From Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century
One sign that refugees as a category did not impinge on the European consciousness is the absence of a general term to designate them until the nineteenth century, the starting point for this study. Before this time, “refugees” almost exclusively denoted the Protestants driven from the French kingdom at the end of the seventeenth century. The third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1796, first marked a change: “refugees,” it said, was a term originally applied to the expelled French Protestants, but had since “been extended to all such as leave their country in times of distress, and hence, since the revolt of the British colonies in America, we have frequently heard of American refugees.” Yet there are few indications that the shift in usage noted in 1796 was widely adopted. Well into the 1800s, French and English dictionaries referred to “refugees” as the victims of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Those who quit France at the time of the French Revolution, the “joyous emigration” of monarchists loyal to Louis XVI, preferred the term “émigrés” and hardly considered their decision to leave France akin to the expulsion of the French Calvinists a century before. Until the second quarter of the nineteenth century there was no mention of refugees in international treaties, and states made no distinction between those fleeing criminal prosecution and those escaping political repression. In German there was no term for refugees until well into the nineteenth century. German dictionaries included the French word “réfugiés,” repeating the generally understood definition applying to French Protestants. Flüchtling, the modern term for refugee, was noted in 1691 as designating a fugitive or a “flighty” person — “profugus, homo inconstans, fluctuans, vagus, instabilis.” Heimatlos or staatenlos began to designate certain categories of stateless refugees after 1870, but only following the First World War did the word Flüchtling denominate them all.
The OED Third Edition (entry updated September 2009) has the following early uses of the more general sense, which do not contradict Marrus’s point (for which his Britannica quote is proof enough) but provide interesting context:
1692 W. Sherlock Let. to Friend conc. French Invasion 17 He [sc. James II] wanted nothing but Power to make himself Absolute, and to make us all Papists, or Martyrs, or Refugees.
1702 True Acct. Eng. Flying Squadron 21 Those..Deserters..were not forc’d to fly their Native Country, and become Refugees in Foreign parts, for the Security of their Lives.
1725 T. Lewis Origines Hebrææ III. vi. vi. 156 Whilst the Temple of Jerusalem stood, the Eastern Refugees sent their Presents to Jerusalem, and came thither from Time to Time, to pay their Devotions.
1771 H. Husbands Fan for Fanning Introd. p. vi Hence it was, that refugees from the western Governments, and from Connecticut, found a safe retreat in North-Carolina.
And a couple of citations for the American usage (“During the American Revolutionary War: a member of a group of guerrilla fighters active in support of the British cause, esp. in New York, and nominally affiliated with the Tories”):
1780 J. André (title) Cow-Chace, in Three Cantos published on Occasion of the Rebel General Wayne’s attack of the Refugees Block-House on Hudson’s River.
1781 J. Adams in J. Adams & A. Adams Familiar Lett. (1876) 403 I expect all the rancor of the refugees will be poured out upon Cornwallis for it.
It was my understanding that the term for these people was “exiles”.
The previous sentence from Fan for Fanning is interesting too: “And such has been the fate of New-Berne and other places in North Carolina, that for many years they were accounted an Asylum for all such as fled from their creditors, and from the hand of justice, and such as would not live without working elsewhere; men regardless of religion and all moral obligation.” It seems like it fits with states making “no distinction between those fleeing criminal prosecution and those escaping political repression.”
Indeed; thanks for finding that!
Yes, refugees first meant Huguenots escaping from France. It was in the Guardian a few days ago; now I can’t find it.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/englands-first-refugees
That’s what I get for not reading the Graun regularly.
It’s decidedly odd that the History Today article discusses Samuel Romilly extensively and John Roget briefly, but has not a word to say about their nephew and son Peter Mark Roget (or Pierre-Marc, he used both), who is probably the most famous of British Huguenots, literally a household name along with Webster and Hoyle, whose books became so famous that anyone could put their names on other dictionaries or books of card games and be guaranteed a good sale. (Johnson is very well known, of course, but no one else has dared to use his name on an unrelated dictionary that I know of.)
But perhaps Roget’s Thesaurus is not so well known in Rightpondia?
Roget’s Thesaurus is indeed well known in Eastpondia. Why shouldn’t it be at least as well known here as in Westpondia? He was born in London and died in West Malvern (incidentally, part of the same conurbation where I grew up).
