If you follow the news at all, you know that we live in extraordinary times, that the events of the next few years will either continue the trend toward a distinctly fascist brand of populism or reverse it. But I wonder—did the fate of the world seem any less in the balance 10 or 20 years ago? And isn’t the political crisis as acute in, say, Southern Africa, or in Korea, or anywhere, really, as it is in the United States, though based on different events and circumstances? We might agree that a particular year is more significant than the one before or after it, or that one place on the globe is facing a more devastating crisis than another, but in the aggregate, I think most people usually see what’s happening in their here and now as nothing less than an inflection point in history. And while future historians will judge that certain times and places warrant more attention than others, the people living their lives tend to see their own circumstances as paramount. The smoke of our respective fires brings the horizon closer. Everything has led up to the present, and the future course will be set by what’s happening now.
By reading history—or an historical novel, as in the present case—we can drop ourselves into a time and place where the world has been turned upside down, and know how it might feel to be overwhelmed by circumstances completely unlike our own. In some cases we may find ourselves at one of the more famous loci of world history, as, for example, when we find ourselves in Moscow during the summer of 1812 in War and Peace. But just as interesting, we may find ourselves at a crossroads that was previously unknown to us, where peoples’ lives were wrenched out of their courses and where the powerless, at least for a time, become powerful and, in Yeats’ words, a strange and terrible beauty is born. Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French tells of such a crossroads. Strife between England and Ireland lasted for at least half a millennia and has flared into violence as recently as thirty years ago. The events of 1798, when a small French force landed in County Mayo in northwest Ireland and spearheaded an uprising that was intended to spark an insurrection across the whole of Ireland, was neither the greatest nor the least of the eruptions of that strife—I wouldn’t know exactly where to rank it, because I’m not especially knowledgeable about Irish history.
Poor oppressed peasants, along with more educated people inspired by the revolution in France, threw in their lot with the invading French army. It was exciting, it was glorious, it was just. But others, though in sympathy with the cause, understood that it was doomed, and that any Irish joining the cause would either be killed in battle or hanged afterwards as traitors to the British crown. With eyes open, they saw that the English army, even after it had been routed in an early battle, had an insurmountable advantage in resources and manpower. It quickly became a matter of how far the combined French and Irish forces could run, and how well they could hide.
I’d known about The Year of the French since it was first published in 1979 and I’d always had in mind to read it. It was republished by New York Review Books in 2004—an indication that it stood out even among first-rate historical novels of the time. Flanagan advances his narrative through a set of several characters, each of whom has a distinct perspective on the events. Some of these accounts are presented in the form of written testimony—for example, “From An Impartial Narrative of What Passed at Killala in the Summer of 1798, by Arthur Vincent Broome, M.A. (Oxon.).” Other accounts are presented in third-person narrative tending toward internal monologue as with Owen Ruagh MacCarthy, schoolteacher and poet (in Gaelic), who has his thoughts rendered in a manner reminiscent of James Joyce’s Ulysses:
It was full morning. The sun hung above the cornfields. To his left, a girl carrying water crossed the field. Seeing him, she paused. The heavy pails pulled at her arms. He shaded his eyes to watch her. Vivid, delicate, her features in profile cut the sky. Beyond her, pigs rooted in a cabin yard. Ballinamuck, the place of the pig. An ugly sound. Bogwater, lifeless and brown. He waited for her to turn her head, but she avoided his glance. Deceptive early autumn covered them, the silence of morning.MacCarthy is a tragic character—he’s smart enough to know better, but gets caught up in the emotion of the uprising. He fails to appreciate the implications as he transitions from witness to participant. Well before the end he realizes that the uprising is doomed and strikes out on his own, but he is irresolute and too fond of whisky, and eventually the insurgents overtake him and he is present at the final battle at Ballinamuck.
All of Flanagan’s narrators are acute and articulate. Some, like, MacCarthy, are participants in the uprising. Others are witnesses who do not take part. Still others are loyalists—one is a British officer who serves as adjutant to the British commander, Lord Cornwallis, who in an earlier command had surrendered to Washington at Yorktown in 1783. What many of the English forces, along with the French general, Jean-Joseph Humbert, can ultimately agree on is that the Irish peasants who bring their primitive pikes to the uprising barely qualify as human. (Cornwallis, to his credit, does not subscribe to this view, though he does not bother to take issue when it is expressed in his presence.)
It’s interesting that Flanagan does not include one of these peasants in his cast of narrators. But we do not need that voice to understand how wretched the position of the Irish underclass was at the end of the 18th century. At that time, Ireland was a puppet state of Britain, with its own parliament in Dublin. Some of the well-educated Irish agreed with Cornwallis that it was time to abolish the Irish parliament, and make England and Ireland a single state. This was accomplished with the so-called Act of Union in 1801. The Irish state had been corrupt and incompetent, and Irish citizens had all the liabilities of British citizenship (e.g., hanging for armed opposition to the King), but few if any of the benefits. So these well-educated Irishmen reasoned that political union could hardly make their situation worse. They guessed wrong. Fifty years later, half the country died of starvation. I’ve read elsewhere that the potato famine was not just a natural disaster, that Irish farmers were required to continue shipping their agricultural products to England even as they starved.
It’s interesting to consider that when Thomas Flanagan wrote The Year of the French in 1979, Ireland was still in the midst of its troubles, with the newspapers full of bombings and hunger strikes. Today the situation has improved markedly, and it isn’t hard to believe that the troubles might actually be over at last. Which is a nice thing to think upon after appreciating the utterly hopeless situation of most of the people in this book.
