This chapter explores a global panorama of settlement projects by French émigrés in the 1790s. These projects – partly realized, planned, or imagined – aimed at transforming the émigré diaspora into defined territories. Situated between the Americas, the Caribbean, North Africa, the Russian Empire, and Australia, these projects allow, on the one hand, for analysis of the émigrés’ political options and spatial imaginaries of exile in relation to political loyalty and the possibility of a return to France. On the other hand, they highlight the émigrés’ strategic and situational relationship toward French, British, and Spanish imperialism and colonial slavery. Such a spatialized perspective on political migration helps in reconsidering the agency of French émigrés. No longer appearing as “absentees” from the revolution, their mobility and awareness about the global impact of the “age of emigrations” provided them with alternative options to the radicalizing revolution in France that also impacted the post-revolutionary order.

The model of how republican government should work that was most often invoked in council debates or by commissions framing legislation was an abstract one, the “well-ordered republic”. A well-ordered republic was not seen as necessarily unchanging. Reforms could be presented as needed not just to correct abuses, but to restore and reinvigorate institutions, or as essential routine maintenance of the workings of government. In practice, what were presented as reforms of institutions were often changes introduced to consolidate or strengthen particular regimes. Reform of laws was less liable to be a political partisan measure, but the administration of justice was always open to political influence. The fair and effective administration of justice was a cornerstone of any concept of a well-ordered republic, but for those involved in partisan regimes, whether good justice was impartial justice was open to question, and their idea of a well-ordered republic was one ordered to suit them.