Famous Exiles: Eight Banishments That Backfired

Banishing someone is a bet on distance. The reasoning is simple: remove a man from his audience and he stops acting on it. It costs less than a trial, commits less than an execution, and lets the state keep the appearance of mercy.

The bet holds up badly. Eight cases, in chronological order, each measured against the same question: what did the exile actually produce?

Voltaire — England, 1726-1728

It begins with an insult. The Chevalier de Rohan has Voltaire beaten by his servants; Voltaire demands a duel; Voltaire is the one sent to the Bastille. He is offered a way out in exchange for leaving for England.

Two years in London, where he finds a country that argues about religion in public, where a merchant ranks with a lord, and where Newton is buried like a king. Out of it come the Letters Concerning the English Nation, published in 1734.

The book is condemned and publicly burned, its author threatened again. He eventually settles at Ferney, a few kilometres from the Swiss border — a choice of address that is already an escape plan.

Result. Banishment handed him his subject. Without the English years there is no point of comparison, and the critique of the French regime loses its footing.

Napoleon — Saint Helena, 1815-1821

Elba had failed: ten months, then a landing and the Hundred Days. The second time the British chose the South Atlantic, 1,900 kilometres off the African coast, under permanent guard.

Militarily it worked completely. Napoleon never returned; he died on the island in May 1821.

Politically it went differently. He spent his last six years dictating. Las Cases published the Memorial of Saint Helena in 1823: the account of a liberal sovereign persecuted by the kings of Europe. It became one of the century’s great bestsellers and the template for the Napoleonic legend — a subject we treat in Napoleon’s legacy in Europe.

Result. The rock neutralized the man and manufactured the myth. Thirty years later that myth carried his nephew into power. Hold on to that point: the next case follows from it directly.

Victor Hugo — Jersey, then Guernsey, 1851-1870

On 2 December 1851 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte seizes power by coup. Hugo, a sitting deputy, tries to organize resistance, fails, and leaves France. Brussels, then Jersey, then Guernsey after his expulsion from Jersey in 1855.

Nineteen years. What he wrote there: Les Châtiments (1853), a verse assault on “Napoleon the Small”; Les Contemplations (1856); and Les Misérables (1862).

In 1859 the Empire declared an amnesty. Hugo refused it publicly: he would return when liberty returned. The refusal was a political act — it turned an imposed condition into a held position.

He came back on 5 September 1870, the day after the Empire fell. At his death in 1885 the Republic gave him a state funeral and the Panthéon.

Result. The exile coincided with the major work and built the moral standing. The regime that expelled him fell before he did.

Karl Marx — London, 1849-1883

A career of successive expulsions: Prussia, then Paris in 1845, then Brussels in 1848, then the Rhineland again after the revolutions collapsed. In 1849 Marx reached London. He stayed thirty-four years, until his death.

Those years were materially brutal — poverty, children dead in infancy, financial dependence on Engels. They were also the years of the British Museum reading room, where he worked through British factory inspectors’ reports, official statistics and parliamentary debates.

Capital, Volume I, appeared in Hamburg in 1867. The empirical documentation that gives it its force came from the archives of the country that took him in, not the one that threw him out.

Result. London gave him the two things he lacked: time and sources. No European state gained anything from having expelled him.

Yaa Asantewaa — Seychelles, 1901-1921

Here, banishment worked.

In 1900 the British had deported the Asante king and were demanding the Golden Stool, the sacred seat of the nation. Yaa Asantewaa, queen mother of Ejisu, took command of the revolt when the chiefs hesitated.

The War of the Golden Stool was crushed. She was deported to the Seychelles, thousands of kilometres away, with no network, no press, no readership able to receive her. She died there in 1921 without seeing her country again.

Result. The exile did its job. What separates her case from the others is not courage or cause: it is access to a printing press and a readership. Voltaire, Hugo and Marx were banished toward publishing capitals. She was banished toward isolation. Other lives erased by the same mechanism appear in 9 major historical figures nobody talks about.

Leon Trotsky — Turkey, France, Norway, Mexico, 1929-1940

Expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, relegated to Alma-Ata in 1928, Trotsky was deported from the USSR in 1929. Eleven years of movement followed: the island of Büyükada, France, Norway, and finally Mexico in 1937.

He never stopped writing. The Revolution Betrayed appeared in 1936; he founded the Fourth International in 1938.

In August 1940 an NKVD agent killed him at Coyoacán.

Result. This is the sharpest demonstration of the problem exile poses to those who order it. Stalin had banished Trotsky in 1929. Eleven years later he still had to send someone to the other side of the world to kill him: distance had not been enough to silence him.

Albert Einstein — United States, 1933-1955

In January 1933 Einstein was travelling in the United States when Hitler took power. He never went back. He resigned from the Prussian Academy of Sciences, renounced his German citizenship, and settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Six years later he signed the letter to Roosevelt — drafted with Leó Szilárd — warning that Germany might build an atomic bomb. It was one of the impulses behind the American program.

Result. Nazi Germany drove out a decisive part of its own physics. That expertise was used elsewhere, and against it. The scientific exodus of the 1930s is the most expensive transfer of intellectual capital a state has ever inflicted on itself.

Charles de Gaulle — London, 1940-1944

On 17 June 1940 a temporary brigadier general, an undersecretary of state for all of two weeks, flew to London. On the 18th, de Gaulle spoke on the BBC.

Few people heard him. He had no troops, no territory, no mandate. In August 1940 a Vichy military tribunal sentenced him to death in absentia.

Four years later he headed the Provisional Government at the Liberation.

Result. This is the only case on the list where exile was not imposed but chosen, and where it was itself the political act. Distance here was not the punishment: it was the condition for continuing to speak.

What the eight cases measure

Banishment assumes a man’s influence depends on his physical presence. These cases point to three variables that matter more.

Access to print. Hugo on Guernsey, Marx in London, Trotsky in Mexico were all publishing. Yaa Asantewaa in the Seychelles was not. That is the factor separating effective banishment from the rest.

Time freed up. The Letters, Les Misérables, Capital and the Memorial of Saint Helena were all written in exile. A banished man has no duties, no seat, no social calendar. He has his days.

The legitimacy of martyrdom. Hugo’s refusal of the 1859 amnesty, de Gaulle’s death sentence in 1940: the power that punishes hands its target a standing it could not have earned otherwise.

Then there is the loop. Saint Helena produced the Memorial, the Memorial produced the legend, the legend carried Louis-Napoleon into power, and Louis-Napoleon exiled Hugo — who wrote Les Misérables. Two banishments ordered thirty-seven years apart, and both handed their victim the book that would outlive him.