Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Thomas Flanagan's The Year of the French


I remember watching, as a very young lad, the 1982 RTÉ-Channel 4-France3 co-production The Year of the French, an adaptation of Thomas Flanagan's novel about the 1798 Rebellion (or Revolution, as it has come to be erroneously known). It is striking how vividly I remember the mini-series, which I watched compulsively every Sunday night and despite not having seen it since I can still recall the title sequence where a sleán digs brutally into the ground in extreme close-up. Likewise I remember the scenes at the end where the rebels are hanged for their acts, especially the face of the Romantic hero, the rakish Gaelic poet-hedgeschool-master Eoghan Ruath MacCarthaigh. I had suspected that my admiration for the show might have been a bit misplaced because of how young I was at the time but a few people a good deal older than me have confirmed my memories of it. Which makes one wonder why it has never been screened since - to the best of my knowledge it did not even get an airing during the bicentenary commemorations nine years ago - or released on video or DVD.

Flanagan's novel stood on the shelf at home for years when I was growing up, not too far from Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, another doorstopping bestseller that was adapted for TV at the time. Because of this I imagined for a long time that Flanagan's novel was a Leon Uris-style potboiler, a novel that peddled comfortable truths about the glorious failure that was the rebellion and the foundation of modern Irish Republicanism. Last year I came across a re-issue of the book, published by the New York Review of Books, a publication that usually knows a good thing when it sees it. Flanagan, a third-generation Irish-American from Connecticut, and a childhood friend of Truman Capote, was a pre-eminent scholar of Irish literature - particularly the nineteenth-century, pre-Celtic Twilight variety, and published often in the NYRB, which has also re-issued his collected essays. He was one of those Americans (of whom there have been quite a few) that knew Ireland and its history better than many natives of the island, and he brought his extensive reading of 18th and 19th century writing to bear on the stylistic and political tour-de-force that was this, his first, novel.

The 1798 rebellion, like much of Irish history, is enveloped in the mists of collective memory and is usually evoked as an event far more cogent and straightforwardly noble than it actually was. From a modern perspective, it seems like an easy choice to make between the two principles: an avowedly non-sectarian Republican movement founded on Enlightenment ideals versus a foetid, decrepit oligarchy given free rein to rule at whim by a reactionary crown in London. Many of us - myself included - would naturally choose the former party though in doing so one runs the risk of extricating the event from its historical context. Flanagan's great achievement is to flesh out that contemporary world of the rebellion and to people it with characters with credible (if sometimes venal) concerns and motives. His narrative is a masterpiece of dialectical story-telling; though his sympathies are clearly with the rebels, there are few outright villains to be found on the side of either the loyalists (many of them Catholic) or the British. Flanagan is a believer of Jean Renoir's adage that 'every villain has his reasons'.

The novel makes use of a polyphonic narrative, much like a 19th-century novel, using multiple narrators, some in the first and some in the third person. The main character is the poet-schoolmaster MacCarthaigh, emblematic of the old Gaelic world that is about to die out, no matter how the Rebellion might fare. He wavers between idealism and cynicism, trusting neither the United Irishman leading the rebellion nor the French prosecuting the military expedition, reserving his chief concern for the wretched Irish peasants, his own people. There is also the narrative of Malcolm Elliott, a Mayo solicitor and landowner and United Irishman, who leads the insurgency in Mayo (the scene of the French landings and the start of the latter part of the rebellion); that of Arthur Broome, the humane Protestant minister of Killala; some exhilarating passages involving Wolfe Tone in Revolutionary Paris cajoling the Directory and Bonaparte into sending troops to help the Irish, and other narratives from the British perspective, many of them laced with a mixture of paternal condescension for and disbelieving resignation at the status and behaviour of the Irish peasantry and their aristocratic overlords. There is much in their narrative that many Irish nationalists will recoil at and denounce (quite rightly) as racism but Flanagan never allows his convictions to cloud his cool command of the narrative.

