Abstract: Presenting the career and cultural activities of Auguste Duvau (1771-1831), Pestel’s chapter places Charles de Villers’s trajectory in the context of French emigration in the Holy Roman Empire. It puts forward four comparative observations about the conditions of cultural transfer during exile: generation and political orientation, the spatiality of exile and its transnational dimension, the relationship between national cultures and cosmopolitanism and the logics of circumstance in exile.