One sign that refugees as a category did not impinge on the European consciousness is the absence of a general term to designate them until the nineteenth century
Probably because there wasn’t a regular system of citizenship, passports, and border regulation for refugees to be an exception to.
It doesn’t exactly not mention Roget’s Thesaurus, and I’ve known it since I was three or four years old and began to need alternate or substitute words and phrases, standbys to use as substitutes or replacements, but I wouldn’t call him as famous as Garrick:
https://stewartstaffordblog.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/step-into-the-darkness/
The 1692 quote seems to be only a slightly wider sense – you have a choice of being a Catholic, a martyr, or a Protestant-in-exile.
I suppose there would be a stage when people were aware of making an analogy with the people-who-are-called-refugees, before it broke free of that and became simply a word for anyone in a similar situation.
Yes, those were my thoughts too.
And 20th century went further and invented (at least the term, if not practise of) population exchange.
I did miss the mention of the book (is the name applied Over There to other thesauri, though?), but I read about Romilly and John/Jean Roget expecting at least half a sentence about P. M. / P-M, and was let down something horrid. Anyway, if he had been unknown or lesser known, he’d hardly be the first product of the Isles to be better known or more popular across the Sundering Sea. Investigating the question turns up John Oliver, Piers Morgan, streaky bacon (known as bacon simpliciter, as opposed to Canadian bacon, which Canadians sensibly call back bacon like the rest of the Anglosphere), the Girl Scouts/Guides (ask any American about Girl Scout cookies), and the expression You’re welcome in response to Thank you.
For an early, more general use of the word: Defoe, 1701, The True-born Englishman
(of Charles II)
The Royal Refugee our breed restores
With foreign courtiers and with foreign whores,
And carefully repeopled us again,
Throughout his lazy, long, lascivious reign.
is the name applied Over There to other thesauri, though?
I don’t think most of Them would know there are others, not in physical form anyway.
I was expecting at least half a sentence about P. M. / P-M
Yes, it’s a peculiar place to abbreviate the article, if that’s what happened – why not leave out the other Roget.
I can’t find anything about Huguenots baking Girl-Scout cookies but I’ll take your word for it. I did find some pics of buildings in Spitalfields with Huguenot connections, and I like this shop front in Artillery Lane – occupied from 1720 by Nicholas Jourdain, Huguenot silk mercer – for its cramped proportions and curved glass.
The True-Born Englishman
This gives an extra layer of etymological flavor to my favorite Stewart Lee bit:
The very last rhyme in The True-Born Englishman is cheat – great, BTW.
@David Marjanović, the eighteenth century’s greet/grate alternative pronunciations for great are discussed at
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/accentuating-the-positive-an-irishman-s-diary-about-how-ireland-put-the-grate-in-great-britain-1.2566721
Stewart Lee’s so great, if a bit of an acquired taste (he was for me). I doubt that he’s very well known in America. He writes a column on Sundays in The Observer (Sunday’s Guardian), but I’ve never seen one of his standup monologues transcribed before. You get his very distinctive style with the constant repetitions and you just have to add the soft, sardonic delivery.
the soft, sardonic delivery
How I envy you Brits for that “soft” feature ! I can do soft sardonic no more than I can name the kings of England.
I hadn’t been familiar with him, but that monologue is great. “Four hundred million years ago… Get back in the sea, finned cunts!”
I took a look at the google books n-gram viewer, and 1912 is the year where “refugees” became more common than “exiles” in their corpus, with a pretty consistently widening lead since then. (I used the plural to exclude “exile” in the sense of a state or condition rather than an individual in that state or condition.) “Emigres” was a quite distant third at all times. Other terms have also come in and out of vogue along the way, e.g. “displaced persons” in the WW2-et-seq era.
Because the early Huguenot influx to North America assimilated so thoroughly into the wider community after a few generations there are lots of WASPs like me who have some small portion of Huguenot ancestry but few who predominantly have that ancestry – whether it is reflected in the present surname is largely a matter of chance in terms of which branch of the family tree that small percentage happens to fall in. And of course sometimes surnames get clipped or otherwise Anglicized in funny ways, e.g. the legendary frontiersman Davy Crockett apparently descended from a refugee who at the time he departed France was known as Antoine de Saussure Peronette de Crocketagne.
Free-association poetry link: Travelogue for Exiles, by Karl Shapiro.
