Policing the British in Revolutionary Paris

Abstract

How did normal British people engage with the French Revolution, promote its ideals, and then fall victim to the shift to Terror? Revolutionaries rejected traditional diplomacy, instead valorizing direct links between peoples. This gave foreign groups in France the perilous role of representing the ‘people’ of their home countries. British visitors and expatriates had long been regarded as assets to France and left largely unmolested despite inter-state conflicts. Yet over 1793 they became key internal enemies of France’s new republican government. This crisis saw the internment decreed of all George III’s subjects, with hundreds detained in Paris and many more across France—and some ultimately guillotined. Why did this happen, and why were British subjects the chosen target? What was the British presence in France at stake, and what were these interventions’ legacies? This book historicizes the idea of a foreign community and of transnational lives during a critical formative period for both British and French nation states. It argues that perceptions of Britons loomed large in French mentalities as the Revolution developed, and it uses expatriates’ personal histories and collective trajectories to illumine larger questions about foreigners in states of political upheaval and international conflict. Ultimately, it shows, Franco–British entanglements over the 1790s cannot be reduced to the Manichean stereotypes privileged by the Terror. In fact, this conjuncture also revealed much closer and less embattled relationships between nationals of both sides—and the existence of many individuals for whom black-and-white national categories proved a poor fit.