Exil et conversion. Les trajectoires de vie d'émigrants tchèques à Berlin au XVIIIe siècle

Exile as conversion : some life stories of Czech emigrants in Berlin in the 18th century. Between 1717 and 1780, about 20 000 peasants and craftsmen emigrated from Moravia and Bohemia to Prussia. The reasons of their exile were at that time explained in different ways, but the religious motive always played the most important part in the contemporary representations. So did it in the 19th-century historiography, either in the confessionally related or in the academic one. In this way Crypto-protestantism in the Habsburg Monarchy and especially in the Czech Countries was established as matter of fact, rather than a notion likely to be questionned. After reopening this case file the article first analyses set of manuscript letters sent in about 1738 to East Bohemia bya group of emigrants, all of them coming from two neighbouring estates. Then it follows some emigrants' evolution, taking as a basis the Czech autobiographies they wrote 30 years later after joining the Rixdorf and Berlin communities of Zinzebdorf's Unitas Fratrum. The comparison speaks in favour of an hypothesis of confessional discontinuity; pointing out a permanent possibility of recomposed non-conformist religious identities, under the influence of Pietism as well as of family memory.Ducreux Marie-Élizabeth. Exil et conversion. Les trajectoires de vie d'émigrants tchèques à Berlin au XVIIIe siècle. In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 54ᵉ année, N. 4, 1999. pp. 915-944