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16 Return to the Homeland Our generals are getting ready to leave in a year, especially Grouchy, Clauzel if it is possible. Vandamme and Lefebvre will not stay either. However the latter is constantly busy on his large allotment, has many people with him and is having a lot of work done. They say that if his wife agrees, he will not go back to France for a long time. —Jacques Lajonie, Aigleville, March 2, 1819 Beloved France! Sweet homeland! May your sons thus all see you again! At last here I stand, And upon your strand, On bended knee I give thanks to heav’n. I embrace you, oh dearest land! God! How an exile must sigh. But now I’ll be able to die. All hail to my homeland! —Pierre-­ Jean de Béranger, “Return to the Homeland,” August 1819 Of 352 observable cases, 86 members of the Colonial Society—that is, one-­ fourth of them—left America to return to Europe permanently, in ways determined by the conditions of their departure: motivated by economic considerations or po­ liti­ cal harassment, those who had left voluntarily could return whenever they wanted; on the other hand, those condemned to death or banished, victims of the proscription edicts, were entirely dependent upon royal goodwill.The return of some other fugitives, such as Colonel Douarche, who was pursued by creditors, or Lajonie , sought for murder, was linked to the decision of a court of justice. Of the many returns, the first ones examined here are those cases of the thirteen exiles who were the most at odds with the king: six of the seven who enjoyed his clemency returned during the Restoration, while Desnoëttes, the seventh, perished in a shipwreck; two others returned during the July Monarchy; four died in the United 346 • Chapter 16 States. The chapter will conclude with several more ordinary situations, among them that of Jacques Lajonie. The King’s Pardon In May 1818, upon his return from a year in America with his father, Alphonse de Grouchy wrote him that he found France completely changed:1 reason and liberal ideas had replaced terror and partisan feeling. Public opinion wanted liberty and was asking that the banished be recalled.The government was ready to satisfy it, but how could it extricate itself from the position into which it had been placed by the double rigor of the edicts of proscription? A law that would wipe out the lists was out of the question, for this would be hard to justify to the majority of the deputies; but partial and gradual returns could be considered, beginning with those banished by article 2 of the July edict, some of whom had supposedly already been selected. Furthermore, the promise of the allied occupation forces to soon leave the country could probably favor a recall.2 Although hoped for since early 1817, the first returns were nonetheless slow in coming, as was royal pardon itself, finally granted on an individual basis. But it was indeed pub­ lic opinion that hastened the decision to put an end to the exiles of many outlawed men, in America and elsewhere. The Pressure of Opinion Opponents of the Bourbon regime, whether Bonapartist, liberal, or revolutionary, first seized upon the affair of the Champ d’Asile to affirm their solidarity with the Texas adventurers and repudiate the government that had exiled them. They found expression in the Minerve française, a newspaper founded by spokesmen of the Liberal Party3 that quickly became the principal voice of pub­ lic opinion, particularly of those favoring a constitution.4 Benjamin Constant was one of its most noteworthy editors. The others, and their contributors, had had trouble with the authorities because of their imperial past and their association with the Nain Jaune: its founder, Cauchois-­ Lemaire, was in exile in Brussels, and Étienne, editor in chief of the Journal de l’Empire, was outlawed in 1816 and expelled from the Académie française, of which Étienne de Jouy, imprisoned for a month for something he wrote, was also a member.5 Their colleagues in the Académie were also harassed: Aignan, the Emperor’s former aide for ceremonies and later secretary-­ general of the Paris prefecture, and Arnault, minister of pub­ lic instruction during the Hundred Days and, in 1816, expelled from the Institut to which Bonaparte had had him appointed seventeen years earlier. “Alms for Misfortune.”6 These men, whom the Restoration harassed, expelled, or banished for...

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