Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners 1789-1799

Michael Rapport begins and ends his book with references to two modern events revealing that "some of the central issues posed by the French Revolution are still relevant today: how to define the nation and its membership; the rights of citizenship and its limits; the balance between universal rights ... and national and cultural traditions" (vi). How foreigners were treated and how they survived is an aspect of the French Revolution which until now has not been thoroughly investigated. Rapport's approach is to examine chronologically each of the main phases of the Revolutionary period. Within each phase he analyses the consequences for a foreigner in his role as merchant, soldier, priest, diplomat, artist, government official, political refugee and student, traces the complex variations in the laws governing them, and through specific examples illustrates the effects of these laws. In the introduction to the book a survey of recent authors' attempts to deal with this question leads Rapport to state the aim of his book: "How foreigners were treated in practice might indicate how far the revolutionaries succeeded in aligning citizenship with nationality. This current work aims to show that there were not only contradictions within revolutionary ideology [....] but there was also a gap between what the revolutionaries said and what they actually did" (15).

Before embarking on the post-1789 events, the author begins with a description of the situation of foreigners during the Ancien Régime when "privilege defined relationships between the component parts of Ancien Régime society, and different foreigners enjoyed different benefits and confronted a variety of difficulties, depending on their occupation" (33). The Constituent Assembly was faced with dealing with these privileges when it began its reform of France. Foreigners were encouraged to become French citizens under some circumstances, without the stipulation that they speak French or be catholic. Foreign troops were retained and some foreigners were involved in French politics. This would of course change when war broke out and in particular after the overthrow of the monarchy when xenophobia became bureaucratized, creating a dilemma for foreign soldiers and merchants: "The fate of foreigners in France was increasingly linked to their political reliability, which meant that they would be at the mercy of the sweeping political tides which were gathering strength" (187-8). We follow the progress of the Terror when the most acute measures against foreigners were taken, instigated in part by "a decline of revolutionary cosmopolitanism and the heated expansion of xenophobic patriotism" (191-92). Foreigners of all nationalities, not just enemy subjects, were now equated with danger: the seizure of Spanish then British property took place, accompanied by expulsion and exclusion. But there were exceptions. Although "the nationalization of the war led to the harassment, imprisonment, and expulsion of foreign patriots for the simple fact of their nationality", even so "the authorities supported foreign refugees through the Terror" (238). The revolutionaries were too concerned with the economy to expel manufacturers, bankers, and merchants during the war.

Between Thermidor and Brumaire conditions for foreigners improved overall in spite of continuing exclusion and persecution, and the new struggles for survival faced by foreign clergy. Finally, in an epilogue, Rapport looks at foreigners under the Napoleonic regime when the focus shifted to a reinforced state power over the lives of foreigners, entailing an expansion of bureaucracy, familiar to any foreigner who has lived in France even today. In an interesting final chapter, Rapport comments on the problems associated with the 'Republican' tradition, summing up his previous arguments and making a link between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. He concludes by reiterating that our negative impression of the treatment of foreigners during the French Revolution must be modified. We must take into consideration "the revolutionaries' practice of quietly retaining the services of foreigners, [....] the protection of special rights such as those of the clergy and foreign regiments; the tolerance [....] of the political organization of foreign patriots; and the protection of foreign financiers, merchants, and artisans" (343).

Rapport has thus achieved what he had set out to do: he shows convincingly that, in spite of the vicissitudes they faced and the desperation of some of those in power, "the revolutionaries fell short of excluding all foreigners from participation in revolutionary politics and from the structures of the state. Nor did they, in practice, shut foreigners out from the broader social and economic life in France, even in the dark, xenophobic days of the Terror" (29-30).

Two small quibbles: a glossary of French terms would have been useful (what is "allobroges" for example), perhaps also a chronological list of the events of the Revolution (although the list of decrees in the index is useful); and I wonder why Lynn Hunt's book appears among primary sources in the bibliography. But overall this is a splendid book, packed with facts supported by extensive archival research. In amongst these facts he has managed to unearth are some which lighten the mood of this sombre period: "In the summer of 1790, among the debts of the twenty-one not-so-abstemious English Augustinian nuns of the rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor, an impressive 1,539 livres for beer was owed to Santerre, the brewer and future commander of the Paris National Guard" (57). At the beginning of each chapter, the author pinpoints specific occurrences which serve to draw the reader into the everyday fabric of the Revolution: for example, we relive in discomforting detail the arrest of Thomas Paine on December 28 1793 and learn that "the guillotine did not kill him, but the illness contracted in the squalor almost did" (189). Written in an accessible readable style, this book is a well-organized, refreshing and convincing look at an aspect of the Revolution which few historians have tackled.