Transfer of Ideas and Exile Sociability in Paris,1830–1848: A Localized Intellectual History

In the 1830s and the 1840s, numerous German, Polish and Italian writers and activists, who were looking for opportunities to discuss and publish their ideas without being censored or prosecuted, gathered in Paris. Some of their names—for example, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Adam Mickiewicz or Niccolò Tommaseo—still resound because of their enduring influence on the formation of political ideas or their national literatures. However, this habitat of émigré intellectuals included numerous lesser-known writers, who tried hard and sometimes in vain to keep their heads above water. Life in the French capital enabled them to meet one another, but it also confronted them with the local intellectual community and with other social groups, such as large communities of migrant workers from various national backgrounds.

Foreigners of all sorts and conditions were part of and criss-crossed the Parisian urban landscape. In 1844, the journalist Louis Desnoyers observed that ‘there are industries and professions which are, in Paris, almost exclusively practised by provincials or foreigners’ and that ‘it results from all the different reasons of eternal movement by foreigners that you won’t be able to take a short walk in Paris without encountering one of our exotic guests’. ¹ On a population that grew from about 860,000 around the year of 1830 to about 1,227,000 just before 1848, historical demographers have estimated their number between 47,000 in 1833 and 174,000 in 1847, which more recent research has shown is probably an underestimation. At the end of the July Monarchy, probably 8% to 10% of the Parisian population had German as its mother tongue. ² In addition, the city hosted numerous Italians, Brits, Spaniards, Romanians and Russians who had emigrated for various economic, cultural and political reasons, and about 500 of the 6,000 Polish refugees who settled in France after the Great Polish Emigration of 1831. ³ While Paris was not the only metropole to attract such large groups of foreigners—for instance, London had equally large communities of migrant workers and hosted many exiles—Paris was certainly among the most diverse cities of Europe. In this metropolitan world, exiled writers, thinkers and political activists sought a living, looked for opportunities to gain public reception and found places to gather and discuss their ideas. In due course, they both exemplified and contributed to shaping the persona of that ‘new type of itinerant figure’, which arguably played a crucial part in the development of political thought and activism in the first half of the 19th century and which the sociologist Richard Sennett described in an imaginative essay as the epitome of modernity because of its fundamental condition of displacement: the political exile. ⁴

This article studies the exiles in Paris as part of the urban landscape and metropolitan culture. It argues that their thought was shaped in important ways by the experience of Parisian exile, a term that encompasses not only being a stranger but also living in a burgeoning city, with a feverish political culture and numerous opportunities to meet and exchange with people from different nationalities and backgrounds. Moreover, Paris was not a random destination for exiles. Instead, it was the political and cultural heart of a country with a revolutionary reputation, had recently been the scene of a second revolution that had installed a more liberal constitutional monarchy, had a vivid salon culture and theatre life as well as a publishing industry that was regarded by the whole of Europe. While its urban culture evidently shared some features with those of other cities that attracted large groups of migrants, such as the aforementioned London, the smaller but equally francophone Brussels, or the port city of Marseille, the local specificities of every urban context both enabled and excluded particular experiences or interactions, and exiles thus had to adapt their behaviour and expectations accordingly. Therefore, this article seeks to use the Parisian case to apply and demonstrate a research perspective on exiles that connects intellectual history with urban history and migration history, that is, three approaches that until now have scarcely communicated with each other. By building on recent discussions concerning transnational urban history and calls to take into account space as a category of analysis in intellectual history, it proposes a localized intellectual history that studies how political thought emerges in interactions enabled by specific geographical contexts.

Transnational urban history has produced a growing body of research since it was identified as a promising domain of enquiry in a special issue of the journal Urban History in 2009. ⁵ However, as Claus Møller Jørgensen has rightly observed, scholarship on the topic has thus far been limited in large part to studies of urban planning and the city as a socioeconomic unit, which overlooks the transnational and intellectual-historical dimensions of urban culture. ⁶ Migration history evidently has a long tradition of thinking about the transnational circulation of people, goods and cultural representations. It has recently adopted perspectives from what is called ‘mobility studies’ in sociology, an approach that accounts for the experience of movement itself, as well as of place, and aims to study on an equal footing the motions of people as well as material and mental objects. ⁷ Yet partly due to its background in social history and the emancipatory commitment of many of its practitioners, mobility studies has made few connections to intellectual history, a field that tends to be seen as elitist. ⁸ The fruitfulness of studying flows of knowledge, material objects and movements of people simultaneously has, however, been proven in the history of science. ⁹ Unfortunately, in its turn to the study of practices and places of knowledge-making, this subdiscipline has severed its ties with intellectual history. ¹⁰ Intellectual historians, in turn, have their own, well-established tradition of studying the transfer of ideas from one context to another. ¹¹ However, the persistence of the nation and the state as the paradigmatic units for historical study despite the emergence of international and global history has all too often led to the tacit assumption that the relevant units between which transfer takes places are national or state-based. ¹² This is especially true in the history of political thought, which has for a long time been centered on the study of the emergence of the modern (nation-)state. ¹³ Another deficit of transfer studies is its focus on the national or linguistic contexts of ‘departure’ and ‘arrival’, which results in a conception of transfer as something unidirectional. Proposals to speak of ‘entangled’, ‘connected’ or ‘crossed’ history have sought to remedy this deficit by describing the exchange of ideas as a multisided process, in which exchange is considered a fundamental characteristic of the formation of ideas as such. In addition, this ‘histoire croisée’ recognizes that the transfer of ideas to another society has repercussions for their context of origin too. ¹⁴ Despite its merits, however, this programme has not yielded a satisfactory answer to a third major shortfall of much existing work on the mobility of ideas: its relative neglect of the actual social conditions under which the interactions occurred that led to the creation, reformulation and mutual exchange of ideas. A tendency to focus on the changes that ideas underwent in these interactions has often led to the oversight of the actual places of such occurrences, the actual modes of contact between people carrying the ideas, and how these inform both the ways in which exchange and interaction could happen and the results thereof. ¹⁵ This limiting tendency makes it difficult to go beyond the mere description of the trajectories of ideas and providing an in-depth explanation of them. Although terms such as ‘transfer’, ‘crossing’, and ‘connection’ seem to evoke notions of spatiality, the actual junctions and meeting places have received remarkably scarce attention in this historiography to date.

