The Wild Geese may be the best known example, but for four centuries Irish fought and died for France, writes Lara Marlowe, in Paris
Had France invaded Ireland rather than Egypt in 1798, Napoleon remarked in his memoirs from St Helena, he might have ruled the world. Of course, the forces of revolutionary France twice aborted invasions of Ireland, in 1796 and 1798, but it is less known that the fantasy cropped up at least twice more, under the Second Empire of Napoleon III, and at the beginning of the 20th century.
These might-have-beens were among the many revelations of a two-day symposium on "Franco-Irish Connections: Military Aspects, 17th-20th Centuries" at the Service Historique de la Défense in the Château de Vincennes near Paris this month.
Raising a glass of champagne at the reception she gave for the historians, Ambassador Anne Anderson hailed the creation of the "Société d'études militaires franco-irlandaises" (SEMFI) to "encourage academics to study in greater depth the extraordinary links between the French and Irish military". In the popular imagination, the Irish became involved in French wars after the flight of Britain's last Catholic king, James II, in 1690. Troops loyal to James II, the "Wild Geese", went on to fight in France's 18th-century wars, even as the dream of a Jacobite restoration faded.
It all started nearly a century earlier, Dr Éamon Ó Ciosáin of NUI Maynooth explained, when France replaced Spain as the foreign power to which Irish Catholics looked. For decades, English authorities encouraged the Irish to go to France. "It was part of the whole process of clearing people out for colonisation," O'Ciosain said.
Eoghan Ó hAnnracháin, the author of more than 80 articles on the Irish in France under Louis XIV and Louis XV, has identified 2,550 Irishmen among the 130,000 men who applied for admission to the Hôtel Royal des Invalides - the military hospital built by Louis XIV - between 1674 and 1770.
Ó hAnnracháin provided a glimpse of what a soldier's life was like then. Some were surprisingly old, for example Simon Kelly, from Galway, hospitalised at Les Invalides at the age of 85, after 60 years in various French regiments. Robert Bourg, also from Galway, was admitted at the age of 16 and a half, in 1695, when his right arm was torn off by a musket shot. Other Irishmen were stampeded by horses in battle - "the nightmare of every 17th-century infantryman". One was disabled when he fell from the ramparts of Perpignan.
Prof Thomas Bartlett of UCD said the term "Wild Geese" first appeared in the 1720s, when the archbishop of Dublin referred to "the vermin called Wild Geese - I mean persons listed for the Pretender (James III)." Prof Bartlett said Irish historians "established the legend of an impossibly loyal and Catholic force, intrepid, brave, courageous, inspiring and romantic . . ." He quoted the 19th-century writer Matthew O'Conor, who praised the "brilliant exploits . . . which have rendered the name of Ireland illustrious in the military annals of Europe." In the 19th century, Irish families often had O'Conor's book re-bound in elaborate leather covers embossed with shamrocks. By the time such texts on the romance of the Wild Geese were published, Prof Bartlett noted, some 40 per cent of the British army were Irish. "Playing up Irish Catholic loyalty to the exiled Stuarts during the 18th century may have been an attempt to prevent Irish service in the British army acting as an integrator that would hinder the Irish quest for self-determination," he suggested.
One member of the audience did not want Prof Bartlett to dent his boyhood memories of the Wild Geese. Liam Healy (70) stood up in the conference room in the Château de Vincennes: "I'm a Fermanagh man and I remember being called vermin in the 1950s," he said. "As a young Catholic growing up in the North, I was buried by books that showed Britain as all powerful, and the rest of the world as degenerate. It was a pleasure to find a role model in the Wild Geese."
One of the most heroic, and tragic, of the Wild Geese was Thomas Arthur Lally, the son of an Irishman who fled to France with the Stuarts. Lavinia Greacen, a writer from Dublin, told the story of the military strategist who, as an officer in the Irish Brigade, helped win the Battle of Fontenoy for France in 1745.
But Lally was betrayed by Louis XV, who sent him to fight the English in India with only one third of the men, munitions and money he needed.
Lally fought hard but inevitably lost, for which he was imprisoned in the Bastille, then beheaded with an axe. Nor was France kind to the Irish officers who fought on her behalf in the American war of independence. At least three generals of Irish origin were guillotined in the Revolution.
THEOBALD WOLFE TONE is the most emblematic figure in four centries of Franco-Irish military cooperation. Dr Sylvie Kleinman of TCD recounted the last two years of Tone's life, when he travelled from America to France as the self-described "minister plenipotentiary planning a revolution". In an archive box at Vincennes, she discovered the Proclamation to the Irish People that Tone planned to distribute on landing in Ireland. "I know his handwriting so well," she said. "It was in the 2005 heatwave. I was sitting there, holding it in my hands, and I was worried my hands were sweating." Dr Kleinman called Tone "the project manager, public relations and information services for the French invasion of Ireland".
