7 - French Immigration

Summary

THE Anglo-French wars following William III’s coronation in 1689 to some extent impeded the routine intercourse with Normandy and Brittany fostered by Guernsey’s proximity to the French coast. While this was partly counterbalanced by concurrent French migration to Guernsey (Huguenots from 1685, and émigrés fleeing the 1789 Revolution), persistent eighteenth-century warfare took its toll in terms of mutual alienation. In 1814, after two decades of the most intense hostilities ever seen, Thomas Quayle could say with some justification, ‘at this day, all intercourse of the islands with that ill-fated nation is completely cut off: former friendships and connections have passed away’.

Nevertheless, after the Peace of Paris in 1815, channels of communication did re-open, and a French presence was re-established in the Island. As early as 1817, a newspaper claimed that unemployed Guernseymen preferred parochial relief to labouring on the roads for the pittance accepted by Frenchmen. Much of the labour for the major public and private building projects of the 1820s and ‘30s seems to have come from France, among them St Peter Port’s Commercial Arcade, which, it was later claimed, was built by French workmen ‘at a wage of only one franc a day’. So steadily did the French community grow that, by the time of the 1831 census – at a total of 446 – French nationals comprised 3 per cent of St Peter Port’s population.

No further data on the French are available from the 1831 census, but more substantial information is provided in the migrants’ census of 1830. Over three-quarters of the Frenchmen enumerated in St Peter Port came from the Norman département of La Manche, many from villages on the northern and western coasts of the Cotentin peninsula, just a few miles across the water from Guernsey. As regards occupations, Frenchmen in the 1830 listing fell into three main groups: a majority were recorded simply as labourers (no doubt those engaged on the building projects), and there were smaller but roughly equal numbers of semi-skilled artisans (notably braziers and grinders) and unspecified merchants and dealers. Very few of these Frenchmen figured again in the 1841 census, and it seems likely that most were just making a temporary stay.