The desirability of an intellectual history that takes spatiality seriously as a category of analysis has been affirmed, albeit from very different perspectives, by David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. ¹⁶ Whether it be the global, the national, the far-flung or the very local, space should be part of intellectual-historical enquiry and the appropriate scale of it should be determined in light of the research question at hand instead of being taken for granted. It is the contention of this article that connecting intellectual history and the histories of urban culture and mobility offers in this respect a highly promising venture for the study of modern European political thought. It thus ties in with recent initiatives for applying microhistorical approaches to global history in order to remedy the fierce criticisms that global history, and global intellectual history in particular, have received. ¹⁷ If intellectual historians hold that ideas should be studied in context, if historians of urban culture consider urban space a site where innovative things happen and ideological conflicts are played out because people from diverse backgrounds meet, ¹⁸ and if migration historians consider human mobility as formative for new experiences and ideas, ¹⁹ then an approach that connects and enriches intellectual history with urban history and mobility studies is long overdue.

In what follows, the methodological opportunities of such an approach are empirically explored through three case studies: the salon of Marie d’Agoult, the Collège de France, and the editorial office of the German newspaper Vorwärts. Instead of starting from the biographies of particular exiles—an approach taken, for instance, by Lloyd Kramer in his essential study of Parisian exiles in the same period—this article centres on particular venues of exile sociability in order to spotlight how their social dynamics enabled specific types of contacts between people and particular kinds of intellectual exchange. ²⁰ The three locations largely differ in the kinds of sociability that they offered and the intended public. They are therefore very different places, in the sense in which the geographer Tim Cresswell used the term for locations that are not neutral points on the map, but socially constructed parts of space in which people imbue meaning, which they inhabit and structuralize with relations of power and exchange. ²¹ While a salon was a private venue organized by a noblewoman and frequented by a selected group of people, the Collège de France was a freely accessible public institution. The editorial office of Vorwärts, by contrast, was the almost exclusive territory of a small number of German exiles. The case studies have been chosen among numerous other possible ones because they show some important and partly Parisian-specific social contexts in which exiles could move, and because they were connected by the same individuals who visited two or all three of them. This latter aspect permits us to perceive how different places fulfilled complementary functions in the exiles’ lives and offered them different opportunities. These case studies do not pretend, however, to describe Parisian exile life as a whole: it leaves aside numerous other places where exile life happened, such as cafés and reading rooms (especially those with newspapers in their mother tongues), churches and theatres, or simply ‘foreign’ grocery shops and temporary housing facilities. Studying these additional contexts would be the task of a larger research that further pursues the programme proposed in this article.

1. The politics of salon invitations

Paris of the 1830s and the 1840s was a city under construction: old neighbourhoods were being redeveloped, completely new ones were built to house the expanding population and even though most boulevards were only constructed a few decades later, the first new arteries were already being broken through the existing street plan. The center of cultural and intellectual life was not—as in the 20th century—the left bank of the River Seine but the western part of the right bank, especially the present-day 8th and 9th arrondissements, where the areas north of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the brand-new Madeleine church (finished 1842) had been undergoing development since the second half of the 18th century. Here, in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the Chaussée d’Antin neighbourhoods, which were situated within walking distance from the new opera house in the Rue Le Peletier (built 1821, burnt down 1873), one could almost literally go from door to door to visit one fashionable salon after another. ²² A choice to settle in this neighbourhood was also a political one: in contrast to the Faubourg Saint-Germain on the other bank, where more conservative nobles lived together with an international community of diplomats, these areas had a rather progressive reputation and attracted dignitaries of the Napoleonic era as well as the rich and liberal parts of the bourgeoisie.

This is the site for the first case study. The salon of Marie d’Agoult was among those that were frequently visited by exiles who used these venues to inform influential figures in French society about their activities and create informal connections with people who could help them. The daughter of an émigré and a German banker's daughter, Marie d’Agoult (1805–1876) had grown up in Frankfurt. Her world thus had been internationally oriented, and German-oriented in particular, from the outset. Between 1835 and 1839, she had an affair with Franz Liszt, with whom she lived an itinerant life in Switzerland and Italy and had three children; one of whom would later become known as Cosima Wagner by her second marriage. Facing social exclusion upon her return to Paris, Marie d’Agoult made the best of her forced independence by starting to write under the nom the plume Daniel Stern. Although she declared later that the pseudonym was more or less improvised for the publication of her first art review, the choice of a male name in which she followed her friend, the writer George Sand (Aurore Dupin, Baronne Dudevant), and the German and hence cosmopolitan tinge seem well-considered and testify to her desire to carve out a new identity for herself. ²³ Once more or less settled again, she opened a salon in her lodging at number 10 Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, nowadays called Rue des Mathurins. The residence of Jacques Necker, the Minister of Finance at the beginning of the French Revolution and the father of Madame de Staël, had been just around the corner; Adolphe Thiers, the foremost liberal and reformist politician of the July Monarchy, also lived nearby. D’Agoult took care to invite especially visitors who reflected her cosmopolitan and German propensity.

Salon sociability was a core activity for the noble and higher middle classes: visiting a number of salons, most of them on a fixed evening of the week, represented a serious time investment, while this was also the means to keep informed of the theatre performances and concerts to visit. Due to this function of information dissemination and the platform they offered to people for them to read out new plays or give small-scale concerts, these semiprivate venues formed the basis of the Parisian public cultural infrastructure. Politically, salons in the first half of the 19th century became even more important than they had been in the century before, as Steven Kale has convincingly shown. ²⁴ In a society where political participation had become extended to the wealthiest layers of the bourgeois class, the politically active part of the population made up almost exactly the world of the salons. In addition, political parties, the typical modern institutions for political discussion and agenda-setting, did not exist at this moment in time. Consequently, salons served as an important place of extraparliamentary politics. In the same manner as new literary works, parliamentary speeches were tried out here. Moreover, as had been the case before the Revolution, the salon enabled women to participate in intellectual and political debates. Even if it seems exaggerated to ascribe significant secret political power to salonnières, as some 19th-century commentaries have insinuated, both the centrality of women in this institution and its centrality in French intellectual life of the period are undeniable. ²⁵ The salonnières decided whom to invite, and it was not uncommon for them to produce their own writings too. They thus determined the conversation on literary, artistic and political topics.

