Capital of Exiles

How London became a refuge, printing press, political headquarters and waiting room for revolutionaries, deposed rulers, nationalists and governments in exile.

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Portrait of Karl Marx — Karl Marx in 1875, photographed by John Mayall in London. Photo by John Jabez Edwin Mayall, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1848 the revolutions sweeping continental Europe forced

from Vienna. For decades Metternich had been the great architect of conservative Europe, building a political order intended to contain nationalism and revolution after Napoleon. He escaped to England and lived for a time at 44 Eaton Square. , who had devoted his life to creating the unified, republican Italy that Metternich's system was designed to prevent, was already living a few miles away. Then, in 1849, arrived in London after governments in Prussia, France and Belgium had all found reasons to expel him. Within a few years the defeated Hungarian revolutionary and the Russian radical would join them. London had achieved something extraordinary: revolutionaries, dispossessed rulers, nationalists, socialists and the statesmen who had tried to suppress them could all find themselves living within a cab ride of one another.

This was not because Victorian Britain agreed with them. It agreed with almost none of them simultaneously. What London increasingly offered was something more useful: a place where foreigners could, within limits, live, publish and organise without automatically being surrendered to the government that wanted them back. The result was one of the strangest secondary roles in London's history. The capital of a growing empire also became the unofficial capital of people who had lost their countries, hoped to create new ones or intended to overthrow the governments of the ones they came from. Ideas subsequently associated with Italy, Russia, Latin America, India, China and revolutionary socialism were argued over in Bloomsbury lodgings, Soho rooms, Clerkenwell printing shops and Bayswater drawing rooms. In the twentieth century the pattern became even more literal: entire governments of occupied European countries operated from London streets.

There was already a much older history of refuge behind this. Religious persecution had repeatedly pushed people across the Channel, most famously the French Huguenots. After Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and effectively outlawed French Protestant worship, perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 Huguenots came to Britain, most settling in London. Their silk workshops transformed

, while other refugees brought skills in watchmaking, goldsmithing, tailoring and numerous other trades. London had therefore learnt long before the age of political revolution that persecution elsewhere could send it unusually skilled, ambitious and interconnected newcomers. The idea of England as a refuge was never as uncomplicated or universally generous as later national mythology suggested, but by the nineteenth century it had become an important part of how Britain liked to imagine itself.

One of the most remarkable early political examples can still be found at 58 Grafton Way in Fitzrovia.

, the Venezuelan soldier, traveller and revolutionary, lived here from 1802 until 1810. He had fought in the American Revolution, travelled through Europe and Russia and become obsessed with liberating Spanish America. London suited him because British power could potentially be useful against Spain and because the city gave him access to politicians, publishers, intellectuals and an international communications network. From his house he published propaganda for Spanish-American independence and turned the address into something approaching a political headquarters. In 1810 a Venezuelan delegation arrived containing the young , Luis López Méndez and Andrés Bello. Miranda received them, introduced them into British political society and discussed the revolutionary future of their continent. Bolívar soon returned to South America; Bello remained in London for almost two decades. The modern house therefore marks an extraordinary moment when several of the people who would help create the intellectual and political foundations of independent Latin America were meeting in an ordinary London street.

London's hospitality was politically indiscriminate. French royalists fled here when revolution or Napoleon made France dangerous for them; revolutionaries arrived when restored monarchies regained control. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte lived in St James's during exile before returning to France in 1848, becoming president and then

. After losing the Franco-Prussian War he would end his life in exile in England once again. The plaque marking his former King Street house, put up in 1867 while he was still Emperor, is now the oldest surviving commemorative plaque in London. The city could therefore serve as waiting room for a future emperor just as readily as it served as headquarters for people planning republics.

It was the defeated revolutions of 1848, however, that turned London into something resembling the political refugee capital of Europe. Governments fell, constitutions were promised, barricades appeared in major cities and nationalist movements challenged the great empires. Then much of the revolutionary wave collapsed. London filled with those who had lost. British politicians openly discussed the phenomenon in Parliament. In 1851 the House of Lords was told that it had long been British principle and practice to offer asylum to people driven from their countries by political or religious persecution — but the same debate complained that some refugees were using London as a base from which to organise revolution abroad. The House of Commons was soon discussing what one member simply called the problem of “Foreigners in London”, including committees of exiled Italians, Germans, Poles, Hungarians and French republicans.

