Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies Volume 2: Issue 1 Gallic Connections: Irish & Scottish Encounters with France AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen JOURNAL OF IRISH AND SCOTTISH STUDIES Volume 2, Issue 1 September 2008 Gallic Connections: Irish and Scottish Encounters with France Published by the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen in association with The universities of the The Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative and The Stout Research Centre Irish-Scottish Studies Programme Victoria University of Wellington ISSN 1753-2396 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies General Editor: Cairns Craig Issue Editors: Michael Brown, Rosalyn Trigger Associate Editors: Stephen Dornan, Paul Shanks Editorial Advisory Board: Fran Brearton, Queen’s University, Belfast Eleanor Bell, University of Strathclyde Ewen Cameron, University of Edinburgh Sean Connolly, Queen’s University, Belfast Patrick Crotty, University of Aberdeen David Dickson, Trinity College, Dublin T. M. Devine, University of Edinburgh David Dumville, University of Aberdeen Aaron Kelly, University of Edinburgh Edna Longley, Queen’s University, Belfast Peter Mackay, Queen’s University, Belfast Shane Alcobia-Murphy, University of Aberdeen Ian Campbell Ross, Trinity College, Dublin Graham Walker, Queen’s University, Belfast International Advisory Board: Don Akenson, Queen’s University, Kingston Tom Brooking, University of Otago Keith Dixon, Université Lumière Lyon 2 Luke Gibbons, Notre Dame Marjorie Howes, Boston College H. Gustav Klaus, University of Rostock Peter Kuch, University of Otago Graeme Morton, University of Guelph Brad Patterson, Victoria University, Wellington Matthew Wickman, Brigham Young David Wilson, University of Toronto The Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies is a peer reviewed journal published twice yearly – in September and March – by the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. An electronic reviews section is available on the AHRC Centre’s website at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/issjournal.shtml Editorial correspondence, including manuscripts for submission, should be addressed to The Editors, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, Humanity Manse, 19 College Bounds, University of Aberdeen, AB24 3UG or emailed to: [email protected] Subscription information can be found on www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/publications Cover image: Richard Thomas Moynan (1856–1906). Detail from The Artist in his Dublin Studio, 1887. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland. CONTENTS Editorial v Scottish Philosophers in France: The Earlier Years 1 Alexander Broadie The Scots College Paris, 1652 – 81: A Centre for Scottish 13 Networks Thomas McInally Revolutionary and Refractory? 29 The Irish Colleges in Paris and the French Revolution Liam Chambers Loyal Catholics and Revolutionary Patriots: 51 National Identity and the Scots in Revolutionary Paris Michael Rapport A Scottish Literati in Paris: The Case of Sir James Hall 73 Michael Brown Ambassador incognito and Accidental Tourist: 101 Cultural Perspectives on Theobald Wolfe Tone’s Mission to France, 1796 – 8 Sylvie Kleinman Holland and France: Prototype and Paradigm for Nineteenth- 123 Century Scottish Art John Morrison Painting, Politics and Propaganda 139 Maebh O’Regan Cain’s Burden: Trocchi and Beckett in Paris 151 Paul Shanks Rimbaud in a sporran? The French Scotland of Kenneth White 171 Gavin Bowd Poem: A Backward Glance 187 David Kinloch Notes on Contributors 191 EDITORIAL The following issue explores one of the oldest significant migratory connec- tions in both Irish and Scottish history – that connection binding the two countries to France. Often romanticised through reference to the Flight of the Wild Geese or the conceit of an Auld Alliance, both Ireland and Scotland have claimed a special affinity with their Gallic cousins. A shared cultural Celticism binds their national self-images, just as much as a tactical engage- ment with England’s rival to European and Imperial power brought Ireland and Scotland into the French political orbit. Much work has been done on pre- cisely these engagements, exploring the myth history of the Celt and how the Jacobite communities in Britain’s other kingdoms integrated into the French military system. Yet beyond such potent symbolic ties, the value of a French connection to the Irish and Scottish populations is often obscure. In evaluat- ing their intellectual and cultural engagement with France this volume makes its contribution. In doing so it draws structural inspiration from Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (2004). Therein, Casanova postulates