Dublin Easter 1916 The French Connection: The French Connection

By Bill Mc Cormack

All revolutionary movements since 1789 have looked instinctively to the French model. In this book, Bill Mc Cormack demonstrates that the French influence in Ireland was indeed profound, especially in the years leading up to the Easter Rising.
However, it was not the traditions of the Tennis Court Oath or Bastille Day that motivated the Irish rebels, but a new French Catholic nationalism which reached its apogee with the Dreyfus Affair (1895) and which pervaded literature as well as politics.
This was a complex reactionary movement, partly religiose, partly royalist, and anti-modern. In Ireland, its influence was advanced through the thought of individual visitors, through Catholic teaching orders, and through a vigorous periodical press. The 'blood sacrifice' rhetoric of Patrick Pearse and (eventually) James Connolly owes more to Maurice Barres than to Wolfe Tone. Connolly's use of the sympathetic strike derives from Georges Sorel's syndicalism.
Mc Cormack examines how the formerly anti-clerical Irish Republican Brotherhood was in effect re-baptised by a French-inspired Catholic mission, which even absorbed Pearse's English and agnostic father. He explores the wealth of French material published by Thomas MacDonagh and J. M. Plunkett in The Irish Review (1911-1914), and traces the long campaign of The Catholic Bulletin to convert the rebel dead into martyrs. Finally, he discusses how the anti-democratic undertow of 1916 breaks out again in 1939 with the IRA's bombing campaign in England.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gill Books
• Release date: Sep 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9780717154135

Bill Mc Cormack

Bill Mc Cormack has taught at Leeds, Georgetown (DC), Antwerp and Budapest universities, and retired as Professor of Literary History at Goldsmiths College, London, in 2002. He subsequently devoted six years to reviving the Worth Library in Dublin.

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CONTENTS

Cover

Title page

Dedication

Epigraph

A Letter of Introduction

Chapter 1: Children of the Nation, or a Nation of Children?

Chapter 2: The Phoenix as Dying Bird

Chapter 3: Baptising the Neo-Fenians

Chapter 4: Pearse, France and The Irish Review (1911–1914)

Chapter 5: Joe Hone Introduces Georges Sorel to Dublin, March 1916

Chapter 6: Sorelian Myth, and ‘Suffrage of the Dead’ (Barrès)

Chapter 7: Irish Sovereignty and German Decisionism: Carl Schmitt and Friends in 1923

Chapter 8: Hans Franzen in University College Dublin, 1937–1938

Chapter 9: Bloody Frivolity

Chapter 10: Spectres and Materialisations; or, the Proclamation Re-proclaimed (1939)

Notes

Select Bibliography and Further Reading

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill & Macmillan

In memory of

Justin Keating (1930–2009)

Out of great affection,

And out of regret that we had not time enough to

discuss ideas outlined in the following pages which

would have been better for his criticism;

And (not least) because he once proposed that a

statue of James Joyce should be erected in

University College Dublin; then was threatened

with expulsion for his trouble.

The cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers had gathered in clumps to watch the cars careering homeward and through this channel of poverty and inaction the Continent sped its wealth and industry. Now and again the clumps of people raised the cheer of the gratefully oppressed. Their sympathy, however, was for the blue cars — the cars of their friends, the French.

The French, moreover, were virtual victors. Their team had finished solidly; they had been placed second and third and the driver of the winning German car was reported a Belgian. Each blue car, therefore, received a double measure of welcome as it topped the crest of the hill and each cheer of welcome was acknowledged with smiles and nods by those in the car. In one of these trimly built cars was a party of four young men whose spirits seemed to be at present well above the level of successful Gallicism: in fact, these four young men were almost hilarious. They were Charles Segouin, the owner of the car; Andre Riviere, a young electrician of Canadian birth; a huge Hungarian named Villona and a neatly groomed young man named Doyle.

James Joyce, ‘After the Race’ (December 1904)

A Letter of Introduction

Bill Mc Cormack

Monaghan

17 March 2011

Dear Fergal,

Many thanks for your very positive response to the chapters that I submitted for your consideration. Your comment, that perhaps they need a less detailed introduction, is well taken. The book which you have agreed to publish arose from several kinds of source or prompt or unease, and the reader is entitled to know something of them.

First, a personal debt is being settled. Liam de Paor died on 13 August 1998. The following Saturday, while his funeral was taking place, a republican bomb exploded in the town of Omagh, killing twenty-nine people, not all of them Irish. It would be no less offensive than redundant to wonder what the author of On the Easter Proclamation and Other Declarations (1997) might have said. Approached by elements in the Fianna Fáil administration long before the Arms Trial (1971) to lend academic cover for illegal importations, de Paor regarded the militarisation of conflictual politics with abhorrence, reserving especially thoughtful condemnation for the sneak-bomber, the absentee warrior.

