Transnational Lives under Scrutiny

Abstract

The October 1793 mass arrest decree aimed at the British- and Irish-born population in France, complemented by other policing initiatives, produced a mass of detailed documentation regarding individuals and groups for whom scant trace would otherwise have survived. The extant archival material allows a nominative list to be assembled of several hundred such individuals who were living in Paris. This chapter begins by amassing a quantitative picture regarding these people. It then examines the multiple contexts and dynamics which had brought them to the French capital in the first place. Finally, it turns to the polemics which emerged around the attempts of those arrested to contest the ascription of British subject status, and thereby to regain their liberty. Ultimately, arrest and imprisonment may be said to have created, rather than merely recorded, the essentialist and unitary national categories, and the identifiable expatriate groupings, to which they accorded such punitive potency.