THE FRENCH CONNECTION

The commemoration of the 1798 Rebellion has revived memories of the historical links which existed between Ireland and France during the closing decades of the 18th century. The disastrous expeditions to Bantry and Mayo followed by the savage suppression of the Rebellion extinguished all hope of French support and greatly diminished French influence in Ireland.

We may well ask why Ireland, in the person of Wolfe Tone had turned to France initially. It was the age when French influence permeated every aspect of intellectual life, philosophy, politics and literature. The writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau were to be found on the book-shelves of the educated; the French language was commonly used in the embassies and drawing-rooms of Europe. The ideas of French writers were discussed and their political views, favouring alternative government to the existing autocratic regimes, gained credence. The emergence of the U.S.A. as a democracy demonstrated to all Europe that this was a viable political system. The outbreak of revolution in France itself gave hope to the oppressed millions of the Old World. Liberty was in the air and Ireland wanted its share of it too. The Volunteer movement, started in 1782, owed its existence to some degree to French liberal thought which filtered in through Trinity College through the Dublin book shops, haunts of the wealthier bourgeoisie who could now afford the time and the money to respond to the intellectual ferment which surrounded them.

It would be interesting to know the French works carried by these establishments. Some must have been of a political nature such as Rousseau's Contrat Social or Montesquie's "Spirit of the Law" all of which sought a form of government which would benefit humanity? It's more than likely that Voltaire's Lettres Philosophiques was purchased by Dublin booksellers since the Lettres were conceived during an exile in England where he came under the influence of Locke and Swift and was impressed by the English government. He would have appealed to the Irish aristocracy but hardly to the system of the United Irishmen at the close of the century.

Surely some French literature filtered through to satisfy the taste of those fortunate enough to know French or whose imaginations were stirred by their experience of the Grand Tour. Perhaps they read La Nouvelle Héloïse of Rousseau - a new departure for the novel where the sensibilities of man and woman are explored against a backdrop of nature which at last

comes into its own. Here are the first stirrings of romanticism

melancholy, unrequited love; nature reflecting the emotions. Even Diderot, one of the pillars of the Temple of Reason, yielded to the demands of sensibility in his Lettres à Sophie Volland. Bernardin de St. Pierre's Paul et Virginie may well have found a place in Dublin book-shops because of its exotic landscape and its doomed heroine, a hostage to le mal du siècle. A century raised on reason was at last re-acting against its dominance and seeking solace in the emotions. Andre Chénier, the great poet of the XVIIIth century deserted the formal sentiments of the men of reason and gave way to melancholy thoughts. At first, enthused by the revolutionaries' thirst for liberty, he soon became disillusioned with the Jacobins and their excesses. In Les Iambes, written in prison as he awaited the guillotine he berates the "hideous scoundrels" who stole from antiquity words such as 'Justice' and 'Liberty!' His earlier poems- La Jeune Tarentine and Les Elégies reveal "the romantic amongst the classic" as Victor Hugo described him. The publication of his Complete Works in 1819 was a powerful influence on the next generation of Romantic Poets.

Chénier was not alone amongst the writers in opposing the Revolution. Chateaubriand, who came of a noble family from Brittany, was at first a loyal advocate of the Encyclopedistes in their fight against intolerance. He soon turned against the carnage which Robespierre and his followers ceaselessly carried out until they themselves were devoured by Madame la Guillotine. In his Essay on Revolutions, written during his English Exile (1793-1797) Chateaubriand is obviously influenced by Rousseau and yet fascinated by the ideas of those who set the Revolution in motion. Drawn to the idea of 'the noble savage' he had travelled to the United States in 1791 hoping to write an epic on the natives living in an uncorrupted state of nature. He even had an ambition to discover the North West Passage. Disillusioned on both counts, yet not to the extent that his experience of the New World was without influence in his creative life. He contended that he wrote Atala in the wilderness, yet it was not published until 1801 and then only to test the waters before the whole work of which it formed part, namely The Genius of Christianity, was launched the following year. It contained another episode called René which was similar to Atala in many respects, and in 1805 the two titles were detached from the main work and published together in one volume. Other books followed in fairly quick succession- "The Martyrs, Journey from Paris to Jerusalem" and finally "Les Mémoirs" after his death, but for his contemporaries Chateaubriand was above all else the author of Atala and René. Atala was received with rapture by the young. "The old century

rejected it, the new welcomed it" he was later to comment in "Les Mémoirs"; its imaginative and emotional qualities, its depiction of the 'noble savage' whom he infused with the ardour and passion of his own temperament and nature itself with his own sensibility. Eleven editions appeared between 1801 and 1805, translations were published as far afield as Hungary and Russia. It would be surprising if Irish booksellers had not heard of its success and that Irish readers who had enjoyed Atala were avid to purchase René which had outstripped the popularity of the former in France. Its particular attraction was that Chateaubriand wrote it at the close of a love affair and poured into the character of René his own frustration and loneliness. But it really owed its success to Chateaubriand's power to convey that vague longing for an indefinable ideal to which the French early in the nineteenth century gave the name of the 'mal du siècle'. René's influence was to reverberate across the century through many of the heroes and heroines of literature in the Romantic period. Lamartine, de Musset and Hugo were all indebted to a book written at the end of the Revolutionary period.

We can only speculate about the influence of French Literature in Ireland. At a recent Dublin Symposium on Sir John T. Gilbert, Librarian of the Royal Irish Academy from 1855, author of A History of Dublin and prime mover in the establishment of the Public Record Office, I learned that his own remarkable library, now in the care of Dublin Public Libraries, contains those of Daniel O'Connell, Rowan Hamilton and Lord Charlemont. There are French books in the collection but nothing of the humanities. We know that O'Connell was educated in France and fled from the excesses of the Revolution. In a Catholic college at that time he would not have been encouraged to read French Novels and was much too well focused to worry about 'le mal du siècle', Rowan Hamilton's chief interest was mathematics and Charlemont, one of the founders of the Volunteers was rather an unlikely purchaser of French Literature. It would be an excellent excuse to visit the libraries of some country mansions to take this idea out of the realm of speculation. I look forward to the publication next year of a collection of essays entitled: The French Enlightenment and Ireland in the 18th Century to evaluate the extent to which French literature was known in Ireland at the close of the Age of Reason.