Between Scylla and Charybdis? Irish Republicans Between the British Empire and the Early French Republic, 1792–1794

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Between Scylla and Charybdis? Irish Republicans between the British Empire and the Early French Republic, 1792–1794

MATHIEU FERRADOU

abstract In 1792 foreigners flocked to France to participate in the new republican regime, redefining the nation as the conduct of popular sovereignty. A number of American, British, and Irish foreigners formed a club in Paris, the Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man (Société des Amis des Droits de l’Homme), among whom Irish republicans were a key com- ponent. Eager to “revolutionize” Britain and Ireland, they contributed to the rise in tensions and, ultimately, to the outbreak of war between France and Britain. The author argues that these Irish, because of their colonial experience, were a crucial factor in the redefinition of and opposition between British imperial and French republican models of nation and citizenship. Their defense of a cosmopolitan citizenship ideal was violently rejected in Britain and was severely tested by the “Terror” in France.

keywords French Revolution, Ireland, citizenship, nation, empire

Introduction: The Republican Cause n January 23, 1793, on the packet boat returning from the continent where he O had been studying, the young Daniel O’Connell, future “Liberator” of Ire- land, met the Irish brothers Henry and John Sheares. John boasted that he and his brother had paid off two National Guardsmen whose uniforms they had worn to attend the execution of Louis XVI. Images of people dancing the carmagnole around the scaffold and dipping their handkerchiefs in the royal blood inevitably come to mind. While the veracity of this anecdote is dubious at best, there is an element of truth to it: foreigners did participate in the trial and execution of the king.1

1. For similar anecdotes placing two other members of the Société des Amis des Droits de l’Homme (SADH), John Oswald and Dr. Maxwell, at the scene, see Erdman, Commerce des Lumières, 245–46. The Brit- ish spy Captain George Monro, however, informed his government that the Sheareses had left Paris before the execution of the king on the 16th and that they were to go back to England or Ireland through Ostend: Monroto[Grenville],Jan.21,1793,NationalArchives,Kew(henceforthNA),ForeignOfﬁce27/41,fol.113.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 When asked why they desired to witness this “horrible spectacle,” John Sheares answered, “Love of the cause, sir.”2 The “cause” was the French Republic, which Henry and John Sheares, along with many other Irish, English, Scottish, and American patriots, had decided to support by founding the Société des Amis des Droits de l’Homme (SADH) following a dinner held at White’s Hotel on November 19, 1792. This political club was also a way for them to participate in the making of the new French republican regime.3 With the founding in 1792 of the first true democratic republic, the French revolutionaries were inventing the modern concept of the nation as the sovereign people made up of “citizens,” that is, those who shared in the decision-making process. As all adult men were for the first time included in the body politic with the first “universal” (actually, male) suf- frage election, the French Revolution defined the “nation” first and foremost as a political concept. Indeed, in the 1791 and 1793 constitutions, residency in France, involvement in French society, and a declaration of allegiance to the new political principles opened the way to becoming a French citizen and thus to French nationality. In other words, since it was defined politically, citizenship granted nationality, not the other way around; one could be a foreigner and a French citizen.4 Yet, precisely because popular sovereignty was at stake, this universalist conception of citizenship, which belies the idea of nation-states as exclusive and homogeneous, forced the nation to be delimited; boundaries had to be set up for citizenship, whether age, gender, race, or origins. Foreign patriots played a key role in the process of determining these boundaries. Informed by their ambiguous political identity and by their alienated status within the British Empire, Irish republicans, alongside their allies within the SADH, expressed their hopes for an egalitarian and inclusive French republican citizenship and nation, a plea heeded by the French authorities, under both the Girondin and Montagnard conventions. However, nation and empire were entangled as republican France in 1792 tried to build a sovereign nation while inheriting a colonial empire from the Old Regime. Recent “global” and “imperial turns” in history and political theory have challenged the dichotomy between state building at the national and imperial scale, as well as the narrative that treated empires as belonging to a

On the execution of Louis XVI as a way for France to truly become a republic, see Biard et al., “Apprivoiser la république.” 2. O’Connell, Life and Speeches, 9–10. 3. Ferradou, “Histoire d’un ‘festin patriotique.’” 4. Baczko, “‘Ici on s’honore du titre de citoyen,’” 9; Bart, “Citoyenneté et naturalité,” 34–37. For a similar development in the United States, see Perl-Rosenthal, Citizen Sailors.

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 premodern world and nation-states as the crucible of modernity, the latter replacing the former during the Age of Revolutions (ca. 1760–1820) and more specifically during the French Revolution.5 As Krishan Kumar asserts, “Many nation-states are empires in miniature,” while “some empires are nation-states writ-large.”6 These political projects have been represented in the literature as two models available to elites for state building. Great Britain is an example of the former: the English core ethnie built an inner empire that became Great Brit- ain.7 Scholars have long identified examples of the second in “imperialist republics” from Rome to Machiavellian Florence, the United States, and most certainly republican France, which in its dealings with its colonies remained an “imperial republic.”8 The Irish of the SADH embraced another republican tradition, however, one that judged imperialism as abhorrent and incompatible with republican vir- tue. These “anti-imperial republicans” were heirs to classical republicanism when they denounced territorial or commercial expansions as leading to cor- ruption that would transform an external empire into an internal empire, synonymous with tyranny and absolute monarchy.9 In the same vein, these republicans drew from a radical antislavery tradition whose origins lay in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century.10 This tradition played an important role in the reframing of the relationship between the republican metropole and the French colonies, particularly Saint-Domingue, as Manuel Covo explores in his contribution to this forum, highlighting how federalism could be used to protect territorial inequality and thereby to maintain slavery. The Irish of the SADH, who themselves originated from a country that had been colonized, acted as a link between this tradition and France.11 In participating in the debates about French citizenship in the early republic (1792–94), and in navigat- ing the dangerous vagaries of the “Terror,” Irish republicans in Paris advocated a truly republican model of nation building in opposition to that of the British Empire. This article, by focusing on these Irishmen’s involvement in the French Republic, contributes to the discussion of the influence of the “global,” or the

5. Malešević, “Empires and Nation-States.” 6. Kumar, “Nation-States as Empires, Empires as Nation-States,” 120, 124, 128. 7. Kumar, “Empire and English Nationalism.” For the evolution of the meaning of empire during the eighteenth century, from the sovereignty of the Crown to the hierarchical collection of territories, see Marshall, introduction, 4–8. 8. Gainot, L’empire colonial franc¸ais, 135–54. 9. Kennedy, “Empires and Republics in the History of Political Thought.” 10. Donoghue, Fire under the Ashes. 11. On the debate about Ireland as an example of the ancien régime or a colony, see McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1–22.

