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5 the french state and transoceanic emigration François Weil In the fall of 1835, the French minister of the interior heard for the first time of an emigration movement from the border département of BassesPyr énées to Uruguay. He was alerted almost simultaneously by the French consul in Montevideo and the local prefect in Pau, Leroy, that “a society had been formed in order to establish a French colony in Montevideo and its agents were recruiting peasants and various kinds of artisans in [Pau].”1 This set the state machine in motion. The interior minister immediately wrote back to demand more detailed information from the prefect, who forwarded the order to his deputy in Bayonne. Through the Foreign Ministry , the minister of the interior also requested more specific information from the French consul in Montevideo. Prefect Leroy repeatedly wrote the minister in Paris to ask for instructions and to report on the situation. Local newspapers began to discuss the issue. Bayonne’s Phare and Sentinelle des Pyrénées supported emigration; Pau’s Mémorial des Pyrénées criticized the movement. The person responsible for organizing these departures was Alfred-Auguste Bellemare, who acted as agent for Lafone, Wilson, and Company of Montevideo; Lafone, Robinson and Company of Buenos Aires; and George Barker and Company of Liverpool. Bellemare regularly wrote to the prefect and his deputy, published several pamphlets on the subject, and published several articles in the local newspapers. By the spring of 1836, Prefect Leroy deemed the situation serious enough to send a printed circular letter to the deputies and the mayors of his département. He acknowledged the existence of “rather lively polemical debates” in the local newspapers and officially deplored the emigration movement. The emigration question remained a matter of public discussion throughout 1836 in the Basses-Pyrénées, but by 1837 it disappeared from public notice and official reports.2 This incident is of interest because of how little we know about the ac- tual process of emigration from France. For reasons I have investigated elsewhere , historians often neglect or underestimate the importance of French migration overseas between the 1820s and the 1920s. Yet, hundreds of thousands of men and women elected to leave their home in France and emigrate to Argentina, the United States, or Canada. Recent works have only begun to explore and reintegrate their history into French history, migration history, or the history of their host countries.3 However, much remains to be done. One important aspect of this larger story that requires analysis is the attitude of the French state toward emigration. That such a theme remains poorly understood is hardly surprising given historians’ scant knowledge about the French state’s actual modus operandi.As Pierre Rosanvallon rightly notes, “It seems as though it is considered that the state has no true history, that its development is only a pure reproduction, ever enlarged, of an image created at the beginning.”4 In a sense, then, I also hope to use the lens of emigration to contribute to the much-needed investigation of the process of national and administrative construction at work in nineteenthcentury France. I want to argue here that, contrary to conventional wisdom, emigration from France was a matter of public debate and public policy in the nineteenth century. Scholarly interpretations of this subject are few. The earliest was the work of Gustave Chandèze, a civil servant at the Ministry of Commerce in the late 1880s and a major figure in the organization in Paris of an international conference devoted to public intervention with regard to emigration and immigration. The conference took place during the 1889 Paris World Exhibition, with Chandèze as its general secretary. He gave a paper on emigration agencies, which he published the following year, and embarked upon the preparation of a law thesis that he defended and published in 1898. In this book, he offered a broad comparative view of public intervention in emigration in various European countries, concluding that public authorities were incapable of either forbidding or developing emigration , and could only attempt to redirect the flow toward their colonies.5 According to Chandèze, emigration policy throughout Europe experienced three successive stages. Before the nineteenth century, European states tightly controlled emigration and granted emigration privileges only to certain individuals or companies. By the early nineteenth century, emigrants were allowed to leave as they wished, provided they fulfilled certain administrative obligations.Around 1850, Chandèze argued, things changed...

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