Flanagan's style (or styles, as they change as the narrators do) is elegant but never ostentatious and he has a meticulous eye for detail - both social and historical - that is indispensible in the historical novel. The build-up to the Rebel's ultimate routing at Ballinamuck is masterfully rendered as is the chilling retribution meted out to the Irish peasants by the British afterwards (30,000 summarily executed) which, as Seámus Deane, in the introduction, points out, made the French Revolutionary Terror seem a cake-walk in comparison. But the novel is also thick with the air of tension between the peasantry and the Protestant Irish, bearing in mind that the rebellion spiralled out of control in places, such as Vinegar Hill in Wexford, where the local Protestants were massacred in a horrific sectarian attack. Given the animosity harboured by each for one another, it is remarkable how the rebellion, and later Irish history, avoided a level of savagery that marked many other ethnic disputes throughout 19th- and 20th-century Europe. Often the remarks of the Protestant gentry and their English backers regarding the Irish carry the echo of the pronouncements of many contemporary Israelis about the Palestinian people; there is a willingness to be generous tempered by both a deep mistrust and a failure of introspection.

The rebellion of course failed, having been badly-organised from the start (though the failure of Hoche's 15,000 men to land at Bantry two years earlier was a crucial setback) and its leaders executed, leading to the abolition of the Irish Parliament and the Act of Union, and a century that was as tragic for the Irish as the previous one, though one which ended on a hopeful note, following the Land Wars and the Irish Cultural Renaissance. It is hard to guess how different things might have been had the United Irishmen succeeded in imposing their Revolution. After the fall of Bonaparte at Waterloo, the British would probably have moved back in, for the industrial jewel of Belfast, if for nothing else. Ireland may have become more economically-self-sufficient sooner though it is unlikely that the peasantry would have fared much better and the Irish language certainly would not have survived the United men's 'civilising' drive any more than it did the one that the British later implemented. The ideals of the United Irishmen were admirable though this is no guarantee that they would have informed the state of Ireland that followed; both the 1916 proclamation and the (original, unamended) Irish Constitution were admirable progressive documents that failed to have much effect on the society that followed them. But 1798 was nonetheless crucial in sowing the seeds of Republicanism in Ireland without which modern Ireland would undoubtedly not exist. That a group of men in a small, underdeveloped country in Europe at the time could be so audacious and far-sighted to follow the examples of the US and France and attempt to force change was a remarkable thing.

The streets in the towns of Mayo and Sligo - where much of the rebellion took place, bear the names these days of Wolfe Tone, Teeling - the Belfastman who was a General in the French Revolutionary Army - and Humbert, the French General who led the expedition and whose name has been hardened into English - as it would later be in Nabokov's Lolita - in towns such as Tubbercurry. Flanagan's novel is one of the greatest of all Irish novels of the 20th century - it is, to all intents and purposes an Irish novels - and deserves a new, wider audience.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

i remember the tv miniseries fairly vividly - i was allowed up late to watch it despite being only 6 at the time, because it was important i suppose and an unusual hiberno-french production. i read the novel years later, indeed i picked up a decayed paper back circe 1982 from a shelf in the sitting room one wet weekened was amazed by how good it was (despite the cover and phonebook thickness).
the french connection and indeed mayo angle seemed to be largely overlooked by the main commemorations in 1998, with the wexford and ulster narratives much more to the fore.

seanachie said...

I had noticed the greater emphasis on Wexford and Ulster too in the 1998 commemorations. Wexford could possibly be explained by the fact that two pre-eminent 1798 historians, Tom Pakenham and Kevin Whelan are Wexford-men. Ulster was of course the engine-room of the United Irishmen.

However the General Humbert Summmer School takes place every summer in Ballina and Killala and is a fitting venue for progressive republican debate (I mean 'republican', of course, in its historical rather than, contemporary, sense.

Interestingly most of the streetnames honouring the United Irishmen in the West date from the centenary commemorations in 1898 (as does the pilgrimage to Wolfe Tone's grave at Bodenstown). The Teeling monument at Collooney - located on a rock beside the site of the battle between Humbert's men and the Sligo garrison, and one of the finest of its kind in the country - was also erected in 1898 and a Sligo Champion report of the day states that a time capsule was deposed at its base.

Another legacy of 1798 is the introduction of the word and idea of the 'committee' into Ireland; the Irish have continued to use their own idiosyncratic pronunciation (com-mitt-EE) derived from the French. The GAA, Macra na Feirme, the ICA and many other organisations would be very different things altogether without it.

