Ireland in The Long Nineteenth Century 101: Flags of Freedom - Ireland and The French Revolution

Foreword

The ‘long nineteenth century’ refers to the immense impact and lasting legacy of the key events spanning from the French Revolution in 1789 until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This era has proven to be one of the most influential periods of revolutionary change in modern history: the creation of the modern nation state, the birth of modern human rights discourse, and the rise and fall of colonial empires that drew much of the world map as we know it today. This series will be a comprehensive guide to Ireland’s place in this pivotal period. By using the experience of one nation as a guiding principle, we can examine the progression of key historical themes of the era, including nationalism, colonialism, industrialisation and revolution. Through 8 episodes, we will establish the influence of tumultuous world events on Irish social, political and artistic movements, as well as exploring the many contributions made by Irish men and women to the era.

This 101 Series is divided into eight articles including:

1. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: Flags of Freedom

2. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: Famine, Emigration and the New Irish

3. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: The Same Sea of Struggle

4. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: Revolution, Religion, Reunion

5. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: Citizens, Not Slaves

6. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: Ireland and the Age of Empire

7. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: The Ink of Green and Orange

8. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: The Great War at Home and Abroad

Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: Flags of Freedom

In the eyes of many historians, the French Revolution represents the beginning of the truly modern age. The revolutionaries in Paris in 1789 began a revolt based on citizens' rights, democracy and the ideals of freedom that underpin modern political discourse. Paired with the technological and demographic changes brought about by the concurrent Industrial Revolution, the revolt in France gave the upcoming nineteenth century the parameters around which its great debates and conflicts would be concentrated: the ideological concerns of the revolution and the events it instigated throughout Europe would in many ways define the course of Western history for over a century to follow, being the determining event of the era up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The revolution inspired panic and admiration in equal measure throughout Europe: revolutionaries across Europe were moved either to join the conflict on behalf of the French or to stage similar revolts in their own countries, while the old monarchies fought with desperation to uphold the ancien règime and by extension continue their own legitimacy (Hobsbawm, 1988). This chapter will focus on the effect and consequences of the revolution on Ireland, and how the ideals of the French Revolution - nationalism, democracy, and independence - would dictate the key struggles of every nation for the century to follow.

The French Revolution began in earnest with the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. The preconditions for this event, however, had been in place for a long time. The class system in France was divided into three Estates saw the vast majority of the country’s population labouring under a tax system of extremely unequal distribution: the Third Estate, comprised of peasant labourers, artisans and merchants, essentially propped up the First Estate of King Louis XVI’s aristocracy and the Second Estate of the clergy and lesser nobility. France had been a dedicated supporter of the American Revolution beginning in 1776, seeing it as an opportunity to undermine their rivals Great Britain by supporting the insurrection of one of its most profitable and strategic colonies (Merriman, 2009). King Louis XVI provided soldiers, arms, clothing and ships to the value of over 1.3 billion livres (the equivalent of approximately 8.45 billion euros today) from 1778-1782 in order to sustain the American effort. While the revolution was ultimately successful, the resultant increases in taxation and inflation placed immense strain on the French economy, a burden of course felt most acutely by the tax-paying Third Estate. France at the time was primarily an agricultural society (as was the majority of Europe) and the French peasant class could be decimated by taxation in years of poor harvests, and this is exactly what happened in 1788. The inability of the rural population to adequately feed themselves or fulfill tax obligations inspired unrest, and this was compounded by the concurrent downturn in production in industry in more urban centres, making the urban poor ‘doubly desperate as work ceased at the very moment the cost of living soared’ (Hobsbawm, 1988, p. 61). As the 1780s progressed these taxes funded not only the French expenditure in America but an unsustainably lavish lifestyle for the aristocracy and a number of poorly invested public works (Schama, 1991). The militancy and fervour of the urban poor grew uncontained in light of inflation and the price of basic necessities such as bread, a metric Eric Hobsbawm identified as the ‘measure of the political temperature in Paris’ throughout the Revolution (1988, p. 64).

