Before becoming a tortuous inspiration and one of the most famous muses in the canon of poetry written in English, and shortly before becoming a very visible and enterprising agitator for Ireland, Maud Gonne had become a boulangiste in France. In 1887, aged twenty, she had become the lover of Lucien Millevoye, father to her first two children. He was a conservative, married Catholic journalist, but also the henchman and speechwriter of the radical right-wing, militarist and revanchist General Boulanger. As Millevoye was becoming embroiled in populist agitating and conspiring against the French state, they nurtured their shared, feverish Anglophobia, and he cast her as the Joan of Arc of Ireland. With his encouragement and expertise in propagandist communications, Gonne began to publish articles in French on the misery and oppression which British egotism was inflicting on Ireland.
These disquieting facts partially shaping her entrée into agitating for Ireland are well known, though they have not been satisfactorily contextualised from a historical perspective, at least not in English-language publications. In 1922, Gonne's name was even juxtaposed with Millevoye's and his right-wing paper, La Patrie, in James Joyce's Ulysses (Proteus), though without comment. A review of a recent short biography in these pages (no. 167, May 2021) had duly highlighted that the book, while departing from previously reductionist approaches, had not adequately analysed the early rhetoric on Ireland Gonne projected to French audiences. Nor had it afforded the reader an understanding of the international circles and milieux she operated in.
The Millevoye period had already been addressed by Adrian Frazier (The adulterous muse) who references the contribution made by the two authors of the book here under consideration: Anne Magny's examination from a cultural perspective of Gonne's career in France and self-representation, and Pierre Ranger's critical assessment of her contemporary press contributions. As most of their publications are in French, their examination of this early phase of Gonne's activism has not been sufficiently drawn on. They begin with a historiographical overview of the paradoxes which define Gonne and which have challenged biographers, considering gendered and reductionist approaches to this female rebel, the crushing weight of her relationship with Yeats, and the gender barriers she broke. While stating that Frazier's book has gone farther (in English) than any other to date in discussing the early problematic years, they also direct readers to Margaret Ward's vigorous response to it, well beyond its provocative title. His book will not be reviewed here, but it is worth signalling that it approaches Gonne via her relationships, its language is unsympathetic, almost mocking at times, and the narrative is burdened by an overabundance of anecdotal detail. Her agency in agitating for Ireland is overshadowed by the doings of Millevoye and his set, and her cruel misleading of Yeats.
Magny and Ranger on the other hand approach this paradoxical subject and eccentric person with scholarly distance. Their timeline begins with meeting Millevoye in 1887 and ends with the marriage to John McBride in 1904, because these dates clearly delineate a critical period of Gonne's agitation; during this time she frequently travelled to London or Ireland, but France shaped her ideology and methods, and was the base from which unfolded her most intense years of political engagement. The book demonstrates that only by examining the political, social and cultural context of France on the cusp of the twentieth century not as a backdrop, but as the major definer of her militancy, can one truly understand Gonne's lifelong ideological choices and activism.
In a first, historical section, after summarising Gonne as an Englishwoman turned boulangiste, Ranger examines both her conversion to the cause of Ireland as a militant and furiously Anglophone journalist, and the rhetoric she deployed in pleading for justice for Ireland. Her very first article (‘Une people opprimé’ published in Nouvelle Revue Internationale in May 1891), effective in appealing to the emotions of her readers by graphically describing, as a female eyewitness, the human suffering caused by Donegal evictions, none the less alluded to an evidently metaphorical ‘Jewish’ landlord. She and Millevoye reflected the anti-Semitism of the age, rampant well before the Dreyfus affair and by no means confined to France. To particular French audiences she could project publicly the grievances of a small, oppressed, Catholic and Celtic ‘sister’ nation.
In fact, the trope of Irish misery had been circulating in France for decades. Her articles were well received, her views echoed and relayed by others, and she began lecturing to Catholic students. In 1897 she founded a French branch of the Young Ireland Society (L'Association Irlandaise) and the newspaper, L'Irlande Libre, supposedly representing the views of the Irish colony in France. Class and financial independence were key to her success and enterprises, but in Ireland the emergence of equally enterprising militant nationalist women facilitated her organisation there of targetted events, which echoed the methods of French nationalist pageantry. Multiple links were established, and she not only financed Arthur Griffith's United Irishman but informed its references to France and influenced its Francophile rhetoric. Capitalising on France's reactions to the imperial crisis at Fashoda and the resultant surge in Anglophobia, Gonne transported to Ireland some of France's pro-Boer actions. Especially pertinent is the chapter on the multiple facets of French right-wing ideology reflected in her rhetoric and taken up in Griffith's paper. It discusses the inspiration to separatist Ireland of French nationalist, patriotic-militarist culture and identity politics, and the shared obsession with regaining territorial sovereignty. Pinning her writings and actions to key French thinkers, Ranger examines, inter alia, the evolving image of an increasingly feminised Joan of Arc, and the cult of the homeland (namely rural) and her heroic dead, thus internationalising our understanding of the patriotic identifiers which helped galvanise Irish separatists.
In the second part, Magny adopts a more cultural approach and scrutinises the imaginary when dealing with the female and the nation, and the blurred contours between myth and reality. She identifies three fundamental representations exploited by Gonne, immediately recognisable in Irish-Ireland cultural nationalism but here shaped by prevailing French identifiers. These are the daughter of a motherland, as above, her soil sanctified by the blood of her self-sacrificing sons, and evidently the female embodiment of the nation. Equally scrutinised is this particular rebel's devotion, indeed fanaticism, in rejecting her Englishness and embracing a new identity.
Targeting a French audience, the book may reach a limited audience here; as Gonne is paradoxically little known in France as an Irish revolutionary, explanations in the background will seem over familiar and may come under close scrutiny by an Irish academic audience (for example, the sections discussing right-wing currents in Ireland). The absence of an index is regrettable, and the price is high. Overall, this is a lucid and insightful discussion, in fluid prose, of a complex figure. Enthusing or infuriating through words or deeds, Maud Gonne was for a time an influential agent for change, now properly located within the Franco-Irish nationalist cross-currents she both moved in and created.