No figure better demonstrates the contradictions than Giuseppe Mazzini. He arrived in London in 1837 after years of conspiracy, imprisonment and exile generated by his attempts to replace the fragmented Italian states with a unified republic. London was initially miserable for him, but it gave him something continental police states generally would not: the ability to live under his own name, cultivate British supporters and continue political work. His activities extended beyond revolution. He helped establish a school for impoverished Italian boys in London, many of whom worked on the streets with organs and performing animals. Yet while Britain allowed Mazzini to remain, the British state was far from indifferent to what he was doing.

In 1844 Mazzini discovered that his letters had been secretly delayed, opened, copied and resealed at the Post Office. He complained to Parliament and the affair developed into a major political scandal. Parliamentary investigations eventually confirmed that the Home Secretary had authorised the interception and that information taken from Mazzini's correspondence had been communicated to a foreign government. Here was the ambiguity of British asylum in unusually clear form. Mazzini was free to live in London, publish his beliefs and argue for Italian revolution; the government nevertheless monitored him and was willing to use secret surveillance when his activities threatened Britain's diplomatic relationships. Britain offered refuge, not immunity.

The British government made roughly the same distinction during the refugee controversies after 1848. Foreigners were entitled to the protection of British law and, as ministers argued in Parliament, the same freedoms available to other people living in the country. They were not entitled to organise military attacks on friendly states from British soil. European monarchies found even that position infuriatingly permissive. In 1852 Parliament discussed diplomatic complaints from Russia, Austria, Prussia and France about revolutionary committees operating in London. Britain refused to adopt the continental assumption that the political enemies of another government should simply be removed. The principle hardened over the century: the Extradition Act of 1870 explicitly prevented surrender for offences of a political character.

Karl Marx benefited from exactly this environment. Expelled repeatedly from continental Europe, he settled permanently in London in 1849 and stayed until his death in 1883. The irony of the location is difficult to improve upon. Marx chose — or was forced into — the capital of the world's most industrialised capitalist economy as the place from which to produce capitalism's most famous critique. For several years his family occupied cramped rooms at 28 Dean Street in Soho and suffered severe poverty; two of his young children died there. Yet London also gave Marx access to the extraordinary collections of the

, where he researched for years, as well as to newspapers, economic data, political refugees and the commercial society he was attempting to understand. He worked on the ideas that became Das Kapital while living above what is now a restaurant in one of London's busiest entertainment districts.

London did not merely protect ideas; its printing industry allowed them to travel back into countries where they could not legally be printed. Alexander Herzen arrived in 1852 after the collapse of his hopes for the European revolutions and established the Free Russian Press the following year. From London he printed Russian-language political material beyond the reach of Tsarist censorship. In 1857 he and Nikolai Ogaryov began The Bell, which was secretly carried into Russia and became highly influential in debates over serfdom and political reform. For a period, Herzen's London homes became destinations for progressive Russians travelling through western Europe. The city was functioning as a piece of communications infrastructure: ideas prohibited in St Petersburg could be written in London, printed in London and then smuggled back across the Russian frontier.

Herzen himself did not romanticise his refuge. He sometimes found London alienating and dreary, just as Mazzini had before him. This is an important corrective to the comfortable modern image of cosmopolitan exile. Many of these people arrived without money, fluent English or any certainty that they would ever return home. Their London could consist of rented rooms, correspondence, political quarrels and endless attempts to raise funds. Marx's poverty in Soho was real. Mazzini repeatedly struggled financially. Exile could mean freedom from prison while still involving the loss of language, status, family and homeland. London was valuable precisely because it did not require newcomers to love it before allowing them to use it.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the Russian revolutionary world had established its own London geography. In 1902

began working from the Twentieth Century Press at 37a , sharing an office with its manager Harry Quelch. From here Lenin edited and printed Iskra — The Spark — which was then smuggled into Russia. The building is now the , creating a slightly misleading historical coincidence: Marx himself is not known to have worked there, but Lenin certainly did. The small office survives as the Lenin Room. Clerkenwell was already an appropriate setting, with a long radical and printing tradition and regular political meetings on the Green outside.

