When Charlotte Smith's The Banished Man was published in 1794 at the height of the French Revolution, the Analytical Review considered it ‘an amende honorable for her past political transgressions’. Similarly, the European Magazine received the novel favourably because it ‘makes an Englishman thrill with added horror at the idea of introducing into England any portion of those sentiments which have already wrapt an empire in flames’. Although her earliest novels had been more sentimental than political, Smith's prose work of the mid-1790s appeared at a time when the link between politics and the written word was a powerful one. The Banished Man's plot is concerned with events of great actuality: it opens in 1792 with the impact of the Revolutionary wars and covers the execution of King Louis XVI in January 1793 as well as the radical period of the Terror. Smith offers characters reflecting a range of political opinions, with particular emphasis on the unfortunate émigré hero, d'Alonville, and his Revolutionary brother, Du Bosse. French radicalism is consistently criticized in the text, although the depiction of the republican Polish exile, Carlowitz, and the idealistic Englishman, Ellesmere, ensures that ‘the tone of the work favours the liberal’. The setting, the sympathetic portrayal of émigrés and the constant criticism of France make it perhaps a surprising novel to translate into French. The fact that it was translated (in 1799, although not published until 1803) is partly due to Charlotte Smith's unqualified success as a novelist in France during the Revolutionary decade and partly due to the vogue for émigré novel s that was sweeping Europe at the turn of the century.

This article aims to examine how Charlotte Smith's novel was adapted to conform more naturally with aesthetic and political concerns across the Channel. The translator, Louis-Antoine Marquand, subverts Smith's political message to make the novel more acceptable to French readers. This decision can only be understood in the context of literature in France during the Revolutionary decade which saw the rise of the ‘European’ émigré novel.