In a pioneering article on the relevance of French politics to the development of Irish nationalism in the mid-Victorian period, R. V. Comerford argues that the foundation in 1858 of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the oath-bound secret society that sought to bring about an Irish republic by force, was a response to the Anglo-French tension of the late 1850s.Footnote 1 Hoping to exploit the opportunity a possible Anglo-French war would provide, the Fenians (as members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood termed themselves) aimed to ensure that Ireland was in a state of revolutionary readiness. Comerford, however, demonstrates that it was not only nascent Fenians who identified with France. Irish nationalists of a less revolutionary bent successfully mobilized a movement to present to the French marshal Patrice de MacMahon, who was of Irish descent, a ceremonial sword in recognition of his military successes in the 1859 Italian war.Footnote 2 At the same time, a petition attracting the signatures of a significant proportion of the Irish population testified to Ireland's desire for national independence. Both endeavors were intended to signal the strength of Irish national sentiment, not least as a means of favorably conditioning French opinion should an Anglo-French war lead to a French landing in Ireland.

By demonstrating that enthusiasm for France was typical of mid-Victorian Irish nationalists, Comerford's analysis risks rendering indistinct the variety and ideological significance of this sentiment. Instead, “France” in Irish nationalist discourse should be treated as a synecdoche for the often contradictory religious, racial, and civic commitments that animated Irish nationalism in this period. Consequently, although Jennifer O’Brien's work on Irish public opinion during the 1859–60 crisis demonstrates that Catholic and Protestant responses to the Italian Risorgimento tended to reflect the “religious imperative,”Footnote 3 a more complex picture emerges if this moment of apparent certainty is located within an account of the longer-term struggle of nationalists to define their political objectives. It quickly becomes clear that 1859–60 was just one of a number of international crises that saw Irish nationalists align with France, Britain's most important “other.”Footnote 4 To so articulate their “otherness” from the English strengthened nationalist arguments that Ireland's national claims were rooted in historical, religious, political, and racial difference. However, as these themes might suggest, this French affinity left many questions unanswered. The analysis made here highlights the interplay in Irish nationalist discourse between the increasing tendency to characterize national belonging in religiously and racially determined ways and the secular, democratic radicalism associated with the United Irishmen of the 1790s and the Young Irelanders of the 1840s. By presenting the discursive evolution of the French affinity through a broadly chronological exposé, this article highlights the ways Ernest Renan's famous categorization of nineteenth-century nationalisms as either “civic” or “ethnic” does not hold true for mid-Victorian Ireland.Footnote 5

In the Irish context, the tensions between the civic and the ethnic conceptions of the nation were complicated by the perception that European radicalism and the politics of the “struggling nations” were contrary to the interests of Rome and the pope. In response, Irish nationalists tended to characterize Pope Pius IX and the French emperor Napoleon III in ways that demonstrated the absence of any fundamental conflict between nationalism and Catholicism. Pius, the longest-serving of all the popes (1846–78), was fixed in the Irish nationalist imagination according to his reputation as a liberal reformer in 1846–48; Louis-Napoleon was increasingly seen during his reign (1851–70) as a manifestation of an idealized Napoleonism, according to which French foreign policy was predicated on the principle of liberal interventionism. Such characterizations proved—or so these Catholic nationalists insisted—that Catholicism was compatible with progressive politics.

By contrast, strong pro-French feeling among influential Protestant nationalists, such as John Mitchel and John Martin, was distinctly secularist, with the rhetoric of Napoleonism drawn on to conjure up a religiously pluralist Irish nationalism. In September 1860, at the height of Louis-Napoleon's cult in Ireland, Mitchel wrote that the “soul of the French Empire” was “the rights of nationalities.”Footnote 6 Like other Irish commentators, Mitchel offered a view of Louis-Napoleon that chimes with Sudhir Hazareesingh's analysis of the “Legend of Napoleon.” Adherents of the “legend” embraced Napoleonism (“a sentimental identification with the Emperor”) and “Bonapartism” (the belief in a political system governed by Napoleonic ideas and institutions). These readings suggested that Napoleon I had been a lover of peace, a democrat, an emancipator of peoples, and, above all, the faithful embodiment of the principles of 1789.Footnote 7

Nonetheless, mid-Victorian Franco-papal cooperation, as exemplified by the events of 1859–60, excited among many Catholic nationalists a tendency to see Louis-Napoleon as the harbinger of a European holy war. This aggressively sectarian attitude merged with the more typical midcentury radical expectations, common throughout Europe, that an imminent war would remake Europe in the image of the “struggling nations.” Popular perceptions of the long history of Franco-Irish friendship reinforced these contradictory sentiments. One of the most popular Irish nationalist songs of the nineteenth century, “The Shan Van Vocht” (The poor old woman; a figurative representation of Ireland), includes the refrain “The French are in the bay,” a reference to the military assistance lent by France to the republican United Irishmen in the 1790s. However, popular songs celebrating Napoleon I segued into an older Jacobite tradition that recalled France as Ireland's ally against Protestant England in the colonial/religious wars of the seventeenth century.Footnote 8 Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants alike were haunted by memories of the 1607 “Flight of the Earls”—the departure of the defeated titled heads of the Old Irish aristocracy to Spain with their followers, many of whom eventually joined the French army—following the Nine Years' War, otherwise known as Tyrone's Rebellion (1594–1603). Equally remembered were the “Wild Geese,” the twelve thousand soldiers, with their family members and priests, who agreed to withdraw to France in 1691 under General Patrick Sarsfield following the Irish defeat in the Williamite wars. Nineteenth-century nationalists were acutely aware that soldiers of Irish descent contributed to the French victory over the Anglo-Dutch-Hanoverian army at Fontenoy in 1745.

What was new about these memory cultures in the middle of the nineteenth century—and this marked a departure from traditional Jacobitism—was the tendency for Irish feeling for France to also be thought a natural response to the racial intermingling that stemmed from this migration. Interest in the genealogy of any leading European with an Irish-sounding name was one symptom of this curiosity; eccentricities, like the suggestion that Marshal MacMahon be invited to take the Irish crown, another.Footnote 9 Such moves formed part of a broader racial discourse, often obscured in scholarly work by the emphasis placed on religious identities, that associated the French with the Celts and the English with the Teutons. As such, the reading of nationalist polemic offered here complements Gary Peatling's account of the sectarian and racial dimension of Irish Protestant sympathy for Prussia in 1870.Footnote 10

This article draws heavily on the Nation newspaper. Although the newspapers of the more conservative Freeman newspaper group (established in 1763) and the more radical Irishman (established in 1859) are presented in counterpoint, the privileged position of the Nation in the argument of my essay requires some explanation and justification. Established in 1842, the Nation was the newspaper of Young Ireland, the group that formed a cultural nationalist adjunct to Daniel O’Connell's Repeal Association, the movement for the repeal of the Act of Union (the legislation by which the Irish parliament was absorbed into the British parliament and an executive government accountable to the British government was established in Dublin). The Nation was a phenomenal success, serving as the house journal of the Young Ireland movement, but attracting a much wider readership. Propagating a religiously pluralist nationalism that was “racy of the soil”—or so ran the famous slogan on its masthead—the Nation played a formative role in the development of modern Irish nationalism, bequeathing a set of languages, motifs, and images that would shape nationalist discourse for generations to come. Thomas Davis, a Protestant poet and essayist, provided much of its initial ideological orientation; Charles Gavan Duffy, a brilliant young Catholic journalist, its editorial direction.