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 outside, on the French Revolution.12 I argue that French and British political (re)definitions of citizenship were fueled by a dialectical process between republican France and the British imperial monarchy. French citizenship—and through it the French nation—were defined as a countermodel to the British Empire. Concurrently, on the other side of the Channel French developments informed government policy for reconfiguring the British Isles, specifically the relationship between Britain and Ireland, which redefined the meaning of citizenship there. Thus nationality, as a political concept, was redefined transna- tionally during the 1790s, and Ireland and Irishmen played a central role in these parallel developments in France and Britain. This focus on a transnational conception of French citizenship and nation questions the prevalent narrative of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1792–93 as a downward spiral from peaceful cosmopolitanism to warmongering chauvinism and to a xenophobic targeting of foreigners.13 In so doing, this article builds on Michael Rapport’s demonstra- tion that the persecution of foreigners during the Terror reflected political dis- putes rather than xenophobia. It also incorporates Anne Simonin’s argument that the exclusion of foreigners from the national community and the harsh measures against suspects must be analyzed in the particular historical context: France was under siege, shielding itself from internal and external enemies and attempting to prevent military power from taking over civil power.14

“Nomad Citizenship” in the French Republic, August 1792–February 1793 From the establishment of the French Republic to the declaration of war against England, many Britons and Irishmen came to France to support the new regime, and they played a role in deﬁning the emerging republic.15

A “Congress of the Entire World” in Paris

On August 24, 1792, as elections for the future National Convention were under- way, deputy Marie-Joseph Chénier declared that he wanted to gather a “congress of the entire world” comprising all the “apostles of liberty.”16 As a token of

12. Bell, “Questioning the Global Turn.” 13. On the challenges to the use of the word Terror, see Martin, La Terreur; and Jourdan, “Les discours de la Terreur.” 14. Rapport, Nationality and Citizenship,esp.227,327–33;Simonin,Le déshonneur dans la Répub- lique, 263–69. This was also the thesis defended by Mathiez, La Révolution et les étrangers,1–4,181,189–90. Sophie Wahnich reached similar conclusions in her elaborate analysis of revolutionary discourse regarding foreigners (L’impossible citoyen). 15. On “nomad citizenship,” see n. 21. 16. Session of Aug. 24, 1792, Archives parlementaires (henceforth AP), 48:688–89 (all translations are mine).

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 “universal brotherhood,” on August 26, 1792, the Legislative Assembly granted French citizenship to eighteen prominent British, American, Italian, German, Swiss, and Dutch writers or politicians. The assembly asserted that “men, who, through their writings and courage, have served the cause of liberty and furthered the emancipation of peoples, cannot be regarded as foreigners by a nation made free by its enlightenment and courage.”17 This decree tied together the different sources on which the French Repub- lic was founded: enlightened cosmopolitanism as expressed in the public sphere, the claim that France defended universal human rights, and the legitimacy of the defensive war it was ﬁghting against Prussian and Austrian invaders. As Suzanne Desan wrote, “These three forces accentuated the centrality of foreigners and foreign issues to the Revolution. Republicanism—born at war and based on universalism—could not be simply a national product.”18 Among these illustrious defenders of liberty was Thomas Paine. The founding father of the American Republic—the author of The Rights of Man (1791–92) who was prosecuted in England for seditious writings—came to France in September 1792, where he was elected to the National Convention. While he was considered a threat to the political stability of the English monarchy, this “apostle of liberty” was deemed worthy not only of French citizenship but also of representing the people in the newly formed National Convention as it drafted France’s new constitution.19 Paine was the center of the circle of foreign patriots who had come from the English-speaking world to bask in Paris’s atmosphere of cosmopolitan hope. There they formed a political society, the SADH.20 Prominent members included English radical entrepreneur John Hurford Stone; Scottish ex-soldier, publicist, and vegetarian John Oswald; and renowned “feminist” authors Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft. Many were associated with the Society for Constitutional Information and with the abolitionist movement. In France they involved themselves in the debates on the future constitution, prompted by deputy Bertrand Barère, who in the name of the National Conven- tion on October 19, 1792, had invited “all the friends of liberty and equality to present [to the Convention], in any language, . . . the means they thought

17. Decree of Aug. 26, 1792, AP, 49:10: the recipients were Jeremy Bentham, Joachim Heinrich Campe, Thomas Clarkson, Anacharsis Cloots, Giuseppe Gorani, John Hamilton, Friedrich Gottlieb Klop- stock, Thadeus Kosciusko, James Mackintosh, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Cornelius de Pauw, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Joseph Priestley, Friedrich von Schiller, George Washington, William Wilberforce, and David Williams. On September 25, 1792, the list was extended to Thomas Christie, Thomas Cooper, John Oswald, John Horne Tooke, and Joseph Warner. 18. Desan, “Foreigners, Cosmopolitanism,” 100. 19. Jourdan, “La République franc¸aise.” 20. Moniteur, Jan. 7, 1793.

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 proper to confer a good constitution on the French Republic.” SADH member, American poet, and diplomat Joel Barlow responded on November 7, 1792, pleading for a “nomad citizenship” that would make the French into “citizens of the world.”21 On Wednesday, November 18, 1792, the SADH organized a dinner at White’s Hotel. Presided over by John Hurford Stone, this “patriotic feast” gath- ered about one hundred guests from the entire Atlantic revolutionary galaxy to celebrate the recent French military victories at Valmy and Jemmapes.22 In a series of rousing toasts, they linked religious toleration, radical democracy (including women), and the abolition of slavery.23 They also resolved to convey an address of congratulations to the National Convention. On the next Saturday (November 24), a committee of fifteen headed by Irish journalist D. E. MacDon- nel penned the address, which was signed by fifty of the “English, Scottish, and Irish resident and domiciled in Paris.”24 On November 28, a delegation of twenty, headed by SADH secretary and Irish lawyer Robert Bray O’Reilly, presented it on the floor of the National Convention. This address reaffirmed the signatories’ attachment to liberty and equality as exemplified by France and urged the “victorious troops of liberty”“to lay down their arms only when there are no more tyrants or slaves.”25 Onthesameoccasion,JohnFrost,aleading radical and a member of the London Corresponding Society, and Joel Barlow presented a second address from the Society for Constitutional Information. Both addresses were enthusiastically applauded, receiving the “honours of the session.” The president of the National Convention, Henri Grégoire, responded by addressing the deputation of the SADH as “co-citizens of the world” engaged in a common struggle of liberty against tyranny.26 Deputy Léo- nard Bourdon invited the honored guests to sit while the deputies resumed the trial of the former king Louis XVI. Honoring foreigners, especially British and Irish, by allowing them to participate—even if only as spectators—in the trial of the king indicated the Convention’s belief that royalist and republican models were incompatible. The Convention’s British and Irish republican guests had rejected the English constitutional tradition of a commonwealth composed of

