France has a long tradition of asylum for refugees. Since the Revolution, this has made it the land of liberty (pays de la liberte) and the land of asylum (la terre d'asile). In practice, responses have been shaped less by principle than by political and social conditions. Various refugee movements - from the late eighteenth century Lowlands, to Spanish and Italian liberals in the 1820s, Polish nationalists in the 1830s, German social revolutionaries of 1848-9, anti-Bolsheviks from the Russian Revolution, Christians from the former Ottoman Empire, and Jews from Nazi Germany - have met mixed responses, which shifted uneasily between sympathy, principle, pragmatism and open hostility. This book examines the tensions between refugee rights and political responses, humanitarian concern for their plight and hostility to their imposition on the state. Increasingly punitive measures against refugees saw, in 1939, the end of asylum in the internment of republican exiles from the Spanish Civil War.