And of course sometimes surnames get clipped or otherwise Anglicized in funny ways, e.g. the legendary frontiersman Davy Crockett apparently descended from a refugee who at the time he departed France was known as Antoine de Saussure Peronette de Crocketagne
The spelling of Crocketagne (with -ck- for -qu-) invites scepticism and sure enough the story seems to be a crock.
As in the Crockett yarn though, America’s Huguenots seem to have come predominantly not from France directly but after having first settled in the Netherlands, England etc. Given that the demise of New France was ultimately the result of the numbers game, it might have made all the difference had the French authorities actively encouraged rather than prohibited Huguenot emigration to the New World (= if it wasn’t for Richelieu you’d be frogs).
@per incuriam: The Mayflower Pilgrims also famously spent time in the Netherlands before embarking for the New World. It was a fairly natural development for Calvinists in Britain and France to try settling in the Netherlands during that period. The colonization of eastern North America roughly coincides with the peak of the Dutch Republic’s period of economic and political ascendancy; it was the pinnacle of Calvinist civilization at the time. If English Puritans wanted to settle in a nearby Calvinist country, they could either go that backwater, Scotland, or across the water to the United Provinces. In France, the Edict of Fontainebleau forced Huguenot exiles out—and the Dutch were much more welcoming than the Swiss.
Some of the British and French exiles stayed in the Netherlands, while some of them (including the founders of the Plymouth Colony) decided to strike out for America (where, during part of that period of time, the Dutch, along with the English and French, had an important colonial presence around New Amsterdam and in Canada). Other Calvinists, of course, such as the larger group of founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, skipped the sojourn in the Netherlands and went straight to the New World—where they were often able to be at least as religiously narrow-minded as the Anglican and Catholic regimes they were fleeing.
“During the American Revolutionary War: a member of a group of guerrilla fighters active in support of the British cause, esp. in New York, and nominally affiliated with the Tories
Wiki notes that the group of Loyalist guerrillas led by the legendary former slave Colonel Tye operated from 1779-80 out of “a forested base called Refugeetown in Sandy Hook”. Tye and his black fellow guerrillas, known as the Black Brigade, worked with the British unit the Queen’s Rangers to guide foraging raids out of New York, and also raided Patriot forced labour camps, in particular those where they had formerly been imprisoned. Tye was killed during an attack on the Patriot officer Joshua Huddy, who had murdered several Loyalist prisoners of war.
Given that the demise of New France was ultimately the result of the numbers game
Americans tried to conquer Canada in wars of 1688–1697, 1702–1713, 1744–1748, 1754–1763, 1775-1783, 1812-1814.
Failed every time despite having necessary numbers.
The only success – British conquest of Canada in 1758–1760 – was achieved by the Royal Navy and regular British army (with some colonial support).
After 1815, the Americans continued to have (and still have) the same dominance in numbers over Canada, but the country is still not American yet.
Perhaps numbers don’t matter as much as we were led to believe in school.
Loyalist forces in New York were merely a minor thorn in the side of the Patriots after 1778. The Battle of Saratoga in the fall of 1777 and the mopping up efforts afterward ensured subsequent Patriot control of New York and environs. By 1779, the war had moved to the South, and while there were plenty of clashes in New York and New England later in the war, they were largely irrelevant from a strategic perspective.
Americans tried to conquer Canada in wars of 1688–1697, 1702–1713, 1744–1748, 1754–1763, 1775-1783, 1812-1814.
It’s a lot more complicated than that.
1688-1697: Nine Years’ War / King William’s War. Basically a set of raids over control of the fur trade. Nobody wanted conquest, least of all the colonial powers, who didn’t care about this theater at all.
1702-1713: War of the Spanish Succession / Queen Anne’s War. Another set of ecopnomic raids. The British seized N.S., Newfoundland, and the Hudson Bay area (also St. Kitts) at the end of the war because France lost the war in Europe, but British colonies further south gained little from that, as intercolonial trade was still illegal.
1744–1748: War of the Austrian Succession / King George’s War. Much heavier raiding. A French fortress was captured but returned, otherwise no territorial changes.
1754–1763: Seven Years’ War / French and Indian War / Guerre de la Conquête. Definitely a war of conquest, no debate there. France lost all its New World colonies (Louisiana went to Britain’s ally Spain) with some trivial exceptions like St. Pierre et Miquelon. This was a matter of numbers, with British colonists outnumbering French ones 20 to 1, plus superior British regular forces as you said.