21. Wahnich, L’impossible citoyen, 72–73; session of Oct. 19, 1792, AP, 52:577; session of Nov. 7, 1792, AP, 53:292. Barlow in his Lettre à la Convention nationale . . . (AP, 53:286–97) lamented that in the 1791 Consti- tution a French national would lose his nationality if he became naturalized in another country. 22. John Oswald to the editor, Patriote françois, Nov. 26, 1792. 23. E.g., Patriote françois, Nov. 21, 1792; Morning Chronicle, Nov. 26, 1792; Northern Star, Dec. 6, 1792. 24. “Adresse de la société des Anglois, des Ecossois et des Irlandois Résidans et domiciliés à Paris,” Archives Nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine (henceforth AN), C 241; Captain George Monro’s report, Dec. 6, 1792, NA, Treasury Solicitor’s Papers 11/959, pt. 2. 25. AN, C 241. 26. Session of Nov. 28, 1792, AP, 53:635–38.

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Irish Patriots and French Citizens Among these cosmopolitan republicans were several Irishmen. Besides O’Reilly and MacDonnel, about ﬁfteen Irish signed the SADH address to the National Convention (about one-third of all the signatories). Among them were Edward FitzGerald and the brothers Henry and John Sheares, who were both lawyers. All three were future planners of the Irish Rising of 1798 and died during the event. Other less well-known members were either soldiers in the service of France or students from the Irish College in Paris.28 FitzGerald had previously experienced a political epiphany when he fought in the American War of Independence in the ranks of the British army. From this imperialist and colonial experience, he went back to Ireland and England as a committed abolitionist and a Paineite democrat.29 Following Paine to Paris in September, FitzGerald basked in the atmosphere of fraternity and embraced the egalitarianism of republican citizenship. He ostentatiously pre- ferred walking, eschewed the use of carriages, and sported a republican cropped haircut, à la romaine, playing the part of the French citizen. Prior to the dinner at White’s, he had even publicly renounced his aristocratic title, calling himself “citoyen Edouard Fitzgerald,” an attitude that was celebrated by a toast. Henry and John Sheares came from Dublin to France to visit Henry’s chil- dren, who were in the custody of a friend after their mother’s death.30 In the aftermath of the address, both of them assumed French civic responsibilities, as Henry testiﬁed: “We have just been honoured with the title of French citizens this morning. We came off of guard which we mounted at the Convention. On Sunday, we mount guard on the King & Queen, & are to escort him for tryal to the Convention.”31 This letter reveals two crucial developments in the early French Republic. First, other foreigners in addition to those on August 26 and September 25 were granted French citizenship. Another case is Joel Barlow, who received French citizenship in February 1793 following the prompting of Paine and Grégoire.32 Second, before being recognized as citizens, these Irish patriots

27. Session of Sept. 21, 1792, AP,52:74;Glénard, “La République des origines”;Edelstein,Terror of Natural Right. 28. Ferradou, “Histoire d’un ‘festin patriotique.’” 29. Whelan, “Lord Edward Fitzgerald”; Tillyard, Citizen Lord; Moore, Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. 30. Woods, “Henry Sheares.” 31. Henry Sheares to Citizen Henry Fleming, Dec. 1, 1792, Trinity College Dublin, MS 4833. 32. Erdman, Commerce des Lumières, 187–89.

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 participated in the trial of the former king, a pivotal moment in defining the character of the new republic. Republicanism not only was therefore a national project but also embodied a universal aspiration, attracting foreign patriots and making them French citizens. Another telling instance of this Irish-French citizenship is the episode of the “Republic in the College.” Irish Catholics went to the continent for their education because the “penal laws” banned Catholic educational institutions in Ireland. Alienated from and colonized within the British Empire, several of these Catholic students in Paris unsurprisingly embraced rather than con- demned the French Revolution, contrary to the position of their hierarchy. The politicization of the Irish students, led by William Duckett, who had arrived in Paris in 1786, and Nicholas Madgett, a former priest and professor at the univer- sities of Bordeaux and Toulouse, resulted in their attempt to reconcile Catholi- cism and republicanism. They denounced their superiors as refractory and counterrevolutionary priests, ousting and replacing them after having organized an election on October 29, 1792, with the support of the Parisian Commune. They formed for a brief but highly significant moment a “Republic in the Col- lege.” Though it only lasted for three weeks, this episode paved the way for their continued involvement in the French politics.33 The SADH members promoted a global or nomad citizenship that they felt could be implemented in the French Republic. They wanted to evade the increasingly English identity of eighteenth-century Britain, from which they were excluded: Paine because of his outlawry; Henry Redhead Yorke—another associate of the SADH and close friend of the Sheareses—because of his mixed origins as the illegitimate son of a wealthy plantation manager in Antigua and Barbuda and a slave; Barlow because of being American; and Williams because of her gender. As the British Empire reconfigured itself, especially after the Seven Years’ War and the American wars, English identity increasingly formed the core of the British Isles.34 This consolidation of Englishness produced a growing sense of marginalization for these alienated radicals who embraced cosmopolitan republicanism to assert their own sense of identity and, as citizens of the world, to create a political space, or a “periphery public sphere,” that com- bined a global identity with a local form of belonging.35 These radicals’ embrace of the French Republic meant that they celebrated its egalitarianism, pitting it against the monarchic British Empire and its hierar- chies. These republicans were also adamant in their condemnation of slavery;

33. Ferradou, “La République au collège.” 34. Colley, Britons, 101–93. 35. Goodrich, “Radical ‘Citizens of the World,’” 624, 634–35.

