Aristocrats into Modernity: French Émigrés and the Refashioning of Noble Identities

In the wake of the French Revolution, several thousand noble men and women sought refuge outside France. The emigration was a unique space in which ci-devants – as the revolutionaries called ex-nobles – could experiment with different practices and conceptions of nobility. The collapse of the traditional social structure under which they had been accustomed to exist and the extraordinary circumstances of exile allowed, and often compelled, several noble émigrés to adapt, or at least attempt to adapt, to the new world ushered by the Revolution. In order to find a new place and a new legitimacy, noble émigrés relied on a variety of practices and discourses. Some turned to landownership and argued that land was the foundation of the order’s moral superiority and socio-economic power. Others turned to commerce to rebuild their fortunes and re-establish their families on a favourable footing in post-revolutionary France. Noble émigrés also modified their social reproduction strategies to meet the revolutionary challenges and facilitate the survival of the noble family’s corporate distinctiveness. In spite of its dispersal all over the Western world, the émigré diaspora formed an imagined community tied together by cultural productions as well as by a common set of valued emotions and comportments meant to affirm their nobility, their national identity, and their resistance to the Revolution. The counter-revolution was not limited to taking up arms against the French Republic and émigrés waged war against revolutionaries in the Francophone pan-European public sphere. They articulated discourses that contested the revolutionary representation of the émigré as a decadent, treasonous aristocrat. This cultural battle continued after their return to France under the Napoleonic Regime and Restoration when they penned several memoirs. The revolutionary upheavals led to the development of a heightened historical consciousness. As a result, émigrés left numerous testimonies that helped them impose their specific interpretation of the Revolution – one that emphasized its destructive nature – and helped them fashion their individual and collective identities.Ph.D