Another revolutionary discovered that London's protections could extend even inside a diplomatic confrontation. In October 1896

, then a little-known opponent of China's Qing government, was seized and detained inside the Chinese Legation on Portland Place. The plan was apparently to return him secretly to China, where his prospects would have been grim. News reached his former teacher James Cantlie and then the British authorities and press. The Foreign Office formally demanded Sun's release, describing his detention as an abuse of diplomatic privilege, and the Chinese minister released him on 23 October. Sun subsequently published an account titled Kidnapped in London and spent time studying in the British Museum. He later became the central revolutionary figure associated with the overthrow of China's imperial system and the foundation of the Republic of China. An attempt by a foreign government to make its political opponent disappear from London had instead made him internationally famous.

By then Britain's apparently open system was itself changing. The idea of the country as a refuge had always coexisted with hostility towards foreigners, especially when refugees were poor rather than famous. Large-scale Jewish migration from persecution in the Russian Empire generated intense political debate at the turn of the twentieth century. The Aliens Act 1905 introduced the beginnings of meaningful immigration control in the United Kingdom. Significantly, even this restrictive legislation contained an exemption protecting people fleeing political or religious persecution. The contradiction had become embedded in law: Britain was becoming more willing to exclude migrants while simultaneously preserving a special category for refugees.

There was another, still deeper contradiction. London was not merely a refuge from foreign empires. It was the capital of the British Empire, and over time people from Britain's own colonies learnt to use its freedoms, institutions and publicity against imperial rule. Not everyone involved was technically an exile, but they belonged to the same political ecosystem.

spent more than three decades of his life in London, became the first Indian elected to Parliament by popular vote and developed his devastating argument that British rule was draining wealth from India. His house in Penge became a meeting place for Indian visitors and nationalists. Several decades later Gandhi came to London for negotiations over India's constitutional future and deliberately stayed not in a grand West End hotel but at in Bow, living among an East End community while negotiating with the government of an empire he was trying to dismantle.

More radical Indian nationalism had its own London address.

at 65 Cromwell Avenue in Highgate was established as a hostel and political centre for Indian students. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar lived there from 1906 to 1909, years critical to the development of his revolutionary politics and Hindu nationalism. The larger point is more interesting than any one ideology. Britain's imperial capital contained universities, libraries, newspapers, debating societies and legal protections that could be exploited by people studying the mechanisms of British power while simultaneously imagining a world without British rule. London was becoming a political school for some of its empire's future opponents.

The same phenomenon appeared beyond the empire. In 1863 five young men from the Chōshū domain, remembered now as the

, illegally left a Japan that was still largely closed and travelled to London. They were not refugees in the ordinary sense, but their story belongs to the same international London. At University College London they studied chemistry and toured factories, shipyards, banks and other British institutions. Their experience transformed their understanding of western industrial power. Among them was Itō Hirobumi, later Japan's first Prime Minister and one of the architects of its modern state. London could therefore influence political change abroad in two almost opposite ways: radicals came because their governments excluded them, while reformers came because they wanted to understand the industrial and institutional system that had made Britain powerful.

The arrival of fascism in continental Europe changed the nature of exile again. Now the people escaping to London included artists, scientists and intellectuals whose work itself had become politically unacceptable. Sigmund Freud fled Vienna following Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938 and eventually settled at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead. He managed to bring much of his consulting room with him, including his antiquities and his famous psychoanalytic couch, transforming an ordinary London house into something like a transplanted fragment of Vienna. Freud completed some of his final writing there before dying in 1939; his daughter Anna remained for another four decades and made London an important centre of child psychoanalysis. The house survives as the

A short walk away, the modernist

became another improbable refuge. Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy all lived there during the 1930s after the increasingly hostile political climate surrounding the Bauhaus and the Nazi regime drove its leading figures out of continental Europe. Their presence helped feed European modernism into British architecture and design. The Austrian writer likewise made London his base after leaving Austria, writing at his Hallam Street flat while watching the European civilisation he had known deteriorate. London did not merely shelter these people. British culture absorbed things that authoritarian governments were expelling.

