Displacement and the French Revolution

This interdisciplinary workshop brings together historians, historical geographers, literary scholars and art historians working on the theme of "displacement" in and around the French Revolution. In doing so, it seeks to open up a dialogue across disciplines between historical study of people in movement during the displacements of the revolutionary era — including individuals and groups such as émigrés and exiles, refugees, arrestees, enslaved persons, soldiers — and wider work from neighbouring disciplines focused on movements and displacements affecting and embodied in texts, objects and images, including translations, transnational media/correspondence, property seizures, trade and capital. The workshop will thus contribute to the development of a growing scholarship emphasising transnational and global approaches to the study of the revolutionary period while extending this in new interdisciplinary directions. 

PROGRAMME

10:00 Opening remarks

10:10 Panel 1

Chair: Sanja Perovic (KCL)

Rosa Mucignat (KCL), ‘“In Italy Instead…”: Italian Radical Translators and the French Revolution’ 

Tazio Morandini (University of Milano-Bicocca, CAPTED), ‘Displacements, borders, expatriates: Jacobin cosmopolitanism in Nice (1792-1794)’

11:20 BREAK

11:30 Panel 2

Chair: Renaud Morieux (Cambridge)

Innes Keighren (RHUL), ‘Prisoner, Émigré, Spy: Revolution and Counterrevolution in the Life of William Macintosh'

Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth (Edinburgh), ‘“Sèvres-Mania”: Collecting “Old” Sèvres in Britain’

Conor Muller (Oxford), ‘British Manufacturers in France and the Political Economy of Displacement, 1802–10’

12:55 LUNCH BREAK

14:00 Keynote

Miranda Spieler (American University of Paris), ‘Slaves and the Police in Pre-Revolutionary Paris: The Clandestine History of an Imperial Capital’

Chaired by Colin Jones (QMUL/Chicago)

15:10 BREAK

15:20 Panel 3

Chair: Tom Stammers (Courtauld).

David Gilks (University of East Anglia), ‘Quatremère de Quincy and the Displacement of Artworks’

Simon Macdonald (UCL), ‘Revolutionary Fragments: Capturing the Bastille in 1790s Britain’

Anne Eriksen (European University Institute), ‘The Panorama is Going to Paris: Integrating an English into Parisian Culture; 1799–1842’

16:45 BREAK

17:00 Round-table - book your free place here.

Round-table discussion on ‘Displacement’ with the authors of three new books: Chloe Ireton (UCL), author of Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic (2025), Miranda Spieler (American University of Paris), Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories (2025), and Richard Taws (UCL), Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France, (2025).

Chaired by Emmanuela Wroth (Cambridge) and introduced by Jagjeet Lally (UCL)

With funding from the UCL Department of History and the UCL Department of History of Art.

Image: Noël Le Mire after Jean-Michel Moreau, Louis Seize, engraving, 1792 (UCL Art Museum)