The Year of the French

545 Pages·2004·3.74 MB·English

by  Thomas Flanagan

THOMAS FLANAGAN (1923–2002), the grandson of Irish immigrants, grew up
in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he ran the school newspaper with his friend
Truman Capote. Flanagan attended Amherst College (with a two-year hiatus to
serve in the Pacific Fleet) and earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University,
where he studied under Lionel Trilling while also writing stories for Ellery
Queen's Mystery Magazine. In 1959, he published an important scholarly work,
The Irish Novelists, 1800 to 1850, and the next year he moved to Berkeley,
where he was to teach English and Irish literature at the University of California
for many years. In 1978 he took up a post at the State University of New York at
Stonybrook, from which he retired in 1996. Flanagan and his wife Jean made
annual trips to Ireland, where he struck up friendships with many writers,
including Benedict Kiely and Seamus Heaney, whom he in turn helped bring to
the United States. His intimate knowledge of Ireland's history and literature also
helped to inspire his trilogy of historical novels, starting with The Year of the
French (1979, winner of the National Critics' Circle award for fiction) and
continuing with The Tenants of Time (1988) and The End of the Hunt (1994).
Flanagan was a frequent contributor to many publications, including The
New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Kenyon Review. A
collection of his essays, There You Are: Writing on Irish and American
Literature and History, is also published by New York Review Books.
SEAMUS DEANE, formerly Professor of English and American Literature at
University College, Dublin, is now Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the
University of Notre Dame. Among his books are Selected Poems, Celtic
Revivals, Strange Country: Ireland and Modernity, and the novel Reading in the
Dark. He was General Editor of the three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish
Writing.
THE YEAR OF THE FRENCH
THOMAS FLANAGAN
Introduction by
SEAMUS DEANE
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
This is a New York Review Book Published by The New York Review of
Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1979 by Thomas Flanagan Introduction copyright © 2005 by
Seamus Deane All rights reserved.
Cover image: Ian Hamilton Finlay, The Present Order Is the Disorder of the
Future, Saint-Just, from the garden at Little Sparta; courtesy of the artist and
Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Flanagan, Thomas, 1923– The year of the French / Thomas Flanagan ;
introduction by Seamus Deane.
p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)
ISBN 1-59017-108-X (trade pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Ireland—History—Rebellion of 1798—Fiction. 2. French expedition to
Ireland, 1796–1797—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.
PS3556.L3445Y43 2004
813'.54—dc22
2004017965
ebook ISBN: 978-1-59017-686-3
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit
www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Contents
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Informaction
Introduction
THE YEAR OF THE FRENCH
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
Part Two
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
Part Three
18
19
20
21
22
Epilogue
Winter, 1798
Principal Characters
Maps
Introduction
One morning in the spring of 1978, I was clearing my mailbox in the faculty
office of the English Department in Wheeler Hall at the University of California
at Berkeley, when I noticed that Tom Flanagan’s ears had risen a notch or two
along the sides of his perfectly bald head. His mailbox was close to mine and he
had his back to me, but it was evident from the ears that he was smiling—no,
that he was beaming. I stepped over and said to him, “So, what’s the good
news?” He was holding an opened letter across his chest and said to me, “Just
the biggest check I’ve ever seen; or the biggest one made out to me anyway.”
But he would not go further, although I later learned it was his advance for The
Year of the French.
That was the beginning of the great adventure of The Year of the French; it
became a best-seller in the US, and also sold very well in Ireland. In Ireland, too,
it had a remarkable second life after the national television company, Radio
Telefis Eireann (RTE), decided, in collaboration with the French television
channel FR3 and the British Channel 4, to make it into a film that was broadcast
on television in late 1982 in a six-part series.
