French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution by Juliette Reboul (review)

Reboul's study undertakes a reexamination of the standard notion of Revolutionary emigration as the formation of a discrete community of exiles cut off from their hosts and from any cultural exchange with them. Instead, the work sets out to analyze, on a variety of levels, the ways in which the émigrés and the British natives interacted and intermingled. Eschewing the traditional texts left behind by financial and political elites of the French Restoration and the British establishment, Reboul focuses on documents for the most part not considered previously. Her extensive research took her to no fewer than nine archives and libraries in France and across Britain, and allowed her access to "classified adverts, passports, addresses and administrative forms [...], open letters and private correspondence, caricatures, printouts of parliamentary legislation translated and distributed to the exiled population, anti-emigration pamphlets" (xxi), along with diaries and memoirs. This unique array of texts allows Reboul to examine the émigrés from a variety of angles, from discursive structure, to ideology, to the "marketing" of their trauma. Reboul offers an excellent synthetic evaluation of the data culled from these myriad sources, and she is skilled at critiquing and contributing to the theoretical frameworks surrounding her topic. Some of the finest and deepest passages in the book are those where Reboul re-considers key terms and concepts related to those frameworks. The only aspect of the work that some readers might consider a shortcoming is the book's lack of extensive narratives of personal experience. While Reboul offers a great amount of detail to support her ideas, this detail often comes across as a series of bullet-point lists reworked into paragraph form. In some places there are too many details given from too many different sources, with no in-depth recounting or discussion of any one source at any particular time. This can render the book somewhat dry and at times can make the text feel stylistically jumpy. Consequently, certain readers may find themselves disengaged from the prose as the data points pile up. This is not a criticism of the book as such. Rather, it is an indicator of the types of readers who will find this book interesting and useful. Generalists, eighteenth-century specialists in other areas, and readers seeking a more vicarious sense of the émigrés' life experience will likely find that this book does not meet their needs. However, Reboul's text is an essential reference for the Revolution history specialist focusing on French emigration to Britain. Such specialists will definitely wish to consult this text.