PAUL BRENNAN is a Parisian who was born in Co Roscommon. Professor Brennan, who has lived in the French capital since 1962, divides his time between the departments of Irish Studies at Caen University in Normandy, which he heads, and at the Paris III campus of the Sorbonne Nouvelle university.
In the 27 years since he was first appointed as a lecturer in the English department at the Sorbonne, he has been one of the main movers behind the rapid growth of Irish studies at French universities.
There are now four departments of Irish studies in France the others are at Lille in the north and in the Breton capital, Rennes. The department at Lille was started in the early 1970s by the late Patrick Rafroidi, an Irish literature specialist who was a grandson of Alfred O'Rahilly, president of UCC in the 1930s.
The interest in Rennes goes back furthest: as long ago as the late 1940s, Breton students were learning about Ireland and the Irish language - albeit often in its early and medieval forms - as part of their Celtic studies.
Impressed by O'Connell
Paul Brennan dates the first real popular French interest in Ireland back to the 1840s, when Daniel O'Connell was a major European figure, recognised throughout the continent as one of the founders of the Christian democratic tradition. Some 40 years later, national newspapers such as Le Figaro, and even large provincials like La Montagne in Clermont Ferrand, were giving extensive coverage to the Land War and the Home Rule movement.
The catalyst for the reawakening of interest in the modern period was the outbreak of the Northern Ireland conflict. From 1970 onwards, a small but growing group of students of English and American studies started to specialise in Irish subjects: either in literature or what the French call "civilisation" i.e. history, sociology, politics and even a little economics.
It was an uphill struggle to get Irish studies recognised by the university authorities, to set up research programmes and put out publications, says Professor Brennan. However he also pays tribute to levels of both institutional and governmental goodwill, which he attributes to "the national French weakness for Ireland".
The huge international interest in the Northern "troubles" in the early 1970s in particular, meant that attracting students was no problem. There was, understandably, a strong bias among most of them towards the Catholic, nationalist viewpoint.
The Irish government helped the process in a small way by providing half a dozen scholarships (including two at summer schools) every year to allow French students to continue their studies in Ireland. Professor Brennan is utterly dismayed that the Government has decided to discontinue these scholarships (thus saving £15-20,000 a year) at a time when the Imaginaire Irlandais cultural festival has seen an explosion of interest in things Irish.
He estimates that there are now around 10,000 French university students doing Irish studies as some part of their course, with around 100 doing graduate studies and 40 doing doctorates.
One of the liveliest departments, and the only one where a student can obtain a qualification in the Irish language, is at Rennes. Here the director of the Centre for Irish Studies is Richard Deutsch, formerly well known in Belfast for his coauthorship of a massive daily chronology of the Northern conflict between 1968 and 1974.
Extensive research
The research work being done is impressively broad. Books and theses currently being written or just completed include a soon to be published work (by Macmillan) on the moral order in the Republic between 1920 and 1994 by Chrystelle Hug, now a French cultural attache in Edinburgh; a book in French on the IRA by Agnes Maillot; and theses on John McGahern, France's favourite contemporary Irish novelist; John Banville; Irish women playwrights; the secularisation of Ireland; the Irish border; and The Irish Times.
At the same time there is a heavyweight biannual journal, Etudes Irlandaises, brought out jointly by the departments in Caen, Lille and Rennes, and an occasional book length collection of essays called Irlande Politique et Soeiale.
Last month and this month have seen major Irish studies conferences at Caen and the Irish College in Paris. In May the president of the University of Rennes II, Professor Jean Brihault, himself an Irish enthusiast and an expert on the early 19th century writer Lady Morgan, oversaw the ceremony in which his university conferred an honorary doctorate on the President, Mrs Robinson.
The Societe Francaise d'Etudes Irlandaises has even more ambitious plans. Under its auspices, academics interested in Ireland from France, Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands met in Paris at the end of June to lay the foundations of a European wide federation of centres of Irish studies. The Europeanisation of Ireland - or the "gaelicisation" of Europe is going from strength to strength.