Aurélien Lignereux, Sciences Po Grenoble, CERDAP2
There's no doubt that the Dictionnaire des idées reçues, version 2019, would include an "Expat" entry, and this one would pleasantly line up clichés about the pool sociability, school strategies or eating habits of today's expatriates. In a world that is increasingly open to mobility and, as a corollary, subject to the standardization of lifestyles, the massification and multiplication of the forms and actors of expatriation have not done away with national habitus, which is precisely what expatriation highlights, nor with the clichés about these expatriates.
The age of social representations may have something to do with it, as they date back to the Napoleonic period, when several thousand French-born civil servants were appointed to the four corners of a Europe that was partly conflated with the Great Empire. Rome and Hamburg were just two of the 130 prefectures in France in 1811. In Naples or Kassel, didn't the sovereigns of Napoleon's family maintain around them French dignitaries, civil servants and military personnel? Didn't young auditors at the Conseil d'Etat administer Catalonia or the Illyrian Provinces?
Long at the heart of Napoleonic studies, the imposition of the French model on conquered or reunited territories, annexed or vassalized, has more recently been approached from a cultural rather than merely institutional perspective by the New Napoleonic History. The latter has focused attention on the relations, less univocal and unilateral than previously thought, between the center and the peripheries, as well as on intercultural contacts and conflicts within such an empire.
Extending this work by taking a social and family approach to the agents of the imperial state allows us to reconsider this unprecedented experience of administrative expatriation in all its dimensions, however anecdotal they may seem, but they shed light on cultural shocks, the construction of social identities and the emergence of the expatriate as a social type. In fact, Napoleon's entire gamble on the fusion and amalgamation of elites and peoples was compromised by the behavior of these Frenchmen, who had little desire to settle down for the long term and bond with the locals - who, incidentally, reciprocated in kind. France's missionary civil servants were therefore quick to disassociate themselves from the imperial enterprise, as Napoleon noted in a June 1805 letter to his son-in-law, Viceroy Eugène, regarding Méjan, former Secretary General of the Seine Prefecture, who had been promoted to head the administration of the new Kingdom of Italy, built on the French model: "You will have to suppress in him, as in other Frenchmen, the disposition that leads them to despise the country, all the more so as melancholy will join it; for the Frenchman is well nowhere but in France".
Remarks that the emperor often indulges in? Far from it far from it: whether it's a request for leave of absence for health reasons and intolerance climate, a husband's worried letter to his wife, or an official report denigrating an official report denigrating the unsociability of the natives - the term was or the nullity of their theaters, the archives are full of striking are full of striking illustrations of the dissatisfaction of these men despite positions they held. In May 1808, the Isère deputy Dumolard annoyed by the pretensions and impatience of Joseph Perrin, one of these Perrin, one of the many Dauphinois integrated into the Régie des Droits Régie des Droits Réunis (indirect taxes), promoted to senior controller in Alba town of Alba, Piedmont, where he enjoyed a comfortable situation homesickness:
"I hope, within a month, to get to Grenoble and stay there for a while. We'll be there together, and we will work together to accelerate your brother's re-entry and placement of your brother in the interior of our old France. It is a misfortune, no doubt, to wait when one is bored. however, that with 5,000 francs of salary in Piedmont, you can enjoy yourself and, if need be, a French cook, if the local dishes seem badly prepared. the local dishes seem badly prepared".
The lifestyle created by the difference in the cost of things and services (especially domesticity) would compensate for the tastes and habits. This is, of course, only one element among many others revealed by a long-term survey of French expatriates expatriates in Napoleon's Europe. Echoing the Coloniaux of the Third Republic, the survey follows a group of a group of 1,500 Impériaux, i.e. civil servants who were born French who were stationed between 1800 and 1814 in territories outside the the borders of 1792, from the conditions of their departure for a to the memory of an episode that combined the intimate ordeal of the intimate ordeal of disorientation with the gratifying feeling of having written history.
In preference to the usual corporatist or hierarchical divisions, it is the cross-disciplinary experience of expatriation that forms the basis of this cohort, bringing together prefects and simple customs officers, Ponts-et-Chaussées engineers and tax inspectors, judges and police officers. Conducted with the finesse of a prosopographic grain (the individual files provided by the File MakerPro database break down into almost 100 headings, from birth to retirement pension, including the tribulations experienced during the Revolution), this reconstruction of the careers and even the intimacy of these 1,500 civil servants gives substance to a category in the process of being constituted before the events of 1813-1814 dislocated it.
The fall of Napoleon did not, however, wipe out the relationships forged and the knowledge acquired during their expatriation - in short, a whole body of imperial social capital that these men intended to make the most of on their return to France. In fact, after having been the architects of a State-Empire on a European scale, the same civil servants were employed to complete the Nation-State within the framework of a France reduced to the borders of the Paris Treaties of 1814-1815.
Three phases structure the book that presents the results (Aurélien Lignereux, Les Impériaux. Administrer et habiter l'Europe de Napoléon, Paris, Fayard, 2019, 432 p.). The aim is first to identify the now imperial market for public-sector jobs, highlighting the opportunities and tensions created by the interplay of state supply and social demand, as well as the misunderstandings generated by the gap between applicants' prior knowledge of the area or their abilities and local realities or useful skills, in the absence of recruitment channels other than patronage.
We then propose an anthropology of expatriates, through an immersion in family correspondence, attentive to daily life, language problems and the place of women in this context. Weighing up all aspects of expatriation in this way means that we can no longer be fooled by the imperialism that the Imperials displayed in their dealings with the government.
Finally, the third part sheds light on the repatriation of these civil servants, the reintegration of some, the retraining or retirement of others, and the conclusions they draw from their experience. In the political arena, for example, some Imperials became Patriotes, and these practitioners of the right of one people to dispose of others became defenders of the right of peoples to dispose of themselves, while pushing for a global rebound in French expansionism. Armed with the knowledge they had acquired, some Imperials set themselves up as experts on neighboring countries. In any case, all of them were custodians of a memory of the empire, nurtured by their social practices and passed on to those close to them, which was not confused with the Napoleonic gesture and which, despite everything, contributed to making Europe better known to the French.