The émigrés and conspiracy in the French Revolution, 1789-99

The spectre of the émigré conspirator, the most implaccable enemy of the French Revolution, stalked the revolutionary imagination throughout the 1790s and beyond. In many ways this was natural. The émigré conspiracy represented the antithesis of the revolution's transparent, public politics. Nevertheless, the émigré leadership's sponsorship of conspiracy was ultimately based largely on self-delusion and thus proved self-defeating. Reliance on conspiracy, both among the émigré leadership and freelance activists was not due primarily to desperation. The outbreak of war between France and Austria in April 1792 transformed the status of the émigré conspirator. On one level it relegated him to the rank of junior partner in foreign intrigues to overturn the Revolution. On another, it elevated him to the spearhead of a vast international plot headed by France's inveterate enemies Austria and, from January 1793, Britain, with whom the émigrés now became indelibly linked in the revolutionary imagination.