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 toasts at their dinner linked the French Republic, with its egalitarian promise, to theabolitionistmovement.Indeed,Yorke,whenhefirstcametoEngland,had tried to fit into metropolitan society and assert his own whiteness and English- ness by writing a proslavery pamphlet—which he recanted when he came to France, seeing the possibility to integrate, but for which he was denounced by others within his circle.36 The Irish brought their own sense of alienation and their own aspirations for a nomad citizenship, highlighting the particular Irish colonial experience as they navigated between the British Empire and republican France. Irish students tried to find a way to be included as Catholics within the French Republic. Fitz- Gerald, the Sheareses, MacDonnel, and O’Reilly, despite being members of the Irish Protestant “Ascendancy,” were all “colonial outsiders.”37 They had all basked in the atmosphere of classical republicanism and Protestant “colonial nationalism” that prevailed in eighteenth-century Ireland, which posited an equal status for Ireland as a sister kingdom to England that would benefit equally from the British Empire’s commercial advantages, a claim that English politicians dismissed. They also were imbued with the glory and pride of the Irish Volunteers, the “citizen-soldiers” who had emerged during the American War of Independence, whose political role was pivotal in securing legislative independence for Ireland in 1782. Colonial nationalism could have fit within a British imperialist, Anglo-Irish constitutionalist, and Protestant framework.38 However, the mingling of these members of the Irish Protestant elite with Brit- ish radicals and with Irish Catholics in revolutionary France ensured that no such alliance emerged, because this French experience made questions of popular sovereignty and of parliamentary reform central to Irish politics. In Ireland, national sovereignty was explosive as it was linked to the Cath- olic question, to the prospect of Irish independence, and ultimately, to the question of slavery. Many Irish patriots, drawing on a complex mix of traditions— republican, antinomian, classical, humanist, and Enlightened—associated the political and civil “slavery” as experienced under a tyranny with racial slavery. Their identification with the first led them to fight against the second.39 One notable example is Edward FitzGerald, whose friendship with his long- time companion, Tony Small, a former slave who saved his life at the Battle of Eutaw Springs in 1781 and whom he freed, constitutes “the best documented Irish example of imaginative sympathy between a white and a black man. For

36. Goodrich, “Radical ‘Citizens of the World,’” 622. 37. Dunne, Theobald Wolfe Tone; Bartlett, “‘A People Made Rather for Copies than Originals.’” 38. Small, Political Thought in Ireland. 39. Di Lorenzo and Donoghue, “Abolition and Republicanism.”

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 FitzGerald, Small represented the talisman of universal brotherhood, of the possibility of human companionship across the barriers of colour, class and nationality.”40 Years later, in June 1789, FitzGerald had been adopted by the Seneca Tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy under the patronage of chiefs Joseph Brant and David Hill.41 Imbued with all these hopes for an inclusive republican citizenship, the SADH members, especially the Irish, tried to inﬂuence the debate on the nature of the French Republic, infusing it with their egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and anti-imperial ideals.

From Cosmopolitanism to Internationalism? The advent of war on February 1, 1793, against the British Empire tested the lim- its of the ideal of French “nomad citizenship” as an atmosphere of suspicion against the British soon pervaded France.

British and Irishmen Faced with the Terror Between the spring of 1793 and the spring of 1794, the National Convention enacted a series of measures targeting foreigners in France. On March 21, 1793, the Committees of Surveillance were legally established to monitor foreigners. As the military and political situation worsened during the summer, the French government identiﬁed the troubles within the country and the setbacks abroad with the so-called foreign conspiracy (complot de l’étranger), which the notori- ous (and probably forged) “Letter from Lille” allegedly documented. Between August and October, the Convention voted on a series of decrees against foreigners, ordering the mass arrest of “all the subjects of the king of Great Britain who are now in the territory of the Republic.” In his Rapport sur la Loi contre les Anglais of 25 Vendémiaire Year II (October 16, 1793), Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just justiﬁed this measure in reference to the Irish general in French service, Charles Edward Jennings Saul de Kilmaine, who had recently been forced to retreat in the face of a larger enemy army. Tellingly, though, Saint-Just described Kilmaine as “English”: “There are factions within the Republic. . . . Who can testify for an Englishman, after Kilmaine, on whom we showered so many favors? Who can testify for an Englishman when so many French are themselves conspir- ing against their homeland?”42

40. Whelan, “Lord Edward Fitzgerald.” 41. Moore, Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, 1:147–48; Gibbon, “Return of the Native.” 42. Archives Diplomatiques, La Courneuve (henceforth AD), Correspondance politique Angleterre (henceforth CPA) 588, fols. 47–52 (47v, 51v).

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 On December 25, 1793, the National Convention passed a decree excluding foreigners “from the right to represent the French people,” targeting specifically Anacharsis Cloots and Thomas Paine, who were arrested the following day.43 On January 11, 1794, Robespierre rallied the Jacobins against the English: since they did not rise up against their government, they were complicit in its war on France, especially considering their political system allowed them to express their opinions.44 Barère used the same logic to justify the infamous decree of 7 Prairial Year II (May 26, 1794), which forbade French soldiers “to take any English or Hanoverian prisoner” because, by making war on a nation fighting for its natural rights, Englishmen were guilty of the crime of lèse-humanité (crime against humanity), rendering them strangers to all mankind.45 However, the idea that without the cosmopolitan Girondins the French Revolution took up xenophobic nationalism must be challenged: the Monta- gnard Constitution, adopted on June 24, 1793, still defined citizenship as indepen- dent from national identity. Again, one was French because one was a citizen, not the other way around.46 Even after the summer of 1793, political loyalty still mattered more than nationality, though political orthodoxy restricted such loyalty, and dissent was not tolerated, which explains Paine’s arrest: “It was not his nationality which mattered but the fact that his conformity to the current political orthodoxy was suspect” because of his connections with the Girondins and his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI.47 Finally, the accusation of lèse- humanité against the English should be associated with the vote by the National Convention on 16 Pluviôse an II (February 4, 1794), which abolished slavery and granted French citizenship to the inhabitants of Saint-Domingue: slavery was also a crime of lèse-humanité.48 The ongoing revolutionary commitment to a political qualification for citizenship did not preclude the possibility that old prejudices might combine with nascent xenophobia.49 One deputy and representative on mission justified his opposition to Kilmaine’s appointment as general in chief of the French armies in the spring of 1793: “Republicanism does not easily penetrate Irish minds.”50

43. Wahnich, L’impossible citoyen, 127; AN F7 4774 61, fols. 27–38: Paine’s prison ﬁle. 44. Aulard, La Société des Jacobins, 5:633–34. 45. Wahnich and Bélissa, “Les crimes des Anglais”; Wahnich, L’impossible citoyen, 243–312. 46. Art. 4: “Any man born and domiciled in France, aged 21 accomplished;—every foreigner aged 21 accomplished, who, domiciled in France for one year—Lives there from his work—Or acquire a property— Or marries a French woman—Or adopts a child—Or nourishes an old man;—Any foreigner at last, who shall be judged by the Legislative body as deserving of mankind—Is admitted to the exercise of the Rights of French citizen.” 47. Rapport, Nationality and Citizenship, 144–50, 190–91. 48. Serna, “Que s’est-il dit à la Convention les 15, 16 et 17 pluviôse an II?” 49. Noël, “Images de l’Irlande”; Le Biez, “Irish News in the French Press.” 50. Quoted by Hayes, Ireland and Irishmen in the French Revolution, 139.

