(Un-)Settling Exile

Abstract

In 1806, François René de Chateaubriand, whom the French Revolution had turned into one of the most-traveled Frenchmen of his time, had an unsettling encounter in Palestine. He was presented to Frère Clément, a former Capuchin from Mayenne who lived in a monastery next to the Church of the Nativity. The monk, refusing to adhere to the 1790 civil constitution of the clergy, had been deported to Spain and from there was sent by his order as a missionary to the Holy Land. There, he hoped to "obtain by the merit of my Savior's crib the power to die here without … thinking of a country where I am long forgotten." 1 The two émigrés, who had known the world from Niagara Falls to Jerusalem, were not the most extreme cases of mobility induced by the French Revolution. Farther east, we find Antoine de L'Étang, former master of the stables at Versailles. After his emigration, he took up the same function with the British East India Company at Fort William in Calcutta before moving into the service of the Saadat Ali Khan II in 1809, overseeing the wazir's stud at Lucknow. 2 As for Gabriel Louis Marie Huon de Kerilleau, former secretary to Louis XVI and, as rumor had it, illegitimate son of Louis XV, he first moved to England, where he enlisted as a private in the army, then joined the 3 (Un-)Settling Exile