Figure 1: "Portrait of King Louis XVI" (Callet, 1789).

These issues reached a boiling point in July 1789, when the King called a gathering of the Estates-General, a nominal form of parliament in which the aggrieved Third Estate could air their frustrations. The voting structure however gave the working majority of the Third Estate no real opportunity to challenge the status quo upheld by the monarchical government and the supporting clergy and nobility. This situation encapsulated the true lack of free democracy and recourse for change available to the French citizens. Weeks of subsequent protest erupted on July 14 with the storming of the Bastille (a Parisian prison symbolic of the monarchy’s despotism) by vast crowd’s in the French capital. Within weeks the Revolution had spread with remarkable coherence throughout France. News of the fall of the Bastille and its inevitable implications had spread instantaneously throughout rural France (where equal action followed suit amongst the disenfranchised lower classes) and ultimately abroad, to a mix of fascination, applause, and terror from all sections of European society. Although France was an anomalous situation given its vast size, population, and strength in the European system, the living conditions of the people and the societal structure was similar enough to many other countries on the continent to inspire fear (and hope) of imitation revolutions elsewhere.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) was the formal articulation of the revolution’s ideals and philosophy, penned by the National Assembly. This document was foundational in its radical promotion of the idea of a nation - the cultural, historical, and linguistic ties between people - and not a divinely-appointed king, as the ‘principle of all sovereignty’ and the source of all rights (Article III). This prescription can be seen as the foundational definition of modern nationalism, a force which would determine countless wars, revolutions and independence movements through the nineteenth century:

France made their revolutions, to the point where a tricolour of some kind became the emblem of virtually every emerging nation, and European (and indeed world) politics between 1789 and 1917 were largely the struggle for and against the principles of 1789 (Hobsbawm, 1988, p. 53).

Figure 2: "Liberty Leading the People" (Delacroix, 1860).

The new society in France gave “the first great example, the concept and the vocabulary of nationalism” for the rest of Europe and the world to model themselves on (Hobsbawm, 1988, p. 53). The means by which France came to construct its own sense of identity would be foundational for struggles like Irish Republicanism. The individualisation of the citizen as a free and independent subject with rights to ‘freedom’ and ‘property’ from birth also questioned the old feudal system that persisted in various forms throughout Europe, including Ireland (Article II). The paradigms that the French presented would be a model for all national independence movements to come. The feminine personification of France as 'Marianne' in romantic imagery of the time (e.g., Eugene Delacroix's iconic Liberty Leading the People) would be imitated almost exactly by Irish nationalists in literature and propaganda throughout the nineteenth century, from the United Irishmen rebellion in 1798 to W.B. Yeats' verse and poetry in the early twentieth century.

On the eve of the Revolution’s outbreak in July 1789, Ireland had its own questions of representation and identity to confront. The island found itself in a state of political limbo: nominally a separate kingdom in its own right, Ireland was very much in thrall to its larger neighbour Great Britain, and to a Protestant upper-class minority unrepresentative of its largely Catholic population. Conflict and antagonism between the English crown and disparate Gaelic clans throughout Ireland had existed for centuries, with dynastic politics resulting in a complex system of division of territory where the English Tudor crown controlled a large section of eastern Ireland which in 1542 was designated the Kingdom of Ireland. The other sections of the island remained divided between differing factions and dynasties of Gaelic Earls, namely the O’Néills and the O’Donnells in Ulster and Munster respectively. Throughout the 1500s and 1600s, against a backdrop of King Henry’s religious reformation, the Tudor monarchy began a series of coordinated campaigns to replace expelled local populations with Protestant British loyalists. ‘These Irish settlements’, writes Annaleigh Margey, ‘became exemplars of future British imperial expansion’ (2017, p. 555). This was particularly effective in Ulster in the northern section of the island. The ‘Plantations’ ultimately stripped the local Irish Catholic population of almost all political influence. The Penal Laws were a series of religious prohibitions against Catholic activity, inhibiting the Irish clergy from worship and the preaching of Catholic doctrine. Catholics were barred from owning land, voting, teaching and owning land (Cullen, 1986). Participation in the Parliament of Ireland was restricted only to Protestants, and the Irish language was replaced in all official capacities by English. By the late 18th century, the weaponisation of privatised land had become the defining political cause on the island.

