Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory

Notes

Notes ( 335 ) Introduction 1. Trotsky to the Mensheviks, at the Second All-Russian Congress of the Soviets, 25 October 1917; reproduced in Alexander Rabinowitch , The Bolsheviks Come to Power (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 296. 2. Including infantrymen from the Second Battalion of the Seventieth Demi-brigade, a company of grenadiers, a detachment of the Eleventh Company of the Twelfth Artillery division, a detachment of cavalry from the Third Regiment of Chasseurs à Cheval, and Humbert’s personal escort, which was drawn from the Twelfth Regiment of Hussars; “Désignation des Corps,” ADG B11/2. Slightly different figures appear in other naval lists. Profiles of 60 officers and 934 soldiers can be found in the troop registers; ADG 18 YC 170 and 171; 21 YC 782; XB 290. 3. In 1798 the term “races” had already been used to deplore the disorderly retreat of government troops (who fled as far as Tuam and Athlone); for example, a letter written by Mrs. B. Thompson, Castlebar, 17 October 1798; Ormsby Papers, NLI microfilm P8162; reproduced in Cornhill Magazine (1898), 467. Shortly after, the name “The Races of Castlebar ” appears to have entered common use; see Sir Jonah Barrington, Historic Memoirs of Ireland , vol. 2, 280. 4. Throughout this book, “the West” is used liberally in reference to the experience of the French invasion and the Rebellion in the province of Connacht and the north midlands of Ireland. The wide spread of the map of the Year of the French in social memory (“vernacular landscape”) is discussed in chap. 12. For the geographical distribution of relevant sources in the Irish Folklore Collection, see my chart 1 (52) and chart 3 (59). 5. Similarly, a study of the memory of the controversial antipolice riot in the village of Chauri Chaura in the Gorakhpur region in India in 1922 noted that the number of victims and the date are often cited erroneously; see Shahid Amin, Event, Memory, Metaphor: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 10. 6. Hardwicke Papers, BL MS 34454 ff 466, 476. 7. R. R. Madden estimated the Irish rebels at 8,000 and reckoned desertions reduced their number to 1,500; United Irishmen, vol. 1, 93 and 95. Valerian Gribayédoff maintained that 1,500–2,000 Irishmen left Castlebar with Humbert while a larger force stayed behind; French Invasion of Ireland in ’98, 118. W. E. H. Lecky soberly cautioned that “the distribution of arms is no measure of the number of Irish,” which he maintained did not exceed 500 when taking Castlebar and were joined there by “some hundreds of recruits”; History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 5, 47–48 and 59. Richard Hayes set the number of Irish insurgents at 1,500; Last Invasion of Ireland, 116. Marianne Elliott insisted that the number who joined the French “had never exceeded 3,000”; Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France. More recently, Harman Murtagh claimed that “in all 6–700 volunteers enlisted with the French at Killala and another 3,500 at Castlebar”; see “General Humbert’s Campaign in the West,” in Póirtéir, Great Irish Rebellion of 1798, 117. Kevin Whelan has raised this figure to 10,000; see Bartlett, Dickson , Keogh, and Whelan, 1798, 101. 8. Foster, Modern Ireland, 280. 9. Ian McBride, “Reclaiming the Rebellion ,” 396. Overwhelmed by the growing volume of publications, the same reviewer subsequently pondered “if the time has come for a self-imposed ban on all further writings about the 1798 rebellion”; Ian McBride, “Manipulating ‘Memory,’” Irish Review 28 (2001): 186. 10. Kevin Whelan, Tree of Liberty, 133–75; reproduced in Whelan, Fellowship of Freedom, 121–41. 11. Bartlett et al., 1798, 98. 12. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge; Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 8. 13. A standard dictionary definition of “folk memory” as the “recollection of the past persisting among a people” may serve as a working definition, though the more-accurate term “social memory” is developed in chap. 1; see Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English , 9th ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 526. 14. David Gross, Past in Ruins, 82. 15. For the abstracts of the lectures see the program booklet 1798 Bicentenary Conference (Dublin: n.p., 1998); edited papers were subsequently published in Bartlett et al., 1798. Ian McBride’s contribution on “Memory and Forgetting ” stood out for its reference to oral traditions. 16. “Oral traditions” can be loosely defined as knowledge...