Participating in this world was also crucial for foreigners who lived in Paris. Ambassadors used them to gather diplomatic information, touring musicians socialized with their public, and some immigrant women opened their own salons that functioned as informal embassies and gathering places for the migrant communities. ²⁶ While the politeness of salon sociability permitted antagonistic opinions to mingle to a certain extent, many salons had their penchants and reputation, which were based on the invitation politics of the salonnière. Hence, it mattered to know where and how one could secure invitations. Conservative-minded exiles, among whom Spaniards, such as Juan Donoso Cortés, and Poles, including Adam Jerzy Czartoryski and Władysław Stanisław Zamoyski, sought the geographical and social proximity to the centres of power of salons such as those of the Duchess de Dino, the Princess de Lieven, and the Comtesse de Boigne. ²⁷ On the politically advanced side, the former French and American revolutionary, Marquis de Lafayette, gathered veterans from the 1820 revolutions in Italy, Spain and Portugal, as well as a large number of Polish refugees from the 1831 uprising, at his dwellings in the rue d’Anjou-Saint-Honoré. This made his house a hotbed for the European-wide revolutionary activities of what Maurizio Isabella has pertinently called the ‘liberal international’ of the 1820s and the 1830s. ²⁸ This enticing cosmopolitan spirit inspired some salonnières to open their doors to refugees and foreign writers and musicians as well. Evidently, most of the impoverished scribblers trying their luck in the French capital had no access to these exclusive venues of politeness and mondanité, because admission depended on the whims of the salonnières. For this reason, Delphine Diaz argues that foreigners in salons were a kind of curiosities with hardly any active role and were invited mainly for the sake of prestige. ²⁹ This ignores, however, the fact that some exile writers managed to participate in the world of the salons in ways similar to French intellectuals and writers. Their presence in salons allowed them to establish important contacts in the politically active part of the French population, connections they would otherwise have had more difficulties to build. Furthermore, even if, for instance, Frédéric Chopin did not present himself as a representative of the Polish emigration and was primarily invited into French aristocratic circles because of his musical genius, it can be argued that his playing of polonaises and mazurkas contributed to the sympathy for the Polish cause that was widely shared in French public opinion. ³⁰ In addition, exiles who frequented salons often had contact with other, less well-to-do members of their exile community too, and thus they acted as go-betweens between these communities and the French politically active class.

Although Marie d’Agoult's salon was not of particularly liberal reputation, the decoration of her apartment reveals at least some sympathy for politically advanced causes. A poem by the art critic, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, informs us that she had decorated a boudoir with a portrait of Goethe, the universal genius she had met as a child and admired ever since. It was surrounded by medallions of ‘some celebrated rebels’: the poets-cum-freedom fighters Lord Byron, Félicité de Lamennais and Adam Mickiewicz. ³¹ Serious and politically independent intellectual discussion was the first aim of her afternoon receptions, which she compared with a ‘masonic lodge’. ³² Hence, she invited people as different as the liberal politician and writer Alphonse de Lamartine, newspaper editor Emile de Girardin, the diplomat Louis de Viel-Castel, the English writer and diplomat Henry Bulwer, the Danish writer and philosopher known as the Baron d’Eckstein, as well as the American writer and abolitionist Ralph Waldo Emerson. ³³ This mixed and international company enabled the exchange of diverse points of view on matters such as literature, art, music and current affairs. In addition, among her regular international guests was also a number of exiles, such as the Germans Georg Herwegh, Jacob Venedey, Franz von Dingelstedt and—for a short period—Heinrich Heine, and the eccentric Polish writer Adam Mickiewicz.

The example of the leftist German poet Herwegh, who came very often, demonstrates how exiles could make use of salon visits to gain access to the Parisian elite. ³⁴ He had made his name with the publication of Gedichte eines Lebendigen (1841), which abounded with revolutionary sentiment, and was banned from Prussia in 1842 after he had offended King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. His marriage with the equally politically active banker's daughter Emma Siegmund provided him with more financial comfort during his exile in Switzerland and Paris than most German exiles enjoyed. Being less well-known in Paris than Heine, his reputation was also significantly more—and for some: too—radical. His exile both furthered and complicated his political activities. On the one hand, it gave him an international stage for his campaign against the Prussian government, but on the other, it complicated, for instance, the material support that he tried to organize for Polish revolutionaries who were imprisoned in Berlin in 1847. The quick failure of his attempt to form an army of volunteers to stir up revolution in Baden in 1848, for which he had mistakenly counted on French governmental support, is exemplary for the combination of the high expectations, the inadequate assessment of political realities, and the insufficient preparation that often characterized exiles’ political activism. ³⁵ Nevertheless, the attempt, as well as the internationally diverse recruitment of Herwegh's army, testifies to how exile experiences contributed to the transnational connectedness of the 1848 revolutionary wave.

D’Agoult, however, initially invited Herwegh mostly for his literary expertise and they cooperated intensively in the writing of literary critique. Herwegh provided d’Agoult with inside information about the German literary world, which she used in her articles for journals such as the Revue des deux mondes, and updated her on the publications of other German exiles in Paris. ³⁶ Politics was something they agreed to disagree on, although the subject was omnipresent in their letters, for instance when Herwegh explained to d’Agoult that ‘art pour l’art’ was no option in the repressive German political situation, which instead called for protest from artists and writers. ³⁷ Moreover, Herwegh introduced to d’Agoult's salon his friend, the impoverished Russian revolutionary Michael Bakunin, with whom d'Agoult shared an interest in the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Yet, the fact that she seemed to have slowly come over to Herwegh's political standpoints, as she committed herself in 1847 to ideals of political liberty and emancipation, albeit without propagating a revolution, illustrates how exiles contributed to the political fermentation of French society in the years prior to 1848. ³⁸