This was by no means an unmixed blessing. Flanagan’s friend Conor Cruise
O’Brien, then editor of the London Sunday newspaper The Observer, reviewed
the novel very favorably. O’Brien had previously been a government minister in
charge of broadcasting in Ireland and he exerted his considerable influence to
persuade RTE to invest a large sum of money (eventually 1.7 million pounds
sterling) in the venture. The film presented the novel as a tract against violent
rebellion, even against an unjust established order, and further suggested that
rebellion was an ingrained and reactionary habit of the Irish that provoked
British occupying forces to commit yet another series of their periodic atrocities
in the name of law and order. O’Brien and many other influential people in the
media were then on the crest of a crusading wave against Irish republicanism,
especially its military operations in Northern Ireland.
It cannot be said that this production did the reputation of the novel any
good, even though it was lavishly done, had a great musical score (by Paddy
Moloney of the Chieftains), and caused great local excitement in the forty
locations in County Mayo where it was shot. It was not entirely a travesty of the
novel, but it was not a treatment that was anxious to preserve the nuances of
Flanagan’s text. Yet in another sense, the film helped turn the novel into a
phenomenon. Local people in County Mayo especially began to refresh their
views and their inherited memories of the Great Rebellion of 1798 in Ireland, the
ferocious and bloody prequel to the Act of Union between Great Britain and
Ireland in 1800, that created what is now known as the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland. Most of the ferocity was displayed by the
regiments of the British army, who killed 30,000 people in a few months,
making the slaughter in revolutionary France earlier in the decade seem quite
tame in comparison.
Ireland at that time was a profoundly sectarian state in which the bulk of the
Catholic population was allowed no political existence and a Protestant minority,
notorious for its unflinching bigotry—what Edmund Burke called “a plebeian
oligarchy” that had begun to style itself in the decade of the rebellion as an
“Ascendancy”—sought tirelessly and cynically to preserve its own contrastingly
privileged position. The United Irishmen, who led the rebellion, posed a lethal
threat to this rancid system; its leadership, largely Presbyterian and
predominantly from the North of Ireland, promoted a secular dream of Irish
separation from England and an end to the injustices and divisions upon which
that relationship’s security depended. The leader of the United Irishmen, Wolfe
Tone, sought help from the French government, which had already abandoned
its radical revolutionary phase and entered upon the period of the Directory and
the subsequent Napoleonic military dictatorship. Twice the French attempted to
land an army in Ireland: once in 1797 at Bantry Bay, off the Kerry coast, a
venture defeated by bad weather, and the second time at Killala in County Mayo
in 1798, after the main rebellion, which had broken out in County Wexford, had
been defeated.
Those who opposed the rebellion and wrote its history claimed that it was
nothing more than a sectarian Catholic assault on the local Protestants, of the
kind which their propaganda had been telling them for two centuries to expect.
The Catholic peasantry had their own elaborate political views, mostly Jacobite
rather than Jacobin, favoring the deposed Stuart monarchy and opposed to the
Glorious Revolution of 1688 that had brought a triumphalist Protestantism and
the infamous penal laws against Catholics in its train. They rose in rebellion
largely because of provocation by government forces in 1797 and also in
reaction to the various oppressions they endured. Yet in the conventional
accounts of the rebellion, they were depicted as a purblind community, far
removed from any enlightenment or revolutionary ideals; and their secular
leaders as irresponsible intellectuals who had led astray a benighted peasantry.
The arguments created by Flanagan’s novel were largely concerned with its
complicated narrative techniques, the success of these in rendering some sense
of the political complexity of the situation, and the pertinence of the work to the
contemporary political crisis in Northern Ireland in particular. For some
historians it was too “literary” to be wholly reliable; for some literary people, the
literary skills were precisely what gave the work an imaginative and sympathetic
dimension that any polemical political reading of the novel was obliged to
ignore. But the film version produced another, quite different, reaction. It led to
a widespread renewal, at first in County Mayo and later elsewhere, of interest in
the microhistories of the various localities mentioned in the novel and included
in the shooting of the film—sometimes indeed because a site mentioned in the
novel, like the site of the final and fatal battle of Ballinamuck, had not been used
in the making of the film. Also, the various personages mentioned in the novel
gained a new prominence, among them the French General Humbert, after
whom a summer school is now named. (Summer schools, which can last from a
couple of days to two weeks, are now pandemic in Ireland. Flanagan’s novel
played an important role in stimulating this relatively benign development.) It is
appropriate too that this novel should have had such a visible influence, visible
even in the most literal sense, by helping to make the areas around Killala and
Ballina tourist attractions. Road signs bearing the book’s title, The Year of the
French, appeared, although they were, in the traditional way, carefully and
obliquely angled to create confusion rather than clarity in the mind of the
traveler caught in the network of spidery roads that lay across the wild and
desolate landscape that is such a persistent presence in the book.