He and the present writer first met in the Seán Connolly branch of the Irish Labour Party (Dublin South-East constituency), regarded by head office as a troublesome refuge for intellectuals who often disagreed amongst themselves. That was late in the 1960s, yet before ‘the north began . . .’, the venue Mrs Margaret Gaj’s restaurant in Baggot Street where republican veterans, feminists, and Trotsky-ites had their tea. (In one evening Gery Lawless could spot more armed detectives across the road than would fill Croke Park.) Further upstairs, when the Labourites convened, de Paor enunciated brief but effective suggestions for policy, never unconscious of the latent tension between nationalist and socialist interpretations of history. In 1970 he published a Penguin Special embodying this thoughtful engagement under the title Divided Ulster.

The republican movement had already split into Official and Provisional factions, the former overtly, but not plausibly, Marxist in orientation. De Paor was un-seducible from constitutionalist politics. He prefaced Divided Ulster with an unexpected Old Testament quotation (the King James version), including the words,

Be ye therefore very courageous to keep and to do all that is written in the book of the law of Moses, that ye turn not aside therefrom to the right hand or to the left.

(Joshua, 23:6)

Bloody Sunday in Derry (January 1972) greatly assisted the Provisional wing, and the ghastly tit-for-tat decades of atrocity got under way. Inaugurated in one dimension by the Official IRA’S stupid, immoral and desperately incompetent bombing of Aldershot (February 1972) — the victims six civilian canteen workers, and an army chaplain — these long years drained the Left of argument, methodology and morale. The Provisionals were not to be out-heroded; three children died in the bombing of Claudy village a few months later. It is difficult now to reconstruct the headlong simplicity which people vested in their pet option — Irish unity, UK integration, or whatever. I recall very clearly how de Paor advised against confusing any plebiscite with the complex, un-dramatic workings of democracy. I believe his relationship with the thought of Ernest Renan (1823–1892) might be explored through this apparently casual remark, particularly with Renan’s discussion of the modern nation, the role of ‘sacrifice’, the shared past, etc. From that same period of French history, more particularly the 1870s, a martial ‘literature’ developed. In it Peadar Kearney found models for ‘A Soldier’s Song’, composed in 1907 and thus unaffected by the formation of the Irish Volunteers and the soldiering of 1916.¹ In the pages that follow, however, the focus is concentrated on a later generation of French thinkers than Renan’s.

There is then a problem about commemoration. Even by mid-2010, when a proposal to re-issue de Paor’s work was mooted, the bugle calls to commemorative amnesia were audible — though the Proclamation’s centenary still lay almost six years in the future. That was the summer when an official enquiry into the Claudy bombing (July 1972) strongly suggested the involvement of a rogue Catholic priest, provoked to action by what he knew of Bloody Sunday (January 1972). It was also the summer when the remains of Charlie Armstrong, who was disappeared in 1981 heading for Mass, were discovered at Aughrim More bog, County Monaghan. The issue of Provisional IRA responsibility was, Gerry Adams averred, ‘a secondary matter’ which brought to mind Pearse’s franker admission that ‘we might shoot the wrong people.’ A long tradition for whoever ‘we’ might be, a tradition of unease, evasion and bad faith.

In contrast, nationalist movements regard their fundamental propositions as self-evident truths. It does not necessarily follow that these propositions are false, but it behoves enquirer and exponent alike to adopt a modest hermeneutics of suspicion. Likewise, terms of analysis which have been devised in relation to one movement are often resisted or ignored in regard to another. If Pearse invoked revolution, perhaps he intended a subset of what German historians term ‘the conservative revolution’, available in hard and soft versions. Preferring for the moment to use the term ‘separatists’, his most recent biographer has identified ‘a longing for the small integrated communities where everyone had face-to-face contact and which they perceived to be under threat from a modern large-scale impersonal society.’²

Against this cosy assumption, a critique might be offered despite the fact that Theory is now more unfashionable than canasta or fondue. If there is a central point of principle, or ‘theoretical’ hypothesis, to be advanced, it might be this: no human project or achievement of any complexity can be fully understood on its own terms alone. In the words of a recent historian of the Dreyfus Affair (1893 onwards), ‘revisiting historical cases rarely results in the reassuring closure of a new verdict that simply replaces the prior one.’³ And this leads me to outline the fundamental difficulty in writing about the 1916 Rising — its double existence as historical event and as foundation myth, complicating commemoration in 2016 (see Chapter 10 below).