Figure 3: "Map of territorial distribution in Ireland in the mid-17th century" (Trinity College Dublin, n.d.).

The Irish peasant was victim to a predatory land system installed by Protestant English conquerors in the seventeenth century and extended to nine-tenths of the island in the eighteenth century. By law Catholic peasants owned no land, worked small plots on short-term leases, and made payments to a landlord via a profit-taking middleman. Rack rent and low wages were the rule, and the situation worsened in the late eighteenth century as an enlarging Irish population put pressure on the land… To the Irish Catholic peasant, oppression wore a Protestant face (Kennedy, 1974, pp. 225-6).

Although parliamentary efforts at reform throughout the 1700s brought some relief to Catholic standing in the island, by 1789 the position of the common Irish man was largely unchanged. Much like in France, a large and resentful underclass existed under a state of exploitative taxation and material insecurity.

Considering many of the close parallels between the experience of the French and Irish populations at this time, one might imagine a sense of kinship with the movement among the Irish Catholic population. Yet upon the outbreak of revolution in Paris in July, immediate reactions were unsupportive. Prominent Anglo-Irish politician Edmund Burke penned a highly influential polemic pamphlet against the movement, titled Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). This would prove to be the defining conservative rebuttal to the revolution. Burke critiqued the Revolution as a dangerous and reactionary threat to what he saw as the stabilising force of monarchy:

So far is it from being true that we acquired a right by the Revolution (in 1688) to elect our kings that, if we had possessed it before, the English nation did at that time most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves and for all their posterity forever (1790, p. 27).

Although initial English reaction to the overthrow of French power was enthusiastic, once the ‘true nature of the object we are invited to imitate’ became clear, Burke found it politically repulsive (1790, p. 4). The presence of a consistent, elevated monarchy was a guiding principle by which a nation could find peace and justice. ‘Pure’ democracy was, to Burke, an experiment demonstrably doomed to fail, evidenced by the overflow of violence that ensued against former nobles and aristocrats. One of the principles of a fair trial was that a man was not part of his own judgement, and this concept must extend to the process of democracy and ruling (1790, p. 33).

Figure 4: "The United Irish Patriots 1798" by Selig Lipschitz captures the Society of United Irishmen, in a style deliberately reminiscent of French revolutionary Romanticism (Lipschitz, n.d.).

Perhaps surprisingly given the shared experiences of the majority of the population, the typical Irish Catholic peasant was not swayed into replicating the Revolution. Written from his residence in Dublin, Burke’s words formed the intellectual basis of opposition to the revolution in France. Political sway in London was firmly swung against the revolt for fear of similar outbreaks amongst their own population, and governments across Europe rallied in opposition to the self-installed leadership in Paris.

Edmund Burke repeatedly stressed the importance of placating the Irish public. He wrote in 1794 that Ireland could either be ‘a strong dike to keep out Jacobinism, or a broken bank to let it in (Kennedy, 1974, p. 221).

The air of crisis amongst the existing monarchical governments led to preventative measures. In Ireland this sense of trepidation took the form of appeasement. In the late eighteenth century, the British army had a heavy reliance on conscripts from the Irish Catholic population. Close to 20% of British ‘redcoats’ fighting against the American Revolution were Irish or of Irish descent (Shiels, 2014). In 1793 the Revolutionaries in Paris executed King Louis XIV, an action that officially brought the British government to declare war on France.

This alliance of the discontents of Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, against the domination of England was a source of fear, particularly for the so-called ‘Ascendancy’ –the Protestant elite of about 5,000 landowners, descendants of the English colonists who considered the government of Ireland to be their possession. The reference to France in these oaths and catechisms sent shivers of panic: the fear of a French invasion of Ireland, transforming the island into a beachhead from where to launch an attack against England, was a recurring nightmare (Ferradou, 2020, p. 2).