Thomas Flanagan had altered the Irish literary landscape once before in his
marvelous study The Irish Novelists, 1800–1850, published by Columbia
University Press in 1959. This book still has no equal for the wit and penetration,
the learning and the sympathy, that it brings to bear upon writers like the Banim
brothers, Gerard Griffin, William Carleton, and many others who disappeared
from view in the retrospective blaze of Joyce’s reputation, like stars in sunlight.
Part of the appeal of this book is that it shows not only a wide knowledge of the
novels themselves, but also a knowledge of what the novelists had read. Thomas
Flanagan’s range of reading was immense; every page of The Year of the French
bears the imprint of this. Quotations from Irish (often in well-known translations
or adaptations) and from English and French are embedded in his prose, and yet
they are so easily lofted into his narrative that they bring no burden to bear upon
the reader. The style is literary in the best sense, for this novel aims to provide
that thickness and richness of detail that a great historical novel needs, yet is also
determined to avoid simply dressing the story up as a costume drama.
But it is not enough to speak only of one style, although there is indeed,
throughout the whole book, the indelible mark of a sensibility. There are
different styles adapted for each of the five major narrators. The success of this
polyphonic structure of voices is underwritten by Flanagan’s great and
appreciative knowledge of the masters of nineteenth-century fiction, Irish,
English, American, and French. There are also subtly flexed variations on social
and historical types. We know from the work of Scott and Edgeworth and from
later critical writings by Manzoni and Lukacs that the stereotype is unavoidable
in historical fiction, since in it the individual person must always serve at least to
some extent as a representative of a community. The danger of course is that the
stereotype may turn out to be crude and destructive. In the case of Ireland and
Irish writing, there is immense temptation in this regard, since its colonial
history has made the stereotyping of “native” character so easy and vulgar an
attraction. The author who succumbs to the temptation presents a cartoon
“realism” that impedes the possibility of analysis.
Perhaps it is in the figure of the poet-schoolmaster Owen Ruagh McCarthy
that Flanagan most obviously takes up the challenge of the stereotype and the
struggle to overcome it without entirely abandoning the useful narrative
functions it can command. If one reads some of the memoirs of Gaelic poets of
the eighteenth century or even looks at some of the most famous representations
of the histrionically doomed Irish poet, victim to drink, drugs, and history, like
Joyce’s representation of the poet James Clarence Mangan, who died of cholera
during the Famine, then one can see some of the sources for Flanagan’s Owen
McCarthy. Other sources lie in the realm of folk memory.
But not many. This is a historical novel in a profoundly literary sense; it
draws on printed and written sources, but rarely looks to folklore. This makes it
the more choice that the novel could legitimately be said to have given a great
impetus to the revival of folklore accounts and memories of what the local
people have always called Bliain na bhFranchach (“the year of the French”).
The film of the novel is certainly central to this aspect of its influence. But it is
also a tribute to the novel’s capacity to endure such a transient and polemical
adaptation and thereby reveal its richer resource. It was the fact that this novel
came from outside Ireland and that it delved into such detail about the local area
that, for many local historians, increased the prestige of the local memories and
revived that prestige in time for the bicentenary of the invasion in 1998.
So here we have a great historical novel created by a great literary scholar
and raconteur, that has already been incorporated deeply into the contested
literary and cultural history of modern Ireland. It helped to bring into focus
within one concentrated sequence the calamitous history of a century and a
country when Ireland was invaded by the French for one month in the late
summer of 1798. The history of its own reception since its first publication in
1979 is by now part of the history of the reception and interpretation of 1798