Members of the French nobility who fled France during the French Revolution. In exile, mainly in England, many émigrés plotted against the Revolutionary government, seeking foreign help to restore the old regime. In response, Revolutionary leaders in France decreed that those émigrés who did not return by January 1792 were liable to death as traitors, and their property was confiscated. Napoleon granted the great majority of émigrés amnesty in 1802. During the Bourbon Restoration they were an important force in French politics.

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Originally, leadership by a small privileged class or a minority thought to be best qualified to lead. Plato and Aristotle considered aristocrats to be those who are morally and intellectually superior, and therefore fit to govern in the interests of the people. The term has come to mean the upper layer of a stratified group. Most aristocracies have been hereditary, and many European societies stratified their aristocratic classes by formally titling their members, thereby making the term roughly synonymous with nobility. Seealso oligarchy.

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