Irish History: Robert Emmet 1778-1803: As might be expected, the current Emmet bicentenary has generated a plethora of books.
Having read them, can we say that we have learned anything? For a start, historians now treat Emmet with a good deal more respect than in the revisionist 1980s, when Norman Vance sought to debunk his speech, and Roy Foster dismissed it as mere "attitudinising". We now have the lineaments of a much more substantial post-revisionist Emmet. Here is a young man who mingled in Paris with the Polish patriot Koscuisko, the American poet Joel Barlow, and submarine inventor Robert Fulton, the enlightened Madame De Staël, the scientist Vauguilin and the statesman Talleyrand. Here too is someone who enormously impacted on the European Romantics of this period - Coleridge, Southey, Shelley, Hazlitt, Byron, Berlioz.
The recent work repositions Emmet as a classic Enlightenment republican. His intellectual formation occurred during a renewed republican moment when republicanism was thrillingly migrating from the ancient world of Athens, Sparta and Rome. The American Revolution demonstrated that a republican experiment could achieve an eminently practical political form. Emmet saw himself as introducing into Ireland an inaugural republicanism whose core political philosophy is in fact what our constitution now endorses. In that sense, Emmet can seem very much our contemporary.
Both Geoghegan and especially O'Donnell emphasise the significance of the proclamation of The Provisional Government To the People of Ireland. The Government sought to suppress all 10,000 copies: only two copies are known to survive. His proclamation followed the precedents of the American and French Revolutions in proclaiming Ireland to be "an independent country", competent to take its place "among the nations" of the world. It clearly separated church and state through the abolition of tithes: "We fight that all of us may have our country and that done - each of us shall have our religion". The proclamation details how to manage the transition from one administration to another, without a descent into revenge, blood-letting or anarchy. Finally it sets out a democratic system of parliamentary representation weighted by population. This proclamation of "a free and independent republic in Ireland" should be much better known as a foundational document in the constitutional history of the country.
Despite the fiasco (all are agreed on this point) of the Rising itself, it had a disproportionate significance. It is not sufficiently emphasized in these books (which treat 1803 as the last gasp of the United Irishmen and 1798) that the Act of Union had taken place in the interim. The rebellion of 1798 was against an Irish parliament. That of 1803 was directed against a British administration in the brand new United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Emmet's rebellion against a British administration so soon after the passing of the Union sent shock waves reverberating through Dublin Castle and the London establishment. As long as the Act of Union was in place, the challenge to it so early in its life posed a pivotal question for both Irish nationalism and British unionism. That is why Emmet resonated across the 19th century: he became shorthand for the refusal to accept that the Union was a definitive, just or enduring settlement of the Irish political situation.
These books also focus on the celebrated 'Speech from the Dock' with the most penetrating account being provided by Geoghegan. Here again it is necessary to acknowledge the prescience of young Emmet: he understood that there were two types of death, the physical one of the body but also death by forgetting. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur aphorised that for the victims of political injustice to be forgotten is to die again. For Emmet, it was crucial that he, his United Irish colleagues and their republican project should not be thrown into the rubbish bin of history, and his speech was his defence against oblivion.
The speech itself also deserves more careful rhetorical analysis than it has hitherto received. As Seamus Deane has noted, a crucial feature is its use of the future perfect tense - the open-ended tense of nationalism. This carefully crafted piece of oratory was pitched not to its contemporary occasion, but to an unfolding future, and to those who would complete and perfect his republican vision. That appeal to the future sent Emmet cascading down the echo chamber of Irish history. These words resonate as words delivered from the living present not the dead past. That explains its enduring appeal (it survives in at least 70 versions). Emmet's oration is projected into a virtual future in which the republic will finally have achieved constitutional embodiment: only then can his epitaph be written.
The speech - and Emmet's life - awaits the verdict of history for vindication, to give it meaning and closure.
A discussion of the forms that Emmet's legacy takes forms the substantive core of Elliott's book, which quickly sketches his life as a backdrop to a treatment of what she calls the "legend" which reduced him to sound-bites from the speech, sight-bites from the iconic record. She applies to Emmet the depiction by Eavan Boland of the "typical trajectory of the nationalist hero: from action to image: from event to invention". For Elliott, the "real Emmet" has been buried under layers of legend. She establishes a binary opposition between history (real, objective) and memory (imagined, emotional, and subjective). As in the revisionist project, Irish nationalist history is then presented as a bad case of false memory syndrome - a collective neurosis induced by the toxic legends and myths that accrete around figures like Emmet. She deploys a consistently medical vocabulary, taking Irish nationalism into the revisionist detox clinic. The cluster of words she uses to describe nationalism are variations on this theme: to take a small sample, spawned, bitter, resentment, intoxicated, besotted, revenge, zealotry, mesmerisation, poisonous. We are still in the presence of a profoundly 1980s mindset here. This is the Irish historian as paint stripper, applying a blowtorch to peel off those nasty layers of lurid greens, bloody red, gaudy orange, to lay bare the underlying original pine, "the truth".
However attractive this superficially sounds, one might question whether this version of memory and history is not equally misleading. Elliot lays out her stall early, with a breezy declaration that the vast recent outpouring of material on memory can be ignored as "unhelpfully jargonistic". Her book might have benefited considerably from a less dismissive attitude. Indeed, her own work could be described as an attempt to historicise memory, but, blinkered by her binary, she does not adopt a sufficiently historical approach. For example, she skates around the fascinating debate on Emmet in the 1920s between Republicans and Free Staters, based on the vexed question of whether the time had come when Emmet's epitaph could be written. But the Free State was wary of allowing propaganda advantages to the republicans: they refused to allow the Emmet family return to Ireland. They only came back in the 1950s after declaration of the republic in 1948.