Tone had always wanted to be a soldier, and when he received his French officer's commission in August 1796, he wrote in his diary: "Put on my regimentals for the first time; as pleased as a little boy in his first breeches . . . Walked around Paris to show myself! Citizen Wolfe Tone, chef de brigade in the service of the republic." Tone was captured by the British near Lough Swilly, Co Donegal, during the second French expedition to Ireland in 1798. At his court martial in Dublin, he wore full French ceremonial uniform and pleaded guilty to treason. Rather than face the indignity of death by hanging, he slit his throat in his prison cell.
At the end of the 18th century, as recounted by Prof Hugh Gough of UCD, the revolutionary Directory and the United Irishmen rivalled one another for sheer hatred of the British. "The truth is I hate the very name of England; I hated her before my exile; I hate her since, and I will hate her always!" Wolfe Tone wrote. The French revolutionary deputy Barère, speaking for the Committee of Public Safety, sounded similar: "National hatred must sound forth. Young French republicans must suck hatred of the name of Englishman from their mother's milk. The English are a people foreign to Europe, foreign to humanity. They must disappear."
Nicholas Dunne-Lynch of the Military History Society of Ireland outlined the less than glorious 12-year existence of Napoleon's Irish Legion. From the moment it was created, the Legion was plagued by in-fighting and desertion. "Napoleon simply wanted to use the Irish to achieve his goals," said Dunne-Lynch. "Most of the Irish were republicans, and nothing gets up the nose of a dictator as much as a republican. He made some cynical decisions, such as putting them in malaria-infested lowlands to spare his own troops."
The disbandment of the Irish Legion in 1815 marked the end of Irish recruitment into the French army. Britain had lifted a ban on Irish soldiers in 1793, and mass recruitment into the British army had started. "The two best things that happened to the British army in the 19th century were the breech-loading rifle and the Irish infantryman," Dunne-Lynch quoted a British general.
After the failed landings in Ireland, the closure of Irish colleges across France and the dissolution of the Irish Legion, Franco-Irish relations reached a low point, said Janick Julienne of the University of Paris. But the friendship revived between 1860 and the 1880s, when Irish Fenians made Paris their headquarters. Napoleon III was angry with Britain for offering sanctuary to his opponents, so he used the Irish nationalists to get even. Rumours of a French invasion of Ireland abounded.
During the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian war, "the Irish said, 'The French are like us, because they are fighting an imperialist and Protestant nation'," Julienne explained. From Dublin, the Irish sent bandages and money. An Irish ambulance plied the battlefields. In Paris, the Irish College and Passionist Church were transformed into field hospitals.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Paris again toyed with the idea of "liberating" Ireland. France was stinging over a colonial snub at Fashoda, in Sudan, and the Dreyfus Affair raised anti-French sentiment in Britain to such a pitch that the French embassy in London had to be protected. With British troops engaged in the Boer Wars, said Dr Jérôme aan de Wiel of the University of Reims and UCC, French military missions to Ireland recommended Ballycotton Bay, Courtmacsherry Bay, Kinsale Harbour and Oyster Haven as appropriate landing sites for an invasion force. The Irish republicans Maud Gonne and Seán Mac Bride tried to establish an Irish brigade in Paris.
BUT WITH THE Entente Cordiale in 1904, France definitively lost interest in using Ireland against the British. Thereafter, Irish republicans looked to Germany for arms against the British. "The Franco-Irish military relationship went according to ups and downs in Anglo-French relations. If they were good, forget about Ireland. It was very cynical, but that's the way it was," said Dr aan de Wiel.
Yet tens of thousands of Irishmen fought alongside the French and British in the First World War, a camaraderie documented by Siobhán Pierce of the National Museum of Ireland. Though the Irish Free State was neutral in the Second World War, Irish men and women played a significant role in the Resistance.
Dr David Murphy of TCD has identified more than 20 Irish people in the records of the Bureau de la Résistance at the military archives in Vincennes. They include Sr Katherine Anne McCarthy, born in Cork in 1895. In 1940, she smuggled allied servicemen out of hospital once they'd recovered sufficiently to escape. She was betrayed to the Germans and deported to the women's death camp at Ravensbruck, which she somehow survived.
Samuel Beckett was the most famous Irish member of the Resistance. Under the codename "Samson", he typed up intelligence reports in his apartment so they could be photographed and sent to London. After a friend was betrayed in 1942, Beckett fled to Roussillon where he joined another Resistance group. The French awarded him both the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française.