Foundation myths may be ancient or modern. The story of Romulus, Remus and the she-wolf is a good example of the former, telling how the city of Rome came into being, how it was essentially founded. Modern examples are more difficult to choose, because there are so many of them and because they are inevitably surrounded by a buzz of contemporary, ‘non-essential’ knowledge. The Boston Tea Party (1773) was steadily mythologised by American separatists from an early date, though only with the Tea Partyers of today has it acquired the dignity of farce. The Alamo (February–March 1836) might serve better — the heroic few, the cruel besieging enemy, the gallant reinforcements, sacrifice, defeat and triumph. This was an ‘iconic’ event in the Texan Revolution and, consequently, in the development of the United States as a transcontinental power.

Though there are other routes to Rome’s origins — for example variants traceable through Virgil’s Aeneid — they do not challenge the story of the two boys as a foundation myth. The logic of contradiction does not apply; the principals are semi-divine. With the modern instance, there are inevitably bothersome details — the Alamo’s original establishment as a mission station, and the later aggression of Texas and the United States towards Mexico and ‘hispanics’ generally. The twentieth century has its own examples to offer — the reception of Vladimir Lenin at the Petrograd railway terminus (February 1917) and the Beer-Hall Putsch in Munich (November 1923). In the first case, Leon Trotsky exploited a routine transport detail to produce a transfiguration, the revelation of a saviour shortly to become head of the first Soviet government; in the second, Adolf Hitler failed in proclaiming ‘The National Revolution Has Broken Out’, though later the incident ‘became’ crucial in the emergence of the Nazi Party and the Third Reich.

The Easter Rising provides a foundation myth for independent Ireland, in keeping with some of the features active in the examples cited. It is not an origin myth, because the constituent parts are already in place, awaiting the transfiguration which (in the Irish instance) is crucial. What is founded is the state, not the nation, not Ireland; and Pearse’s anxieties about human generation are in turn motors of action disguised in natural (biological) garb. Not all republicans accepted the foundation myth. In a late address to an audience in Galway, the veteran Peadar O’Donnell differentiated himself from those who held that the War of Independence stemmed from Easter 1916. He argued that the Conscription Crisis of April 1918 created widespread popular resistance to British power in Ireland, upon which Dan Breen and his associates predicated their January 1919 attack on policemen. But O’Donnell was ever the iconoclast.⁴

Such modern myths as we have looked at cannot survive the logic of contradiction, and so their custodians prohibit any modification (however minor) or critique (however obscure). It is therefore necessary to devise an approach which may disinter hitherto neglected connections between the event and the myth. I have tried to do this by concentrating on a cultural dimension, for the most part French in origin and literary in form.

For the French connections, one could go back to the Jacobins of 1798, or even the marquise de Saint-Ruth at the Battle of Aughrim (1691), as indeed Pearse did on several occasions. In brief, the present book investigates three kinds of contemporary influence on the Easter Rising of 1916. These could be named (i) retrospective nationalism, (ii) revolutionary syndicalism, and (iii) Catholic Revival literature. The three overlap, and cannot be regarded as French monopolies. Indeed, retrospective nationalism may have a longer Irish pedigree than French, though the centre of energy at the beginning of the century was Paris, not Dublin. The period of influence might be dated 1890 (0r earlier) to 1914, but it is distinctly marked into two phases by the Entente Cordiale (1904) between the United Kingdom and France, the annus mirabilis of James Joyce. Some may wish to regard Joyce as an ornamental thread that runs through the Hiberno-European fabric I am trying to unfold. He is not the thread; he is the needle or, more bluntly, ‘Kinch the knife-blade’ (Ulysses, chapter 1).

One could look further back in French culture. Baudelaire’s excavations of the modern city disclosed Archaic modernity. Such a super-stratum is not wholly at odds with the iconography of 1916 in Dublin, the figure of Iron-Age Cuchulain in a score of texts — poems and plays by Yeats, essays by Pearse, and also the art-work of Oliver Sheppard. On the last, Denis Donoghue has useful comments to make: ‘on April 21, 1935 — Easter Sunday — Oliver Sheppard’s sculpture The Death of Cuchulain was unveiled in the centre of the General Post Office in Dublin. It was not designed for the occasion or commissioned by a Government to celebrate, the following year, the twentieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, 1916. Sheppard created the sculpture in 1911/1912 . . .’⁵ So much for the unity of symbol and meaning. It is fitting that Cuchulain should be more recently appropriated by Ulster Loyalists, bent on keeping southern-style republicanism at bay.

