Revolution Demythologized

Next year will witness the centenary celebrations in Ireland of the 1916 rebellion that would change the political and cultural landscape of Ireland forever, and which in effect led to the Sinn Fein electoral victory of 1918, the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21, and the Irish Civil War that followed. For many people, the 1916 Easter Rising contains the origins of the modern Irish state which gained official status in 1937. The leaders of the Rising, sixteen of whom were executed by the British in the aftermath of the rebellion, became national heroes in the pantheon of Irish history. In the words of W. B. Yeats, they were “changed utterly” as they assisted in the birth of the “terrible beauty” of that Easter week.

There is a considerable literature on the revolutionary period in modern Ireland (1890–1923) and a large body of work on the cultural revival (which almost exactly coincides with that period). Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923 by Roy Foster is a brilliant and original contribution to the study of the period, focused initially on the time before the rebellion, what Foster calls the “pre-revolution,” with the aim of discovering what the rebels thought and felt they were doing. Few historians would take seriously Thomas Carlyle’s notion of history as “the sum of innumerable biographies,” but Foster’s skill as a biographer has served him well in this fascinating account, which resembles in some ways a group biography. This is an extraordinary portrait of a generation, including the best-known figures of the period such as Patrick Pearse, Eamon De Valera, and Roger Casement, but also friends and family members of the major players. Foster draws from many contemporary sources, including personal correspondence and diaries, and he has mined the resources of the National Library of Ireland, the National Archives of Ireland (Dublin), the National Archives of Great Britain (Kew), the Military Archives of Ireland, the Archives of University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, and many other libraries. In so doing he has produced a vital record of the revolutionary period. The focus is on individuals and private lives, as well as on amatory relationships and friendships; as Foster writes, “the changes that convulse society do not appear from nowhere; they happen first in people’s minds, and through the construction of a shared culture.”

Widely regarded as one of the foremost Irish historians of his generation, Foster is the Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford University and is author of many books, including the standard history of the period, Modern Ireland 1600–1972; The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland; and Paddy and Mr. Punch: Connections in Irish and English History. He has also written lives of Charles Stewart Parnell and Lord Randolph Churchill, as well as the magisterial two-volume life of Yeats: The Apprentice Mage and The Arch-Poet—a work which offers proof of Foster’s talents as a biographer and literary critic as well as his authority as a historian of the late Victorian and modern periods. A brilliant political historian, he is also a major historian of culture and of the dynamic intersection (so vividly embodied in modern Ireland) between political and cultural change.

The title, Vivid Faces, is taken from Yeats’s “Easter 1916,” which opens with the declaration:

I have met them at close of dayComing with vivid facesFrom counter or desk among greyEighteenth-century houses.

These were the participants before they had been changed by the revolutionary events celebrated (and questioned) in the poem, which famously declares the rebels’ hearts had been turned to stone by the sacrifice they and their nation had made. Yeats’s friend Maud Gonne questioned this characterization at the time, claiming that political commitment does not turn you to stone, but makes you fully human. This debate is likely to continue in our present age of radicalization, but the texture and immediacy of the personal lives of the revolutionaries is decisively revealed...