The Nation's particular ideological complexion was shaped by the political controversies familiar to historians of 1840s Ireland. In the wake of O’Connell's decision to cancel a Repeal “monster meeting” in early 1843 following its prohibition by the authorities, Young Ireland became increasingly disillusioned with his leadership. Questioning O’Connell's refusal to countenance the use of “physical force” under any circumstances, a group of radicals eventually seceded from the Repeal Association, forming the Irish Confederation in early 1847. Under Duffy, the Nation took a less determined line, rejecting both Mitchel's insistence that violent revolution was inevitable, and therefore to be welcomed, and O’Connell's position that there could no principled departure from his “moral force” strategy. Duffy's equally principled occupation of the middle ground served to maintain the Nation's preeminence. Uncompromising in its demand for “Ireland a Nation,” the Nation was nonetheless nondoctrinaire about whether Ireland's nationality could be fulfilled through either a complete secession from the Union or a reordering of the Union's political structures. As such, and even with the Catholic hierarchy wary of the Nation's radicalism, it remained the newspaper that most closely articulated the complex passions of Irish nationalism throughout the mid-Victorian period.

Like radicals throughout Europe, the editors of the Nation were thrilled by the February 1848 revolution in France.Footnote 11 At the outset, the journal's coverage emphasized the significance of the rebirth of French republicanism for Ireland:

Here, then, the contours of the Irish affinity for France are immediately clear: it was a matter of shared political ideas rooted in historical cooperation, as evinced through Jacobin references to the 1790s—Bantry Bay and Killala—and Jacobite allusions to the French welcome for the “Wild Geese” after the Williamite wars.

Believing the establishment of the French Republic had created two incompatible political systems in Europe, the Nation shared with many radical European voices the conviction that counterrevolutionary resistance to the fraternal impulses of French republicans made a European war inevitable. Evidence that French '48ers sympathized directly with Ireland was printed in the Nation, all of which was reinforced by French philanthropic efforts for Ireland during the famine.Footnote 13 These French Catholic republicans, the Nation claimed, knew Ireland's “wrongs” and “desires” and, given their “kindred Celtic nature,” knew Ireland better “than the black foreigners who live at home.” This pan-Celticism was often linked to shared Franco-Irish martial values, while the phrase “black foreigners” referred not to skin color but to adherents of reactionary Orangeism, here understood as a manifestation of racial difference. Finally, French sympathizers were cited comparing Ireland's relationship with England to that of Italy in “the thrall of Austria,” and to that of Poland, “the victim of Russia.”Footnote 14

The small Young Ireland uprising of July 1848 was directly inspired by French events. At meetings of the republican Irish Confederation in early March of 1848, Duffy said that his recent insistence that the Irish revolutionists bide their time must be abandoned. “Nation after nation,” he addressed the cheering crowd, “is rising into the light of liberty, while Ireland seems sinking hopelessly into ruin; while famine and death hold her more mercilessly in their grasp. But if the people be true to themselves now, the Western Isle will arise to shine like a new star in front of the old, and in the face of the new world.”Footnote 15 Duffy's reference to the “new world” alluded to the idea that Ireland was peculiarly well placed to connect the two beacons of liberty, France and the United States. At the same time, Dublin Corporation's vote of sympathy with France celebrated a French triumph over a “tyrant king.” Although the vote reflected popular enthusiasm for France, the debate that had preceded it clearly demonstrated divisions in Irish opinion.Footnote 16 A minority of Dublin Corporation members supported a motion condemning “the blood-stained acts and proceedings of a revolutionary mob,” finding France repellent in its fundamental instability and abhoring its periodic lurch to revolution. By contrast, some Repealers cautiously congratulated the French on their conduct, as distinct from their political achievement, but argued that if the Irish constitution of 1782 was restored, the English could be absolutely confident of Irish loyalty in the event of a French invasion. Such formulations were typical of the ideological slippage that often occurred in Repeal rhetoric: demanding Ireland's equality with England under the crown was here inadvertently construed as leading to Irish loyalty to England.

Numerous public meetings and demonstrations in Ireland evinced further sympathy for France. Some gatherings were addressed by Catholic priests, others by Young Irelanders. Most speakers associated the French achievement with the Irish movement to repeal the Act of Union. At a notable, but in many ways typical, meeting at the radical Sarsfield Confederate Club in Limerick, the French tricolore was flown alongside the green flag of the Irish nationalists. John O’Donnell, applauding French “resistance to crowned and sceptred authority,” urged the Irish to adopt “constitutional resistance.” Violence, he said, would result only in imprisonment, but to emulate the Irish Volunteers of 1782 would mean success. Like many, he emphasized the civic republicanism of the ordinary Frenchman, suggesting that although the Napoleonic military engagements at Austerlitz, Jena, and Friedland were “eloquent” expressions “of Gallic bravery,” they were morally dwarfed by the “nobler victory” just won on “the streets of Paris.” By naming these actions of the Parisian citizenry “a monument to freedom that shall endure for ever,” O’Donnell romanticized the revolutionary moment as a noble aspiration whose value was not diminished by a possible failure to fulfill its aims in the long term.Footnote 17

Much of this enthusiasm was strongly conditioned by the idea that French events were inspired by the liberal reforms of Pope Pius IX. Since Pius was adored by many in Ireland for his reputation as a reformer, a liberal Catholic, and a defender of national principles, Irish nationalists were excited by the “theocratic-liberal outburst” that drove Italian developments until April 1848 and was thought to disprove the Protestant assertion that despotism was inherent to the maintenance of “popery.”Footnote 18 In the constancy of this characterization of Pius's mission—the Weekly Freeman described Pius as Europe's “leading reformer” as late as December 1859—Irish Catholic commentators differed from Protestant British liberals, whose enthusiasm for Pius collapsed following the defeat of the Roman Republic and the restoration of the papal throne in 1849 by the French, Austrian, and Neapolitan armies.Footnote 19 To Irish Catholics, Pius IX was affectionately known as “Pio Nono,” borrowing the Italian form of his papal name, long after liberal Catholic governments, such as Belgium’s, had come to terms with the post-1848 authoritarianism of his papacy.Footnote 20

The centrality of Catholic interests even to radical nationalists was evident in the March 1848 address by the revolutionary Irish Confederation to the “citizens of the French Republic.” As did many Irish responses to the events of 1848–51, it blended conservative and radical impulses, praising the maintenance of “public order” and advising that “by securing the rights of industry”—the right of people to work—the French might “guarantee the rights of property.” Most important, the French had proved that “true liberty claims no kindred with spoliation and anarchy”; having “respected religion,” their “work” had been “blessed” by God.Footnote 21