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 The execution on April 13, 1794, of Irish-born General Arthur Dillon, hero of the American War of Independence and the Battle of Valmy, along with nine- teen others, including common criminals and Lucille Desmoulins, the wife of leading Montagnard journalist Camille Desmoulins, has certainly been inter- preted as a similar blend of new and old hostility to foreigners.51 However, Dillon’s example helps us probe the meanings of “foreignness” under the Terror. Dillon was guilty of associating with opponents of the National Convention: with the Feuillants because he shared their attachment to royalty and slavery, and with the Dantonists because of his friendship with Des- moulins.52 Consequently, he was a factieux (a member of a faction) whose exis- tence threatened the unity of the French Republic and who was therefore also a stranger to the revolution. As a general, he was an especially dire threat, as France was under siege and the National Convention was wary of a military coup.53 In other words, as Saint-Just articulated, all those who plotted and waged war against the French Republic—émigrés, Vendée “brigands,” criminals, and spies—were “foreigners” (étrangers) regardless of their nationality.54 But a linguistic ambiguity persisted: l’étranger could designate either a foreigner, who was not a Frenchman but could be a friend of the French Revolution, or a stranger, in the political sense, an enemy of the French Republic. French does not distinguish between the two types of étranger. Were the republic’s enemies factieux because they were foreign, or was it the other way around? Were all foreigners suspi- cious, and should they be persecuted as factieux?

“This Liberty for Which I Have . . . Made Every Sacriﬁce” The fate of the radical British and Irish exiles associated with the SADH provides some insight into this conundrum. To lift the cloud of suspicion over them because of their association with the Girondins, they reafﬁrmed their support for the French Republic in a second address to the National Convention on Sep- tember 23, 1793.55 Thanks to this declaration and their networks of support, they survived the waves of arrest, and all obtained their freedom.56 Heretheroleof Nicholas Madgett is relevant. From his position as head of the translation bureau (Bureau des Traductions), established in 1792–93 within the Ministry of the Navy before it was moved to the Committee of Public Safety, Madgett

51. Hayes, Ireland and Irishmen in the French Revolution, 171. 52. Hayes, Ireland and Irishmen in the French Revolution, 119; Alger, Englishmen in the French Revolu- tion, 171–76. 53. Mazeau, “La ‘Terreur’”; Simonin, Le déshonneur dans la République, 263–69. 54. Wahnich, L’impossible citoyen, 130; Edelstein, Terror of Natural Right, 164. 55. Session of Sept. 23, 1793, AP, 75:49–50; AD, CPA 588, fols. 3–4. 56. Rogers, “Vectors of Revolution,” 197–213.

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 shielded many SADH members from persecution and obtained the liberation of Reverend William Jackson, a fellow Irishman and signatory of the address of November 1792 who had been arrested on October 13, 1793.57 Madgett mobilized on Jackson’s behalf an impressive range of contacts within the Ministry of the Navy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as the Committee of General Security and the Committee of Public Safety. He argued that Reverend Jackson conducted “useful work for the Republic.” Indeed, the pastor was a member of the English Revolutionary Committee set up by Madgett to detect British spies in France and would later become a French agent sent to England and Ireland to assess public support for a French invasion.58 A comparison between the fate of members of the SADH and that of other Irishmen who actively opposed or merely did not join the SADH offers further support for the claim that Irishmen—and British subjects—in France were persecuted because of their political allegiance rather than their national origins. On September 8, 1793, twelve Irish students signed a petition and sent it to the National Convention asking for protection from the decree of September 6 against British subjects.59 They expressed their concern that ill-intentioned (malveillants) fellow countrymen had denounced them. The students seeking protection had opposed the “Republic in the College” and had been denounced by the republican students’ ally, deputy Léonard Bourdon, at the National Con- vention on September 6.60 Many of these students were later arrested and would have been deported to Ireland had war not intervened. They were released in April 1795 and treated as refugees.61 Madgett also helped another fellow Irishman, Thomas MacDermott, whosecaserevealsthatthetwomensharedanunderstandingofapatriotism that crossed national boundaries. Born in 1752 near Roscommon, MacDermott was a quintessential example of the Catholic “underground gentry” and had family connections with the Society of United Irishmen and the secret society of the Defenders.62 In 1782–84 he became a colonel of a regiment of Volunteers, one of the few Catholics invited to join their ranks. Coming to France in 1790,

57. Kleinman, “Translation, the French Language,” 75–84. 58. AN F7 4748 1, doss. 1; Madgett to Lebrun, Mar. 13 and 22, 1793, AD, CPA 587, fols. 20–21, 45–46; [Madgett], “Projet d’organisation du comité révolutionnaire Anglais,” Service Historique de la Défense, Vin- cennes, Marine BB3 36, fols. 115–17; Elliott, Partners in Revolution, 63–67. 59. Session of Sept. 8, 1793, AP, 73:526. The original text of the petition is in AN C 271, fol. 29. 60. Gallois, Réimpression de l’“Ancien Moniteur,” 17:617–68; Sydenham, Léonard Bourdon, 200–201. Wahnich analyzed these two addresses but, failing to identify their authors, did not perceive that their differ- ence in tone stemmed from their authors’ rivalry (L’impossible citoyen, 47–53). 61. Swords, Green Cockade, 96–106. 62. Whelan, “Underground Gentry?”; McDowell, Proceedings of the Dublin Society of United Irish- men, 7; Tone, Writings, 1:153–54.

