We are now just five months from the beginning of the commemorations of the 1798 Risings; we should brace ourselves for a great festival of selective memory as this atrocity is commemorated while that atrocity is forgotten, and the entire tragic affair is woven into 20th-century simplicities. The truth is that we are probably no more able to put ourselves into the minds of the Unitedmen of Wexford and Wicklow, Antrim and Mayo than we are into the minds of the suicide car-bombers in Jerusalem.
And to refer to one side, as many recent letters have done, as patriots, with little doubt as to what their opponents must have been, merely imposes on their deeds very much our own political constructions and perceptions.
Terrible atrocitiesThe atrocities of the time were so terrible, especially in Wexford, Kildare and Carlow, that we must judge that the forces behind them were long in making. Contrary to virtually we all we have been hearing already, and all we are likely to hear next year, the atrocities were not all committed by one side. Nor were atrocities just local, or even Irish, or British. Just as in this century when Ireland was convulsed by violence through its length, our violence was part of a European convulsion, and the events here were only made possible, and the local hatreds and conflicts of interest exacerbated, by the influence of events in Europe.
The truth is the ruling classes of Europe were terrified of the Jacquerie, whose loyalty to their kings was uncertain. The French revolutionary forces had allies everywhere, especially among the intelligentsia and the disaffected sons of the gentry and the merchant classes. The ruling classes had a very good reason to be terrified of everything that the French revolution stood for.
And not just the ruling classes. Revolutionary fervour often enough became homicidal fervour, and the taste for a little blood developed into the appetite of Gargantua. Saint-Just's dictum that "the republic consists in the extermination of everything that is opposed to it" stood as the epitaph for hundreds of thousands of French people.
Blood was washing over much of Europe, the gibbet stood at hundreds of crossroads, and in the Vendee the revolutionaries embarked upon a programme of genocide. The revolutionaries devised vast barges with collapsible floors which, packed with peasants who would not forswear their loyalty to Rome, were taken out to the river estuary and the floors opened. The barges were brought ashore, refilled with people, and taken out to sea again.
Nobody knows how many died in this majestically planned exercise, but we can say with certainty that Zyklon B had a predecessor. It is called the Loire.
"No prisoners""There is no more Vendee," boasted Francois-Joseph Westermann, the prototype of a very 20th-century animal. "It has perished under our free sword. I have just buried it in the marshes and mud of Savenay. Following orders that you have given, I have crushed children under the feet of horses, massacred women who will engender no more brigands. I have no prisoners to reproach myself."
Events in the Vendee in the Year II (1794) were not entirely irrelevant to Ireland, for one of those who participated in the subjection of the Vendee was General Humbert, who four years later was to lead the invasion force at Killala where, it must be said, the Unitedmen behaved with exemplary regard for the lives and liberties of civilians. But this was not the case in the south-east of the country, where there were quite terrible atrocities on both sides; but we can be sure that that the suffering of only one side will be celebrated next year.
We know that the Rising in Wexford was almost certainly exacerbated by often atrocious means employed by the government to prevent it. The floggings, the pitch-capping, the house-burnings in the campaign against the Unitedmen did not constitute some normal form of government, but rather reflected the chronic insecurity of the ruling classes, both for local reasons and for international ones. After all, one third of the population of the Vendee had been done to death by revolutionaries.
It doesn't excuse what happened, but it does place it in context - a European-wide context in which the similarly dreadful deeds of 1916-1922 must also be placed. It is not coincidental that the Ireland of the 1790s and the Ireland of 1920 began to behave in very untypically Irish ways. Organised violence is a departure from the normative rules of most of Irish life; its eruption cannot be explained in simple terms of high-minded libertarians taking arms against tyranny.
Massacre at ScullabogueHigh-minded libertarianism did not cause Unitedmen to massacre the inhabitants of Munster mall at Naas, or to butcher almost all the garrison of 50 yeomen at Prosperous, burning the body of their captain Swayne in a tar-barrel, or to massacre the 100 men of the North Cork militia at Oulart, even as they held up their Catholic missals and pleaded for mercy. Nor does it explain the massacre of the 135 Protestants at Scullabogue, shot in groups of four or burnt alive in the church: I mention these unrepresentative massacres now because equal and opposite selectivity will probably be in evidence when 1798, the Year VI of the French Revolution, will be commemorated, and songs will be sung of Father Murphy at Boulavogue, but not a note will be murmured of the poor dead Protestants of Scullabogue, or the two-year old child who crawled out of the church before it was burnt, and was then piked to death nearby.