Militants in Exile: Spanish Republicans and Political Mobilization in France

Can political exiles reshape the politics of the societies that receive them? Existing research on the political effects of migration has largely focused on how native populations react to migrants' presence rather than on migrants' capacity to shape local politics directly. We argue that political exiles, who often arrive with strong political identities and organizational experience, can instead act as agents of horizontal transmission within host societies. We examine this argument by studying the exile of nearly two hundred thousand Spanish Republicans to France following the Spanish Civil War. Leveraging newly digitized refugee records and a difference-in-differences design, we show that communes hosting larger numbers of refugees shifted significantly toward the French Communist Party (PCF) after World War II. We provide evidence that this effect partly operated through Resistance mobilization: communes receiving more Spanish Republicans experienced greater Resistance activity, which helped legitimize the PCF in the postwar period.