Outside Europe we’ll welcome exiles again

As master of its own destiny the UK can return to the hospitality it has shown refugees in the past

Tate Britain has just announced its next great show – an exhibition of works by French impressionists who fled to London to escape the Franco-prussian War of 1870-71. It should be of more than purely artistic interest. It will, I hope, remind us we were a home for the world’s émigrés.

What Victor Hugo called “the terrible year”, from June 1870 to June 1871, is largely forgotten. But at the time it was a global sensation. France and Germany suddenly went to war and, to most people’s astonishment, the Germans, led by the Prussian army, quickly gained the upper hand.

This led to the capture of Emperor Napoleon III, revolution in France, a gruelling siege of Paris (with Parisians reduced to eating rats), the creation of a united German Empire, and then the bloody civil war of the Paris Commune. France ceased to be the Continent’s dominant power, and seemed on the verge of total collapse.

Many French artists volunteered to fight the Germans. Indeed, the very term “impressionism” may stem from a snowy landscape painted by Manet while in uniform on the Paris ramparts during the siege. Less bellicose artists took a ferry for England, principally Pissarro and Monet. Though the prime attractions of London were safety and the possibility of making some money, artistic influences in both directions had long been important. Constable, Bonington, Lawrence and above all Turner had had a major impact on French art in the 1820s, the heyday of Romanticism – Delacroix, France’s leading Romantic painter, was described as belonging to “the Anglofrench school”.

Half a century later, Pissarro and Monet took the opportunity to study Constable and Turner anew in the National Gallery – the Louvre had no Turners, and did not acquire one until the 1950s. Pissarro (who got married in Croydon registry office), wrote: “Monet worked in the parks, whilst I, living at Lower Norwood, at that time a charming suburb, studied the effects of mist, snow and springtime.”

Another artistic attraction of London was, perhaps surprisingly, fog, and the extraordinary colours it produced. “Imagine a setting sun seen through grey crêpe,” wrote another refugee, the poet Arthur Rimbaud. Monet, who was later dubbed “the French Turner”, came back two decades later to paint his monumental series of views of the Thames in fog.

But it was not just painters, and it was not just the Franco-prussian War. England has always been a destination for victims of Europe’s frequent political conflicts. At that time, refugees (admittedly in relatively small numbers) could come freely: no British government had legal power to stop them, and no other state could bully Britain into handing them over, whatever they had done. The most famous exiles at the time were the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini and the Hungarian Lajos Kossuth, both huge celebrities in their day; and subsequently famous, of course, was Dr Karl Marx.

That tradition carried on well into the 20th century, when so many Jews and political exiles found a home in Britain. The most constant stream of refugees, however, has always come from France. All French monarchs over the last two centuries and the first presidents of all five republics have spent time as exiles in England – from Louis XVIII to Charles de Gaulle.

In 1871, as well as celebrities there came thousands of ordinary refugees from the vicious repression that followed the civil war of the Commune. Many suffered the usual pangs of poverty, homesickness and English cooking, and most returned once the repression died down. But some set up businesses, including one Soho café still flourishing. This says something not just about the chronic instability of some of our neighbours, but also the imperturbable self-confidence of a government and society which was happy to welcome talented Communard exiles despite their evidently revolutionary credentials.

They taught French at Eton, Sandhurst and the naval college at Dartmouth, where the man who had burnt down large areas of Paris may have given French lessons to the future George V. The British, detached from European entanglements, felt masters of their own destiny, and that security was the foundation of hospitality. Let’s hope we can one day recreate the security and hence the hospitality that the Victorians could provide.