Micro-histories of expatriation

 

Visualizing French migrations to Egypt helps discern the origins and destinations of major flows, but it can also serve to identify unusual singularities. These “exceptionally normal” cases can, in turn, be the object of potentially fruitful micro-historical studies. For instance, zooming in on the hinterland of Marseille highlights an abnormally large number of journeys from the modest town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in the Rhône valley north of Avignon, with 33 journeys for a population of c. 5,000 in the nineteenth century.

The numerous connections between Pont-Saint-Esprit and Egypt almost certainly resulted from the extraordinary career of François Bravay. Born to a saucepan seller in Pont-Saint-Esprit, Bravay settled as a wine salesman in Alexandria in 1847. In Egypt he rapidly amassed an enormous fortune, not least thanks to the favours of its ruler Sa’id Pasha (r. 1854-1863), before bribing his way into the French parliament as a representative for the Gard department between 1863 and 1869. Consular civil registration tends to confirm Bravay’s own claim, made to defend himself against accusations of corruption, that his activities in Egypt had facilitated the expatriation and enrichment of many other natives of Pont-Saint-Esprit, to the ultimate benefit of French prosperity. Alphonse Daudet wrote a best-selling novel inspired by Bravay’s rise and fall, Le Nabab (1877), and historians too have tended to focus their attention on Bravay himself. But the dozens of other expatriates from Pont-Saint-Esprit who left traces in French consular archives – including a lawyer, three employees, two merchants, two bakers, three tinsmiths and a locksmith (all male), and four unemployed women – suggest the possibility of rewriting Bravay’s story within a broader and more complex context of the circulation of individuals and of wealth between eastern Languedoc and Lower Egypt. Note that Bravay’s name appears in the data – in the birth records of the four children he had with his wife Elisabeth Schutz in Alexandria – but as his own birthplace is not mentioned in these records, the 33 journeys from Pont-Saint-Esprit itemised above do not include his own expatriation.

Visualizing migrations from France to Egypt reveals other intriguing concentrations, such as the town of Embrun in the Alps, with 27 journeys to Egypt for a population of c. 4,000. Such data from civil registers can then be combined with other sources, for instance the decisions of cours consulaires (extraterritorial consular courts) and chancellerie (notarial) records, also held at the Archives Diplomatiques, and local archives, in order to elucidate the significance of such “exceptionally normal” connections between small French towns and parts of Egypt.