Moreover, Herwegh's friendship with d'Agoult gained him entry into the French elite, which would otherwise have been rather inaccessible for this reputed troublemaker. D’Agoult promoted his fame in the French literary world by writing a lengthy article on him and the German left-Hegelians in the newspaper La Presse. ³⁹ In addition, the connections that he established during his visits to her salon proved to be very useful when several German exiles faced expulsion from France in the beginning of 1845 as a result of Prussian diplomatic pressure. Although Herwegh knew that his second Swiss passport protected him somewhat against the Prussian authorities, he felt uneasy about the situation and therefore tried to figure out whether the threat had to be taken seriously. The less-than-reassuring information that he obtained through the diplomats whom he had encountered at d’Agoult's was that while Herwegh himself was not targeted, some other German writers would indeed be expelled soon. ⁴⁰

Herwegh's participation in d’Agoult's salon at first seems to confirm that exile writers were, as Delphine Diaz states, a kind of exotic species in these gatherings of the French elite, who contributed to the prestige of the salon because of the fascination that they excited but were expected to mostly talk about the literature and culture of their home countries. However, it is precisely because of the latter aspect that their position in the salons did not differ that much from their French counterparts, whose role equally consisted of animating conversations about their and their colleagues’ or rivals’ work. The aura of exoticism and heroism was, in addition, something they could take advantage of when seeking support for themselves and their political causes among the French elite. Salons provided the exiles with access to the French elite and public reception for their work—an incessant need for every writer, and especially for those who were cut from the public in their home countries by exile. It is entirely true that the friendship between d’Agoult and Herwegh, as well as the friendships that she had with other exiles, was partly based on mutual interest. However, that had always been the case of writers who frequented salons to find there a public audience, connections and financial and practical support for themselves. ⁴¹ In this sense, visiting a salon paradoxically normalized Herwegh's position as a writer in French society.

2. Legitimating nationalism academically

In January 1844, upon d’Agoult's recommendation, Herwegh started to attend the lectures of her friend Mickiewicz at the Collège de France, which d’Agoult judged ‘[i]nfinitely curious and of very great poetry, though absurd from the historical and real point of view’. Herwegh's sceptical remark that ‘my head nevertheless is hardened against all surprises and the abuse of obscure sentiments’ was apparently no reason to not attend—quite the contrary. ⁴² Since the Restoration, lectures offered by a number of academic institutions had become an integral part of the program of urban pleasures that Paris had to offer, especially for those who, due to their gender or socioeconomic position, had no opportunity to satisfy their longing for modern science and scholarship by following regular curricula. ⁴³ For popular lecturers, a procession of carriages from the right bank neighbourhoods invaded the narrow streets of the still-unrefurbished Quartier Latin. In the 1820s, one had to arrive two hours ahead of time at the Sorbonne to be assured of a seat at the lectures of one of the stars of the moment: the historians François Guizot and Abel François de Villemain as well as the philosopher Victor Cousin—until the Restoration government suspended all three of them. The lack of entry restrictions also attracted many exiles to this form of cultural entertainment, who could mingle easily with Parisian society at the Sorbonne. For instance, the Italian-Dalmatian writer and linguist Niccolò Tommaseo assiduously attended the lectures of the linguist Claude Fauriel, as well as, more incidentally, those of the Hellenist Jean-Antoine Letronne, the chemist Louis Jacques Thénard and the physiologist François Magendie. ⁴⁴

In the 1830s, the curious crowd shifted its attention from the Sorbonne to the Collège de France, an institution with the particularity of not having proper students, study programmes and examinations. Situated in the middle of the Quartier Latin, with the Sorbonne just across the street, it was established by King Francis I in 1530 for humanist learning and its mission was and still is both to stimulate the most cutting-edge research and provide public lectures. After its renown had increased in the second half of the 18th century with the creation of several chairs for upcoming branches of scientific and scholarly research, it survived the Revolution and the Napoleonic education reforms remarkably unharmed and came to impose itself as the apex of the learned world in France. ⁴⁵ The popularity of the Collège de France was to a great extent due to the presence of Jules Michelet, Edgar Quinet and Adam Mickiewicz who, united by strong ties of friendship, in their highly mediated lectures challenged the increasingly conservative status quo of the July Monarchy and, for that reason, were suspended one after another in the years before 1848. ⁴⁶ The dynamics around these three professors allow us to assess how the presence of exiles impacted French intellectual debate, as not only Mickiewicz was an exile, but a substantial part of the audience too, which significantly shaped the contents of the lectures. In addition, they illustrate very well how the phenomenon of exile informed the production of nationalism.

Despite some differences in their philosophies of history and political opinions, Michelet, Quinet and Mickiewicz lectured about similar themes and were seen by the public as a ‘triumvirate’; loyal auditors in 1845 financed the founding of a medal that had the busts of the three professors on the front side and the biblical dictum ‘Ut omnes unum sint’ on the reverse. ⁴⁷ Although Michelet was appointed in 1838 for (French) history and morals, and Quinet in 1841 for languages and literature of Southern Europe, both stretched their subjects to discuss and protest against current affairs in French society, such as the growing influence of the clergy. ⁴⁸ Foreigners—exiles, students and other social categories of immigrants alike—were particularly attracted by the fact that Michelet and Quinet discussed topics such as the liberation of oppressed nations and their dignity throughout European history. An otherwise unknown B. Meister wrote to Michelet in 1840:

A German, regularly following your course, cannot fail to express, after today's lecture, his deep gratitude about the eloquent and kind way you spoke of his fatherland. […] I love my fatherland with all powers of my soul, but it is for precisely that reason that this love is almost painful. […] But unshakeable belief in the victorious power of the eternal idea of holy liberty, which is engraved with indelible characters at the firmament of humanity strengthens me and prevents my hope from dying. ⁴⁹

Foreigners were no passive auditors; interactions with them could sometimes lead the two French historians to change their ideas. For instance, in February 1840, a Polish exile complained in a letter to Michelet that he had mistakenly assumed that ‘the inhabitants of Galicia were happier under Austrian domination’. According to the writer of the letter, Michelet should notice that

[i]t is the sentiment of this vitality, the knowledge of their country and the sense they have of their forces that makes persevere the Polish emigration despite all persecutions. This emigration is for a large part composed of Galicians, who actively participated in the last Polish war. Their presence here is a sufficient protest against the likelihood that they could be happy under Austrian domination. ⁵⁰