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 he attended the dinner at White’s Hotel, signing the SADH address to the National Convention. After the passage of the law against foreigners of Septem- ber 6, 1793, he was arrested on December 17. From prison he wrote to Madgett, in very bad, phonetic French, that he almost certainly dictated to a guard.63 He composed another statement in English at approximately the same time.64 In these two documents, MacDermott described himself as a “Citoyen,” reaching out to Madgett as a fellow “citizen” butalsoanIrishcompatriotwhowouldbe “able to judge if I write truthfully or not.” He then listed his “patriot” credentials: his deeds for the establishment of liberty in Ireland, his election by his “co- citizens” as colonel of the Volunteers, and his attendance at the conventions of 1782, 1783, and 1784, whose purpose was to draft a new constitution based “upon the rights of man.” He ended his letter to Madgett with an interesting plea: “Despite being born in a foreign country I hope that the above facts find enough [grace?] to procure me this liberty for which I have, during all my life, made every sacrifice.”65 Adopting republican language as a survival strategy, MacDermott asserted that his struggle against English colonial domination of Ireland proved his republicanism, entitling him to liberty—to the rights of man and citizen— in republican France. MacDermott was successful in convincing the French authorities of his republican sympathies. Revealingly, on May 5, 1794, the revolutionary committee of the section of the Temple, where MacDermott was residing before his arrest, praised his exemplary conduct. His personal papers were seized and examined on June 15, 1794, and three French citizens—all of Irish origin— testified on his behalf on September 3, 1794. In the meantime, MacDermott’s chances improved, a change in fortune that we can perceive in the alteration of a word on an official document: on August 8, 1794, the Committee of Surveillance of the section of the Temple restated that MacDermott was imprisoned because of the law against foreigners and then added that “he is English Irish.” The committee again mentioned his model behavior, and on October 13, 1794, he was freed.66 The crossing out of a single, crucial word indicates that, faced with general suspicion and persecution, Thomas MacDermott, thanks to his network of local Irish contacts, convinced the French authorities that he was a patriot with

63. [MacDermott] to “citoyen Majatte [Madgett],” n.d. [ca. Feb.–Mar. 1794], AN F7 4774 28. 64. Declaration of Thomas MacDermott, n.d. [after Mar. 1794], AN T 1376. 65. [MacDermott] to “citoyen Majatte [Madgett],” n.d. [ca. Feb.–Mar. 1794], AN F7 4774 28. 66. “Attestation devant Guilbert, notaire Franciade, par Jacques ö Melaghlin, Guillaume Walsh, Patrice O’Brien” [Sept. 3, 1794], Comité de Surveillance, section du Temple, 21 thermidor an 2 [Aug. 8, 1794], “Libération de Macdermotte par ordre du Comité de Sûreté générale” [Oct. 13, 1794], AN F7 4774 28. Mac- Dermott wrote that he had died in prison in 1793 as a “political prisoner” (MacDermot of Moylurg, 328).

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 appropriate revolutionary credentials. To do so, he asserted his Irishness and his commitment to Irish independence, thereby proving his compatibility with (French) republican principles. Patriotism was no longer associated with cosmopolitanism but, rather, with internationalism among citizens who fought to establish nationhood, that is, independence and liberty in their respective coun- tries.67 In this context, it was the nation that, as the expression of popular sovereignty of emancipated peoples, rendered internationalism possible among other free nations. This relationship, then called réciprocité, stood in contrast to empire, which entailed domination that was incompatible with liberty.68 The diplomatic principle adopted during the Terror that France should only pursue relations with fellow republics also reﬂected this idea of the nation.69 Republi- canism in France and Ireland sowed the seeds for internationalism between these two nations in their common opposition to empire, perhaps more than to royalty. The fact that this shift from theoretical cosmopolitanism to practical internationalism in wartime started during the Terror, supports the idea that legisla- tion against foreigners was not merely the result of a retreat from cosmopolitanism.70 Marianne Elliott thus misread Saint-Just’s report of October 16 as laying “to rest the myth of international brotherhood.”71 Quite the opposite, Saint-Just responded in a scathing tone against those who proposed either to cancel the law of September 1793 against the English or to extend it to all foreigners in the name of cosmopolitanism and to avoid the “nationalization” of the war against England. He explained that these measures should target only those who were suspect because of their ties—either political or economic—to the British government and who were intent on destroying the French Republic. Extending the law would dilute its meaning and convince the people of its illegitimacy.72 The example of individuals involved in the SADH suggests that Saint-Just was sincere in his desire to target only ideological, not national, enemies among resident foreigners. Irishmen, who risked being mistaken for English, could prove their patriotism, that is, their loyalty to republican principles, by showing their enmity to their imperial British masters. In this fashion they escaped the rigors of the Terror. Their example also shows that the ideal of a “natural republic” that informed the policies of the revolutionary government was not monolithic.73

67. Serna, “Every Revolution Is a War of Independence.” 68. Wahnich, L’impossible citoyen, 354–56; Gillen, “Constructing Democratic Thought.” 69. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 59. 70. Rapport, Nationality and Citizenship, 206–7. 71. Elliott, Partners in Revolution, 62–63. 72. Saint-Just, Rapport fait à la Convention nationale . . . sur la Loi contre les Anglais, 25 [vendémiaire] an II [Oct. 16, 1793], AD CPA 588, fols. 47–52. 73. Simonin, “Comptes rendus.”

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 Ireland and the Nationalization of the British Empire

Historians have documented how the French Revolution prompted ideological opposition in Britain. Based on the belief that the British enjoyed true liberty, constitutionalism became the language of loyalty. Jacobin and democrat became synonymous with bloodthirsty regicide. The government’s repression of radicals forced them to go underground or to couch their demands in constitutional language. Popular loyalism and conservatism were stronger than radicalism.74 In Ireland, however, popular disaffection grew unabated.75 The British treatment of the SADH members, especially in relation to Ireland, is a vantage point from which to examine the construction of a British countermodel.

