FAMOUS EXILES

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 51, 23 November 1929, Page 31

FAMOUS EXILES

TROTSKY JOINS THE THRONG

Leon Trotsky, banished from his own land and hatred from other lands in which he has sought to take up his residence, is the man without a country ■ in the news of the day. But if he is alone in his exile he is none the less a member of a great though scattered . company of voluntary or involuntary expatriates. That company includes both the living and the dead. For throughout the ages men have banished themselves or have been banished from the borders of their homelands. 1 Perhaps the most notable of living, exiles is the former German Kaiser. Perhaps at Doorn he still saws wood, as photographs once showed him; perhaps he is just writing. One hears less about the Kaiser these days; and less about the other royal exiles that the war made. There was a flurry of news when Amanulluh of Afghanistan, who lost his throne not through the war but because he tried to impose European ideas and customs upon his Asiatic subjects, announced that he would seek refuge among ... peoples other than his own. But he, too, has been swallowed up in the throng of former rulers. Other royal persons living outside their former realms may be named. There is Manuel, Portugal’s former King, who has settled down in a villa at Twickenham, near London; there is. the Indian Prince, Aga Khan, living in Paris; there is the former Shah of Persia, now of Paris, who. it is said, '■ has made something like a fortune in the stock market. And there is the former Sultan of Turkey, who lives in Switzerland. Nor is the list completed by the addition of King George II of Greece, who, forced to leave his country in 1925, wanders ab’out Europe, from London to Bucharest. The former King Ferdinand of Bulgaria lives in Germany. Prince Carol of Rumania lives in Paris, his son being King; 'and the “boy Emperor” of China is an exile in the Far East. These men and other royal persons who have been sent away from their own countries still live. If to their names the names of others, who are dead, were added, the.catalogue would be a thick, one. First of all would be written the name of Napoleon, for it is perhaps the most glamorous of all the names that could be collected.’ Twice an exile was he, at Elba, and at St. Helena— and the storms that swirled about him gathered exiles to his standard and trailed exiles in their wake. Bourbons, revolutionaries, Bonapartists and. Bourbons again—all of the parties counted exiles among their number. Only recently died the wife of the last Napoleon. She bad preceded her husband to England after the collapse of the empire that led to the Third Republic. Exiles they both were, like their son, who died under the English flag in -alien Africa. But not all, not even most, of the exiles of history have been royal persons, or revolutionaries, or even politicians in the strictest sense of the word. Some have been soldiers —like Pannibal, who, having led the Carthaginians across the Alps and won victories and suffered defeats, died far from his native land. Some have been poets, some have been philosophers, some have been murderers and scoundrels. Nobody knows how long the punishment of exile, by whatever name It was called, has been Imposed upon men who for sins or virtues, according to the current view, have incurred the wrath of government or community. Savage tribes, from the beginning, perhaps, have cast out members. Five hundred years before the commencement of our era the Greeks had civilised the practice and given to' it a name that in only slightly modified form has a place in our language. We call it ostracism, and it has a current social significance. It derives from the Greek word ostraca, denoting the small fragments of pottery on which the names of persons to be banished were written. Among those who suffered ostracism were Hipparchus, Xanthippus, Aristides, Themistoeles, Thucydides, son of Melesius; Damon, and possibly, Cleisthenes,*. who instituted the device. Dante died an exile, though the last air that he breathed was Italian. He had left Florence and the turmoil of Guelphs and Ghibellines; and, though he might have returned as a penitent, he declined to re-enter the city save with honour. Ovid, too, was an exile. He had written a poem on the art of love that the Emperor Augustus, sensitive because of the scandal of the conduct

of his daughter, Julia, considered detrimental to the morals of his people. The Emperor waited ten years, and then, after a second.scandal in the imperial family—both of them resulted in the banishment of guilty young women—sent Ovid out to the rim of the world —of the Roman world, at least. It was a place called Tomi, half Greek and half barbarian, near the mouth of the Danube. To be banished from Rome was a terrible fate, especially for an artist, for to leave the Roman Empire was to leave civilisation. • . Banishment was a common practice in the pagan world. In Athens it might be the penalty for uprooting the sacred olive trees, for remaining neutral during a sedition, for giving refuge to a fugitive from justice, or for murder. While for voluntary homicide the penalty was death, the murdered could still leave the country the day after the trial. Even when a general amnesty was proclaimed, he could not return; if he did he was put to death. The involuntary homicide who was supposed to go into exile, might return if he could make a settlement with the family of the slain man. Since extradition was demanded only for persons guilty of high treason or other serious offences against the State, the fugitive generally was safe. At Rome in early times exile was not a punishment but rather a means of escaping punishment. Before judgment had been finally pronounced, it was open to any Roman citizen condemned to death to escape the penalty by voluntary exile. If he returned he was put to death. Of the men who have fled their countries or been sent away for what they have thought or written, Voltaire is perhaps the most notable example in modern times—though there are others almost our contemporaries. Romain Rolland, for example, preferred to live in Switzerland during the war because his attitude toward the conflict was not that of the majority of his compatriots. Vicente Blasco Ibanez died an exile because his opinions were not pleasing to the powers in Spain. Voltaire spent, many years of his life—including that long . residence at Ferney—away from the Paris he loved. First he lampooned the Duke of Orleans and was sent away to Tulle and then to Sully. Twice he was imprisoned in the Bastile. When he came out the second time he went to' England, stayed three years and returned to the Continent the foremost literary man in Europe. After stormy years in Paris he went to Prussia. But there, too, ne was always in trouble with his friend and patron, Frederick the Great. A later period of his life he spent in Switzerland. ' Though he was in Paris at his death, his body wrns for a long time to know no peace. First buried in Champaigne, it was transferred later to the Pantheon and then, in the Hundred Days, it is said, was taken from the Pantheon and buried in waste, ground. ' Banishment from England was legalised under Queen Elizabeth; and banishment for crime was regulated under George IV. It was finally abolished by Acts of Parliament in 1853 and 1857. But in another great Western nation not so very long ago—in France —a former' Minister of War was ex-\ iled by Clemenceau. The former Premier Nitti of Italy it even now living in France because he is persona non grata with the government of his own country. There are exiles from Mexico, exiles from Venezuela and, of course, many exiles from Russia. The Grand Duke Nicholas died, in an alien land and the ‘ Grand Duke Cyril, who calls himself the head of the House of Romanoff, cannot go back to Russia. He and his sympathetic compatriots are scattered all over Western Europe and America. The Czar himself may be said to have died an exile; for. though he was executed within the bounds of his fallen empire, it was in that Siberia to which so many of his sub jects had preceded him as exiles.

But there are other exiles who triumph. Lenin, the patron saint of the Russian Revolution, lived and worked abroad before the opportunity came to him to return to his own country. Trotsky, too, bad his hour of glory. England’s second Charles was an exile before he was a King, and so was James II; the latter after the revolution. of 1688 had to escape to France, where be died. One of tbe most notable of recent exiles is President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia, who fled his country after the war and then returned to help make it tbe republic of wli'ch he had dreamed.