In a subsequent lecture, Michelet corrected himself: ‘It is not sufficiently known what we owe to the Hungarians and the Poles for the defence of central Europe against the Turks. If one would acknowledge it, one would do more for these nations’. ⁵¹

Mickiewicz's lectures show to an even greater extent how the Collège de France could serve as a locus of interaction between the exiles’ and French intellectuals’ thought, how different versions of nationalism were articulated in exile, and why they therefore deserve closer attention. Appointed in 1840 to the chair for Slavic languages and literature of the Collège de France, Mickiewicz was the second political exile at the institution after the Italian jurist and liberal politician Pellegrino Rossi who had taught political economy from 1833 till 1840. The appointment provided Mickiewicz with a badly needed income and visibility in Paris and enabled him to come back from Lausanne, where he had taught since late 1838. Whereas for Herwegh, Paris was a city of pleasure and intellectual excitement, Mickiewicz felt profoundly alienated from Parisian society. He was disappointed by what he perceived as a lack of French interest for the Polish affair and eternally struggled to sustain himself and his family economically. ⁵² For both financial and psychological reasons, he changed addresses very frequently. His wife, Celina Szymanowska, ultimately, could no longer stand her husband's melancholy, the economic insecurity and the pressures of Parisian city life, and began to suffer from nervous breakdowns, which, by the way, increased the necessity of sufficient income to cure her besides sustaining the growing young family. Yet, Paris was preferable to many other places, as France hosted the largest Polish exile community and the city nevertheless offered him a stage to sell his ideas on the historical mission of Poland to both his fellow Poles and the outside world. Indeed, in Paris, he wrote two of his major works: The Books of the Polish People and of the Polish Pilgrimage and the epic poem Pan Tadeusz. Although he plunged into a lengthy writer's block thereafter, these works became gospels of Polish nationalism and inspired nationalist activists from other nations as well.

The person of the lecturer as well as the subject matter attracted large numbers of Polish and other Slavic immigrants to the Collège de France and the venue quickly came to serve as a major place to gather information on all things Polish. Mickiewicz was very aware that his position made him, in a sense, the intellectual spokesperson of the Polish diaspora in Paris and he aimed to use his lectures to both hearten his fellow exiles and provide the French public with insight into the historical backgrounds of the Polish fate:

I have been called to speak in the name of peoples with whom my nation is intimately connected by its past and its future; I have been called to speak in a time when speech has a great power, in a city, I could say, I – stranger, which is the capital of speech. […] Paris is the home, the domain, the instrument of this tendency: through the intermediary of this big city, the European peoples manage to get to know each other, sometimes to get to know themselves. ⁵³

Initially, Mickiewicz set off on a chronological history of the Slavic peoples from the earliest times in order to contextualize their literatures by clarifying Slavic literary developments for French public via the comparison of them to contemporary French or Western-European developments. He particularly discussed Poland and Russia as well as the divergences in the political, religious, ethnic and cultural developments since the earliest history of these countries, because these, according to him, were key to understanding the later Russian aggression against Poland and hence Poland's current misfortunes. As Mickiewicz saw it as a central objective of the course to historically explain and thus further Polish nationalism, his lessons became dragged into the internal rivalries of the Polish community in Paris, in which different strands of Polish nationalism represented by various clubs, circles and lobbies competed for adherents among the large crowd of Polish refugees across France and recognition by the French public as well as official bodies. ⁵⁴ While Mickiewicz was reproached at turns for being too lenient towards Russia, too Catholic, too heterodox, inadequate in his support for the aristocratic party, or undemocratic, the scrupulous scrutiny of the lessons reveals the diplomatic stakes. ⁵⁵ From the second year of his lecturing onwards, Mickiewicz fell under the influence of the Polish-Lithuanian sect leader Andrzej Towiański, a conversion that was at least partly inspired by his feelings of alienation in Paris. Now, his thoughts took an increasing mysticist turn, in which the Polish cause ultimately became identified with messianism. While his lecture style had always been somewhat impromptu and eccentric, Mickiewicz now quickly gained a reputation for his exalted prophet-like performance. ⁵⁶ Despite his somewhat nebulous rhetoric, he managed to communicate the common mission of Poland and France to fulfil the promises of a new world Christ had given to humanity—a mission that he felt was embodied by the epitome of vigorous action, Napoleon Bonaparte. ⁵⁷ It is evident that for reasons of diplomacy, public order and political self-preservation, the juste milieu regime of the July Monarchy could not endlessly condone such behavior at the lectern and the course was suspended in May 1845. Similarly, for other long-standing critics of the July Monarchy, including Michelet, and for parts of the Polish immigration, Mickiewicz's messianism and adulation of Napoleon were difficult to swallow. ⁵⁸ Yet, Quinet had come under Mickiewicz's spell to such an extent that he also started to present Napoleon as the liberator of Europe and liberation as a spiritual undertaking, much to the distaste of—especially—the German immigrants in his audience. ⁵⁹ The German left-Hegelian and democrat Arnold Ruge, for instance, found that Quinet, ‘like so many Frenchmen, mistook interest in revolution for interest in French patriotism’ and criticized his religious inclinations. ⁶⁰ This observation was part of the painful process by which Ruge, who had come to Paris with ambitious ideas about German-Franco collaboration, came to see the irreconcilability of progressive political programmes along the two sides of the Rhine.

