On 26 Germinal Year II (15 April 1794), the Committee of Public Safety banished ex-nobles and enemy foreigners from Paris, maritime towns and military strongholds. These men and women were given only ten days to organise their affairs and leave town – a terrifying situation for those forced to abandon their jobs, homes and support networks. Yet the penalty for disobeying the law was even more alarming: those who stayed after the deadline without having proved that they were good French citizens and non-noble were declared ‘outside of the law’. They would be defenceless in the face of the Terror, risking prison or the guillotine.

Hundreds rushed to petition the committee, explaining both why they feared that they would be encompassed by the law, and why they should be exempted from it. Their pleas and the eventual responses – and silences – from the revolutionary government illuminate changing conceptions of membership of the nation. They show both the power of the state in defining citizenship, and challenges to that power even during the most violent moments of the Revolution. They also reveal the profound difficulties contemporaries faced in trying to reconcile new definitions of membership of the nation, which emphasised regeneration and individual adhesion to the state, with the stubborn legacies of older categories of identity and the need to distinguish loyal citizens from dangerous outsiders.