"Our life has been a house with the door bolted and the shutters fastened tight"
In late August 1798, three French warships sailed into a harbor on the coast of Mayo, a poor isolated country in the northwest of Ireland. About a thousand soldiers disembarked under the command of General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert, an illiterate trader of animal skins from the Vosges who rose in the tumult of the French Revolution and brutally suppressed the Vendee uprising.
The expedition fulfilled the wishes of many Irish exiles who had pleaded with the French Directory for an invasion to liberate the island from the British (an earlier expedition in 1796 by a large French invasion force thwarted by ill winds off the south coast of Ireland).
Humbert's first landing was to be followed by a second, larger fleet carrying several thousand French soldiers, a fleet that never arrived.
Attracting a crew of a couple of thousand Irish, mostly peasants or landless and armed primarily with pikes, Humbert embarked on an 18-day campaign into the island at first winning unexpected success in battle before Lord Cornwallis captured Humbert and his French and massacred most of the Irish.
Humbert had been too late and landed in the wrong place. A much larger Irish revolt erupted in May in the south of the island with its organizers, the Society of United Irishmen, counting on French support which did not arrive before the revolt was ultimately suppressed by the British in July with much brutality on both sides and between Catholics and Protestants.
It was these events that led 1798 to be referred to by Gaelic speakers as The Year of the French.
The tale of the Mayo uprising, of those caught up in it, Catholic and Protestant alike and the long sordid history of Britain in Ireland is the subject of Thomas Flanagan's magnificent novel, The Year of the French. Published in 1979 and recipient of multiple awards, I read it in the 1980s and just completed rereading the book. This is not a military narrative, rather a beautifully and poetically written story of the people caught up in the events. Many of the characters are those prominent in the uprising and its suppression, most of whom died in its course or were executed after (the captured Humbert was exchanged and resumed his military career, fell out with Napoleon and emigrated to America, setting himself up in New Orleans, where in January 1815 he encouraged the French community to assist the American army in resisting the British attack, and carried a rifle at the Battle of New Orleans for which he received the thanks of General Andrew Jackson).
We also meet invented characters such as the itinerant Gaelic poet, schoolmaster and drunk Owen MacCarthy who, though ambivalent, finds himself entangled in the uprising.
Flanagan portrays all his characters in full and with sympathy or at least understanding and makes us understand the course of Irish history that led to this tragedy and of the conflicting motivations of all parties. What some were fighting for was never quite clear and for others it was a romantic vision of Ireland detached for reality. For a thoughtful exposition on the themes of the novel and the inherent conflicts among the rebels read this piece.
And, above all, we have Flanagan's lovely writing.
The author's view of the events can be seen in the conclusion of one of his narrators, a Protestant minister in Killala, prisoner of the rebels during the uprising, whose life is saved by Ferdy McDonnell, the Catholic leader of the militia in town. The minister after reflecting on his reading of Gibbon who makes the decline and fall of the Roman Empire:
"Each cause and reason is locked securely into place. And over all the mighty drama presides the awesome authority of Gibbon's splendid language, his unimpassioned rationality . . . Great was Rome and catastrophic was its fall, but great too is the energy of the historian's mind, the cool deliberation of his judgment.
But then! We put the volume upon the table, and go out for a stroll in the garden or to visit a sick parishioner or perhaps only to pare our nails, and doubt seeps in . . . Perhaps it had not been like that at all. Perhaps all had been chaos, chance, ill-luck, perhaps even Providence . . . Perhaps it is not Rome that we have seen, but Gibbon's imagination bestowed capriciously upon the past . . ."
The words at the top of the post are uttered by Ferdy McDonnell as he ends a discussion with the minister and are proceeded by this comment from the minister, "It was as though he hated history itself". It is this tortured history, from which there seems no escape, that Flanagan makes us feel in our bones.
Thomas Flanagan was an American professor of literature and The Year of the French his first novel, published when he was 56. He went on to write two more volumes, both concerning Irish history, The Tenants of Time about the Fenian uprising of the 1870s and The End of the Hunt regarding the Irish War of Independence in 1920-21. Both are fine books though neither rises quite to the literary and evocative heights of The Year of the French.
