Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After 0801441420, 9780801441424, 0801488397, 9780801488399

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UNNATURALLY FRENCH

UNNATURALLY FRENCH FOREIGN CITIZENS IN THE OLD REGIME AND AFTER

PETER SAHLINS Cornell University Press Ithaca I?( London

Copyright© 2004 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 5I2 East State Street, Ithaca, New York I485o. First published 2004 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2004 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sahlins, Peter. Unnaturally French : foreign citizens in the Old Regime and after I Peter Sahlins. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8oi4-4I42-o (alk. paper)- ISBN o-8014-8839-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Citizenship-France-History. 2. Naturalization-France-History. 3· Immigrants-Government policy-France-History. 4· Aliens-France-History. I. Title. }N29I9 .S24 2004 323·6'23'09440903-dc22 2003020422 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorinefree, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. Books that bear the logo of the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) use paper taken from forests that have been inspected and certified as meeting the highest standards for environmental and social responsibility. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing IO 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I Paperback printing IO 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

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CONTENTS

List of Tables vu Preface ix Introduction: Citizenship, Immigration, and Nationality Avant La Lettre

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-PART ONE FoREIGNERS AND CITIZENS IN EARLY MoDERN FRANCE

The Making of the Absolute Citizen I 9 The Letter ofNaturalization in the Old Regime 65 3 The Use and Abuse ofNaturalization Io8 I

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-PART TWO

A SociAL HisTORY OF FoREIGN CITIZENs, 166o-1789 4 Status and Socioprofessional Identities I 3 5 5 Geographic Origins and Residence I 56 6 Temporal Patterns ofNaturalization r85 -PART THREE THE CITIZENSHIP REvoLUTION FROM THE OLD TO THE NEw REGIME

7 From Law to Politics before the French Revolution

2I 5 8 Naturalization and the Droit d'Aubaine from the French Revolution to the Bourbon Restoration 267

Conclusion: Ending the Old Regime in I 8 I 9 3 I 3 Appendix r. Sources of the Statistical Study of Naturalizations, I66o-I790 J29 Appendix 2. Treaties with France Abolishing or Exempting Foreigners from the Droit d'Aubaine, I753-I79I 335 Notes 34I Bibliography 42 I Index 447

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TABLES 4.1 5.1

5.2 5·3 5+ 8.1

Socioprofessional Identities of Naturalized Foreigners (1660-1789) and Immigrants Taxed (1697-1707) 141 Geographic Origins of Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime 159 Naturalizations from the Northeastern Borderlands, 166o-1789 167 Naturalizations from the Southeastern Borderlands, 1660-1789 170 Naturalizations from the European Peripheries, 1660-1789 181 AbolitionsoftheDroitdeditraction, 1811-1813 301

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PREFACE

F

rom the late sixteenth century until the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, an average of about fifty immigrants a year, foreigners long established in the kingdom, undertook the costly but ultimately successful quest to be naturalized. Granted letters of naturalization (lettres de naturalite} by the French crown, they became French citizens. Yet they remained, in the language of the time, "naturalized foreigners," and they were never fully assimilated into the legal category of French citizens. Foreign citizens were subject to periodic taxes, state proscriptions, property confiscations, lawsuits over inherited property, and other discriminatory measures of state and society, in times of peace and war. Their condition was admittedly far better than the much larger group of unnaturalized foreigners in the kingdom, the tens of thousands of aliens (aubains) settled in France but who were unable to inherit or bequeath property, to hold office or religious benefice, and who suffered a range of other civil incapacities. Foreigners and naturalized foreigners occupied distinct statuses in the legal worlds of the Old Regime, but both stood opposed to French "naturals" (for the period did not know the modern vocabulary of "nationality"): those born in the kingdom or descended from French parents born abroad and settled in France. Natural Frenchmen and women (Franfais naturels), of all statuses and conditions, enjoyed as a birthright a common set of "rights, duties, privileges, franchises, and immunities" in the kingdom (according to the text of the naturalization grant). Foreign citizens were those foreigners who became "unnaturally French": their naturalization was a complex legal fiction that gave them, in principle though hardly in practice, the status of "natural Frenchmen" but did not purport to change their nature as aliens. This book is about the incidence and meaning of naturalization, both from the perspective of foreigners who sought its benefits, and from that of the state that used the practice of naturalization to raise revenue, articulate sovereignty, and define citizenship. It explores naturalization as social practice and as legal ( ix)

