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The study of the genesis and theoretical articulation of the notions of crisis and migration, as they appear in the classical dictionaries, in the Encyclopédie and in Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois, reveals some surprises. The migrant has been thought of, not as the foreigner who immigrates and threatens the native, but as the very condition of the native, whose people were first migrant. As for the crisis, it was first a medical notion, designating the outcome of the illness, the cure or death. Crisis brings out the fluid that endangers health, whereas we conceive of migratory crisis as the entry of a foreign body. We may be misunderstanding the crisis today because we are not observing the right flow, the one that, from within our social and political system, seeks to exit. For as early as the Enlightenment, the medical notion of crisis took on a political meaning: in Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois, crisis refers to the moment when the feudal regime was established. Its origin was by no means a peaceful translation from the Romans to the Franks, but an invasion and a subjugation. The old Roman regime was not abolished : a hybridisation of the systems occurred. Montesquieu sees in it the germ of the rule of law. We are, as Europeans, the product of this migratory crisis, without which our values would never have come into play.