Kelly Summers

Aufenthalt

November 2023

Forschungsthema

»Emigration and Re-migration during the French Revolution«

Projektbeschreibung

My book project, titled The Great Return: Émigrés, Refugees, and Revolution in France, 1789–1815, charts the complete life cycle of emigration, refuge, and re-migration across the momentous quarter-century that birthed modern politics. French efforts to police residency influenced the domestic and foreign policies of every government that held power between the fall of the Bastille and the Bourbon Restoration. The Revolution and its attendant wars dispersed unprecedented numbers of soldiers and civilians—many of whom, rightly or wrongly, were classified as counter-revolutionary émigrés and banished in perpetuity on pain of death. By means both legal and otherwise, however, the vast majority managed to return home within a decade of their departures. This wholescale repatriation—the speed and scale of which distinguishes émigrés from their Huguenot, Jacobite, and Loyalist predecessors—was neither smooth nor inevitable. This was evidenced by the twists and turns of the so-called Calais Affair, a cause célèbre involving a regiment of shipwrecked émigrés that will be the focus of my time at the FKH. In chronicling how the French nation vacillated between banishing and reintegrating the 150 000 citizens who fled during the revolutionary era, my research contributes to an interdisciplinary body of scholarship dedicated to voluntary and forced migration, political reconciliation, the rights and duties of citizenship, and the politics of exile and asylum.

Veröffentlichungen (Auswahl)

• »Fugitives from France: Huguenot Refugees, French Revolutionary Émigrés, and the Origins of Modern Exile», in: The Routledge Handbook of French History, hg. von David Andress (im Erscheinen).
• »A Cross-Channel Marriage in Limbo: Alexandre d’Arblay, Frances Burney, and the Risks of Revolutionary Migration«, in: Age of Revolutions (2021) [Aufsatz lesen]
• »Healing the Republic’s ›Great Wound‹: Emigration Reform and the Path to a General Amnesty, 1799–1802«, in: French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe: Connected Histories and Memories, hg. von Juliette Reboul und Laure Philip, London: Palgrave MacMillan 2019, S. 235-255.
• Review of Peuples en Révolution, d’aujourd’hui à 1789, hg. von Cyril Belmonte und Christine Peyrard, in: English Historical Review 131 [553] (2016.), S. 1541-1542.

Forschungskontext

Kelly Summers folgt einer Einladung von Frederike Middelhoff, Professorin für Neuere deutsche Literatur mit dem Schwerpunkt Romantikforschung an der Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main sowie Goethe-Fellow am Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften. Ihr Aufenthalt wir von Middelhoffs Goethe-Fellow-Projekt »Romantik und Migration. Eine Wissensgeschichte« gefördert.