Figures vary, but there are probably more than 300,000 French in Britain at the moment, the vast majority of them professionals living and working in London.

Though the raw numbers may never have been higher, French have a long and illustrious history in London and the present influx is only a small chapter in a long, unfolding narrative. The history of the French in London is one of punctuated domestic upheaval, and ensuing waves of migration across the Channel.

This history of course first begins with the Norman Conquest, after which William the Conqueror built the White Tower which now sits at the heart of the Tower of London. For over 200 years English kings ruled on both sides of the Channel – later French merchants were a strong presence in London. You can see traces of the French as style leaders and traders in the Museum of London’s Medieval Gallery.

After the medieval period, the first wave of settlers consisted of Huguenot dissenters fleeing state persecution. These French refugees, along with other continental Protestants on the run from counter-reformation monarchies, founded Austin Friars’ Church in 1550 in the heart of the City of London.

The congregation, however, was united only in its fear of Catholic reaction and quickly faced schism within. In ten years, the congregation of Austin Friars had split along national lines.

The French founded another church on Threadneedle Street at St. Anthony’s Hospital, the Dutch and the others remained at Austin Friars. Both were destroyed: the French church did not survive the Great Fire of London. It was rebuilt, but eventually demolished to make way for the Royal Exchange. The Dutch church at Austin Friars today is modern: the ancient building was one of those destroyed in the Blitz.

After the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685, Catholicism became the only legal religion in France, and there was a massacre of Protestants. A further exodus of French refugees came to London. They either joined the worshippers in Threadneedle Street, or opted for a more Anglicanised variation of Protestantism in the Savoy congregation in the West End.

Huguenot history in London is quite geographically diffuse. You can find French Huguenot influence and practice in several boroughs, the aforementioned City branch, in Richmond, and in several areas of South London.

For centuries, the Huguenot cemetery at East Hill in Lambeth was a significant monument to the presence of the Huguenot community that worshiped at the nearby All Saints Church. Some of the oldest French graves in London could be found there, dating to the late 17th Century. The East Hill cemetery is a public garden now, but its history is well remembered by the London French.

Many of the poor French immigrants who came to London during these years worked around Spitalfields, producing some of the finest silk products of the time before the conquests of the following century brought Chinese silk into the market. These new French weavers, though enjoying a degree of religious tolerance unknown in their native country, were not particularly popular in their adopted home. Riots against French silk weavers were a depressingly common event, occurring throughout the East End in 1675, ‘81, and ‘83.

Despite the obvious religious overtones, not all French history in London is ecclesiastical. French political turmoil proved as great a spur to migration as the religious turmoil that preceded it. Voltaire wrote his famous “English Letters” from observations collected during his three year stay in London from 1726-1729 when he fled France as a political refugee. It is known Voltaire lived in Wandsworth and Billiter Square in East London, and that he attended plays in Covent Garden (and wrote the opening act of his play Brutus, while here).

He also seems to have spent time in Fulham sailing and riding horses, and wagering on incidents from the New Testament with English noblemen, but aside from these oblique sketches, his time here is relatively poorly documented.

The French Revolution provoked another mass exodus. Most of the Wallace Collection was imported around this time of the revolutionary flight.

The Marquis de Chateaubriande wrote his 1797 Essay on Revolutions from the comfortable distance of London. Though most of these exiled noble families were content to live in peace, the Comte d’Antraigues Louis de Launay, associate of another notorious French exile, General Puisaye, worked with George Canning as a secret agent for the restoration of the monarchy. He was assassinated in London in 1812.

Many aristocratic French congregated around Richmond – particularly at

The fear that France might again invade stayed with the British for centuries, being particularly acute at the time of Napoleon. The National Maritime Museum explores how that competition was played out at sea.

The notoriously unholy poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine moved to London in 1873, escaping the scandal their affair caused in Paris. They found a small house at 8 Royal College Street in Camden Town. Their adventures are well known, culminating in Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in a lover’s tiff just before Verlaine boarded a boat back to France. There are now moves to try and preserve their Camden home as a museum

The Second World War was another period of instability in France, and once again French people of all religious and political beliefs found refuge in London. One of the most interesting stories from this period is that of Violette Szabo. She was born in Paris to a French mother and English father, moving with her family to Lambeth. The house where she lived at 18 Burnley Road has a blue plaque as a testament her achievement and sacrifice.

During the Second World War, Szabo, like the Comte d’Antraigues before her, became a secret agent. She was recruited to work as a spy in Occupied France. Parachuting in, Szabo waited in farmhouse in the French countryside for orders, but she was captured shortly afterward in a shoot out with the Nazis and eventually killed in Ravensbruck concentration camp. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross.

The French who stayed in London during the war were centred around a French language school in South Kensington, the Institut Francais du Royaume-Uni at Queensberry Place.

The Institut's other building on Cromwell Road became the headquarters of the Free French Air Force during the war and was bombarded heavily during the blitz; some of the bomb damage is still visible today in the façade of the nearby Victoria and Albert museum. The Institut survives today, and is one of the most respected French language schools in London as well as housing an extensive French language library and cinema.

Recently there’s been much written in the French press about the implications for the national psyche of the model Laetitia Casta, moving to Knightsbridge. She is the woman who was chosen as the face of Marianne, the symbolic embodiment of France.

While it may not be as quite as obviously significant as the mass exodus of religious and political exiles, the idea that even Marianne herself would choose to live in London seems to have awoken the French to just how many of their countrymen and women have crossed the Channel.

Perhaps that is why Sarkozy felt the need to appeal for their return, but looking around at the boutique shops in South Kensington, at Exmouth Market in Farringdon, and in the offices of the city, it is clear that no matter how potent Sarkozy’s powers of persuasion are, there will be many new chapters in the history of French life in London.

The Orleans House Gallery are opening an exhibition in November 2007 about the history of the house - including its many French inhabitants from aristocrats to cooks and ladies maids.