Reconﬁgurations of the Empire The activities of the SADH had far-reaching consequences in Britain. The day after the dinner at White’s Hotel, the National Convention, presided by Gré- goire, voted its (in)famous decree of November 19, 1792, promising fraternity and help to all oppressed people who rose up to assert their liberty. This decree encouraged the covert activities of Paine, FitzGerald, and Oswald to urge the French government to support some combination of uprising and invasion in England and Ireland.76 The dinner and the decree were unmistakably linked, provoking consternation and alarm in the British government.77 Faced with the prospect of war abroad and rebellion at home, William Pitt’s government sought to secure ties between Britain and Ireland. After Edmund Burke drama- tized the threat of insurrection in England in a speech on December 28, Pitt’s cabinet enacted several security measures between December 1792 and February 1793: increasing the number of troops in London; forbidding the importation of weapons; surveilling correspondence and travelers, especially French; and ban- ning conventions.78 Responding to these measures, the Edinburgh Convention, whose delegates were eager to prove their constitutionalism, rejected the Society of United Irishmen’s address that had been presented by the Scottish reformer Thomas Muir in December 1792. The Convention’s action ensured that there would be no pan–British Isles movement for a more democratic representa- tion and that the British Parliament would be an imperial one. The “radical”

74. Dickinson, British Radicalism, 25–42; Dupuy, “Vue d’Angleterre.” 75. Smyth, “Introduction,” 12–13; Dickson, “Paine and Ireland”; Morley, “Continuity of Disaffection.” 76. Erdman, Commerce des Lumières, 244–66; Ferradou, “L’insurrection n’aura pas eu lieu.” 77. See Burke’s speech of March 5, 1793, in the Commons: Cobbett, Parliamentary History of England, 550–51. 78. Cobbett, Parliamentary History of England, 180–90. For Burke’s pivotal role in raising the alarm at this time, see Bourke, Empire and Revolution, 809–19, 852–919; Emsley, “London ‘Insurrection’”; and Ems- ley, “Aspect of Pitt’s ‘Terror.’”

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 movement in Britain thereby identified itself with British patriotism, competing with loyalists only as to the meaning of this patriotism.79 Pitt’s government tried to conciliate Irish Catholics with the Catholic Relief Act in April 1793, granting them the right to vote in parliamentary elections, as well as the right to bear arms (both attributes of citizenship), to secure their loyalty and to recruit Irish soldiers in his effort to defend Ireland from French invasion.80 With these measures, the British government redefined the boundaries of citizenship in Ireland, which now included Catholics (who nonetheless could not hold elected office). Irish citizenship was no longer exclusively Protestant despite the outcry from the proponents of the “Protestant Ascendancy.”81 This inclusive policy, long promoted by Irish-born British imperialist Edmund Burke, was a masterful response by the British government, which managed to strengthen the ties among the different components of the “British” Isles.82 Pitt’s effort at conciliation suggests that Linda Colley’s argument that the making of the British nation against rival France was synonymous with Protestant national identity is overstated.83

British Citizenship versus French Citizenship: The Fabrication of an Irish Anti-Briton

Ireland was central to the threat that Britons perceived in French Jacobinism. Indeed, the expression French disease was coined by Thomas Hussey, Irish chap- lain to the embassy of Spain in London, disciple and friend of Edmund Burke, in a letter to Burke’s son Richard in 1790; Hussey blamed French ideas for the new hostility of Irish Catholics toward their clergy.84 This threat grew with the establishment of the French Republic and the collusion of Irish, English, and Scottish republicans. In response, government propaganda refuted the idea of an international republican model of citizenship, instead proposing a new deﬁ- nition of what British citizenship entailed. The government sponsored a wave of conservative loyalism through the press or through the Volunteer Movement to maintain its grip on patriotism. Writers like Hannah More proclaimed that Brit- ish women performed the duties of a citizen in the domestic sphere, serving their family and their religion.85 Targeting members of the SADH was part of

79. Pentland, “Patriotism, Universalism, and the Scottish Conventions.” 80. Bartlett, “Ireland during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.” 81. Bartlett, Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation, 146–72. 82. McDowell, “Burke and Ireland”;Pitts,“Burke and the Ends of Empire”;Bourke,Empire and Revolution, 209–22, 238–43, 406–19, 783–800. 83. Colley, Britons, 6–7, 11–54. 84. Keogh, French Disease, 27. 85. Macleod, “British Attitudes”; Mori, “Languages of Loyalism”; Gee, British Volunteer Movement; Evans, Debating the Revolution, 45–66, 107–26.

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 this campaign: in November 1792 Thomas Paine was found guilty in absentia of seditious libel, and effigies of him were burnt throughout England to much popular support. On December 24 FitzGerald was cashiered from the British army, indicating that his renunciation of his title and his acceptance of French citizenship were incompatible with British loyalty.86 Henry Redhead Yorke’s passage from radical republicanism to ultraloyalism illustrates how opposition to the French model of citizenship and its Irish element contributed to the imperial redefinition of the “True Briton.” Returning to England from Paris in early 1793, Yorke preached revolutionary democracy; he called for parliamentary reform, the abolition of slavery, and the release of Scottish reformers, and he attracted crowds of thousands at political rallies throughout England. Considering him and the Sheares brothers to be “violent Men and great Republicans,” the government arrested Yorke in June 1794 during a wave of arrests across England.87 Yorke was charged with treason and seditious conspiracy. Tried in July 1795, he was convicted and sentenced to prison, while other radicals like Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, and John Thelwall were acquitted. Yorke’s conviction was the result of his equivocal defense: he first presented himself as an apologist of the ancient English Constitution and then as a romantic martyr for liberty before finally reaffirming the natural rights of men in a universalist and very Paineite challenge to the establishment. Instead of striking an apologetic tone, Yorke tried to use his trial as a public forum to legit- imize his radicalism. This strategy failed: not only was he sentenced to two years in prison, but his rhetoric blurred his radical posturing and prevented him from appearing as a hero and martyr.88 After his release in 1797, Yorke recanted his revolutionary past, married his prison warden’s daughter, and converted to ultraloyalism. Like other British ex-radicals, he cast himself as a paragon of British patriotism and English loyalism, rewriting his revolutionary and republican experience in Paris, notably insist- ing on his opposition to Irish republicans.89 In his Letters from France in 1802,he pretended to have opposed Oswald’s plan for an Irish revolution in 1792–93. He also derisively scorned his former associates in the SADH, especially the Sheareses and their “maniac Irish propositions.” Yorke particularly mocked “Citizen O’Reilly,” who claimed to be “an Irishman, and a French citizen, but not a subject of the king of England,” who used “every opportunity to affront the

86. O’Gorman, “Paine Burnings”; Cobbet, Parliamentary History of England, 88–90. 87. Monro to [Grenville], Dec. 17, 1792, NA Foreign Ofﬁce 27/40 (part 2), fols. 202–3; Monro to [Grenville], Dec. 31, 1792, NA Foreign Ofﬁce 27/40 (part 2), fols. 276–77; Durey, “William Wickham,” 730. 88. Yuval, “Between Heroism and Acquittal.” 89. Yorke, Trial of Henry Yorke, xii–xiii.