Figure 5: Pro-Catholic pamphlet written by Theobald Wolfe Tone for the Society of United Irishmen (National Army Museum, 1791).

In order to assuage any revolutionary potential among the Irish population and maintain this stream of military personnel, the British and Irish Parliaments approved the Roman Catholic Relief Acts of 1791 and 1793. These Acts instigated the repeal of the Penal Laws that had so disadvantaged the Irish Catholic majority. Open Catholic worship was once again officially permitted, and land ownership laws were loosened (albeit remaining prohibitively strict for the majority of the population). Catholics were permitted for the first time to elect representatives to the Irish House of Commons, a level of enfranchisement not held since the British presence had attached itself to the island. Trinity College Dublin (at the time the only university in Ireland) allowed Catholics to take degrees, and the concession to the existence of Catholic schools permitted in the 1782 Irish Act was cemented, albeit with the remaining proviso of an Oath of Allegiance to the British Crown (Cullen, 1986).

Although the progress may seem comparatively meagre, the concessions passed in the Catholic Relief Act are indicative of the beginnings of liberal-nationalist sentiments beginning to spread to other nations in the years immediately following the Revolution in France. Furthermore, this would in future years contribute greatly to public debates on the best means by which to pursue independence: violent revolution like that in France, or patient parliamentary efforts?

Figure 6: A painting by Archibald Robertson showing the naval battle between British and French ships at Toulon (Robertson, 1794).

The foremost revolutionary group in Ireland directly inspired by the French Revolution was the Society of United Irishmen, a group founded in 1791 to campaign for parliamentary reform with chapters in major urban centres in Dublin and Belfast. The publications and writings of the society’s members had a clear ideological link with the enlightenment ideals of the American and French revolutions (Thomas Paine was an honorary member of the Dublin branch). One of the founding members and leaders of the United Irishmen was lawyer Theobald Wolfe Tone, whose advocacy had been a key part of the push for the 1791 and 1793 Catholic Relief Acts (English, 2006). Through the leadership of Wolfe Tone and Edward FitzGerald, the United Irishmen took on immense influence from contact with the French revolutionary government. In a study of theoretical influences in 1790's Ireland, Jim Smyth claims it is impossible for Wolfe Tone to have been unaware of the ideas of the likes of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or any of the other Enlightenment era writers who had informed the ideological foundation of French revolutionary thought.

Despite such radical readings, Locke remained equally amenable to conservative interpretation because his work allowed for narrow, property-based definitions of “the people”, liberty, consent and representation. But Wolfe Tone… sought to extend the boundaries of what was considered “the people”, and thereby enlarge the categories of those entitled to vote to include such groups as Catholics and the industrious poor. Enlisting Locke in support of the revolutionary cause… underlines the eclecticism of radical ideologies in the 1790s (Smyth, 2012, p. 432).

By this time the French Revolution had burst the borders of France alone and was starting to take on the dimensions of a continent-wide war. By 1792, France had officially declared war with Austria and ally Prussia. With the 1793 execution of King Louis XIV in Paris Great Britain declared war on the French. A campaign led by general Napoleon Bonaparte against Habsburg territory in Italy saw France claim significant stretches of territory in the peninsula in 1796-7 (Merriman, 2009). Once the prospect for outright war had become apparent, membership of the United Irishmen was banned in 1794. Wolfe Tone fled to exile in France.

Figure 7: A new wave of globalisation was set in motion by the French Revolution, as shown in "Bonaparte Before the Sphinx" (Gêrome, 1886).

