Abstract
This chapter offers a long-term assessment of French exile journalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, revealing continuities often ignored by a historiography largely focused on distinct and chronologically separate political communities. London’s role as an outpost of French politics and publishing long predated this period, most notably with the Huguenot refuge and French Revolution émigrés, but the second half of the nineteenth century perpetuated and reinvented well-established cultures of exile, in which radical journalism played a prominent role. After 1848, and especially from the winter of 1851–2, the growing French exile presence in Britain was mostly concentrated in London. While strongly disliked by many French exiles, London also had much to offer: the discretion afforded by a sprawling metropolis, geographic proximity to France, an established French-speaking community with dense support networks and above all a lack of repressive legislation against foreign exiles....