The destiny of the French Protestants who, at the end of the seventeenth century, had fled from France to Prussia where they gathered and formed the so-called French colony has not yet received much attention in the field of the specific historiography of philology. A scholar like P.-J. Bitaubé (1732–1808), born in Prussia and a frequent traveler, in his maturity, to Paris, where he finally settled after the French Revolution, provides the interesting testimony of the evolution during the last decades of the eighteenth century of the scholarly relationships between the two countries. By translating Homer into French at a time when the linguistic Germanization of the French refugees had almost been completely achieved, Bitaubé aimed at reconquering, so to say, the legitimacy of his historically lost French citizenship and at the same time to give French philology the dignity the German had already earned. Considered by the Germans as a traitor to the country which had welcomed his fathers and despised by the French scholars who mocked his «style réfugié» encumbered with solecisms and archaisms, he could nevertheless pride himself on being the first, after Madame Dacier, to translate in prose the entire Homeric epic.