Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century: Revolution, Religion, Reunion
Foreword
The ‘long nineteenth century’ refers to the immense impact and lasting legacy of the key events spanning from the French Revolution in 1789 until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This era has proven to be one of the most influential periods of revolutionary change in modern history: the creation of the modern nation state, the birth of modern human rights discourse, and the rise and fall of colonial empires that drew much of the world map as we know it today. By using the experience of one nation as a guiding principle, we can examine the progression of key historical themes of the era, including nationalism, colonialism, industrialisation and revolution. Through 8 episodes, we will establish the influence of tumultuous world events on Irish social, political and artistic movements, as well as explore the many contributions made by Irish men and women to the era.
Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century: Revolution, Religion, Reunion
The events that marked the beginning of the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’—the export of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars—instigated a period of dramatic conservative backlash across the European continent. Traditional monarchical regimes like those in Russia, the United Kingdom and the Habsburg Empire had successfully fended off the danger of radical reform emanating from Paris. The efforts to placate the currents set in motion during these revolts varied from kingdom to kingdom, yet they never overtook the overwhelming concern: the maintenance of political conservatism and traditional power structures. Religion underwent a turbulent process of reform and counter-reform similar to these political fluctuations. The result of this societal unrest was another series of continent-wide revolutions in 1848. This ‘Springtime of the Peoples’ was one of the pivotal moments in characterising the political development of the nineteenth century (Hobsbawm, 1988). Ireland’s experience of this transformative era is instructive of how individual states and their individual contexts complicate simple historical narratives while maintaining large historical trends.
Despite the undulating political landscape of the 1790s and early 1800s, Europe in the 1840s remained overwhelmingly monarchical, and in many pertinent ways remained essentially unchanged from prior to the Revolutionary period. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 sought to re-establish a pre-Revolutionary order across Europe by dividing territory between traditional monarchical powers and creating a system of balances and counterbalances that would prevent such future outbreaks of revolution:
It is true that several European kingdoms, including France, could now be described as constitutional monarchies, but outside a band of such regimes along the eastern edge of the Atlantic, absolute monarchy prevailed everywhere. (Hobsbawm, 1988, p. 301)
While the material results therefore may appear somewhat underwhelming, the progress of Liberalism had nonetheless become a significant factor in all of European politics. The legacy of the French Revolution and the prospect of absolute revolt amongst the lower classes heavily influenced the decision-making of ruling classes. Outright slavery and traditional models of serfdom had been largely abandoned across Europe by 1840 (with the general exception of Russia). However, the conditions in which the rural poor lived remained largely unchanged as evidenced by the potato famine that would reveal the fatal flaws of land-bondage systems across Europe in 1845 (Ó’Gráda, 2000). The modernisation of economies based on Adam Smith’s principles revealed the inefficiencies of serf/slave systems and brought them to a transitional end (Hobsbawm, 1988, p. 300).
Of course, the greatest product of the French Revolution was the concept of the nation. In the aftermath of the Revolution, the idea of distinct nations took its modern form, ordered not by aristocratic bloodlines and their territories but by the linguistic, cultural and geographical trends of the people who occupied and shared those territories (Merriman, 2009). This conception of what makes a nation quickly infiltrated public consciousness throughout Europe. Even after the Napoleonic Period and the Congress of Vienna had settled the old borders in place, many minority groups throughout the various European empires began calling for independence based on these national distinctions. This was perhaps most notable in the Habsburg Empire in modern-day Austria, which was comprised of more than twelve modern nationalities and ethnic groups, including Germans, Ukrainians, Slovaks and Poles, and comprised an enormous stretch of land across Central and Eastern Europe. The period between 1815 and 1848 in this empire was characterised by the divergent national identities of these groups (Merriman, 2009).
During the same period, similar awakenings happened in Ireland. The immediate revolutionary inspiration that resulted in Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen rebellion in 1798 was a military failure but provided an enormous amount of iconography and mythology that would shape the subsequent generation of revolutionaries. Many of the Irish who took part in Simon Bolivar's revolutionary campaigns in South America, e.g. Francis Burdett O'Connor, were inspired by or related to those who took part in the rebellion in 1798. A number of new causes and associations were founded in the image of the United Irishmen, groups that took the causes of legal representation and land reform as the key methods by which to liberate the Irish people (English, 2006). Movements like Daniel O'Connell's successful push for Catholic emancipation have their roots in the widespread intellectual separation of groups into distinct national identities (Davis, 1988).
