In the years after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, thousands of disappointed revolutionary, radical, republican, nationalist and socialist exiles from across Europe sought asylum in Britain.
Aside from its physical proximity to the continent, the country had no significant immigration restrictions and the Aliens Act of 1848, which granted ministers power to expel individual foreigners, lapsed in 1850 without having been used.
This made Britain an attractive destination, as did its vaunted liberties of the press, of speech and of assembly.
As reaction swept the continent, other, smaller potential refuges such as Belgium and Switzerland were pressured by neighbouring states into censoring or expelling resident refugees.
In 1852 John Sanders, the Metropolitan Police officer often tasked with investigating exile affairs, noted of Britain's growing refugee population:
âThey cannot reside in any other country. [âŠ] They prefer coming to England.â The vast majority of these refugees went to London but a significant minority settled in Jersey.
Jersey was an appealing asylum for several reasons.
Most prosaically, it was comparatively cheap, and several destitute refugees relocated there from London for the lower cost of living.
For those determined to remain politically active, its location twenty-two kilometres west of the Cotentin Peninsula and its commercial connections to towns like Granville and St Malo made it an ideal location for smuggling propaganda, people and money in and out of Europe generally and France in particular.
For the French, the island, which had come to the English crown in 1066 as part of the Duchy of Normandy, was also more culturally amenable than London.
Official business, many newspapers and most place names were in French and Jersey's related local language, JĂšrriais, was still widely spoken.
Coinage in French denominations still circulated widely enough for L'Homme to be sold in francs and sous.
For Hugo, the Channel Islands were âdes morceaux de France tombĂ©s dans la mer et ramassĂ©s par l'Angleterreâ.
Jersey also had a long history of asylum, most famously sheltering Huguenots during the French religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and royalist and clerical émigrés, including the author François-René de Chateaubriand, during the French Revolution.
The early nineteenth century saw the arrival of exiles from further afield, including hundreds of veterans of the failed liberal and nationalist uprisings in the 1820s and 1830s in Spain, Italy and Poland.
A small contingent of Polish exiles led by SwiÄtosĆawski were thus already on the island when the revolutions of 1848 broke out.
For several exiles in the 1850s, the romantic appeal of following in the footsteps of these previous exiles was great, particularly for Hugo who read about Chateaubriand's sojourn in Jersey before he arrived.
#histodon #1848revolution #jersey
@RichardJMurphy
https://journals.openedition.org/diasporas/3738
NewsausArchiven
de.hypotheses
Chuck Darwin
UniversitÀtsbibliothek JCS