Donoghue is keen to explore Samuel Beckett’s first novel Murphy (1938) which, through one incident, might claim to commemorate 1916. A character named Neary has entered the GPO to study bronze Cuchulain from the rere. He then assaults the heroic buttocks ‘such as they are’ with his head. A policeman arrives, and a friend of Neary’s. The friend, carefully named Wylie, offers reassurance that no damage has been done. ‘Not a feather out of her . . . No blood, no brains, nothing.’ Given the maleness of the hero and his assailant, the feminine pronoun remains detached — unless one includes in the brazen scenario ‘a raven, signifying death’ on Cuchulain’s shoulder. Birds — farmyard chickens and mythical phoenixes — will recur in the pages that follow, also the theme of politicised sacrifice. Beckett has it skewered: ‘Wylie . . . had already seized Neary round the waist, torn him back from the sacrifice and smuggled him half way to the exit.’⁶ But whose sacrifice — Cuchulain’s, Pearse’s, Sheppard’s, Neary’s? If there is an answer, then the answer is: Always Somebody Else. The archaic super-stratum flies over the heads of Hitler’s storm-troopers, deaths-head Standarten, colossal Roman arches, the resurgent fasces held aloft. The past will last a thousand years.

One could approach this unpleasant challenge through a more abstract formulation. Progressive regression must appear to be an absurd contradiction though surely there are examples to be found in the history of more than one de-colonised state (Zimbabwe, for example, or Burma). And some modern foundation myths, like some classic foundation garments, draw attention to what lies behind.⁷ If we now regard Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station (1940) as a late and too-naïve endorsement of the useful myth engineered by Trotsky after February 1917, Wilson’s early chapters still provide an astonishingly helpful commentary on the French historical writers of the nineteenth century — Michelet, Renan, and Taine — through whom 1789 was de-revolutionised and re-booted as a platform for expansive regression. Two of these historians featured in the French syllabus read by Pearse at the Royal University of Ireland, where other vital actors of the period — Joyce, MacDonagh, Geraldine Plunkett, Thomas Dillon, the Sheehy sisters, Frank Skeffington — were educated.⁸ Their outlook permeated bourgeois Irish Catholicism and, if Renan’s attitude to Christianity rendered him unwelcome, his Celticism won him selective tolerance. On the topic of the nation as such, Renan had argued in 1882 that forgetting perhaps as much as memory is a constitutive force. He went on — ‘and I shall even say historical error[s], form an essential factor in the creation of a nation; and thus it is that the progress of historical studies may often be dangerous to the [i.e. concept of] nationality.’⁹

We can go further back still, however briefly. The regression of which I speak was really the denial or abandonment of progress, a concept which has been traced, cautiously, even among the Greeks and Romans of old. In 1969, a significant year for Ulster, the Belfast-born classicist Eric Dodds delivered a public lecture on ‘The Ancient Concept of Progress’. The argument is learned and intricate, referring to dramatic poets, naturalists, sophist thinkers, medical men and philosophers. But Aeschylus’s play about Prometheus, and the mythic figure of Prometheus the bringer of fire, is central. Against it, Dodds pits the evidence transmitted by Hesiod (eighth century bc). Of these two sources, he can then advance the proposition, ‘If we ask how the poet came to substitute the idea of progress for the Hesiodic regress, part of the answer must surely lie in the triumphant experience of progress enjoyed by Aeschylus and his generation.’¹⁰ Of course, there were dour counter-views according to which Man was getting worse, not better, having fallen out of a once-ordained Golden Age or Lost Paradise.

What is relevant for the present context is an implicit model discerned by Dodds — Optimism about the Future vs. Exhaustion and Fears of Degeneracy. He goes so far as to suggest a parallel between certain Roman expressions of concern and twentieth-century anxieties — the former is ‘crisis poetry’, comparable to the literature of the nineteen-thirties.¹¹ Of the earlier Attic phase, one could advance broader and longer parallels with the Victorian age, the gradual inner collapse of confidence, the growth of irrationalism and authoritarianism and, through the Celtic Revival, a yearning for primitivist restoration. Pearse knew Michelet and Taine; Yeats knew Prometheus through Shelley though the latter was, in that appropriation, purged of his atheism and radical politics. Dodds knew Yeats and Yeats’s late preoccupation with ‘pollution’ and eugenics. If regress fails to deliver restoration, then acknowledgment of fallen man’s Original Sin may follow, not necessarily with the corpus of Christian doctrine still intact. Instead, Alfred Jarry’s Savage God Rules OK.

