen, the German town where an incapacitated Vichy government landed in September 1944. The first is to cast the town as the site of an operetta, a fantasy world in which the Vichy government is seen as nothing more than a spectacle, a parodic version of its former self. The second option consists in describing Sigmaringen as a ghost town, a phantasmal city with its haunted castle frequented, for a period of 8 months, by the shadows of the men who had ruled France for four years. Historians today, as well as eye-witnesses of the time, Vichy journalists in exile, and novelists, all turn to a language of operetta and ghosts to describe Sigmaringen. While these metaphoric systems tell of the demise of a regime, they also ask us to reflect on the forms the takes when it revisits the present. Sigmaringen has a particular status among the sites of memory of the Second World War. As with Oradour-sur-Glanes or the Glieres Plateau, though perhaps to a lesser extent, the German town remains one of the memorable sites of France's war, remembered in historical studies and tour guides alike. It is invested with the will to remember that makes it a presence of the past in France's present, to retain Pierre Nora's phrase (20). At the same time, however, perhaps precisely because it is outside of France's borders and because it represents France's treasonous past, Sigmaringen remains today on the margins of the nation's collective memory; it has never become the site of an official, or even officious, commemoration. Sigmaringen remains between two worlds. It is both present and strangely absent, a transitional realm between France and Germany, between Main's reign and his demise, between the Occupation and the postwar period, between Vichy and the Vichy syndrome. Always men1 Watts: The Ghosts of Sigmaringen Published by New Prairie Press 28 STCL, Volume 23, No.1 (Winter, 1999) tioned in studies of the Occupation, Sigmaringen remains a reference in the appendices, a footnote in the last chapter of the war. From Petain's arrival on September 8, 1944 to April of the following year, Sigmaringen was the site of exile for some 2,000 French collaborators. Main was there, harbored in the castle of the Hohenzollern dynasty, as was Laval, though both considered themselves prisoners of the German authorities and both had desisted from their official government functions. Indeed, Main cut all ties with the German authorities and communicated only through his physician, Bertrand Menetrel. Fernand de Brinon was in Sigmaringen, and, alleging Petain's support, he became head of the French governmental commission whose putative role was to look after the approximately two million French men and women in Germany at the end of the war. Joseph Darnand, head of the Milice, held the position of Secretary of the Interior at Sigmaringen; Marcel Dem, editor of the collaborationist journal L'Oeuvre and founder of the Rassemblement national populaire party 'the National Popular Mobilization Party,' became Minister of Labor. The journalist Jean Luchaire was named Commissioner for Propaganda and Information, and under his direction, the French refugees published a daily paper, La France, from October 26 to April 7, and established a radio station that alternated programs on the Milice with musical recordings. Lucien Rebatet from Je suis partout was there, as were the pianist Lucienne Delforge, the actor Robert le Vigan, the Academician and ex-Minister of Education Abel Bonnard, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, whose novel Castle to Castle is one of the richest chronicles of this little bit of French history (Celine, Romans 936).' In Sigmaringen, the French put together the last collaborationist government of the war. The town, however, was also an antechamber to the purge courts; with only a few exceptions, all of the major figures in exile were tried and convicted for treason upon their return to France. Seeking to render the atmosphere of despair and artifice in this community, historians have used the metaphor of the operetta to represent Vichy's last days. One of the most spirited accounts of this period was written by Henry Rousso, several years before he published The Vichy Syndrome. In Petain et la fin de la collaboration, Rousso outlines the intentions of the Germans in forcing Main and Laval to go into exile recalling the intrigues of the French politicians and highlighting their futile gesticulations and false hopes. The constant image through these descriptions is the stage: Petain's 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 23, Iss. 1 [1999], Art. 4 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol23/iss1/4 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1453

The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments

Preface Joel Blatt Introduction Joel Blatt Chapter 1. Strategy and Scapegoatism: Reflections on the French National Catastrophe, 1940 Nicole Jordan Chapter 2. Marc Bloch and the drole de guerre: Prelude to the Strange Carole Fink Chapter 3. Martyr's Vengenance: Memory, Trauma, and Fear of War in France, 1918-1940 Omer Bartov Chapter 4. Domestic Politics and the Fall of France in 1940 William I. Irvine Chapter 5. Edouard Daladier: The Conduct of the War and the Beginnings of Defeat Elisabeth du Reau Chapter 6. The Missed Opportunity: French Refugee Policy in Wartime, 1939-1940 Vicki Caron Chapter 7. Prelude to Defeat: Franco-Soviet Relations, 1919-1939 Michael Jabara Carley Chapter 8. France and the Illusion of American SUpport, 1919-1940 William R. Keylor Chapter 9. In the Eye of the Beholder: The Cultural Representation of France and Germany by The New York Times, 1939-1940 Robert J. Young Chapter 10. Reflections on France, Britain and the Winter War Prodrome, 1939-1940 John C. Cairns Chapter 11. Fighting to the Last Frenchman? Reflections on the BEF Development to France and the Strains in the Franco-British Alliance, 1939-1940 Martin S. ALexander Chapter 12. French Defeat in 1940 and its Reversal in 1944-1945: The Deuxieme Division Blindee Philip Farwell Bankwitz Chapter 13. The Trauma of 1940: A Disaster and its Traces Stanley Hoffmann Bibliography Index

Religion, Discipline, and the Economy in Calvin's Geneva

Based on Genevan Consistory records from 1542 to 1564, this article argues that Calvin's teaching on the body social informed ecclesiastical restrictions on usury and other commercial innovations.The tendency of Genevan entrepreneurs to adopt new market strategies in order to profit from French refugees and other newcomers turned Calvin against the most salient instruments of the market. He feared especially for the fate of truth-the reliability of language as a means of social communication-in the midst of entrepreneurial ventures and schemes to commodify credit.Against temptations to individualism, Calvin promoted public admonition and excommunication as forms of corporate discipline.Throughout, he insisted that Genevans identify themselves as members of the body social. This combination of religious discipline and moral theory, grounded in the notion of communication and directed against the market, should cause us to rethink the Weberian formulation of the ethos of Calvinism and its relation to capitalism.