Revolutionaries and inmates: Frank McNally on the Irish and the storming of the Bastille

It was almost inevitable that, when the Bastille was stormed on July 14th, 1789, there should have been several Irishmen involved. That they were on both sides of the prison walls is more surprising.

With only seven (or by some counts six) inmates left in the infamous prison at the time it was attacked, the inclusion among them of a Dubliner defied the law of probability.

His name by then was Jacques Francois Xavier Whyte, aka Seigneur de Malleville. But he had been born in Ireland 60 years earlier, as James Francis Whyte.

Then, like many Catholics of his era, he left his native country for a career in the French army, flourishing for a time as a captain in Lally’s Irish Brigade, before suffering a mental breakdown in 1781.

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Incarcerated at the request of his own family, he must have had a very limited understanding of the events that, eight years later, sprang him from jail.

He thought he was Julius Caesar, or Saint Louis, or both, and being paraded shoulder-high through the streets by his liberators only encouraged his delusions of grandeur.

He is also said to have declared himself “le majeur de l’immensité” (“the master of immensity”).

But he was physically diminutive, with a three-foot beard and “the smile of an idiot”. More charitably, he was described as “a little feeble old man who exhibited an appearance of childishness and fatuity, tottering as he walked”.

Alas, his liberation from the world’s most famous prison proved to be little more than day release. After he robbed a sympathiser who had taken him in, he was recommitted, this time to the lunatic asylum at Charenton.

There, he could renew acquaintance with a more notorious graduate of the Bastille: the Marquis de Sade, who had been removed from the prison, naked, 10 days before the revolution, after attracting attention of crowds outside, shouting: “They’re killing prisoners here.”

Accounts of those who did the storming on 14th July 1789 may have been susceptible to self-aggrandisement of a saner kind than Whyte’s. But it is generally agreed that one Joseph Kavanagh (or sometimes Cavanagh), a shoemaker of Irish birth or heritage, played a leading part.

Kavanagh is reputed to have planned and led the assault, perhaps even delivering the words (if anyone did): “To the Bastille!”. In any case, a revolutionary pamphlet later trumpeted “Les exploits glorieux du célébre Cavanagh. Cause premiére de la liberté francaise”.

Less gloriously, perhaps, Kavanagh was also later implicated in the September massacres of 1792 when, amid fears of a foreign invasion, half the prison population of Paris were murdered in their cells.

The barbarity of those events shocked outsiders, although not Wolfe Tone, who thought that one aspect of the mob’s behaviour compared well with what his compatriots would have done in similar circumstances.

“An Irish mob would have plundered but not shed blood,” Tone wrote in his diaries; “A Parisian mob murders but respects property.” As to which was preferable, he added: “I lean to the Frenchman: more manly. Our mob [are] very shabby fellows.”

Another Irish exile, James Blackwell, - a “tall, slender and well-looking” Clareman - is said to have led a separate assault on the Bastille and, after a rapid rise in the revolutionary army, went on to join Tone’s ill-fated mission to Ireland.

Such men belied the judgement, recorded in a report by the French Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety, that “republicanism does not easily penetrate into Irish heads”.

But in the words of one latter-day commentator, Paris at the end of the 18th century had become “if not precisely a little Dublin, the de facto place of asylum for Irish patriots of every kind, one anchor of a great political bridge that united two very different countries against a common enemy.”

It should be no surprise, therefore, that so many played roles of one kind or another in the revolution, provision of religious services included. In the last category, the Bastille was again no exception. Prisoners who had required pastoral care there received it from a Fr Thomas MacMahon.

At the other end of pre-revolutionary social spectrum, the doomed King Louis XVI would comfort in a time of trouble from a priest at the city’s Irish college, Fr Henry Edgeworth, a relative of the novelist Maria. By then, the king too was a prisoner, condemned to death. Father Edgeworth first prepared him for his fate and later accompanied him to the scaffold, standing nearby as the blade fell.