‘L'île des bannis’: Jersey, Britain and the French Emigration 1789–1815

Abstract

The case of the Channel Island of Jersey is an important yet understudied part of the British Empire’s response to the French Emigration 1789-1815. During its high point in 1792-93, the émigré population in and around Jersey’s main town of St Helier was as large as that in London and one of the European centres of political migration. This article explores the complicated relationship between Jersey’s political institutions, the British military authorities in London, the British government and the émigré community. It shows how a brewing humanitarian crisis in the island prompted the British government to sanction subsistence payments in Jersey and enlist Royalist émigrés months before these policies were adopted in Britain. But British support was intimately bound up with the émigrés’ anti-Revolutionary military activities, as much as humanitarian concerns. The forced expulsion of most émigrés to Britain in summer 1796 resulted not from concerns about the wellbeing of the émigré community in face of imminent French invasion but concerns about the Royalist’s military loyalties. During the Napoleonic Wars, British policy towards the émigrés lacked coherence and was not categorised by overriding humanitarian goals, though such concerns played a competing one with strategic ones.