Policing the British in Revolutionary Paris

The French Revolution was a crucible of experimentation in modern state attempts to document foreigner status. Britons became objects of especial suspicion, culminating with a pathbreaking wartime mass arrest decree. In enacting this, the regime was confronted with diverse individuals for whom black-and-white national categories did not fit.

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..