Then, in 1940, the old tradition of political asylum reached an almost surreal culmination. Following the fall of France and the occupation of much of Europe, London became not simply a city of exiled politicians but a city of governments in exile. Charles de Gaulle established the headquarters of the Free French at

. The Netherlands government operated from Stratton House on Piccadilly. The Norwegian government established its headquarters in Knightsbridge. The Polish government, reconstructed after the German and Soviet invasions of Poland, moved from France to London after the French collapse and established its political centre here. Streets in Westminster temporarily housed competing fragments of sovereign Europe.

De Gaulle's London story is particularly characteristic. He arrived as a relatively junior French general refusing to accept his country's defeat and used the BBC to call for continued resistance. From Carlton Gardens he built the institutions of Free France, establishing an alternative source of French authority while the recognised government at Vichy collaborated with Germany. He would later return to France as one of the dominant political figures of the twentieth century and eventually found the Fifth Republic. London had once sheltered Napoleon III before he became French emperor; a century later it provided offices from which another future French head of state contested who had the right to speak for France at all.

Poland's exile lasted far longer. After the war Britain and the United States withdrew recognition from the London-based Polish government when a Soviet-backed government assumed power in Warsaw. Yet the Polish government-in-exile did not simply dissolve. It maintained presidents, prime ministers, political institutions and the symbolic continuity of the pre-war republic for another 45 years. Polish political and cultural life established deep roots in London, supported by a large community unwilling or unable to return to communist-controlled Poland; the

, founded in Kensington in 1945, still keeps the exiled state's papers. Finally, in December 1990, the last president-in-exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, travelled to Warsaw and handed the presidential insignia preserved in London to the democratically elected Lech Wałęsa. A state that had effectively been kept in political storage in London returned its symbols of legitimacy half a century later.

This history is sometimes presented as evidence of an uncomplicated British love of liberty. It was nothing of the sort. Refugees were monitored. Mazzini's post was opened. Wartime Britain interned thousands of German, Austrian and Italian “enemy aliens”, including people who had themselves fled fascism. Poor migrants met a welcome very different from that offered to celebrity revolutionaries. Legislation increasingly restricted entry. British governments also remained capable of supporting authoritarian regimes abroad while allowing their opponents to live in London. The tradition survived precisely because it was pragmatic as well as principled. A powerful island state with relatively stable institutions could tolerate a degree of political dissent that more vulnerable regimes feared. Britain gained useful people, useful information and a reputation for liberalism; exiles gained physical safety, printing presses, libraries and access to the world's most internationally connected city.

The result is now scattered so thoroughly through London that it is easy not to notice. A plaque in Eaton Square marks Metternich. Marx is remembered above Dean Street. Mazzini survives on North Gower Street. Herzen is in Bayswater. Bolívar is on Duke Street, while Miranda and Bello share a Fitzrovia house. Lenin's tiny Clerkenwell office can still be entered. Freud's couch remains in Hampstead. De Gaulle's headquarters survives in St James's. Napoleon III is commemorated by London's oldest surviving plaque. These are not simply disconnected curiosities about famous foreigners. Together they form another map of the city.

And it is a surprisingly consequential map.

From London, Miranda promoted the independence of Spanish America. Mazzini tried to build Italy. Marx attempted to explain and overturn capitalism. Herzen addressed Russia beyond the Tsar's censor. Lenin edited material intended to provoke Russian revolution. Sun Yat-sen emerged from an attempted kidnapping with a global reputation and developed ideas for a new China. Indian nationalists argued against British imperial rule from within its own capital. De Gaulle claimed the right to represent a France that had been occupied. Polish politicians preserved the legal idea of an independent republic for decades after they had lost control of its territory.

They did not agree with one another. Many would have profoundly disliked one another. Their visions led to democracies, dictatorships, wars, liberation movements, nationalism and revolution in radically different forms. To celebrate the fact that London sheltered them is not to endorse everything they subsequently believed or created.

What they shared was the experience of finding, temporarily or permanently, a city in which political defeat did not necessarily mean political silence.

That may be the most interesting reason to think of London as a capital of exiles. The city's historical importance does not come only from decisions made by British kings, ministers, generals and financiers. Some of the decisions that changed the outside world were conceived by people who were in London precisely because they had no power at home.

They rented rooms. They went to libraries. They printed newspapers. They argued in cafés and drawing rooms, raised money, wrote letters and waited.

Then, sometimes, they went back. And countries changed.

The World in London

Capital of Exiles

Sources

Frederick Douglass

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