Despite his doubts about Mickiewicz's religious inclinations, Michelet owed his colleague much of what he knew of Polish history. In reaction to the news of a new uprising in Poland in early 1846, he devoted part of his lectures, which that year had the idea of nationality as their central theme, to the current situation. Michelet interpreted the revolt as a flare of the force of liberty against the ‘fatalist’ philosophy of history. This philosophy of history, which equated factual situations with rightfulness, historically justified the terrorist phase of the French Revolution and the authoritarian rule of Napoleon as necessities given the circumstances. On similar grounds, it legitimized the Russian, Austrian and Prussian domination of Poland. Hence, while Michelet declared that ‘in studying history, we must remain free of it. History is what we make, is our oeuvre, not our tyrant’, he also understood that nationalities were the result of the ‘progressive work of human liberty’. He therefore believed that the cause of ‘that great people which acts’ at the moment he was speaking was ‘legitimate and holy’. ⁶¹ The enthusiasm that this call to liberty stirred in Michelet's audience led to a collection of money to support the uprising. ⁶² While the yield clearly did not prevent the uprising from being quickly suppressed by the Austrian and Prussian armies, his conversations with his transnational audience did help Michelet in clarifying some central features of his historiographical and political positions, which he had hitherto mostly considered within the context of French history but would some years later apply to Central and Eastern Europe again in a short work entitled Légendes démocratiques du Nord. ⁶³ In addition, as Angela Jianu has shown, Michelet's lectures and the exchanges with his audience proved to be formative experiences for a band of Romanian students, who were thus equipped with the concepts of modern democratic politics and learnt to think of Romania as a nation that deserved independence. This enabled them to become the subsequent protagonists of the Romanian national independence movement. ⁶⁴ Thus, in the years before 1848, the Collège de France had become a place where diverse forms of nationalism were articulated, intellectually legitimated and confronted with one another. In the short term, Michelet's lectures and the stir around them that caused their suspension in January 1848 were instrumental in triggering the February Revolution in Paris. ⁶⁵ Yet, if we take into account the involvement of exiles and other foreigners, we suddenly perceive the Collège de France as a place that—by the way it functioned within the urban cultural infrastructure—enabled exile politics and French domestic politics to become entangled, and the French Revolution of 1848 as embedded in a context of transnational connections held together by exiles.

3. Exile press as an incubator for radicalization and internal discord

Parisian exile, however, did not only stimulate transnational contacts; instead, it brought together activists and writers from the same national backgrounds as well, enabling forms of opposition politics that were impossible in their respective home countries. Abroad, speakers of the same mother tongue necessarily relied partly on one another, for instance, when looking for lodging upon arrival, for getting access to social and cultural networks, and for staying abreast of the news from their countries of origin by going to reading rooms or cafés where newspapers in their own languages were available. ⁶⁶ Foreigners also assembled with fellow nationals to write and publish periodicals themselves. The case of the German newspaper Vorwärts exemplifies how their shared experience of Parisian exile induced fellow nationals from various ideological orientations to collaborate, as well as how such collaboration compelled them to articulate political and ideological differences. ⁶⁷ In addition, it shows that foreign residents of Paris were not bound to particular neighbourhoods but integrated into the urban environment as a whole, with many frequenting particular areas or places because of the meaning or function they had for them.

Paris was a centre of foreign-language publishing, where almost every community of foreigners was served by papers in their own languages. Although most titles were commercial undertakings with business news or information about cultural events, as Vorwärts was initially as well, political periodicals were published too. ⁶⁸ Together with London, some Swiss places, and Brussels, Paris was the leading center of German opposition politics, which had become increasingly impossible within the confines of the German Confederation itself; the principal tool for this were newspapers aimed at the mass of migrant workers in these places as well as to be smuggled across the German border. ⁶⁹ Between 1830 and 1848, about a dozen (mostly short-lived) German-language periodicals were published in Paris, of which seven were at least partly aimed at contesting the existing political situation in Germany. ⁷⁰ In 1844, Vorwärts, which was published twice a week, was the foremost German newspaper in Paris.

Established in the autumn of 1843 by the German entrepreneur Adalbert von Bornstedt and the journalist Heinrich Börnstein, Vorwärts was initially of meagre journalistic interest as it mainly rehashed harmless information from other publications and show biz news. This explains the location of the paper's offices at 32 Rue des Moulins, a narrow 17th-century street just north of the Rue Saint-Honoré, that is, in an area that would be cleaned up with the construction of the new Opéra Garnier and the Avenue de l’Opéra in the 1860s, in the vicinity of several hotspots of the entertainment industry. ⁷¹ The paper was most well-known for its connection with another initiative of Bornstedt, stimulated by the Prussian government, the ‘Deutscher Hilfsverein’ that had as its aim to support the poorest of the mass of German workers living in the French capital. ⁷² Vorwärts campaigned for the Hilfsverein, but politically it tried to balance mild criticism of Prussian oppressive policies with that of any revolutionary attempts to terminate it. ⁷³ From spring 1844 onwards, following troubles between Bornstedt and Börnstein over the political line of the paper, the latter enabled a number of German writers in Paris, who had immigrated for various reasons but shared his criticism of Prussia, to take over the paper and carry out a remarkable shift in editorial line and style.

The new team was dominated by university-trained intellectuals and poets, who were deeply immersed in German philosophical debates and had become stranded in Paris after the failure of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. ⁷⁴ That initiative of the liberal writer Arnold Ruge and the young radical philosopher Karl Marx—both of whom had expressly moved to Paris to found a journal out of reach of the Prussian government—aimed to further Franco-German cultural exchange by publishing contributions by both German and French authors. ⁷⁵ However, the young-Hegelian criticism of religion that inspired most pieces in the Jahrbücher, as it was central to German political and intellectual debate, had hardly any relevance for France of the July Monarchy and was ill-received by French authors and readership alike. The journal therefore foundered on a kind cultural misunderstanding that to a certain extent seems inherent to the activities of exiles, whose migration is precisely inspired by their continued political commitment to their home countries. ⁷⁶

Perhaps because it limited itself to a German-reading audience, Vorwärts was more successful and turned into a platform for radical thinking under the shared editorship of Börnstein, Heinrich Heine and Coelestin Bernays. While it was somewhat slow in reacting on current affairs, it offered well-wrought pieces on the German national question and the social question, with anonymously published editorial comments that were mostly devoted to criticizing Prussian politics. Herwegh contributed political poems to several of the issues and Heine published in Vorwärts two of his key-political works of this period: his Song of the Silesian Weavers, with which he protested against the exploitation of textile workers, and (as a republication) his satire on Germany's backwardness in Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen. ⁷⁷ The fact that the great majority of the pieces dealt with German affairs did not mean that the paper completely ignored the French context. Republications of texts by the French revolutionary Camille Desmoulins show that its editors attempted to relate to local traditions of radical political thought. More importantly, the series of articles by Georg Weber and Marx on the structural defaults of the capitalist system, which is now recognized as a formative step in the latter's thought, testify to their thorough assimilation of French political economy during these Parisian years. ⁷⁸