The poorest classes across all European societies were left devastated by the famines of 1845, and the subsequent mass emigration to America brought further political unrest and vitriol amongst the general European population, providing fertile ground for further protest. At the same time, the industrial revolution coupled with the expansion of American territory saw unprecedented growth in global markets. These changes proved in truth to be a time of rapid capitalist expansion, further highlighting the wealth disparity emerging between social classes (Hobsbawm, 1988). These antagonistic political currents across various European societies resulted in the growth of socialist causes, most significantly in the articulation of communist theory in The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. Marx and Engels captured the all-pervasive changes these developments in industry and economy had had on the population at large, identifying how the "need for ever-expanding markets chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe", infiltrating the minutiae of workers lives (Marx & Engels, 1848, p. 11).
This was the 'spectre of communism' which haunted Europe, the fear of 'the proletariat' which affected not merely factory-owners in Lancashire or Northern France but civil servants in rural Germany, priests in Rome and professors everywhere. And with justice. For the revolution which broke out in the first months of 1848 was not a social revolution merely in the sense that it involved and mobilized all social classes. It was in the literal sense the rising of the labouring poor in the cities—especially the capital cities—of Western and Central Europe. Theirs, and theirs almost alone, was the force which toppled the old regimes from Palermo to the borders of Russia. (Hobsbawm, 1988, p. 305)
These emergent ideologies often clashed directly with one another. Socialism and Communism very deliberately set themselves apart from Nationalist causes, regardless of whatever shared opposition they may have had to traditional monarchical regimes:
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. (Marx & Engels, 1848, p. 18)
The Revolutions of 1848 were therefore not a uniform cause but instead a diverse coalition of the historical trends coming to bear across Europe. The exact conditions varied of course between territories, with individual contexts and histories diversifying exact motivations, yet the preconditions existed on a broad scale across the European labouring poor. While the writings of Marx and Engels likely had little direct influence, the conditions described by the pair were as evident in Ireland as anywhere else in Europe.
The first meaningful revolution of 1848 broke out in Paris in February. A general demonstration against the government of Prime Minister François Guizot in Paris on February 22 was the occasion for the combined discontents of liberals, socialists, and the impoverished farming and artisan classes to produce a violent surge against the monarchy of King Louis Philippe. The demonstration had initially been banned, and, expecting small-scale attendance, the authorities had posted only a few guards to positions throughout the city to disperse the crowds. When great numbers of protestors gathered and easily dismissed the insufficient security, the police response was chaotic and uneven, instigating violence that they were subsequently unable to contain (Merriman, 2009). The situation expanded into a full-scale anti-monarchical protest and within two days King Louis Philippe abdicated the crown.
What followed was a wave of similar revolts in major European centres for the duration of the year. Each instance came with its own specific set of internal dynamics, yet a similar pattern was followed in most cases. The combined (and often disorganised) forces of socialist, nationalist and liberal causes coalesced to produce large-scale protests against conservative governments, demanding reform in representation and the rights of citizens (Merriman, 2009). In German and Italian areas the revolts centred on the demands for national unification based on linguistic, cultural and historical ties. The Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire saw mass demonstrations against the lack of representative democracy and the complete removal of traditional serfdom-based systems of land ownership (Duggan, 2008). While all these revolutions were ultimately quashed, they all experienced immense early success. Word of these initial victories helped the revolts to spread further and further afield even in the absence of any organisation between the groups.
Ireland’s case is an interesting case study of the revolutionary ferment which was taking hold across the continent at this time. Revolutions and outbreaks of revolt had been a semi-frequent occurrence in Ireland for the past half-century. There existed an antagonistic relationship between a displaced underclass and the land-owning governing minority, a distinction exacerbated by deep-set religious and cultural divides. The economic hardships brought about by famine and industrialisation had hit Ireland as hard as any population in Europe. The previous two decades of agitation by the likes of Daniel O’Connell as well as the deprivations of the Famine meant that internal support for change appeared high. In 1829 O’Connell had successfully mobilised support from the Irish peasantry to argue for Irish representation in the British Parliament.
