ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns imagery generated by the experience of exile, whether personal or vicarious. Existing scholarship on this topic is largely confined to the late Revolution. Extending the inquiry into the Empire and beyond, I claim that empathy with exiles was overdetermined, and that imaginative evocations of the exile’s plight appear across a broad range of political persuasion. The discussion covers innovative visual representations of two scriptural motifs pertaining to expulsion: Hagar and Ishmael’s ordeal in the wilderness and the curse of Cain. The chapter concludes with Victor Hugo’s cultivation of a public, heroic identity during the two decades in which he chose exile over residence in Paris under the dictatorship of Napoleon III.