Sensing a mutually beneficial opportunity in the developing state of war, Wolfe Tone and his French associates in the Revolutionary government in Paris commissioned a naval force to set sail for Ireland in December 1796. Wolfe Tone sailed from Brest in the northwest of France with an accompaniment of 43 ships and 14,000 men, both Irish and French, aiming for Bantry Bay, Co. Cork on the south coast of Ireland. The force were defeated not in military combat but by a storm off the Munster coast (Ferradou, 2020). The horrible weather conditions resulted in the destruction of several French ships and a general air of confusion as communication of orders was made impossible. With landing prevented, British forces were able to disperse the few boats that managed to remain in the nearby sea and the expedition was ultimately abandoned. It was the first signal of direct French involvement in Irish affairs, and an early signal of the French Revolutionary Wars spreading into ever-greater proxy conflicts across the continent and further afield: later that same year the French forces would invade Egypt and Malta (Schama, 1991).

Following the failed invasion and increasing agitation throughout Ireland, the English and Irish Parliaments imposed severe restrictions against the Irish public. The Insurrection Act 1796 suspended rights to trial and the right of assembly for certain groups. British violence against Republicans broke out across the country, particularly in Ulster, the traditional stronghold of the United Irishmen movement. The Society had been outlawed for the past three years, and now in the aftermath of the failed invasion several leaders throughout the country were arrested. Only Lord Edward FitzGerald and the exiled Wolfe Tone remained free. The increasingly influential Napoleon lacked the same faith in supporting an Irish rebellion as his predecessors, and by 1798 Tone and FitzGerald felt they had no choice but to instigate the rebellion even with limited French assistance (Merriman, 2009).

Figure 8: Illustration of exiled revolutionary Wolfe Tone's appeals to Napoleon for French assistance (O'Hea, 1897).

In May 1798, the United Irishmen launched a rebellion aiming to overthrow the Kingdom of Ireland and establish a secular republic based on the French model. The group had an estimated membership of close to 270,000 men. Despite this, the effect of the previous years’ suppression and loss of leadership resulted in the rebellion itself being ultimately too poorly organised and executed to succeed, despite massive popular support amongst the public (Hobsbawm, 1988, p. 82). Initial outbreaks enjoyed success, particularly in Wexford, but as the battles spread further across the country it became clear that without intervention the effort would fail. In August 1798 a further French fleet of 1,000 men arrived to support 5,000 local rebels, and in October Wolfe Tone himself returned with a further 3,000 French troops, attempting to land near Lough Swilly in Co. Donegal. His ship was captured without making land. The French support ultimately proved too little, too late: estimated casualties vary but lie somewhere in the region of 30,000 across the island’s various spots of violence. An imprisoned Theobald Wolfe Tone committed suicide on November 12, 1798 as he awaited trial before an English court.

The 1798 Rebellion is significant in the unity of the United Irishmen between Protestant and Catholic communities in pursuit of Irish independence. Future debates would see large divergence between the two groups, and ethnic violence and discrimination would continue to mark Irish history. The aftermath of the rebellion would equally prove pivotal to subsequent Irish history. The nominal independence Ireland had enjoyed was brought to an end: the Kingdom of Ireland was dissolved entirely, with Ireland being absorbed into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland by the Act of Union 1800. The effort to repeal this Act and achieve true independence from Great Britain would define Irish political efforts for the duration of the nineteenth century. Theobald Wolfe Tone would go on to become idolised as a symbolic figure in future conceptions of Irish Republicanism through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Figure 9: Symbols and mottos employed by the United Irishmen persist throughout Irish Republicanism (National Museum of Ireland, n.d.).

One of the most telling points concerning the United Irishmen was the religious and ethnic implications of its make-up. Although the group was not strictly segregated on religious or ethnic grounds, until 1795 the United Irishmen was comprised predominantly of Ulster Protestants. From 1796 the expanded aim of national independence and land grievances drew an ever-greater number of Catholics to join. The unity was never fixed, however, with William Kennedy (1974) citing unresolved ideological differences and infighting between Catholics and Protestants being ultimately responsible for the failure of the United Irishmen to cohere and ultimately succeed. Indeed, a fundamental disagreement on the French and the secular ambitions of their revolution split the group ideologically. William Drennan, president of the United Irishmen Dublin Chapter, wrote:

The true cause, which really disunited the Presbyterians and the Catholics, is that the former love the French openly and the Catholics almost to a man hate them secretly. And why? Because they have overturned the Catholic religion in that country and threaten to do so throughout the world (Kennedy, 1974, p. 224).