By marking the succession of “rule by dynasty” to “government by the people,” 1848 was thought to signal the passing of the age of the Vienna settlement. This was given dramatic expression by the Young Irelander T. F. Meagher, who—following the famous declaration of 2 March 1848 by Alphonse de Lamartine, the Second Republic's minister of foreign affairs, that the “treaties of 1815 exist no longer as law” but as a point de départ Footnote 22—declared, “The feet that have trampled upon the sceptre of July have trampled upon the treaty of Vienna.”Footnote 23 Excited by Lamartine's manifesto proclaiming France's intention to support struggling nationalities, Meagher prophesized, “Henceforth the convenience of kings will be lightly consulted by France where the necessities of a people manifest themselves.”Footnote 24

Behind the scenes, however, Irish activists learned tough lessons in the realities of European politics. The leading Young Irelander, William Smith O’Brien, led a delegation carrying Ireland's congratulations to the French, but British diplomacy ensured that their reception by Lamartine, however cordial, was innocuous. Keen to develop good relations with Britain and embarrassed by his earlier declaration of support for Repeal, Lamartine agreed to have his response to the Irish delegation vetted in advance by Constantine Phipps, first marquess of Normanby, the British ambassador to Paris.Footnote 25 Britain's diplomatic achievement lay less in its thwarting of Irish aspirations—which were for the new French government's recognition of “Ireland a Nation”—than in misrepresenting these aspirations as radical and ridiculous. So successfully did Normanby shape Lamartine's perceptions that the Frenchman later wrote that the Irish delegation had requested France's armed intervention—which Smith O’Brien strongly refuted, insisting they had sought only moral support from France.Footnote 26 Nonetheless, the Nation was delighted by Lamartine's recognition of Ireland alongside Poland, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland. It might be noted that this represented an advance on Mazzini's notoriously scathing view of Irish nationalism and Lajos Kossuth's suggestion that the Irish within the Union were in a position similar to those minority groups that a Magyar nation would have to absorb.Footnote 27 Private talks with leading French radicals like Ledru Rollin and Louis Blanc gave the Irish representatives more cause for hope, and this perhaps spurred Smith O’Brien's grandiloquent claim in the House of Commons that he could have raised fifty thousand French volunteers.Footnote 28 The success of British diplomacy, as Leslie Mitchell suggests, might well have generated an audible sigh of relief in London, but this did not spare Smith O’Brien backbench derision at Westminster.Footnote 29

As events in France unfolded, the Nation's coverage was surely conditioned by these disillusioning humiliations. The French workers’ uprising and their subsequent brutal suppression—the “Days of June”—were judged “sad and bloody,”Footnote 30 and the Nation lamented the possibility that disappointment with the French Republic might lead to “a mock revival of the empire.”Footnote 31 The promise of February unfulfilled, France was soon judged isolated, “regarded with hatred by the struggling peoples, and with contempt or distrust by the monarchies of Europe.”Footnote 32 Despondent in the aftermath of the miserable Young Ireland rising of July 1848, the Nation discerned across Europe disappointment with the French Republic's failure to act on behalf of the struggling nationalities. Little understanding that Lamartine feared a European war would radicalize the revolution, the Nation complained that just as Napoleon had crossed the Alps to conquer Italy, so Lamartine should have sent the armies of France to “aid” Italian “emancipation.”Footnote 33 This disappointment conditioned the later celebration of Louis-Napoleon: the emperor's Napoleonism—his foreign-policy interventionism—came to be seen as a truer manifestation of the rebellion against 1815 than had the actions of the Second Republic of 1848.

For the moment, however, nationalists, moderate and radical alike, shared the contempt British public opinion had for the pretender.Footnote 34 Louis-Napoleon seemed to the Nation nothing but an “audacious coxcomb who burlesques the glories of empire,” “a fat sensualist, given up to banquets and mistresses, without a fixed purpose”; he was a “robber, perjurer, cut-throat, traitor”; his acts made him the “greatest criminal in Europe”; the coup was judged—following Talleyrand rather than Marx—“a close parody on the 18th Brumaire.”Footnote 35 The Weekly Freeman was scarcely more complimentary and, placing its own ideological inflection on events, referred to Louis-Napoleon as “the perjured Usurper,” “an unprincipled adventurer placed in a position to usurp the sovereignty of so glorious a country as France” whose “passing power” was no more than a reaction to “the violence of the Socialists and the barricade professors.”Footnote 36

Ideologically disillusioned, the Nation found solace in French militarism, hoping a European war would be the outcome of Louis-Napoleon's reliance on a French army obliged to its history. “How should a BONAPARTE appeal to the heart of France save through the memory of Waterloo?” asked the Nation; “Against whom should the Second NAPOLEON lead his Eagles, save against that ‘perfidious Albion,’ which tore the empire asunder, and chained NAPOLEON to that solitary island in the Southern sea?” “In the hour of England's distress,” the editorial finished, “is Ireland's opportunity.”Footnote 37 Hope lay not in Louis the man but in Napoleon the emperor—the pawn, not the maker, of France's historic destiny.

Such conjectures elicited a remarkably unorthodox intervention from one reader, which presaged the debates about France that periodically exercised Irish nationalists until the Second Empire's collapse in 1870. Is Ireland, the reader asked, really to become “another Algeria, or military colony?” Irish nationalists, the writer suggested, needed to face some stark truths. Not only might France lose such a war, but with the forces of reaction rampant across Europe, England was now “the abode of freedom” and “the home of the [political] refugees from every state on the Continent.”Footnote 38 A few months later, still challenging nationalist orthodoxy, the same correspondent's argument was easily sidestepped when he admitted sympathy for Mazzini and criticized “the present monarchical papacy … which desecrates the purity of the Christian code, and converts it into an engine for the ambition of man.”Footnote 39 Mazzini had a peculiar status in Ireland. Many nationalists shared his view that government should be based on nationality and could be fulfilled only through democratic political structures, recognizing that this was a creed of duty toward others, including the members of other nations. However, the central role Mazzini played in the Italian Risorgimento and its assault on the papacy meant that most radicals did not recognize the ways their thinking aligned with his.Footnote 40 In particular, Mazzini was castigated by Archbishop Paul Cullen, Ireland's leading Catholic churchman. He loathed Mazzinianism and publicly associated the creed with Young Ireland and, in particular, with Duffy.Footnote 41 It is therefore not surprising that the Nation's correspondent triggered a severe editorial reprimand: “To a Roman Catholic[,] religion is dearer than liberty, despotism preferable to anarchy,” and the present church “as directly GOD-inspired … as when the Twelve Apostles spoke with the breath of the Holy Ghost fresh upon them.”Footnote 42 Criticism of Catholic hierarchies that colluded with despotism was justified, but the righteous authority of Rome was not to be questioned.

The growing threat of an Anglo-French war with Russia after July 1853 saw revived enthusiasm for French militarism increasingly foregrounded in the Nation's treatment of Napoleon III. Two themes dominated the newspaper's coverage. First, the military superiority of the French forces to the British and the Russian was taken for granted, and the French war was reported as the effortless mobilization of a machine, utterly responsive to the whim of the emperor. Second, France was now thought to be acting in line with Napoleonic ideals.Footnote 43 Theodore Zeldin has observed the disjunction between Louis-Napoleon's ideas, as expressed in his writings, and his actions.Footnote 44 Irish nationalist observers were less skeptical, using the emperor's writings to decode his famed inscrutability (a quality so disliked in Britain),Footnote 45 reveling in his apparent mastery of any given situation. Europe, to them, was the emperor's plaything, and this generated much armchair strategizing about the possible outcomes of any foreign-policy situation. These analyses were predicated on the conviction that Europe was a series of nations, many of which had been absorbed into the empires. Now reanimated by the example of Napoleonic France, the nations had again taken up their inexorable drives toward the anti-imperial conflicts made irresistible by ethnic and historical imperatives.