Yet when the continent burst into revolt in 1848, the possibility of such an occurrence repeating itself in Ireland was unrealistic. Nationalist groups within Ireland had become split on several ideological differences throughout the 1830s and 1840s. A nationalist group entitled Young Ireland developed from the paper The Nation, founded in 1842 by Charles Gavan Duffy and Thomas Davis. This group was initially a part of the general movement towards Irish separatism, yet they grew increasingly disenfranchised by O’Connell’s views. O’Connell continued to posit a slow-paced, reform-led approach to achieve independence, while Duffy, Davis and the Young Irelanders believed that the time had come for more aggressive demands (Davis, 1988). As a result of this divide, as well as the mass emigration and widespread poverty following the Famine, popular support for mass mobilisation was hard to drum up for either faction.
Hope abounded amongst Irish nationalists that they could count on the French support, as they did in the 1790s with Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen) (Ó’Cathaoir, 1998). Yet two things counted against this happening. The first contributing factor was simply the destitution of the country in the worst years of the Famine, where the resources or even the manpower to sustain a healthy fighting force simply did not exist. The French or other allies would be required to sustain the revolt almost entirely on their own. Secondly, the French were not as enthusiastic to help as they had been in the Napoleonic Era. The Congress of Vienna had set very deliberate balances which prevented the export of rebellion which had marked the 1790s. The new French government was unwilling to engage in unnecessary war with another major power, and the prospect of Irish liberty was not valuable enough a goal to entice them to fight (Ó’Cathaoir, 1998).
The Young Ireland group was therefore on its own. While the conditions called for revolution, the group was non-committal until July 1848. A Young Ireland congregation visited Paris to congratulate the new, self-appointed French government. Viewed as a signal of intent, the British government suspended the right to habeas corpus throughout Ireland, allowing them to arrest the Young Irelanders without trial. Thus forced into immediate action, the Revolution began on July 22, 1848 (O’Cathaoir, 1998). In contrast to the rest of the continent—where major outbreaks brought violence to Paris, Vienna, Rome and other major urban centres—the revolution itself was confined to rural areas of Wexford and to Tipperary. Public support for the revolt was middling and tempered by disapproval by the local clergy. Leaders later admitted to having "totally misjudged" the revolutionary ambitions of the Irish people at this point in time (O’Cathaoir, 1998). The rebellion was easily contained by the British police force and failed to embed itself in the public imagination and culture of the time, as well as in the years ahead, in the same way that Wolfe Tone had failed fifty years prior.
The 1848 Rebellion in Ireland was perhaps doomed to fail. In comparison to its European contemporaries, it found itself with significantly less popular support, both literally and intellectually. A large proportion of the population had departed for America or Britain, and the population that remained behind was weakened, ideologically fractured, and more sceptical of the prospect of a successful revolution: where the revolutions in France and South America had produced dramatic overhaul in both societies, the efforts they inspired in Ireland had not. In the 1820s and 1830s discontent and economic hardship had amounted to nothing in terms of concrete revolution, while without total French support, Wolfe Tone had failed on several occasions in the 1790s.
As revolution, the rising was a pathetic farce; as revolutionary theatre, however, it was a gesture against death and despair, evictions and emigration. Its political effects were profound and far-reaching. Although some of these were slow to mature, others manifested themselves quickly. It re-established republican links to the United Irishmen; James Fintan Lalor and Mitchel brought the issue of land ownership into the political arena; after his acquittal, Duffy revived The Nation and laid the basis for tenant rights agitation. Moreover, the dispersal of the Young Irelanders gave them authority to interpret emigration as exile. (Ó’Cathaoir, 1998, p. 3)
The 1848 revolutions across Europe might have seemed unsuccessful, but their immense results became evident a few years later. In 1861 Italy was fully unified as the state we recognise today, after a series of independent parliamentary reforms and military campaigns under revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi combined to the same end goal. The country was united under the Savoy royal family of Piedmont with its first capital in Turin. By 1870 the capital had been relocated to Rome in accordance with the historic conception of an Italian people and the associated links with the Catholic Church sitting in St Peter’s (Duggan, 2008). A decade later the Confederation of German States had also aligned under the bellicose nationalism and statecraft of Otto von Bismarck. After the Franco-Prussian War, the territorial and military advantages obtained by the confederation cleared the way for German unification in 1870.