These ideas were not debated in the Freeman’s Journal, The Irish Times or the Gaelic Athletic Association. They circulated in different forms — learned (or esotetic) and more popular (exoteric). They emerged in local or antiquarian colour, notably through that burgeoning literature about Cuchulain to which Standish James O’Grady, John Todhunter and T.W. Rolleston also made important contributions. (Here we will note the great German sociologist Max Weber’s early interest.) While Standish James O’Grady (1846–1928) spun out adventure novels, his cousin Standish Hayes O’Grady (1832–1915) worked the esoteric lode, a Celtic scholar to his refined finger-tips, president of the Ossianic Society, cataloguer of Gaelic manuscripts in the British Museum. Newer disciplines emerged. Alienism gradually gave way to psychology and psycho-analysis, whose terms raised implications for accepted ideas of free will — and hence of politics too. (Here we might note — for balance — the role of George Sigerson in the English transmission of Jean-Martin Charcot’s ideas.) For its size, Ireland was not inconspicuous. In comparative literature and linguistics (H.M. Posnett), sociology of the ancient world (J.P. Mahaffy), philosophy and psycho-analysis (J.A. Wisdom), Irish non-literary thinkers cut paths and sometimes little roads into the dark grove of what was not conscious, obvious, reassuring. If most of the cited names tinkle faintly of a Trinity long gone, a clue might lie in its rival, the Royal University’s preference for instruction over research, consistent with Cardinal Newman’s priorities. Perhaps that preference was itself an exercise in distinguishing the spheres of learned and popular discourse, the latter raised a notch to satisfy a growing Catholic middle class, the former discreetly reserved for great minds like Newman’s own or, short of that, the Jesuits. Like Prometheus, Joyce stole their fire.

Nothing was exactly clear-cut, black and white, at turn-of-century. Some of Joyce’s instructors were English Catholics, some of Pearse’s Irish protestants. A Trinity vice-provost, John Kells Ingram (1823–1907), had as a young man published ‘The Memory of the Dead’ back in 1843, its opening line eventually echoed in ‘Who Fears to Speak of Easter Week?’ (written by Sister Columba). Despite his academic success and the jibes of narrower minds, he insisted in 1900 that he had never disowned the poem. Instead, with prescience, he compared the potential for renewed republican/nationalist violence unfavourably with the United Irishmen’s campaign. Professor first of Oratory, then English, then Greek, he was a leading figure in the advancement of positivism, having met Auguste Comte in 1855.¹² His younger brother, Thomas Dunbar Ingram (1826–1901), was emphatically not a Trinity man; from 1866 to 1877 he held the chair of Hindu law and jurisprudence at the President’s College, Calcutta. Retired home, he was just the Unionist numb-skull to infuriate Gladstone.

By the early years of the new century, an Irish Catholic intelligentsia undoubtedly existed — Thomas Kettle, Stephen MacKenna, Eoin MacNeill, Fred Ryan, Fr George Tyrell are diverse examples (all male). And there was evidence of transferring energies — Denis and Aubrey Gwynn (both historians) converted to Catholicism. But political theory? No. While Donal McCartney and Ciaran Brady have recently examined in depth the work of W.E.H. Lecky, Anthony Froude and J.P. Prendergast, the results disinter no politics below what is latent in any Irish historiography from the Victorian age. Isaac Butt had been a practising lawyer; Parnell wasn’t even that. Tom Kettle sat in parliament, wrote about Nietzsche, and held a university chair in National Economics. The Open Secret of Ireland (1912) demonstrates Kettle’s familiarity with Bergson, Moritz Bonn, Alfred Fouillée, Michelet, Renan, Taine, Nietzsche, etc etc, and his own distinction (hardly original) between utilitarian England and cultured Ireland. As for political theory, he remained a captive of Home Rule nostrums.¹³

Both Connolly and Pearse published numerous articles and pamphlets rich in persuasive detail and original thought. Yet, when they and their co-signatories composed the Proclamation of 1916, it delivered familiar dicta and laudable aspirations. In their one gesture towards originality, they had to invent a Gaelic word for ‘republic’ — poblacht, modelled on ríoghacht (kingdom or monarchy).¹⁴ One must sympathise with their fewness of words, given the haste and oppressive secrecy under which they worked. But perhaps the Proclamation was itself a heroic effort towards the exoteric popular enunciation (suitably veiled even from its evangels) of yet-secret doctrines. Orderlies of the Golden Dawn were loose-lipped demagogues compared to adepts of a Neo-Fenian Brotherhood. Using the ordinary language of political organisation, Liam de Paor spoke of the 1916 leaders forming a ‘conspiracy within a conspiracy’, with Eoin MacNeill in the outer circle, and Tom Clarke in the inner. Was there yet an inner-most? Is there?

The chapters which follow treat