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 English,” and who was “an active member of the club of Irish traitors in Paris.”90 Interestingly, Yorke always linked “maniac” revolutionary republicanism with sexual deviance (John Sheares suffered unrequited love for Théroigne de Méricourt, Oswald had two wives, O’Reilly “[kept] his girl,” Stone lived with Helen Maria Williams, etc.) and with Catholicism, which he saw as leading to tyranny and atheism.91 Yorke, the respectable Englishman, was their opposite in every way: respectful of the Constitution, defender of the English “empire” in Britain, Protestant, and married. His dramatic reinvention of himself engaged fully in the “moral turn” that British citizenship took in the 1790s that forced radicals to reconsider their advocacy of the French Revolution.92 In a letter to William Wickham, dated August 3, 1798, after the execution of the Sheares brothers as traitors on July 14, 1798, in Dublin, Yorke commented on their fate: “May it serve to guard the monarchy, and enlighten the deluded!”93

Conclusions

The Irish SADH members who vested their hopes in the fledgling French republic participated in the dialectical redefinition of citizenship in the French and British metropoles and thus in the formation of the metropolitan nations themselves. These cosmopolitan and antislavery republicans asserted that nations should define themselves politically, as ideological rather than ethnic communi- ties. Their experiences with citizenship in the French republic and the British Empire have several implications. First, involvement in French politics prompted these Irishmen, whose identities excluded them from the core of the English monarchy and British Empire, to invest their aspirations in the republican project in conjunction with other English-speaking patriots. Second, even when faced with war and the Terror, Irish republicans could navigate the vagaries of the narrowing political orthodoxy in France by proving their Irish patriotism: their struggle for the independence of Ireland made them reliable republican citizens. This repub- licancommoncause,inturn,laidthe groundwork for a new revolutionary internationalism against a common enemy, imperial England. Geopolitical pragmatism in the context of war, as well as a burgeoning sense of international brotherhood, informed this internationalist republicanism.94 Third, by

90. Yorke probably took a hint from the same depiction of SADH president John Hurford Stone in the trial of his brother, William Stone, in 1795: Wharam, Treason Trials,85–90;NA,TreasurySolicitor’s Papers 11/555 doss. 1793: trial of William Stone. 91. Yorke, Letters from France in 1802, 1:142–43, 162–63; 2:320–29, 383. 92. Rogers, “Deﬁnition of a Virtuous Man.” 93. Stewart, Memoirs and Correspondence of Viscount Castlereagh, 1:257–59. 94. Ferradou, “L’Irlande et la France à l’époque de la République atlantique.”

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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/429/935681/429ferradou.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 advocating abolitionism, these Irish republicans helped make antislavery a key element of an Atlantic, international, and republican language of freedom. This language persisted after the Terror: despite restrictions on accessing French citizenship, the 1795 Constitution established isonomy between the metropole and the overseas territories (furthered by the establishment of administrative departments in the colonies in 1798), and the Directory wel- comed Theobald Wolfe Tone’s pleas for help against England in 1796.95 It is no coincidence that the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte marked the decline of revolutionary cosmopolitanism. In Bonaparte’s “Grande Nation” (a term first coined in 1797), imperial domination replaced internationalism, the Napoleonic Code of 1804 made nationality a function of birth, citizenship was no longer a matter of political allegiance, and slavery was reinstituted in 1802–3. The establishment of the empire in 1804 was the culmination of this imperial turn.96 With the imperialist, racial, and authoritarian turn of 1799–1804, the French Republic ended, even though the name was retained in the imperial constitution, and the nation of the nineteenth century became “nationalist.”97 In other words, the transfor- mation of the French republic into an exclusive nation-state with imperial extensions, highlighted by Megan Maruschke in her contribution to this forum, won out over the cosmopolitan/international definition of the nation defended by the Irish republicans. A similar development occurred in the British Isles. Faced with the threat of a competing language of citizenship founded on the doctrine of national popular sovereignty and internationalism, the English government also redefined citizenship as loyalty to king and empire. With this newly redefined imperial citizenship, Britain was able to integrate Ireland when it erupted in “rebellion” in 1798: the Act of Union “diluted” the power of Irish republican aspirations by submerging Ireland in a Protestant nation.98 Conformity to the liberal imperial model would allow the Irish to participate in its benefits. In this configuration, Catholic emancipation could even become a new pillar of the British Empire, something that Daniel O’Connell understood very well, as the anecdote of his rejection of the Sheareses’ regicide republicanism shows: O’Connell’s advocacy of Catholic emancipation would be compatible with loyalism to the king.99 Therefore, in the nineteenth century, Ireland’s attachment to the empire was greater than to the union, even though the latter permitted Ireland to be a part of the core of the world system. Now part of the United Kingdom, the Irish

95. Gainot, L’empire colonial franc¸ais, 135–54. 96. Serna, “Sister Republics,” 40; Bart, “Citoyenneté et naturalité”; Gainot, L’empire colonial franc¸ais, 134, 165–66; Chappey, “A la recherche du premier écrivain noir.” 97. Rapport, Nationality and Citizenship, 26; Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 112–14, 199–219. 98. Bartlett, “‘This Famous Island Set in a Virginian Sea.’” 99. Colantonio, “L’impossible rencontre.”

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MATHIEU FERRADOU is professeur agrégé d’histoire-géographie, adjunct professor of early modern history at Le Mans University, and associate researcher at the Laboratoire TEMOS (Temps, Mondes Sociétés), specializing in transnational and Atlantic history of the Age of Revolutions.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this article have been presented in the doctoral workshop “Citizenship: Histo- riographies, Questions, and Methodologies” at the European University, Budapest, June 21–22, 2015, and at the Centre for Early Modern History Seminar Series at Trinity College Dublin, Octo- ber 10, 2016. The author thanks Andrea Peto and Christine Lebeau for inviting him to Budapest and Piers Ludlow for his comments and advice there, and Joseph Clarke, David Dickson, and Syl- vie Kleinman for their invitation to Dublin, their comments, and their support. He also expresses his gratitude to Megan Maruschke and Julia Oheim for inviting him to the European Network in Universal and Global History conference in Budapest, September 1–2, 2017, and for their comments. Funding to attend the various conferences was generously provided by the Institut d’His- toire Moderne et Contemporaine, by the Ecole Doctorale d’Histoire of Paris 1–Panthéon Sorbonne University, and by Trinity College, Dublin.

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