Simon Macdonald – författare

How did British people living in France engage with the French Revolution, promote its ideals, and then fall victim to the shift to Terror? Revolutionaries rejected traditional diplomacy, instead valorising direct links between peoples. This gave foreign groups in France a pivotal but perilous role in representing the 'people' of their home countries. Over the final decades of the French monarchy British visitors and expatriates had been regarded as assets to France and were left largely unmolested even during periods of inter-state conflict. Yet over 1793^–^94 they would become depicted as key internal enemies of France's new republican government. This crisis saw the arrest decreed of all George III's subjects, with hundreds detained in Paris and many more across France^—^and some ultimately guillotined. Why did this happen, and what was the British presence in France at stake? Using expatriates' personal histories and collective trajectories, this book historicises the idea of a foreign community and of transnational lives during a critical formative period for both British and French nation states. It shows how the revolutionary crucible revealed the existence of many individuals for whom black-and-white national categories proved a poor fit, and it illumines larger questions about foreigners in states of political upheaval and international conflict..

The recently-discovered letters of the wealthy counter-revolutionary aristocrat, Innocente-Catherine de Rougé, dowager duchess d’Elbeuf (1707-94), offer a vivid and exciting new eye-witness perspective on the French Revolution and the Terror. Hostile witness to everything about the Revolution, from the noble revolt, the storming of the Bastille and the peasant revolution in 1788-91, through to the outbreak of war, the overthrow and trial of Louis XVI and the Terror in 1791-4, the duchess’s letters to an unknown friend offer an unparalleled real-time narrative by an aristocratic woman struggling to understand radical change. Though tempted by emigration to the Low Countries, the duchess was unusual among her contemporary fellow-aristocrats in remaining in France down to her death in 1794, based in her two homes in Picardy and at the heart of Paris. As well as providing a detailed account of all she saw and read, the correspondence also portrays the anguished mental and spiritual odyssey of a highly devout octogenarian woman, who persisted inplangently declaring her outspokenly counter-revolutionary views even as she approached her own death in conditions of great personal danger. The letters constitute a remarkable example of female life-writing at the heart of the Age of Revolutions from a unique perspective.