The failure of the United Irishmen to replicate the successes of their French counterparts and inspirations cannot solely be attributed to this religious difference within their ranks. A number of other factors will contribute to the Society’s fortunes. It must be acknowledged of course that a vast disparity existed between the military capabilities and organisational power of the French and Irish revolutionary groups. However, the uniformity of purpose and shared end-goals that animated the French movement simply did not exist in the same way in the institutions that fought for Irish liberation, with Wolfe Tone’s own political philosophy described as ‘more patchwork quilt, with loose ends and coarse stitching, than grand synthesis’ (Smyth, 2012, p. 432). It is worth analysing this point as indicative of how the Catholic-Protestant religious divide will continue to develop as one of the key themes surrounding Irish revolutionary history throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After the United Irishmen were outlawed in 1794, the underground group became increasingly radical in its ultimate ambitions, and this inevitable splintered views in an already cosmopolitan group. ‘Agrarian violence in the 1790s took on the character of religious war’, especially in Ulster where the group had been particularly strong and where social divisions were perhaps most acutely felt (Kennedy, 1974, p. 226).

Figure 10: "Napoleon Crossing the Alps" (David, 1805).

The French Revolution was not made or led by a formed party or group in the modern sense of the word, nor by men trying to carry out any sort of systematic programme… Nevertheless, a striking consensus of general ideas among a fairly coherent social group gave the revolutionary movement effective unity. The group was the ‘bourgeoisie’; its ideas were those of classical liberalism, as formulated by ‘the philosophers’ and ‘the economists’... To this extent the philosophers can be made responsible for the Revolution. It would have occurred without them; but they probably made the difference between a mere breakdown of an old régime and the effective and rapid substitution of a new one (Hobsbawm, 1988, p. 58).

It is worth noting here the implications of the French exporting of revolutionary ideals and the lengths it would reach. Significant attention should now be drawn to the circular relationship between the revolution of ideas in France and the Industrial Revolution of means and technology throughout Europe (Hobsbawm, 1988). Increased capabilities of communication and faster transport across great distances - while certainly still in relative infancy - indicate a vastly improved ability for revolutionary sentiment and news to travel and ignite across great distances with great spontaneity and no loss of momentum. Revised approaches to trans-national histories and reassessments of globalisation as a historical process have become some of the most active fields of historical research (Bordo, Taylor & Williamson, 2003). While global connections have existed for millenia in the forms of trade routes, war, and migration, debate still continues today as to the starting point of globalisation in the modern sense of the word. It is worth considering Ireland’s burgeoning connections to revolutionary France in this context: while Ireland had past experiences collaborating with foreign powers in opposition to Britain (e.g., Spain in the 16th century), this entanglement with a pan-European moment of crisis and emergency politics can be considered a significant case study in the transition of small nations such as Ireland towards integration into truly global historical processes.

The French Revolution was a pivotal influence on the development of nationalist consciousness in Ireland in the nineteenth century. Both directly and indirectly the events in France that began in 1789 and lasted until 1815 (with the British defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo) launched the major themes of national identity and independence that would dominate political discourse throughout Europe and the wider world for the next century. In Ireland, not only were a political and ethnic underclass presented with a model for violent seizure of control, its unique contrasts with such a model, i.e. the conflicted nature of Catholic nationalist identity, fomented the articulation of a particular Irish identity that would be sharpened and refined by subsequent generations. The limited independence that Ireland claimed prior to the 1798 Rebellion was firmly crushed, and the subjugation of the indigenous population was more firmly entrenched at precisely the same time as they began to develop a more defined sense of national identity. Additionally, the revolution in France exacerbated the militarisation of the British Empire, a neighbour of near-overwhelming influence on the course of Irish history, instigating a further push towards becoming the predominant global power by 1900.

Bibliographical References

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Visual Sources