Something of that earlier hostility toward Louis-Napoleon remained, and his defense of religious interests in the Crimea was initially attributed to the influence of Empress Eugénie. On the eve of the imperial marriage in 1853, there was some speculation as to whether “the beautiful Spanish girl” had Irish blood, and her apparent self-identity as a “daughter of Fingal” was seized upon.Footnote 46 Considered a “woman of imperial intellect and imperial ambition,” the empress was thought “daring enough for the execution of the Napoleonic idea.” However, this brand of Napoleonism was driven by Catholic commitments, for her greatest hope was supposed to be that Louis act as the “first champion of the [Catholic] Church,” establishing “a real Protectorate over the great monuments of our religion in Palestine.”Footnote 47 Such developments would leave England aghast, ready to go to war to protect access to India and the tea trade. France's principled defense of the Catholic Church would run up against Britain's less principled imperial interests.Footnote 48 Eugénie, naturally, was compared very favorably to “the present gadding middle-aged mistress of England.”Footnote 49

Following Russia's march into Moldavia and Wallachia in July 1853, the Nation perceived a lowly British openness to negotiation that contrasted with a noble French readiness to fight. Britain was thought to fear a war that would encourage those “democratic societies still fomenting popular risings against her darling kings,”Footnote 50 but no such fears inhibited the Nation's bloodthirsty editorialists, who now indulged in apocalyptic prophecies: “For when was there a war in which religious hate, national animosity, scientific discipline, vast military power, and desperate ambition, tended to make so bloody and so long?”Footnote 51 This rhetoric suggested that there was no incongruity between scientific methods and holy war, and the French army, frequently celebrated in technocratic terms, was favorably compared, again using Jacobin phrasing, with England's aristocratic effeteness.Footnote 52 France was thought the only power capable of securing Europe's vulnerable southern extremities against “the East,” and though the Nation's political outlook would become increasingly anti-imperial,Footnote 53 French advances into North Africa and the Holy Land were described as necessary to secure the frontiers of Christian Europe and absorb France's tremendous energies, therefore avoiding further revolution.Footnote 54 With Russian orthodoxy rather than Mazzinian republicanism now fingered as the greatest threat to Catholicism, France could be still presented as Catholicism's defender.Footnote 55 Nonetheless, should the pope be compelled to abandon his “neutrality,” the Nation postulated, he would find that “never, since the time of the Crusades, has Catholic Europe been better disposed to answer his appeal.”Footnote 56 A warrior pope, it seems, might be just as appealing as a liberal pope.

The progress of the Crimean War seemed to transform France and expose Britain's fundamental weakness: “aristocratic” England was mocked as “a province of France” pursuing a foreign policy shaped by historic Napoleonic ambitions at odds with English imperial interests.Footnote 57 This transformation in Napoleon III's reputation reached its apotheosis in a long poem by W. J. Battersby, who described himself as “Catholic, poor, and, he hopes patriotic.” Battersby's Les Napoleons celebrated Catholicism as the religion of equality, Eugénie as an exemplary Catholic woman (in over twenty-five cantos of praise), and the emperor for bringing prosperity to France and saving the Holy City from “the vile scum of the earth.”Footnote 58

If the Crimean War enhanced Louis-Napoleon's Irish reputation as a leader, the 1859 Italian war saw him accumulate a great deal of moral capital. Observing the Piedmontese defeat the Austrians, Irish nationalists celebrated Louis-Napoleon's decision to maintain through military intervention the pope's position in Rome, thus avoiding the possibility of the pontiff's being forced to flee the Holy See, as had occurred in 1848. Nationalists generally regarded this as consistent with the maintenance of a true Italian nationalism, holding the balance between Austrian despotism and the secularized radical nationalism encouraged by the British. Indeed, Irish opposition to the Austrian imperial presence in Italy was adduced as evidence that Ireland's Catholicity was not the overriding source of its political loyalties. Moreover, although there was some readiness to admit that Louis-Napoleon might have made a virtue out of an unwelcome commitment, the French presence in the Papal States was presented to Irish readers as a moral commitment to preserve the rightful patrimony of the pope. By contrast, the Weekly Freeman, paying closer attention to the interplay of diplomacy and military buildup, saw France's actions as considerably less selfless or laudable. Most striking, however, was that the Freeman took the view that if the pope were truly threatened he could “launch that terrible engine which, in other times, collapsed the knees of tyrants, and vindicated the rights of religion and humanity.”Footnote 59 Secularist revolutionaries, the Freeman menaced, would have little chance against a mobilized world Catholicism. Just as the Nation had in 1853, so the Freeman in 1859 was prepared to contemplate a Catholic mobilization that would see Europe become the plaything not of the emperor but of a warrior pope.Footnote 60

At the Nation's offices, the preliminary peace treaty between France and Austria signed in July 1859 at Villafranca became the authentic expression of all Louis-Napoleon's ambitions for Italy; for the Weekly Freeman, it was judged to reflect French public and clerical opinion.Footnote 61 Ignoring the fact that the Treaty of Villafranca, among other concessions, allowed Austria to retain Venetia (whose independence Irish nationalists had previously championed),Footnote 62 the Nation attached tremendous significance to the clause aspiring to create an Italian confederation, with the pope as head of state—a revival of ideas Pius IX had encouraged in early 1848.Footnote 63 As a means of defending both the pope and Italian nationalism, these clauses became a crucial touchstone;Footnote 64 they also chimed with the neo-Geulphism popularized in the work of the Piedmontese exile in Brussels Father Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–52). As summarized by Vincent Viaene, neo-Geulphism “claimed that the historical leadership over European civilization belonged to Italy, and that this was due to its privileged relationship with papal Rome.”Footnote 65 Possession of the Papal States was judged central to the pope's ministry, providing his essential temporal needs, while his right to them was defended in terms congruent with Repealite constitutionalist thinking. Figures as strongly contrasting as the Repealite W. J. O’Neill Daunt and the republican separatist John Mitchel claimed that the pope had as much right to be king as Victoria had to be queen.Footnote 66 Moreover, the argument ran, a secure papacy would allow the reform of the Papal States, which was not possible unless the opposition, always supposed to be provoked by outside agitators, was crushed.Footnote 67 British radicals took the exactly contrary view, arguing that it was the pope's temporal power, under assault from Italian patriots, that prevented the emergence of a Catholicism shorn of its authoritarianism.Footnote 68