1775-1783: American Revolution. The U.S. aimed almost entirely at military targets and did not attempt to seize and hold land. There was concurrently an attempt to persuade Quebec and NS to join the revolution. This met with some support, especially in NS, but landowners and merchants came out in support of the British. Most Canadians did not fight for either side, but many in Montreal and Quebec City resented the heavy-handed U.S. occupation. Occupying, much less conquering, Canada, was a minor U.S. war objective at best, especially since the British Navy was occupying Halifax, the best deep-water harbor on the coast, and could never be dislodged militarily.
1812-1814: Napoleonic Wars / War of 1812. Another attempt to liberate Canada from British oppression that Canadians deeply resented, though why the U.S. didn’t see that coming after the American Loyalists were sent into Canadian exile remains a mystery. The war was very unpopular in much of the U.S. The U.S. lost this war, gaining exactly none of their war objectives. That made it the first and last to be lost before Vietnam, and losing is often more instructive than winning. Attempts at liberating Canada were abandoned for good.
1839: The Aroostook War ended with no casualties except two Canadian soldiers injured by black bears.
1856: In the Pig War in B.C., nobody died except the pig.
1866-1871: Fenian Raids. Irish-Americans belonging to the Fenian Brotherhood, the American branch of the Irish revolutionaries of the day, tried to attack Canada to distract and pressure the British and get them out of Ireland. Irish-Canadians provided some encouragement but no effective support. After five days of inconclusive fighting, the U.S. President announced that the Neutrality Act (which prevents such private war) would be enforced.
Various further attempts were made (including an attempt to invade Canada by ordinary commercial railroads, in full Fenian uniform!) in the following years to no effect. The U.S. arrested as many Fenians as it could before they could cross the border, and shared intelligence with the provincial governments, enabling them to concentrate their forces. Nothing came of it all except a new sense of Canadian nationalism and strong support within Canada for Confederation. The U.S. Senate considers an Annexation Bill, but it does not pass.
In the 1920s, a purely hypothetical war plan for war with the UK from the 1920s became part of U.S. strategic planning. War Plan Red was declassified in 1974. Similar war plans on the Canadian and the U.S. side anticipated quick action and a negotiated peace.
In the second half of the 20C, Canada became a glacis state for the U.S., and military conquest was the last thing on U.S. minds, despite some paranoia among a handful of Canadians. Economic and cultural conquest was and is plenty. In any case, Canada has slingshots, peashooters, bears, and the famous General Winter, as the Mayor of Winnipeg pointed out in 2005 when asked about it.
Canadian fifth columnists in the U.S. amount to about a million, with perhaps 70,000 undocumented.
That surprises me.
Some are probably Mohawks, who don’t recognize the existence of the border per their treaties. They have five governments on the rez: Canada, the U.S., the Canadian Mohawk government, the U.S. Mohawk government, and the undivided traditional Mohawk government. (New York State, Ontario, and Quebec have no jurisdiction there.)
This was a matter of numbers, with British colonists outnumbering French ones 20 to 1, plus superior British regular forces as you said
It was the matter of plain incompetence of the French navy which failed to bring reinforcements to Canada and failed to prevent British bringing in very large regular forces across Atlantic.
Note that in the American Revolutionary War, the French navy did manage to break through British blockade and brought regular French army troops to America and then followed by inflicting crashing defeat on the Royal Navy preventing them from sending reinforcements to Yorktown.
As a result, the British lost the war and America became independent.
If the French navy showed same competence in the Seven Years War, Canada would have remained French regardless of numbers of colonists.
Are you saying the French lost the Battle of Restigouche because of incompetence? It’s not like they weren’t trying to resupply the troops.
It was the matter of plain incompetence of the French navy which failed to bring reinforcements to Canada and failed to prevent British bringing in very large regular forces across Atlantic
Bear in mind that the French were distinctly lukewarm about their “quelques arpents de neige”, in Voltaire’s dismissive phrase, whereas the British were hell-bent on conquest. In any case, the main war was in Europe and key to France’s strategy was a plan to invade England (which was lightly defended as a result of the UK’s overseas commitments). This would have resolved all the issues at source: forcing the British to stop bankrolling Frederick the Great while also undoing any military reverses in Acadia or Ohio at the stroke of a diplomatic quill.
The invasion fleet never set sail: having unburdened themselves of their Huguenots the French were presumably ineligible for a “Protestant wind” such as had favoured the successful Dutch armada of 70 years earlier. That Dutch invasion would certainly not have come about but for the business with the réfugiés.