The Refuge in figures

Where does Clairac stand?

The best-documented regions. Normandy and the Dauphiné lost nearly 40% of their Protestants, the Vivarais and the Cévennes barely 10%. [W25] Of the 40,000 to 50,000 refugees in England, most came from Poitou (40%) and Normandy (25%), through the ports of Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Nantes. [W29]

Clairac. Claude Martin drew up the list of the emigrants from Clairac he had found in the archives: 274 lines, and his own total, “261 personnes”. [L] Another list gives the order of magnitude of the community that stayed: the “Rolle des Nouveaux Convertis” of 1699 counts 3,274 Protestants living in Clairac and forced to convert (reference cited on the 2019 reference page). At the first census, in 1793, the town had 5,900 inhabitants. [W1]

Claude Martin himself gave an order of magnitude, without citing its source: a Protestant community of “plus de 4.000 âmes” (more than 4,000 souls) in Clairac at the time of the Revocation and, according to “un dénombrement non achevé” (an unfinished count), “10 % de la population a émigré” (his text on the refugees in Dublin, page 1).

Another figure, not to be confused. The historian Gregory Hanlon reports that Claude Martin identified 981 refugees from the region (not from the town of Clairac alone), of whom 761, or 78%, came from the Nérac–Castelmoron axis. [W46] This regional count is distinct from the list of emigrants from Clairac (261 people according to his summary): the two numbers do not add up, and the calculation below concerns Clairac only.

Taken together, these two figures give a minimum estimate: at least 261 departures out of 3,535 Protestants (who left or stayed), that is at least 7.4%. This is only a floor: the list counts only the people Claude Martin found in the registers; other departures have left no known trace.

The two measures are not of the same kind: for the provinces, a historians’ estimate; for Clairac, an incomplete count by name. The Clairac figure therefore does not show that the town lost fewer people than the average: it only says how many departures are proven today, name by name.

Where the people of Clairac went

At the foot of his list, Claude Martin made his own count: 35 in Holland, 32 in Germany, 51 assisted in Frankfurt, 36 in England or London, 11 in Ireland, 6 in Switzerland and 90 “non suivis” (not traced), making 261 people. [L] The chart compares the distribution of the 171 people traced with that of the refugees from the whole of France (middle of the settlement ranges). [W24]

What can be said. Germany weighs much more heavily for Clairac (nearly half of the traced departures) than for France, and Switzerland much less. A word of caution: those “assisted in Frankfurt” were refugees passing through, many of whom moved on to Holland or elsewhere, and Claude Martin had specifically studied the Frankfurt relief registers; Switzerland, a transit country, kept few refugees. [W24] Clairac’s profile therefore also reflects the archives Claude was able to read.

For each country of refuge, a page brings together Claude Martin’s figures, the families traced, the map, the archives and the societies: Germany, Netherlands, England, Ireland, Switzerland and America.

What the research lab adds

The “Faire parler les archives” research lab looked up every name on the list in other archives. Number of families with at least one confirmed or probable fact located in each country (a family may count in several countries):

The United Provinces come first, but their registers (Amsterdam, Rotterdam) are also the best indexed online (Open Archives): this ranking partly reflects the archives available to the lab. See the map and the lab’s files.

Limits of the data

• The national figures are estimates, with wide ranges; the sources do not always count the same thing (refugees received, settled or only passing through).
• The “shares” for France are calculated by us from the middle of the ranges; they give an order of magnitude, not a measurement.
• Claude Martin’s list is a record by name, necessarily incomplete: it depends on the registers he was able to consult, and 90 people on it are “non suivies” (not traced).
• The 1699 “Rolle des Nouveaux Convertis” is cited from the reference page compiled in 2019; we have not consulted it ourselves.
• No ranking of French towns is published in the sources consulted: we do not invent one.

Is a source missing, or a figure wrong? Write to us.