The close connection between Weber's and Marx's articles additionally shows that Vorwärts was not just a publication outlet; it was also a place where ideas developed in collaboration. In July-Monarchy France, newspaper offices were places of—almost exclusively male and bourgeois—urban sociability, where current affairs and ideological positions could be discussed among peers. Contributors, readers, and politicians walked in and out these operating bases for electoral campaigns, money collections (the money for Poland collected in Michelet's lectures was kept at the office of the republican newspaper La Réforme) and other political actions. Thus, the written press not only contributed to political agenda-setting by informing public opinion, but the editorial boards themselves were, somewhat akin and complementary to salons, places for extraparliamentary politics. ⁷⁹

The foreign political press was no exception to that. Hence the importance of having a real office, even for very small periodicals, instead of using the private home of the editor (who sometimes was the single author) for this purpose. After its radical take-over, Vorwärts could indeed have opted to just meet in one of the apartments in the Rue Vaneau, where most of the regular contributors lived. Although situated in the wealthy (and conservative) Faubourg Saint-Germain—in one of the hôtels particuliers resided the director of the July Monarchy's semiofficial newspaper Le Journal des Débats—this street housed a concentration of German migrants, who lived in private apartments or in hôtels garnis, which formed the typical lodgings for newcomers to the city. ⁸⁰ Ruge and Marx settled down here in two apartments at number 38; their colleague German Mäurer lived with his extended family at number 23, which initially also served as the postal address of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. ⁸¹ Herwegh found a suitable place for his wife and baby son in a large and brand new apartment in the small street behind, the recently constructed Rue Barbet-de-Jouy. Discussions therefore partly took place on the street corners and in the staircases of this small area. However, the heart of the newspaper remained the office across the Seine, where, after the Hilfsverein had moved out, Bakunin came to occupy the vacant space and host the editorial meetings that were held several times a week. ⁸² Börnstein recalled in his memoirs how during the meetings a dozen of fiercely debating people sat cramped together on Bakunin's bed and trunk (his sole two pieces of furniture), while the room was filled with increasingly thicker clouds of tobacco smoke, as opening a window would cause to much uproar in the street. ⁸³ What happened during these editorial meetings was, of course, not entirely different from what happened at those of French political papers: the policy of the paper was discussed, texts were examined and corrected while taking into account what could reasonably be published without fearing fines or censorship. Yet, it offered a very specific place of exile sociability as well, where regular contributors met physically away from their wives, crawling children and personal financial worries, more or less closed off from the surrounding Parisian society as well as the German political reality that was the topic of their discussions, in a somewhat improvised setting that seemed to accentuate the temporary character they hoped their exile would have.

The fact that they unanimously opposed the existing political situation in Germany does not mean that the authors of Vorwärts held common ideological stances or that the paper had a clear political programme. To the contrary, the setting of the editorial meetings allowed for divergences between them to become explicit. While several articles in Vorwärts criticized the conservative standpoints of the influential Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, Heine continued to publish his regular chronicles of his Parisian life precisely there. ⁸⁴ Frictions that manifested themselves while collaborating on Vorwärts were to cause a definitive rupture between Ruge and Marx. The ideological core of their dispute was the question of whether communism or liberalism had to be the aim of the German opposition, as well as the related question of whether the Silesian textile workers’ revolts in the summer of 1844 were a first step in a twofold social and political revolution (Marx's interpretation) or an act of despair of politically uneducated paupers whose socioeconomic situation could only be improved after constitutional reforms (Ruge's position). ⁸⁵ However, these controversies were certainly intensified by differences in character, as well as irritations caused by the fact of being too dependent on one another in a materially precarious situation in what remained a foreign city. While Ruge apparently could not hold back his criticism of Herwegh's loose conjugal ethics (undoubtedly referring to his suspiciously close friendship with d’Agoult), the others condemned him as a petty bourgeois with nationalistic sympathies. ⁸⁶ Under the pressures resulting from the situation of exile, small personal quarrels were blown up to unbridgeable political divergences and ideological clashes became explicit. ⁸⁷ Yet, it was exactly through these confrontations that political ideas arrived at their clearest formulations.

From the summer of 1844 onwards, the ideological sharpening and anti-Prussianism of Vorwärts attracted the attention of the authorities and Prussian diplomats began to exert pressure on the French minister of foreign affairs, François Guizot, to arrange for the paper to be forbidden. ⁸⁸ Parallel to this, they stirred an attack against Vorwärts in the French conservative press, in reaction to which several French oppositional newspapers spoke out for the radical exile paper and against the compliance of the French authorities vis-à-vis Prussia. ⁸⁹ Guizot ultimately gave in for the sake of saving international relations in December 1844: While Herwegh, as shown above, was saved thanks to his Swiss passport and Heine was impossible to expel without causing a scandal, several other contributors were forced to leave the country or imprisoned, which led to the end of the paper in January 1845. ⁹⁰ While Vorwärts, its short lifetime notwithstanding, has been considered a crucial platform for the development of socialism and German political thought in the run-up to the 1848 revolutions more broadly, it was essentially determined by the relative freedom as well as the material constraints caused by exile, and its specific dialog—albeit partly a dialogue des sourds—with the Parisian context.

4. Conclusion

The three case studies above provide an impression of the various places in Paris where exile intellectuals met. They made use of the existing social and cultural infrastructure and fully participated in the life of the city. While these case studies could be complemented with the examination of numerous other places, they remain in themselves illuminating because of their differences as well as their connectedness. By the differences of speech and behaviour that they demanded and the diverse experiences that they offered to partly the same individuals, we discover how place was able to inform and shape intellectual transfer, as well as how exiles moved around in the urban landscape to meet their economic, social and intellectual needs. The trajectories of the three exiles whom we encountered in these places illustrate this.