Similarly, Elliott is too incurious about the trajectory of Irish republicanism, and Emmet's place within it. Indeed most of her discussion revolves around Irish nationalism, and, whatever else Emmet was, he was not a nationalist. A more nuanced approach would emphasise how through the two centuries since 1803, Emmet's speech was used to calibrate the republican project in Ireland, to answer the question: how stands the republic now? The ghost of Emmet reappeared at moments of political redefinition. As long as the Union lasted, Emmet was a lively poltergeist in the political system. He surfaced in an almost physical form in 1848 when Robert Holmes, his brother-in-law, was the lawyer who defended the Young Irelander John Mitchel prior to his transportation to Australia. He re-emerged in the Fenian period in both its American and in its Irish phases: the Fenians themselves emerged out of the Emmet Monument Associations that sprang up in America in the 1850s. The 1903 Emmet centenary was a significant event just as the 1798 centenary had been. The Home Rule movement had become fractured and fractious over the Parnell issue, which poisonously divided them for a decade. The 1798 and 1803 commemorations allowed them to share a platform, however acrimoniously, again. The republican project accelerated after 1903 in the wake of the massive Emmet commemoration when 80,000 marched in the streets of Dublin. It is no surprise that Emmet was powerfully present in 1916. Patrick Pearse engaged with the Emmet legacy. He moved St Enda's up to the Hermitage in Rathfarnham in 1910 precisely because of its Emmet association: he knew that he was literally walking in the footsteps of Emmet and Sarah Curran. Pearse had this enormous sense of a legacy from the past that needed to be vindicated. The last pamphlet that Pearse wrote before 1916 is 'Ghosts', the most powerful of which is Emmet. When Pearse entered the GPO, it was not Cuchulain but Emmet who was at his shoulder.
Curiously none of these books even mentions the most significant literary treatment of Emmet - the 12th Peppercannister volume, St Catherine's Clock (1987), by that most important and neglected of Irish poets Thomas Kinsella. Here are the characteristic Kinsella themes: the intersection of public and private history, the negotiation between inheritance and identity, the tense balance between time and death, origins and endings. The striking cover shows the stylised hands of St Catherine's Clock, with a drop of red blood descending. The poem sequence covers three hours (of the Passion, and of Emmet's ordeal).
The poems are partially based on representations of Emmet in engravings. These include a simianised Emmet scene by Cruickshank, the canonical illustrator of Dickens; an iconic 1877 nationalist chromolithograph; and Malton's 1792 St Catherine's Church, floodlit in a golden Georgian glow.
Characteristically Kinsella's gaze hones in on the bent-over hag crossing Thomas Street, the cailleach figure who symbolizes Mother Ireland, Jonathan Swift, and his formidable grandmother who kept a shop in Bow Lane, adjacent to Thomas Street. Kinsella also meditates on the link between 1803 and 1916, with Pearse and Emmet appearing as both historical figures but also as mythological personages, winged creatures ascending out of the chrysalis/tomb. Kinsella explores a further temporal dimension. While a political martyr suffers a physical death at one precise moment, he simultaneously generates a living memory that keeps him perpetually alive, in suspended animation between history and memory, the stone in the living stream, to quote Yeats. For Kinsella and Yeats, Emmet and Pearse occupy this charged and complex space between death, martyrdom and suicide. The complexity and power of Kinsella's meditation on Emmet (the poet here overwhelms the historians) is only matched by the more oblique but equally profound apprehensions of Medbh MacGuckian in her brilliant poems on Emmet in her recent collection, Had I a Thousand Lives.
When all is read and done, where are we with Emmet? In many respects the best introduction to the topic is the special Emmet issue of History Ireland (Autumn 2003) with incisive articles by (amongst others) Rúan O'Donnell, Patrick Geoghegan, James Quinn, John Gray, Sylvie Kleinman and Ronan Kelly.
We might also suggest a "Greatest Hits" approach to the various books. Geoghegan is best on Emmet at Trinity and the Speech, Elliott has the most incisive chapter on Emmet and France, O'Donnell is by far the most authoritative on the United Irishmen, the military history and the details of the insurrection itself. O'Donnell's two companion volumes are archivally the richest, and also show an impressive command of the complex internal dynamics and politics of the United Irishmen. But they are so chock-full of detail as to be self-indulgent and very hard on the reader. These are books that would have benefited enormously from rigorous editing and massive pruning. Geoghegan has the most polished prose-style and his is the best written of these books. Elliott's is the most mature. Something for everyone in the Emmet audience.
- Professor Kevin Whelan is Michael Smurfit Director of the Keough-Notre Dame Centre, Dublin. He recently co-edited 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective, published by Four Courts Press
Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend, By Marianne Elliott. Profile Books, 288pp. €30
History Ireland: Special Robert Emmet issue, Autumn 2003
Wordwell, 60 pp. €5
Robert Emmet and the Rebellion of 1798
By Rúan O'Donnell
Irish Academic Press, 273 pp. €30
Robert Emmet and the Rising of 1803
By Rúan O'Donnell
Irish Academic Press, 353 pp. €30