(Emigré newspapers and the French exile community, 1792-1814)

This chapter propounds a functional model for studying the role and effectiveness of the primary means of communication used among the French émigrés during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic era, and by exiles in general. The press in particular was one of the prisms through which the émigrés viewed the world and the world viewed the émigrés, especially since the émigré papers circulated widely in Europe and enjoyed a considerable readership among francophone elites. Thus the relationship between the émigré press and French communities abroad allows us better to understand cultural, intellectual and political aspects of the everyday life and reception of the émigrés. It also gives new insights into the historiography of the emigration