In its coverage of the Italian crisis, the Irishman, a new nationalist newspaper, can be differentiated from the Nation. Less refined and intellectually self-conscious, under the editorial direction, first, of Denis Holland and, later, the notoriously untrustworthy Richard Pigott, the Irishman practiced certainty, conveying in a Carlylean prose the republican Anglophobia it derived from Mitchel, ably targeting the urban working class that provided its core constituency. If the Nation, from 1854 edited by A. M. Sullivan (a Catholic nationalist with Young Ireland sensibilities),Footnote 69 increasingly sought common ground with a Catholic hierarchy that kept the newspaper at arm's length owing to its earlier radicalism, the Irishman regarded any claim that support for Italian nationality was inimical to Catholicism as beneath consideration. By the Irishman's reading, at stake in Italy was not Catholicism as such but, rather, the defense of a popular nationalist government against Austrian imperialism. Consequently, the Irishman insisted, once the Austrians were expelled, it was up to the Italians to decide what to do with their national freedom. This echoed the Fenian idea that only after independence was won could Irish problems, including Ireland's constitutional arrangements, be addressed. This represented a rejection of dynastic and constitutionalist thinking, with neither the Irish nor the Italians confined by historical precedent. Despite this uncompromising stance, in the pages of the Irishman challenges to the pope's authority were also delegitimized by attributing them to foreign adventurers, mercenaries, and, above all, the imperial, Protestant, and royalist machinations of the British. By this reading, 1859 became not only “a War of Nationality” but also “a War of races.”Footnote 70 England, the Irishman argued, was the central actor in a conflict of European significance:

By this reading, Italy saw British influence pitted against French military force, resulting in a conflict, Mitchel argued—en route to neutralizing the Catholic dimension of the case—that was really between “the principles of the Revolution” and England, “the most feudal country in Europe.” The “gospel of nationality,” Mitchel continued, “was, and is, eminently French and Napoleonic.”Footnote 72

Despite these certainties, it is clear that Ireland's radical nationalists were placed on the defensive by the intense Irish Catholic reaction to the predicament of the pope. Something of the strength of this reaction can be gauged by comparing it to German Catholic responses. As Jonathan Sperber has shown, the Pius Associations of Westphalia and the Rhineland limited their activities to raising money for the pope and distributing petitions defending the temporal power of the papacy, whereas the Irish people responded enthusiastically to clerical-nationalist efforts to raise an Irish brigade to fight for the pope.Footnote 73 German Catholics were not given the opportunity to cheer returning heroes, bloodied in the name of their religion, whereas few Irish nationalists could resist the outburst of Catholic triumphalism that accompanied the return of the Irish brigade.Footnote 74 Nonetheless, the Treaty of Villafranca and the hope invested in France helped square radical circles, and long after federalism had ceased to play a significant role in Italian political debate, Villafranca was cited as evidence that in Italy Catholicism, liberty, and nationalism were compatible. Villafranca and profederalism, reinforced by the example of the United States, allowed the Nation to share Cardinal Cullen's detestation for Mazzinianism without discarding its nationalist principles.Footnote 75 By contrast, the Irishman bludgeoned its way through, determined not to bow its Jacobin principles to the will of the Catholic hierarchy.Footnote 76

These questions shaped a public exchange of letters in the Irishman commencing in October 1860 between John Mitchel and P. J. Smyth, the proprietor of the newspaper, a prominent Young Ireland activist in 1848, and a fervent Francophile. They grappled with the degree to which Ireland's appeal to the peoples of Europe should be predicated on the Catholicity of the Irish majority. Smyth argued that the only real question European affairs posed Irish nationalists was whether they would advantage Ireland. Although falling back on the shibboleth that Irish nationalists must, therefore, prepare for the day when an opportunity would arise,Footnote 77 Smyth effectively admitted Mitchel's view that Ireland had not achieved the status of a “struggling nation.” This could be rectified only by marshaling all Irish nationalist forces into a unified body that could authoritatively bring Irish interests to the attention of European public opinion. Above all, Smyth pragmatically suggested, this necessitated an appeal to European Catholicism: were not the Irish “a Catholic people perishing?”Footnote 78 Mitchel, writing from Paris, implicitly rejected the view that it was as a Catholic, rather than a nationalist, movement that the Irish struggle might be recognized as legitimate in the eyes of the European public. Hungary, Poland and Venetia were “counted as elements in the present movement of European nationalities” because none were as “oppressed” as Ireland. The completeness of Ireland's subjugation—this was one of Mitchel's idées fixes—came from the fact that England had, in European eyes, achieved “moral” as well as “material” “ascendancy” over Ireland: “As one of the distinct nations of Europe, England speaks for us and interprets us to the world according to her own pleasures.”Footnote 79 The problem Irish people faced, according to Mitchel, was their limited ability to represent themselves, not their capacity to communicate a fraternal Catholicity.

Despite Mitchel's gloomy prognosis, nationalists took seriously the possibility that the apparently imminent Anglo-French war would lead to a French invasion of Ireland. And, as noted above, Comerford argues that the Irish nationalist petition of the time was intended to signal to this possible invading force the strength of Irish national sentiment, thereby breaking through the British barrier Mitchel believed prevented Ireland from taking its place among the nations. Speculation about a French invasion provoked a debate that revealed many of the faultlines running through Irish politics, exposing not merely the divisions between professing nationalists but also the gap that had opened up between them and those Catholics who believed it was possible to reform Ireland through the political structures of the Union. For example, in November 1859 the Weekly Freeman, still skeptical that Louis-Napoleon was a man of personal integrity but confident of his pro-Catholic motivations, argued that there was no possibility of a French invasion because it was in the interests of French statecraft to be on good terms with Britain.Footnote 80 Echoing Archbishop Cullen's view—which he had expressed in a famous pastoral letter—the Freeman argued that if the Irish people were treated with justice, the country would “become the least vulnerable point of the Empire.”Footnote 81

More expressly nationalist positions were captured in the public exchange of letters between “Honest” John Martin, a leading advocate of a French invasion, and William Smith O’Brien, the leading opponent. Both were Protestants, both Repealers, and both well-known Young Irelanders. Smith O’Brien, the leader of the 1848 Young Ireland insurrection and Ireland's most revered living nationalist, had signaled his unwillingness to enter into active political organization following his return from exile in 1856; John Martin, sharing many of Mitchel's perspectives but not his abrasive personality, would win a famous by-election victory in January 1871, when he was elected as one of the first Home Rule MPs. Their exchanges were characterized by the gentlemanly courtesies typical of their class and milieu.

Smith O’Brien argued that a French invasion would divide the Irish nation along sectarian lines, fomenting civil war and precipitating a vicious British-Protestant retaliation following the likely French withdrawal. All hope of Ireland achieving self-government would be destroyed for generations. Martin, though of the view that English government was not preferable to French, nevertheless doubted that Louis-Napoleon had any imperial designs on Ireland that were not compatible with the advance of political liberties. Martin's blithe conviction that sectarian divisions would evaporate as independence delivered its rewards would become a commonplace of Irish republicanism; Smith O’Brien's relentless advocacy of Irish self-reliance would prove an equally persistent panacea.Footnote 82 Smith O’Brien's views were not radically different from later Fenian commentary on “the French party.” The Irish People was contemptuous of any dependency on outside intervention (excepting that by Irish Americans), judging it to be evidence of Irish impotence. In some respects, the Irish People's view chimed with Mazzini's conviction that France had ceased to be in the vanguard of radical political development.Footnote 83

Martin's idealism can be contrasted with P. J. Smyth's skeptical outlook, expressed in a private letter to Smith O’Brien: “For my own part I confess that my patriotism at present, consists less of love for Ireland, than hatred of the system that has made her what she is; and therefore I would heartily welcome an invasion of Turks or Kaffirs, or savages of any kind who would rid us of this system.”Footnote 84 More significant is that Martin, trying to create a political movement that would revive Repeal and independent opposition at a time when the revolutionary politics of Fenianism were beginning to be noticed, had allowed himself to become excited by a military solution to the Irish question.Footnote 85 The possibility of a French invasion risked radicalizing his position, echoing not only the process undergone by the Young Irelanders in 1848 but preempting something of the ambiguity that would run through later Home Rule politics.

