L' émigration irlandaise avant 1800
As far as we know, the first significant migrations from Ireland began in the early seventeenth century. After the battle of Kinsale of 1601, about seven to eight thousand Irish Catholics fled to Spain because of the English Protestants' repression. The next wave of migration was in the late 1620s, mainly to Brittany, because of years of food shortages in Ireland. One of the largest groups to leave Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that of the Irish who went to serve in the huge continental armies of Europe. Between 1634 and 1660, more than 30,000 Irish men were recruited into the French army. And another estimated 30,000 soldiers left Ireland to fight in Irish brigades for France in 1691. These were mainly family groupings who tented to form clusters of Irish settlements in specific parts of cities. The most popular destinations were Galicia, Brittany, Belgium, and the southwest of France. In the seventeenth century, as the trade between Ireland and the European Atlantic ports was becoming larger and larger, Irish families of merchants went to live in these countries. They settled in place like Saint-Malo or Bordeaux in France which they thought as being rights places for a better life. As they were