The word refugee entered English with French Protestants fleeing persecution
When Louis XIV outlawed Protestantism in France in 1685, hundreds of thousands of Huguenots escaped to England, the Netherlands, Prussia and as far as South Africa. English speakers borrowed a French word for them. Back then it meant someone seeking asylum; only during the First World War did it shift to mean someone driven from home.
The word traces to the Latin fugere, to flee, and refugium, a place to run back to. It was first used for Huguenots in France escaping Catholic persecution after an edict of 1540, and reached England after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes sent them across the Channel. Around 1916 it took on its modern sense, describing civilians in Flanders heading west away from the fighting.
The idea of protection is far older than the word. Ancient Greeks and Egyptians believed that harming someone who had fled to a holy place would bring divine punishment, and King Æthelberht of Kent wrote church sanctuary into law around the year 600. Exile had its famous cases too: Rome banished the poet Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea, and Voltaire was packed off to England. Refugees in the modern sense needed something else, though: borders that demanded papers. That only became practical once nationalism spread in late eighteenth-century Europe and nationality started to mean something at a frontier.
Mass flight in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries outran any legal framework. More than two million Russian Jews emigrated between 1881 and 1920, and at least 2.5 million Muslims moved into the Ottoman Empire from Russia and the Balkans between the Crimean War and 1914. When the First World War began, international law had no rules for refugees at all. In 1921 the League of Nations appointed the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen to lead a new High Commission, initially to help about 1.5 million people displaced by the Russian Revolution and civil war. Some 800,000 of them became stateless when Lenin revoked the citizenship of Russians abroad.
Nansen's office devised a travel document for people with no country, the Nansen passport, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938. The United Nations set the lasting definition in its 1951 Convention: someone outside their country with a well-founded fear of persecution for race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion. A 1967 protocol confirmed it, while an African convention of 1969 widened it to include people escaping foreign aggression or serious public disorder.
Source: Refugee