the existence of an autonomous realm of literary power, with its own economies of credit, brokers of worth and ‘central banks’ holding cultural capital (23). At the heart of this transnational polity of the imagination Casanova places Paris – ‘the capital of the literary world, the city endowed with the greatest literary prestige in the world’ (24). To it, the cultural producers of Ireland and Scotland were, and continue to be, drawn. From as far back as the sixteenth century, Irish and Scots have gone to Paris for education and inspiration. In that, they allow us to draw out one of the postulates in Casanova’s thesis; that Parisian centrality is a consequence of ‘political liberty, elegance, and intellectuality’, a configuration that sustains the ‘historical and mythical’ literariness of the city (24). The following essays take up those categories, beginning with the foun- dational intellectual institution of the University of Paris. Both Alexander Broadie and Tom McInally illustrate how the University acted as a lodestone for Scottish academics and students alike. Then, political liberty is interro- gated in four essays which concentrate attention on the decade of the French vi Revolution. The first two, those by Liam Chambers and Michael Rapport also highlight the fate of the Irish and Scottish Colleges in that tempestuous dec- ade, while the second pair, authored by Michael Brown and Sylvie Kleinman, focus on the explicitly political ramifications of an encounter with revolution- ary France through a case study of individual Scottish and Irish travellers. The elegance to which Casanova alludes is the topic of the next two contri- butions. John Morrison points up how Paris was to replace the Netherlands as the focal point of Scottish artistic culture in the nineteenth century, while Maebh O’Regan provides a survey of a generation of Irish artists trained in the French capital. Cumulatively these contributions set the context for the final essays, by Paul Shanks and Gavin Bowd. They attend directly to the place of France in the world literary culture that Casanova outlines. The continued vibrancy of France in the poetic imagination is illustrated by our final contri- bution, a newly published work by David Kinloch. But these essays do more than illustrate the possible power of Casanova’s central conceit. They also shed light on the place Casanova assigned to the translator in ‘establishing value’ through ‘the power of consecration’ and the ‘enrichment’ of the source culture and the recipient (23). The people who populate the pages that follow were all, to a greater or lesser extent, involved in the process of cultural translation, communicating with and disseminating French culture from positions within the Celtic hinterland. Their power, as polyglots, was in no sense peripheral, however, for it was precisely the depth and longevity of their engagement with French culture that credited it with the capital it embodied. This volume is a result of an AHRC sponsored research project on the Irish and Scottish Diasporas since 1600 which runs out of the University of Aberdeen, for details of which readers can go to www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/ events. A critical part of this wider exploration, concerned as it is with the cul- tures of migration and the intellectual ramifications of encountering foreign shores, this volume is the first in a sequence which will study the investment migrants make in their adopted land, the resources that they bring with them, and the cultural capital they retain in their place of origin. In that, the cur- rent volume sets the agenda for some later issues of the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies. Michael Brown University of Aberdeen Scottish Philosophers in France: The Earlier Years Alexander Broadie Scottish philosophers had a prominent role in French academic life up to and beyond the Scottish Reformation in 1560. Until the Reformation the fact that the French universities were in large measure part of the intellectual life of the Catholic Church was no obstacle to the Scots. Thereafter the Scottish presence within the French universities diminishes sharply though they did enrol in Protestant colleges in France and also taught in them. That access to French academe, narrow as it was after 1560, became narrower still in 1685 with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the effective withdrawal of citizens’ rights from the French Protestants, including their right to maintain denominational colleges. Scottish non-Catholic philosophers did continue to visit France and, for example, were present in spectacular fashion in the eight- eenth-century salon-culture, as witness the reception of David Hume and Adam Smith. But after 1685