Either way, the French invasion failed to materialize, just as the French army failed to march in support of the Polish rebellion against Russian tyranny in 1863. In that year, commentary again saw religious and racial themes predominant. Before and during that rebellion, attention focused on the parallel historical experiences of Catholic Ireland and Catholic Poland, their shared affinity for France, and the self-sacrificial idealism that distinguished the Celt and the Slav from the Anglo-Saxon.Footnote 86 It was inspiring to learn of the pro-Polish enthusiasm at the French imperial court, whether motivated by Catholic or nationalist sympathies, and of the “note” issued in June by France, Austria, and Prussia demanding the liberalization of Polish government, although there is little reason to doubt A. J. P. Taylor's argument that diplomatic priorities undermined any urge to intervene.Footnote 87 After the failure of France to intervene militarily, however, even Irish onlookers were not excited by Louis-Napoleon's Congress scheme, which, initiated in November, attempted to institutionalize the collective resolution of the major questions facing the European powers on the assumption that the 1815 treaties “have ceased to exist.” Following the high point of 1859–60, 1863 began to suggest that the emperor's celebrated inscrutability looked like indecision if not disinterest, and nationalist press coverage of the Polish rebellion followed a familiar pattern: ecstatic prophecy of a remade Europe giving way to unspoken disappointments.

That Irish public opinion was not utterly credulous where France and Louis-Napoleon were concerned was evident enough in 1863; however, the unprecedented enthusiasm for France during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71 testified to the powerful desire among nationalists to see the affinity once again meaningful. Accordingly, nationalist support for France held firm throughout the crisis, but political commentary proved as flexible as events proved unpredictable: most striking was how rapidly nationalists recalibrated their view of Louis-Napoleon following the collapse of the Second Empire. A burst of unambiguous Jacobin sentiment accompanied the difficult birth of the Third Republic, and although the pattern of response echoed that of 1848, it was clear that the nationalist commentariat found the new republic more immediately ideologically appealing than they had the establishment of the empire a generation earlier.

On the outbreak of Franco-Prussian hostilities in July 1870, a crowd gathered outside the French consulate in Dublin. Newspaper reporters claimed numbers approaching twelve thousand in the Lower Gardiner Street and Beresford Place area, plainly too many for the one hundred hastily mobilized policemen to “move on.” When one band was prevented from playing, others took up the tune, giving the rapturous crowd “La Marseillaise” and “Partant pour la Syrie.” These patriotic French songs were paired with “O’Donnell Abú”—a reference to the 1607 “Flight of the Earls”—and “God Save Ireland.” Cries of “Vive la France!” “Vive la guerre!” “Down with Prussia!” “Down with England!” “God save Ireland!” and “France and Ireland united!”—interspersed with “groans” for the English press—echoed through eighteenth-century streets.Footnote 88 As this suggests, the Jacobite and Jacobin dimensions of the affinity remained uncritically intact. P. J. Smyth addressed the crowd, giving voice to its support for the French emperor and the importance of this exercise in Irish self-representation:

Smyth then referred to 1798 and the “bitterly remembered” German troops in the British army deployed in Ireland to put down the United Irishmen rebellion. Ireland, he said, “had thousands of men ready to ‘kill a Hessian for himself’ if France required her aid.” This was the first of many such speeches Smyth made during the war, establishing himself as Ireland's most prominent advocate of the French cause.

The Nation and the Irishman represented these events as a battle fought on Dublin's streets, playfully parodying the reports coming from the front: “The police-agents of England attempted to tear” down a French tricolore, it was reported, “and did tear the French colours; but Irish arms upheld the banner on the portal of the French Consulate, and there maintained its rended remnants, in spite of the officials.” The surging crowd prevented Smyth's arrest before the police inspector rushed into the frenzy to call off his men, leaving Smyth and the flag in the possession of the crowd. Taking advantage of the lull in the excitement, Smyth persuaded the “bearers of the flag to furl it” and be “content … that they had successfully defeated an attempt by the police to capture and trample ‘the national colours of France and Ireland.'” One crowd member “wound the standard around his body lest it should be wrested from his hand.” For a moment, France and the body of an Irishman became one. It would be another hour before the crowd dispersed, finally allaying fears that the military would be deployed to clear the streets. In further editorial comment, the flag was described as “intermingling” the green, white, and orange of Ireland with the red, white, and blue of France. As the Nation wryly observed, even though this confected symbol of Franco-Irish unity was not illegal, it was a very provoking symbol of Irish disloyalty to England.Footnote 90

In the weeks following the “battle” of Beresford Place, large meetings in support of the war occurred throughout Ireland.Footnote 91 According to reports in the Irishman and the Irish Times, thirty thousand gathered near Sandymount Strand in Dublin, five thousand assembled in Galway, three thousand in Tipperary, and four thousand in Castlebar, where a Franco-Irish force had famously routed crown forces in 1798.Footnote 92 At Sandymount, the crowd was addressed by Augustus Chaponiere Byrne, chosen by the French residents of Dublin as their representative. Whereas Smyth's address had focused on 1798 and “the year of the French,” taking up the Jacobin interpretation of France's historic destiny, Byrne's address focused on Jacobite affinities. Thanking “the old Irish nation” for their support, he read an address that gave unusually lurid expression to Franco-Irish historical connections:

At the Galway meeting, the religious and the secular-democratic strands of Irish nationalism were combined in the blood-and-liberty address of sympathy extended to the French people: “Members of the same Celtic stock, comrades upon many a field of battle, the Irish nation can never be indifferent to the fortunes of France—the emancipator of peoples.”Footnote 94

Sectarian sentiment was also common, as suggested by O’Neill Daunt's journal entry on popular Irish responses to France's prospects:

Noting the strong tendency to regard the war as a clash between Catholic France and Protestant Prussia, O'Neill Daunt wrote: “The low Protestants of this neighborhood crow loudly over the defeat of France which they interpret as the favor of Providence for Protestantism. A Protestant farmer near this place is said to have intended to celebrate Prussian triumph with a big bonfire, until he got a hint that if he did his hayrick and cornstacks should contribute to the illumination.”Footnote 96 The press was quick to criticize this tendency to understand the struggle as inspired by religious identities, ensuring that a kind of politically correct consensus held sway that viewed the war as a clash of secular ideals. For example, the Morning Mail, as quoted in the Irishman, observed that the war had been triggered by Prussian-Spanish cooperation and, given ready Bavarian support for the war and the pro-Prussian sympathies of Rome, Prussian interests could not be considered Protestant. The “sublime” lesson the Irish should learn from the war, argued the Irishman, striking an unorthodox note, was encapsulated by the cooperation of all Germans, “North and South[,] … Protestant and Catholic, infidel and believer.”Footnote 97