Italy’s path to unity in the middle of the century is a curious contrast to Ireland's. Some surface-level conditions appear very similar: both countries had a Catholic hegemony amongst the population and an independence movement characterised by an anti-occupation sentiment, and each struggled to industrialise at the same pace as their contemporaries (Duggan, 2008). Italy also found itself divided on the means by which independence and unification would be achieved: Garibaldi represented a cavalier, an adventurous hero in popular culture that has become synonymous with the noble rebellion of justified violence, while parliamentary reformer Giusseppe Mazzini led the slow, legal route of reform from Piedmont. In decades to come the debate in Ireland would find itself drawn on very similar lines, as we shall see shortly.
In light of the shifting status of some fundamental cultural institutions -like national identity, government representation and conceptions of class- it is important to draw attention to the status of religion in Ireland and Europe at this time. Since the 16th-century imposition of Protestant settlers under the Tudor monarchy, Ireland had been reckoning with the cultural tensions caused by the clash between the Protestant rulers and the rest of the population, which was mainly Catholic. It is important to draw attention to how, in the 1800s, this Catholic religious identity interacted with the other dominant or emergent ideologies of the century. Catholicism formed one of the central tenets of Irish identity, and in the absence of a unified national character, this religious distinction took on a singular importance for the Irish, managing to "build itself into the very vitals of the nation by becoming almost at one with its identity" over the course of the nineteenth century (Larkin, 1975, p. 1244). Religious identity became close to synonymous with national identity by filling the role of cultural governance.
[Catholicism in Ireland] was characterised by a deep popular devotion featuring the likes of the rosary, benediction, sodalities, indulgences and processions. It provided comfort and fuelled the spiritual and ethical imaginations of its adherents, and had a deeply committed, global missionary outreach. However, its un- and even anti-intellectual nature meant that it was ill-prepared for the challenges posed by a late-emerging modernity in Ireland. It was a religion in which the voice of the priest, the bishop, and the Pope could rely on its formal authority to get a serious hearing, not just from the faithful, but also from the politicians. (O’Hanlon, 2017, p. 10)
The near-hegemony of Catholic culture among the ordinary Irish population would continue well beyond the nineteenth century and would in fact grow even more firmly entrenched post-independence in the 1920s.
The other major ideological creation of the century -socialism- found itself excluded from mainstream Irish life as a result. The American and French Revolutions had been secular operations in nature, guided by rationalist Enlightenment thought. The French Revolution had inspired similar revolts across Europe, making it a major ideological enemy of the conservative establishment, including the Catholic Church. While the various monarchies may have been split between Protestantism and Catholicism, the Catholic Church itself remained an extremely powerful influence across the continent. In Ireland in particular the attempt to support the United Irishmen in 1795 and 1798 saw the French and their ‘godless’ rebellion portrayed as the very opposite of the Irish ideal (Merriman, 2009). This polarity between socialist causes and the Church was obfuscated in the times of the Famine, when the Church -as the foundational social unit- found itself obligated to provide many of the social protections and guarantees that its ardent opposition to socialism so often demonised. While many secularising governments actively sought to reclaim this role as the providers of social protection, in Ireland, the opposite happened: the British government's neglect of social care to the Catholic poor only saw their association with the Church solidified in contrast to the rest of the developing world.
