New monograph by Dr. Matthias Winkler: Revolution und Exil: Französische Emigranten in der Habsburgermonarchie 1789–1815 (Revolution and Exile: French emigrants in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1789–1815)
The storming of the Bastille in July 1789 caused an exodus during which, in the course of just a few years, around 150,000 people left France. These emigrants expected that the revolution would collapse quickly and that they would soon return. Instead, the political radicalization in France and the unsuccessful military fight against the revolution from outside forced them to prepare for a longer-term exile. Many of these opponents of the revolution ended up in the countries of the Habsburg Monarchy, where some of them found refuge for years and even decades.
Dr. Matthias Winkler's actor-centred study examines the complex networks and entanglements between the revolutionary emigrants and the societies which received them. Based on a broad range of sources, he analyzes the emigrants' fields of action and charts how they asserted themselves under often precarious conditions. By consistently changing his perspective, he scrutinizes traditional clichés about revolutionary emigration and arrives at a chronologically, spatially, and socially differentiated assessment of one of the first major political migration movements of modern times. This monograph, which is based on the doctoral dissertation supervised by Prof. Dr. Xenia von Tippelskirch und Prof. Dr. Peter Burschel at the Department of History of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, has been published by Wallstein as volume 26 in the series Frühneuzeit-Forschungen (Early Modern Studies).
Dr. Matthias Winkler has been Scientific Officer in the Department Science – Policy – Society of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 2021 and is an Associate Scholar at the Chair of Early Modern European History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.