doctrine, as a window onto French immigration and as part of an untold history of nationality law in France of the Old Regime, and in the decades that marked the transition to the New Regime of citizenship, immigration, and nationality. Most historians believe that such contemporary phenomena had little relevance before the nineteenth century. After all, the numbers of foreigners and naturalized foreigners paled in comparison with the later waves of industrial migration that fed the far more numerous naturalizations of foreigners in France and Europe beginning in the 188os. And it might seem odd to even think of these Old Regime foreigners as "immigrants," insofar as the "nationstate" in which they settled and to which they became assimilated was fundamentally different from the one today. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, foreigners easily established themselves in the kingdom: in the absence of border controls, passports, and visas, the absolute monarchy had few political tools to mark boundaries and identify foreigners, and little desire to do either. Officially, until the French Revolution, there was no "nation" to which foreigners were expected to assimilate. The kingdom of France knew no statutory definitions of "citizens" and never enumerated their political and civil rights. French "nationality" did not exist: the word only dates from the early nineteenth century. And before the appearance of the nation as a political category in the eighteenth century and, of course, as a sovereign community of citizens during the French Revolution, the different legal privileges of the king's subjects trumped any general definition of French citizenship. Or so the story goes. Yet foreigners became citizens. Their naturalizationas an administrative and legal procedure-is a key site to investigate the law and politics of citizenship before 1789. The history of naturalization during the French Revolution and under the Napoleonic Empire provides a unique perspective on the changing policies and practices of citizenship and nationality. And naturalization, as part of a social history of immigration in the Old Regime, may indeed be statistically insignificant, but it provides an unusual opportunity to study premodern patterns of foreign settlement in France. Unnaturally French is a history of the theory, procedures, and multiple meanings of naturalization told in several stages and from several methodological (if not disciplinary) perspectives. As social history, it documents the patterns of geographic origin and identity of foreigner citizens in space and time and reflects on the political and legal conditions that shaped social patterns. As political history, it considers the development of French policy made in the royal councils and in the different administrative sectors of the king's government, including the ministry of foreign affairs; the offices of the royal chancellery, among the controllers-general and directors-general of finance and their staffs; within the local and national treasury bureaux; and often with the assistance of financiers and tax-farmers. The resulting "policy" towards foreigners, immigration, citizenship, and nationality is traced from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. (x)

Preface

As legal history, the book considers the French lawyers who made nationality law, who constructed, in contestation and collusion with the state, an absolutist model of French citizenship that came to fruition in the seventeenth century. This absolute citizen, defined by the legal distinctions between foreigners and Frenchmen and women, perdured until the 1750s. In its final section, this book considers the unmaking of this absolute citizen and the dramatic mutations of citizenships after midcentury. It then considers this continuing citizenship revolution from r789 to r8r9-during the French Revolution, under Napoleon, and in the early years of the Bourbon monarchy-within the historical movement from the Old to the New Regime.

Research for this book began in 1991 as an attempt to fill a significant gap in the history of immigration to France in the period from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries-one historian's reaction to the French political debates of the 1990s that often effaced the early history of immigration, nationality, and citizenship. The book was never conceived as a history of the social assimilation or acculturation of foreigners into Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, their "integration" (to invoke the contemporary French concern) in France. Paying attention to the dangers of present-day vocabulary, such local histories of the Old Regime could be written, but they would require sustained and detailed research in a variety of local sources that I have chosen not to consider: parish registers, notarial records, municipal archives, private papers, and others. Some excellent work has been done at the level of capital cities and towns of early modern Europe-the necessary scale at which a history of integration must be framed-and parallel inquiries have been undertaken for Spain, where legal assimilation took shape as a social process at the level of local communities.! My initial approach and research strategy, instead, was to use the only sources available at the level of the French kingdom-the legal and administrative traces of naturalization found within the complex bureaucracy of the absolute monarchy. I wanted to describe and interpret the collective profiles (geographic, professional, and temporal) and to reconstruct the motives of a small but revealing group of foreigners who became French citizens. While searching for materials in the French national archives, I stumbled on the extant rolls of the Naturalization Tax of r697-the forcible, collective naturalization of foreigners and descendants of foreigners, along with bastards, who had settled in the kingdom during the seventeenth century. 2 I was not alone, nor even the first, in recognizing the importance of this data; my French colleague Jean-Fran