Despite these sweeping generalizations, this war took some explaining, and nationalists refused to accept the view taken by the English press that Louis-Napoleon had blundered into it. For the Irishman, two explanations sat uneasily with each other, and both gained their force through their scorn for the ways of the English. First, the English, unlike the Irish, could not comprehend a war fought for an “idea.” If 1859 had been about liberty, 1870 was about honor. Second, France had clear Napoleonic aims, for refusing to be “bound between Spain and Prussia like a sword between the two jaws of a vice, or a prisoner between two gend’armes [sic],” it had resolved “to crush a conspiracy of kings.”Footnote 98 Initially, the Nation took a less forthright stance: although “not a man whose hand can be forced,” Louis, with his authority at stake, had to choose either war or abdication.Footnote 99 A week later, with the candidacy of Prince Leopold withdrawn, the Nation wondered if this “victory in the Council Chamber” was sufficient or if French honor would demand “a victory in the field.”Footnote 100 Napoleonic principles were now at a discount. Any war would be “the great struggle for supremacy, long foreseen and by many considered inevitable”: 1870 saw little talk of the liberation of nationalities and much of “the Monarch who represents the traditions of that warlike glory and inheritance of that warlike hatred.”Footnote 101

The Nation's coverage revived the notion that France's foreign policy was a compulsion determined by her history: “Her past forbids her to tolerate an ignoble future.” As in 1853, it was France, the accumulated weight of its history, rather than the Napoleonic regime, the current bearer of that load, that was at stake. For France not to account for itself in the manner determined by its history would leave France not merely diminished but something other.Footnote 102 “Better that gorgeous capital be in ruin,” preached John Martin in September 1870, “than France the slave of the Prussians.”Footnote 103

Ireland, a junior partner in that same history, was similarly bound—not only to an imagined Franco-Irish axis but also to a conception of Irishness as articulated through the French affinity. The accumulated effect of a generation's commentary on French politics was that, by 1870, to be an Irish nationalist was to be pro-French. Consequently, Louis-Napoleon's personal surrender in September and the determination of the French to continue the fight were greeted jubilantly. Indeed, a month earlier, when it was becoming clear Louis-Napoleon was facing defeat, the Nation quickly turned its attentions to the French citizenry, refocusing on Parisian politics and asserting that though the dynasty might fall, the nation could not.Footnote 104 Stripped of the ambivalence that sometimes accompanied assessments of Louis-Napoleon, celebrating the French nation unambiguously generated a racial, historical, and geographic essentialism that, if not novel, was now granted exceptional explanatory power:

Although the Teuton shared with the Celt an ethno-historical integrity, Prussian impulses were thought material (“impudent rapacity”) leading to a war characterized by the “struggle of Right and Duty against the power of Might and Greed.”Footnote 106 Predictably enough, when the Episcopalian and Presbyterian press of Ulster indulged in similar thinking, their racial stereotyping brought them to opposite conclusions: the French were characterized as chaotic and emotional, and therefore likely to lose in a conflict with the disciplined and effective Teuton.Footnote 107 “Plebian liberals” in Britain took a different view. Though they saw the French defeat as the product of specific political circumstances—their frivolous lack of duty was a symptom of imperial decadence—they nonetheless readily believed the German victory the product of Protestant virtue.Footnote 108

Something of the significance of this racialized discourse lies in the bare fact of its existence. Debate regarding the nature and significance of English racializing of the Irish has animated recent Irish historiography, which, at its most forceful, identifies in the English a readiness to explain Irish misfortune as symptomatic of an inherent racial inferiority rather than misgovernment.Footnote 109 These passages from the Nation and the Irishman on the Celt, Saxon, and Teuton saw Irish nationalists indulging in a very overt racial essentialism, and although it was neither developmental nor neo-Darwinian, behavior was nonetheless explained in terms of racial imperatives.Footnote 110 Although Englishness was consistently portrayed as entirely negative—it was materialistic and thuggish—in Irish nationalist thinking, this pervasive racial stereotyping of the Anglo-Saxon has been paid little attention by historians.Footnote 111

Racial ideas, however, coexisted easily in this discourse with classic republican beliefs regarding the rights and duties of the “men who compose a nation,” exposing the tension that ran through nationalism's French affinity between civic voluntarism and ethnic imperative.Footnote 112 As the Nation observed in an editorial contrasting the “Citizen-Soldiers” of France with the “Civil Slaves” of Britain and Prussia, the war witnessed the “volcanic fire of the Celt now raging in the heart of France.”Footnote 113 Nonetheless, in a truly realized nation, the “freeman” was not of an “inferior set” that “the soldiery help to govern” but, rather, the “stay” of the nation. It was the “unquestioned right” of the freeman to hold arms as it was “his duty to learn their use.” In Ireland under the Union, these liberties had been suppressed through the succession of Arms Acts, placing the Irish in a position thought more ignominious vis-à-vis the government than that of the “Belgium peasant” or the “hardy Swiss.” An armed citizenry was possible when “the government is founded on the people's will” and is supported “gladly.” In Ireland, “the subject is denied the use of arms,” because “the stability of the Government, and indeed its bare existence, depends upon the helplessness of the people.”Footnote 114 It was a mainstay of the nationalist critique of the Union that Britain denied Ireland's citizenry their national right to develop a capacity for self-defense. The logic of the argument adhered to classic Lockean thinking that legitimate government rested on consent. If the government could not trust the citizen to play a role in its self-defense, that government could not be legitimate. Not only this, but to refuse the Irish male access to the duties of the active citizen was to deny him the right to fully realize his manhood. By rendering the Irish adult male a dependent adolescent, the British not only enhanced the indignities imposed by the Union but reinforced the ascendancy of one race over another.Footnote 115

“VIVE LA REPUBLIQUE!” headed the Irishman's editorial of 10 September 1870. The French were glad to see the back of Louis-Napoleon, having, it could now be claimed, ever only tolerated his imperial ambitions.Footnote 116 Just as 1848 was glorious because it was brought about by the might of the ordinary Frenchman, a French victory in 1870 was assured by this same republican virtue. However effective the Prussian military machine had proved to be, the argument went, in a war between powers of similar material means, despotism could not hope to overcome the concentrated weight of democracy. As events progressed, this revisionism became more triumphal. By October, the empire was disparaged (Napoloen had “towered menacingly over the liberties of France”), and the “the dawn of a bright future for Europe” was yet again heralded.Footnote 117

France at war, however, failed to deliver the conflict anticipated since 1848. “England” was not drawn in, because the Prussians did not take the opportunity to fulfill their expansionist “lusts for all the lands from the Rhine to the Baltic,”Footnote 118 while growing evidence of Parisian radicalism provoked deep unease. In 1848, Irish nationalist commentary stripped French “socialism” of its ideological content and accounted for it as a rallying cry for liberals resisting counterrevolution. In 1870, “Red republicanism” and the “ultra republican” journals were initially understood in similar ways, and the radical Parisian reaction to defeat was explained as a legacy of the French Revolution and the natural response to the failures of an excessively centralized French state, a perspective shared with some English radicals.Footnote 119 Supposedly bearing little resemblance to the “social Communism” of 1848, the localized radicalism of late 1870 was surely inspired by the Italian city-states of the Middle Ages, opined the Irishman.Footnote 120 Such attitudes were implicitly linked to the suppression in Ireland of the Fenian movement and the consequent treason-felony trials, which left Irish commentators sensitive to the reach of the state: their experience of a centralized regime under Dublin Castle, contemporaries argued, led them to empathize with the reaction of the Parisian working class. But, as in 1848, the pressure of events saw opinion shift quickly, and the Paris Commune of 1871 was condemned as anarchist, especially when priests or church property was affected. As tensions rose, they were accused of seeking to emulate the “helldom” of 1792: the murder of the bishop of Paris in May 1871 provoked outrage, and the republican crackdown under Thiers won convinced Irish support.Footnote 121

