Childs reconstructs the decade in which several thousand French exiles made temporary homes in American cities, and begins by separating two very different movements. The voluntary emigration of 1789 he treats harshly, as the flight of privileged men who did their own cause no good abroad. The far larger departure after 1791 he treats sympathetically: reforming nobles, bourgeois, priests alienated by the Civil Constitution, and officers still loyal to France, most of whom left because remaining meant prison or the scaffold. Almost all who reached the United States came from this second group.

A separate stream came from the Caribbean. Childs narrates the quarrel between Galbaud and the civil commissioners at Le Cap in June 1793, the burning of the town, and the overloaded fleet that carried some ten thousand refugees to the Chesapeake.

He then follows the exiles ashore, from the Orleans princes making their way to New Orleans to obscurer emigres waiting on news from home.