Anonymous said...

Pakenham is from westmeath rather than wexford, though with a strong (lord) longford connection. Unsurprisingly enough there are very few 1798 memorials in munster - the north cork militia are unlikley to be commemorated any time soon, though there is a monument to a very minor, isolated and unsuccessful rising in skibereen, and some in bantry. fantastic re Com it ee, i suspect there's a dose of french in gorsoon too - the kerry term for a boy and about half way between gasur and garson.

seanachie said...

I stand corrected re: Pakenham; for some reason I had always thought he was from Wexford.

Gorsoon (or gasún) certainly does come from French, though I'm not sure from what era. I think that gasúr, more common in Ulster, is a variant of the same, though I'm not sure if it shares an etymological root with its homonym, the Irish for 'hammer'. There's something wryly (or maybe bleakly) providential about the Irish language having the same word for 'lad' and 'hammer'.

Anonymous said...

It's well worth having a look at Guy Beiner's brilliant book:
Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (University of Wisconsin Press).

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john r redmond said...

1798: I just bought "The Year of the French'. I've been looking for some historical fiction to chew on. I searched and found this one by Thomas Flanagan. It deals with the Irish Rebellion of 1798 so I could not resist.

In 1798/99 our 3rd great grandfather, Frederick Lloyd, was mayor of Limerick City. His wife our 3rd great grandma, Julia Vereker, was sister of Charles Vereker, 2nd Viscount Gort who at the time commanded the Limerick Militia. The book's intro on Amazon reads; "In 1798, Irish patriots, committed to freeing their country from England, landed with a company of French troops in County Mayo, in westernmost Ireland. They were supposed to be an advance guard, followed by other French ships with the leader of the rebellion, Wolfe Tone. Briefly they triumphed, raising hopes among the impoverished local peasantry and gathering a group of supporters. But before long the insurgency collapsed in the face of a brutal English counterattack." Our very great uncle Charles Vereker led the attack on those French forces of General Humbert which apparently checked, delayed and prepared for their defeat and surrender. Charles and family were loyal to England but were also publicly outspoken against the Act of Union which dissolved the Irish Parliament.

Charles Vereker was uncle of our great great grandfather John Lloyd Esq. of Lisheen Castle, Co. Tipperary who came to Canada in 1856. John's 2nd wife Mary Ann Minton, our GG grandmother, was born into an Irish Catholic family in Co. Waterford. She told the story to her daughter Kate that her own grandparents had died at the 1798 Battle of Vinegar Hill.

Our Redmond family were living at Hollyfort Co. Wexford and so were in the middle of the 1798 Wexford rebellion; a handful of kilometers from the townland of Ballylusk near Monaseed, home of Myles Byrne, a leader in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and Chef de Bataillon in Napoleon’s Irish Legion. I have read his memoirs which tell the story of the rebellion. https://archive.org/details/memoirsofmilesby01byrniala

We have folk on all sides of this tale. Sarah Cadogan, Grandmother of Lord Edward FitzGerald, a great great grandson of King Charles 11 and a leader of the Rebellion, was a first cousin of our ancestor Elizabeth Prendergast, daughter of Penelope Cadogan and Sir Thomas Prendergast. (Jonathan Swift not a pal of his son, also Sir Thomas. see 'On Noisy Tom' by J.S p.557https://books.google.ca/books?id=_3UEAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA557&lpg=PA557&dq=jonathan+swift+thomas+prendergast&source=bl&ots=jbb8O4-Coi&sig=EuTvcd_rPjpzYE9skunq3N-11XM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjX7tuC85fVAhWIxYMKHVq0Dx0Q6AEIKzAB#v=onepage&q=jonathan%20swift%20thomas%20prendergast&f=false ...ha) .

I therefore feel compelled to read Flanagan's novel.
Keep you posted.

It became a best-seller in the US, and also sold very well in Ireland. In Ireland, too, it had a remarkable second life after the national television company,...to make it into a film that was broadcast on television in late 1982 in a six-part series.

Flanagan, Thomas. The Year of the French (New York Review Books Classics) . New York Review Books. Kindle Edition.

http://www.goodreads.com/…/sh…/651858.The_Year_of_the_French

John Redmond