With Franco-Prussian relations reestablished and France stabilized, the summer of 1871 saw a French party tour Ireland, attracting an enthusiastic welcome wherever it went. The tour was later written up by one of the party, Alfred Duquet, an advocate in the Court of Appeal at Paris. Among his companions were the comte de Flavigny and Marshal MacMahon's son. Their brief was to thank the Irish on behalf of the French government for their contribution to Flavigny's International Society for the Relief of the Wounded. Duquet, as Flavigny's deputy, had overseen the Irish Ambulance Corps sent to assist the French wounded. P. J. Smyth was the driving force behind this enterprise, and it had not covered itself in glory. On the arrival of the Ambulance in France, it was unclear whether the French were expecting them or knew what to do with them; the Ambulance was not well equipped and was judged superfluous to needs. Despite the enthusiasm for the war in Ireland and the success of a public subscription to pay for the Ambulance, the project had been dogged by financial problems, with Smyth eventually out of pocket. Some of the volunteers went home; the others, perhaps as many as six hundred, joined the French army, many ending up in the French Foreign Legion.Footnote 122 Smyth, struggling to find some dignity in all this, had lectured in Waterford that the Ambulance saw the Franco-Irish “alliance,” “heretofore … a sentiment,” now “a tangible reality.”Footnote 123 The progress of the French party in Ireland, however, revealed the huge gap between nationalist hopes and diplomatic realities. A lavish dinner, described by Duquet over ten pages, was held in honor of the party at the viceregal lodge in Phoenix Park, the ceremonial center of British power in Ireland.Footnote 124 At a public meeting, a member of the French party observed, to cries of protest, that it was good to see Ireland “a prosperous State” not needing France's assistance.Footnote 125

Evidently, the French affinity was of little strategic consequence—but this should not obscure the varied and contradictory ways in which it was significant. Exposure to French liberal Catholicism strengthened and legitimized ideas of religious toleration, while Napoleonic ideals helped situate Ireland within a broader European movement of liberation. Both strands of pro-French sentiment helped Irish nationalists imagine a peaceful, independent Ireland shorn of sectarian discord and predicated on voluntarist civic ideals. However, France also excited sectarian sentiments, racial thinking, and the tendency to revel in the prospect of a Europe on the brink of holy war. The political theorist might find it difficult to reconcile these conflicting ideas, but the less intellectually disciplined polemicist, Catholic or otherwise, drew on the languages of ethnic and civic nationalism as the passions of the moment demanded.

Comerford suggests that hopes of a French invasion played little role in the later memoir literature of this period because it was so contrary to the Home Rule idea, which came to dominate Irish nationalism from the early 1870s onward, that it was best forgotten.Footnote 126 Indeed, cool thinking was evident as early as 1873. A year before Home Rule's breakthrough general election, but following a string of Home Rule by-election victories, Louis-Napoleon died. His obituary in the Nation presented a circumspect view of the man once celebrated as Europe's puppet master and the source of Ireland's greatest hope. The “crime of December” (the 1851 coup), though deserving of “vehement condemnation,” was mitigated by the threat posed by “violent anarchists” and the “satisfaction” with which the “French Nation” met Louis's “assumption of the Imperial Crown.” Ultimately, the coup reflected the will of a sovereign people and was therefore legitimate. Louis-Napoleon's foreign policy, however, could now be seen more clearly as riddled with betrayals and misjudgments, particularly with regard to Prussia, Mexico, and Rome.Footnote 127 The Irishman's obituary was a simpler and more conventional act of memorial: while “an empress and an infant weep, we will not stop to scrutinize the chronicle of his faults,” the newspaper intoned, before asking what right they had to condemn “his accession to Imperial power” if the French did not. In describing Louis as a “a great popular Chief,” a designation with strong historic associations in Ireland, the newspaper paid him a compliment while at same time alluding to his autocratic system of government.Footnote 128 In the end, though recognizing “a citizen who raised the fame and extended the prosperity of his country,” the Irishman's assessment of Louis-Napoleon ended on a ambiguous note: “In the impartial eye of history the gloom of his misfortunes will not obscure the greatness of his glory, nor its brilliance obliterate the acts of his usurpation.”Footnote 129

These measured evaluations might belie a further significance to be found in the collapse of France. Given the persistent hope in nationalist circles that France would provide Ireland its “opportunity,” it seems reasonable to ask whether the collapse of Napoleonism and the stabilization of Italy conditioned the mysterious negotiations that saw the Irish Republican Brotherhood agree to temporarily cooperate with Isaac Butt's emerging Home Rule movement. Had European developments, notably the resolution of the Italian question, narrowed the perceived difference between Protestant Britain and Catholic Ireland, helping to create an atmosphere amenable to a more conciliatory politics?

It is hard to say, but what is clear is that for much of the 1850s and 1860s, Irish nationalism had little more than the sustaining power of words, which it spent lavishly, proving unable to develop more than ad hoc responses to events. Thereafter, Gladstone's determination to govern Ireland “according to Irish ideas,” the emergence of the Home Rule strategy, and the mobilization of Ireland's tenant farmers through their material grievances transformed Irish nationalism, generating a more pragmatic and insular rhetorical mode focused on Anglo-Irish political relations. Although Home Rulers were not oblivious to the possible significance of foreign affairs to Ireland,Footnote 130 and although revolutionary nationalism remained a significant strand in Irish politics, with talk of “England's difficulty being Ireland's opportunity” remaining a stock hope, it was nonetheless treated less seriously. Crises like the second South African war (1899–1902) stimulated advanced nationalist activity, but these aspirations lacked the firm expectations of the 1850s and 1860s.Footnote 131 The outbreak of war in 1914 saw much Irish sympathy for “little Catholic Belgium,” the victim of German militarism, while recent work on post-1914 republican propaganda suggests that despite contact with the Germans, their sense of a German cultural or ideological affinity was weak. Republicans attracted criticism from Home Rule nationalists when they made pro-German remarks, and the constabulary was unconvinced that German forces would be welcomed onto Irish soil.Footnote 132

Indeed, on successfully negotiating German support for the 1916 Rising, Roger Casement argued that he “didn’t choose the Germans—it was England. If she had attacked France—I’d have gone to France.”Footnote 133 Given that stance, it is striking that Duquet's book telling the story of the Irish Ambulance was first published in an English-language translation by P. J. Smyth's son in Dublin in 1916 in order to firm up Irish support for France, Britain's most important ally. Being pro-France had come to mean being pro-Home Rule and pro-Britain.