PICTURE the scene: an important country — although one notorious for its corrupt and authoritarian government — experiences a revolution, then civil war. The violence spreads, crossing borders and destabilising a whole region. Tens of thousands are made homeless. The refugee crisis seems hopeless.
To make matters worse, these migrants are members of a religion that has long been associated with terrorism and threats to the British State. Within months, however, not only have thousands settled in Britain, but the Government itself is housing some of them and giving an income to others.
It is not Syria, of course. And it’s not now — indeed, it is not even very recent history. But it is history. This it is exactly what happened in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
We may know the story distantly from Baroness Orczy’s swashbuckling novel of 1905, The Scarlet Pimpernel, but it is worth looking at what actually happened, because the comparison between our response to the Syrian crisis and our forebears’ reaction to events in France after 1789 is telling.
Much like the attack on the Assad regime in Syria, the start of the French Revolution was greeted by many in Britain as an undeniably good thing. France had, after all, been at war with the British for much of the previous 100 years.
As the historian Linda Colley has argued, British national identity in the 18th century owed much to a powerful negative image of France: where the British were Protestant, the French were Catholic; where the British were free, the French were subject to arbitrary government; where the British were rich, the French were poor, crushed beneath a greedy aristocracy, a grasping monarchy, and their avaricious clerics. The Revolution was seen as a moment in which France was liberating itself — and becoming more like Britain.
ALL THIS changed as the Revolution grew more violent — and especially as it attacked the Church. The state seizure of church property in 1789, the abolition of religious orders in 1790, the demand that clergy take an oath of loyalty to the new regime in 1791, the murder of at least 200 priests in Verdun in 1792: all this made the Revolution look like an attack on religion. Far from being representatives of a corrupt state and a corrupting faith, those people fleeing the Revolution were now seen as victims and fellow Christians.
This remarkable change in attitudes towards French emigrés was apparent from the minute they stepped on British soil. In September 1792, the distress, poverty, and hunger of so many French arrivals prompted dockworkers in Dover to raise money for them. Other families later recalled the bravery with which sailors risked their lives in the rough autumn seas to save refugees whose boats had got into difficulty. By 1794, even the British Government had got involved: it was disbursing thousands of pounds to hundreds of men, women, and children.
Most remarkable of all was the welcome extended to those Roman Catholic priests and bishops who had refused to swear the oath of loyalty. As early as September 1792, the MP John Wilmot organised the Committee for the Relief of the French Emigrant Clergy, and by December more than £19,000 had been raised. Money poured in, and Oxford University Press even published 2000 copies of the Vulgate Bible so that they would be able continue to worship and pray.
Yet, with something like 7000 French priests living in England and in the Channel Isles by January 1793, it was clear that charity alone was not going to be enough. That year, the Treasury stepped in — and soon nearly 6000 priests were receiving state aid.
NATURALLY, this sudden turnaround was not universally accepted. There were misunderstandings, such as that the Englishwoman who greeted a group of Roman Catholic clergy with the question: “What have you done with your wives?”
There was also some hostility. In a strange echo of 21st-century language, the Duke of Buckingham complained that these priests had “swarmed into the streets of London”.
“It is impossible to walk a hundred yards in any public street here . . . without meeting two or three French priests,” moaned a popular newspaper in 1792.
The Government, too, was not just generous; it was also suspicious. In the 1793 Aliens Act, it sought to regulate immigration, requiring all emigrés to seek permission whenever they moved so much as a few miles. It was, as critics at the time observed, a form of house arrest. Worse still, it gave tremendous new powers to the State, enabling ministers to imprison, deport, or, in extreme cases, hang any person judged to be a dangerous “alien”, without recourse to law.
THE general attitude of the British, however, is wonderfully made clear in an anecdote from Somerset, where a church was convulsed by disagreements over whether to have a collection for these French priests. Many were opposed, but then a woman spoke up: “True they are our enemies, but they are poor and hungry for all that, and are in a foreign country: I will hold the plate myself.”
Almost 1000 of these clergy died in England. Dorchester Abbey, for example, has a memorial to a Breton archdeacon who had been, it says, “favorably Received by the English Nation”.
Most emigrés, however, returned after the 1801 concordat between Napoleon and the Vatican, leaving only 350 still here in 1815. Later, William Wordsworth would recall this moment in his poem on the “Emigrant French Clergy”:
They came, — and, while the moral tempest roars
Throughout the Country they have left, our shores
Give to their Faith a fearless resting-place.
It is hard not to wonder where that spirit has gone.
The Revd Dr William Whyte is Senior Dean, Fellow, and Tutor of St John’s College, Oxford, and Professor of Social and Architectural History in the University of Oxford.