Standard:

Standard: Dublin

Standard: Irish Manuscripts Commission

Élie Bouhéreau (1643-1719), a French Huguenot refugee, settled in Dublin in 1697 and served as Keeper of Marsh's Library. He led a varied and well-travelled life - an active member of the Republic of Letters during his youth, he acted as secretary on a British diplomatic mission in the Swiss Cantons during the 1690s and subsequently during a military campaign in Piedmont. His diary and accounts offer political, personal, social and diplomatic insights, shedding light on the history of Ireland, France and Europe more broadly. The diary offers a unique perspective on the experiences of exile and diaspora through the primary reporting of one affected by religious persecution, featuring recurrent references to the lives and struggles of refugees, the distribution of passports and large movements of people hoping to relocate family members. It also provides eyewitness accounts of military exploits in Piedmont with Henri Massue de Ruvigny, himself a Huguenot refugee, whom Bouhéreau later followed to Ireland. The pages of the diary contain domestic details pertaining to the lives (and deaths) of Bouhéreau's children and grandchildren. His financial acocunts offer an exceptional picture of family life and social relities in Ireland in the eighteenth century.