Herwegh, who frequented all three discussed places, had to switch between his mother tongue of German, which was also the language of the Vorwärts editorial meetings, and French, which was the language spoken in both the Collège de France and d’Agoult's salon. However, not only the languages differed: the polite conversation in salons demanded a genre of speech and behaviour that completely deviated from the rather confrontational habits of the Vorwärts offices. Herwegh pursued a number of interests by visiting all these places: to integrate himself into the French cultural world and find public reception there; to be entertained and to receive information about the Polish case (with which he, as a critic of the Prussian government, sympathized a lot); to stay connected to German affairs, to continue publishing in German, and finally, to simply have an occasion to speak his mother tongue while being abroad and socialize with people from ‘home’.

For Mickiewicz, salon life offered him the public audience and acquaintances from the Parisian cultural elite that he, as a poet in eternal need of money and support, required. However, it was also an eternal and painful confrontation with an urban world that he perceived as vain and devoid of intellectual and spiritual substance. Given the way that Parisian cultural life functioned, Mickiewicz could not avoid visiting salons, and d’Agoult's, with its atmosphere of serious intellectual discussion, was one of the best suited to him, but he always felt a bit out of place in that world. His position at the Collège de France was a major recognition from the side of the French government. It granted him a wide and international public and made him the focus of attention of the Polish community. Yet it was simultaneously a burden. In some respects, he was relieved when his lectures were suspended (while he continued to be paid), although it also left him without a clear activity and therefore even more prone to melancholy. While Mickiewicz was already sceptical about France and the French upon arriving in the city, Ruge had to learn the hard way during his Parisian exile. He knew almost no French when crossing the border and therefore had limited access to salon life. He had migrated with the aim of collaborating with fellow Germans in a place that was safer than Germany itself, as well as with French authors, but he was quickly confronted with their lack of interest. He visited public venues, such as the Collège de France, to inform himself about Parisian life. However, while learning the language and beginning to understand the society around him, he became increasingly disappointed. In the meantime, the collaboration in Vorwärts made it clear to him how unbridgeable the gap was becoming between emerging German socialism and his own democratic liberalism. Increasingly isolated within the German community in Paris, he returned to Germany in 1846 via Switzerland to try to pursue his political programme there as a publisher. In 1848, he became a member for the left-democratic wing of the Frankfurt Parliament. ⁹¹

The activities discussed here are all manifestations of what Stéphane Dufoix has called ‘exile politics’: the political activity of exiles targeted at changing the situation in their homeland or winning foreign support. ⁹² It has been argued that the early development of the German workers movement in its entirety amounted to exile politics, because organized opposition within Germany was almost impossible, and this can undoubtedly be said for other national contexts as well. ⁹³ Polish nationalism after 1831 could only survive and develop further in exile. Paris, which hosted the greatest part of the Polish exiled elite, was therefore the stage where the rivalling versions of this nationalism could be articulated and compete for support among both the French public and the wider Polish community. Parisian discussions, such as those by Mickiewicz, Michelet and Quinet in the Collège de France, about the concept of nationality also helped other foreigners, such as the Romanian students mentioned above, Germans and Italians, explicate their national ideas. Yet, while most exiles indeed primarily busied themselves with nationally specific causes, this did not preclude transnational exchange and solidarity with other exile communities, since these national questions were sometimes understood to conform or coincide with international developments. Mickiewicz, for instance, put together an army of exiled compatriots in April 1848 to help liberate Italy from the Austrians, and he had the aim of subsequently doing the same in Poland.

The focus of this article on places where these exile politics happened has yielded insight into the study of the processes involved in the intellectual transfer, as well as how the transfer is informed by local geographies, the prevailing linguistic and behavioural norms in these places, and the opportunities that they offered. These sites served as junctions in the transnational contexts where modern political ideas—including notably nationalism—were produced. By looking at these places we can observe how, on the one hand, national thought was shaped by transnational interaction and, on the other, ‘internationals’—be they socialist, liberal or republican—emerged. ⁹⁴ Thus, this approach contributes to the understanding of how urbanity and migration conduced the development of modern political ideas. This is valuable for urban history because it enriches our understanding of what cities can do. To migration history, it adds detailed insight into the political strategies of migrants and the practices of ‘diaspora politics’. ⁹⁵

For intellectual history, this localized approach has a number of beneficial effects. As the case studies illustrate, it naturally puts women—still all too often invisible in intellectual history—on centre stage. It also foregrounds examples of middling figures who, as Emma Rothschild has compellingly shown, despite not being very original thinkers themselves, played a crucial part in the formulation, transmission and application of political ideas to concrete historical contexts. ⁹⁶ The visitors of d’Agoult's salon, the auditors in the Collège de France and even most contributors to Vorwärts were no great intellectuals who produced works that still attract scholarly attention on their own; but, together they shaped the social context in which novel political ideas could be conceived. However, this only becomes visible once we broaden the source base for the history of political thought beyond the ‘lofty’ genres of texts to which it still all too often limits itself. ⁹⁷ Thus, the study of places where the formation and exchange of ideas occur contributes to the expansion of the dominant contextualism in intellectual history. In fact, the reduction of ‘context’ to other surrounding texts has led intellectual historians to disregard material and social contexts and hampered their engagement with other forms of historical enquiry. Yet, the methodological requirement of studying ideas in context should not preclude as relevant context the social circumstances and material or practical conditions under which ideas emerge. Samuel Moyn even deemed it essential to engage with the social in order to create ‘a proper social history of ideas’ and overcome the idealism of intellectual history. Moreover, he argued that this approach would account for the ways in which the social order is constituted by ideas and representations and hence contribute to a fuller understanding of the social itself. ⁹⁸ The localized intellectual history explored in this article aspires to realize exactly that. This article has tested this approach by applying it to the context of Parisian exiles in the 1830s and the 1840s. However, it is generalizable in principle and calls for a comparative study of different urban contexts.

Lastly, while the social-historical explanations of the last decades have prevailed in the historiography of 1848, ⁹⁹ the tracing of exiles’ social and intellectual interactions enables us to invest new energy into intellectual historical approaches of the run-up to the revolutionary wave and thus broadens our view of the relevant social dynamics. Looking at the intellectual activities of exiles and their mutual contact in the period before will therefore help to explain the international parallels and transnational connections during these revolutions. ¹⁰⁰