This book, a literary exploration of the interplay between republican Geneva and late eighteenth-century revolutionary Ireland, is arranged in three parts. The first, in two chapters, evokes the site of the Genevan enterprise in Waterford. It outlines how a European city state, or at least part of it, ambitioned the creation of a new, republican Jerusalem, in Georgian Ireland. The second part, in four chapters, looks at the genesis of the Genevan enterprise in cantonal and French politics. By the mid-1760s, Genevan politics had reverted to ‘the kinds of polarity that marked the era of the Reformation’ (p. 47), the author argues, providing the context for the 1782 civil war, revolution and retribution that culminated in the calculated exodus of some of the vanquished, the représentants (one hundred families in all) to Ireland.
The third part, again in four chapters, examines the unrealistic, even delusional expectations of the Genevans concerning their Irish enterprise, and how they fell foul of political and social realities there. In the interval during which the Waterford site was transformed from a Gandon-designed field of Genevan dreams into a sordid prison for Irish republican dreamers, Whatmore sees a metaphor for a larger, Europe-wide dérive that heralded, he argues, the end of Enlightenment. In an argument some will find extravagant, this was nothing less than the collapse of the ‘old Europe’ (p. xvi), until then characterised by the cohabitation of diverse political forms and cultures. In this sense, it marked the return of a still older Europe, whose violence and intolerance recalled the Reformation.
Whatever one makes of this conclusion, there is no doubting the principal value of the book: its leisurely description and studied assessment of the political turmoil in Geneva during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. The author concentrates less than might be expected on the economic and social factors involved, preferring to explore its rhetorical dimension and its role in contemporary intellectual discourse. Much of this was more diatribe than discourse, particularly when Voltaire was having a go at Rousseau, the latter taxed with supporting the allegedly fanatical représentants, who sought to preserve old fashioned republican and communitarian standards in a city besieged, in their own view, by French aggrandisers in cahoots with local profiteers.
Whatmore's canvas is broad and generous, sometimes frustratingly so, as chapters career across extensive literary and philosophical terrain, sometimes with apparently little reference to the originating narrative. The focus narrows as the narrative proceeds beyond 1782 to outline how the représentants, mainly through the offices of François d'Ivernois, entered into contact with Lord Shelburne, a connection that eventually brought them to Waterford. This is one of the most absorbing sections of the book, as Whatmore describes the complex political and economic choreography that sold the Waterford experiment, temporarily, to its underwriters. To an extent, the ‘experiment’ represented so many different things to its varied supporters and their cooperation was necessarily precarious. Ireland was not what the Genevans expected; the Genevans were not what Shelburne hoped for and, before long, they were drifting back to England and homewards.
The experiment's intersection with the rebellion of 1798 is somewhat less significant than the title of the book seems to suggest. What attracted the Genevans to Ireland was the apparent success of the patriot movement in gaining a degree of parliamentary independence, and the ostensible economic opportunities it promised. It was certainly not solidarity with the rising tide of discontent in the country. The Genevans’ association with Irish ‘terrorists, anarchists and republicans’ (to quote the book's title) was posthumous and indirect, an accident of history rather than the fruit of any shared aspiration. Nonetheless, some of the représentants, had they remained, might have made common cause with the republican idealism of ’98 and they may not have been completely surprised by its sectarianism, Enlightenment notwithstanding. Indeed, in Whatmore's account of the représentants’ reaction to the political manoeuvrings of the magistrates, one gets a whiff of that old-fashioned revivalism so characteristic of European and especially American Protestantism. Exploring this might not have served the main argument of the book but it would have been no less interesting for all that.
Finally, this book is not the standard description of an early modern migration event, largely because the Genevan ‘experiment’ was so unusual, representing the dislocation of a relatively privileged group that enjoyed a high degree of historical agency. This invites a comparison with other Protestant migrants (Huguenots, Palatines and Scots Presbyterians) welcomed to Ireland for the purposes of conquest, colonisation, conversion or improvement. But that would have added another chapter to an already hefty, and beautifully produced, tome. The Genevan experiment in Waterford was testimony to the pluckiness of small state republicans and the canniness of Enlightenment Protestantism but one wonders if it deserves the universal significance the author ascribes it.