Thus, in the 1870s, Ireland had a conflicted relationship to socialism and its teachings. On the one hand, it remained one of the most impoverished nations in all of Europe, a place where the material conditions for the emergence of socialist sentiment were overwhelmingly present. The stronghold of the Catholic Church however had vilified the socialist cause in the eyes of many. Yet there was one factor which complicated the dynamic between religion and socialism, which was the question of land ownership. Since the days of Daniel O’Connell in the 1820s land reform and the Catholic Church became closely associated, even if the rhetoric for such reform directly contrasted with the Church’s usual stance on such causes (Larkin, 1975). The near-absolute ownership of land in Ireland by the Protestant minority allowed for a fostering of support for land reform among the general Catholic population which, in its absence, would have been utterly suppressed by the ideology of the Church. All of which is to say that in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century, the strength and influence of the dominant religious institution only grew stronger while other European nations headed in the opposite direction. Ireland remained relatively poorly industrialised, and in the absence of a fixed national identity and a coherent labour movement, religious identification emerged as the most distinctive characteristic of Irish life and organisation.
What had been created between 1850 and 1878 was a wealthier, better educated, and more practically Catholic Irish national community that was as yet unable to focus on its political end—an Irish State. This inability to focus was a result of serious differences in the community over means, whether constitutional in terms of repeal or federalism or revolutionary in terms of a Fenian republic. (Silke, 1975, p. 1262)
As a result, the 1870s saw the emergence in Irish politics of several figures and movements characterised by socialist goals of enfranchisement, representation, and the equitable distribution of land, which found vast public support. The most notable of these figures was Charles Stewart Parnell. Much like Mazzini emerged in Italy as the moderate, parliamentary alternative to violent revolution, Parnell developed the cause of Irish sovereignty to its greatest height since O'Connell in the 1820s. It can be considered the most important point in the struggle for Irish independence in the entirety of the nineteenth century.
Parnell was elected to Parliament as a representative of the Home Rule League in 1875. Home Rule was the name given to the concept of Irish self-government within the United Kingdom, a proposition which grew in popularity towards the latter half of the century. Parnell actively associated himself with the Land League established by Michael Davitt. Many moderates denounced the League due to Davitt's association with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a more radical nationalist sect. Parnell's endorsement raised the profile of both land reform and national self-determination to new heights, as well as cementing their association as two inextricably linked causes (English, 2006). Without ever achieving overwhelming support in England or in Parliament as a whole, Parnell used the growing Irish support for Home Rule to leverage the Home Rule Party as a key ally for the major parties vying for control in Westminster. As such his support became a great political boost for any party in Britain, allowing the concept of self-determination to grow in acceptability without threatening the dissolution of the entire Kingdom by presenting itself as a wish for total independence. Parnell (and the British) had seen a fortunate precedent in 1848 in the Habsburg empire, where the concept of self-determination was the key goal of the many ethnic groups under Austrian control and the ultimate granting of such rights did not fundamentally destabilise the empire (Merriman, 2009).
In 1881 Parnell's rhetoric in a series of speeches was deemed violent by the British government and he was temporarily placed in Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin. Three days after Parnell's release, on May 6, 1882, two senior British officials were fatally stabbed in Phoenix Park. While the connection to Parnell has never been officially made, at the time these events caused serious damage to his reputation, given his association with the fervent Fenian causes of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (English, 2006). Home Rule, which had been growing in popularity and had found respectability (if not acceptability) in British political circles, soon faded from the realms of immediate possibility under Prime Minister William Gladstone. Parnell would suffer a more significant blow in 1889, when details of an affair with the wife of a close political associate, Captain William O'Shea, were revealed to the public. However great the political status enjoyed by Parnell on both sides of the Irish Sea, the strict morals of both Catholic Ireland and Victorian Britain could not permit such an indiscretion. The subsequent media outrage was enough to tarnish Parnell's reputation and political career forever.
Thanks to Parnell, the cause of Irish independence was elevated to the status of everyday English political topics, when only half a century before it had been the domain of violent revolutions led by a radical minority. Within the hundred years of the nineteenth century, the prospect of land ownership became the vehicle by which Irish identity took its most coherent form. It grew in an odd parallel to the status of the Church, which had elsewhere declined in power as representative democracy grew. As the world sped into the twentieth century and its manifold innovations, the Catholic Church under Pope Pius X fought ardently against the modernisation of society (Silke, 1975). Ireland was among the least changed countries in Europe in terms of its secularisation or its industrialisation, yet its political consciousness was fundamentally reshaped by these trends across Europe. The preconditions for eventual independence and national identity had finally taken shape.
Bibliographical References
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