France is a country with an epic history whose contribution to civilisation has been immense, writes Martin Mansergh.
From Charlemagne to Charles de Gaulle, it has often played a determining role in Europe's destiny. Even today, the European Union owes an immense debt to French political leadership in the EU from Jean Monnet to Jacques Delors and through successive presidents of the Fifth Republic.
This December is the bicentenary of Napoleon's coronation in Notre-Dame Cathedral in 1804 as Emperor of the French, visually captured in the vast tableau of Jacques-Louis David.
Pope Pius VII was present to provide prayers and a blessing, although Napoleon performed the coronation himself. Reconciliation with the Catholic Church through the Concordat was an important part of his policy to consolidate the achievements and heal the gaping wounds of the revolution, but also to provide the new imperial regime with a greater legitimacy vis-à-vis the threatened older dynasties of Europe. The end of the Holy Roman Empire after the defeat of Austerlitz and the abdication of Emperor Franz were as rich in symbolism as the territorial reorganisation of the German states and principalities.
Irish historians, churchmen and commentators have often been troubled by the apparent contradictions between French support for the United Irishmen and the hostility of the French revolution, at its height, towards the Catholic Church.
In the last decades of the ancien régime, Breton magistrates were to the fore in defying absolutism. Yet, by 1792, Breton society was in the forefront of resistance to the revolution, because of its insensitivity to rural society, to the distinct traditions of a province, once a duchy, which was only incorporated in the French monarchy in 1515, but above all because of its hostility to the Roman Church.
This hostility was based on the belief propagated by the popular Enlightenment that Christianity was characterised by fanaticism and superstition and kept peasant society in ignorance of the rights of man. No issue caused greater difficulty to Louis XVI in attempting to fulfil the role of constitutional monarch than the civic constitution of the clergy, which completely Gallicanised the Catholic Church in France.
The revolt of the Vendée and the subsequent chouannerie and their suppression were characterised by ferocious violence and bloodshed, with the émigrés landed by Pitt trying to foment civil war.
The pacifier of the Vendée was a young general, Lazare Hoche, son of a Versailles stable-hand who, although a republican, had been imprisoned during the Terror. He was one of many whose rapid rise exemplified the career open to talents, a lasting legacy of the revolution, admired by one later Irish bishop, JKL.
Hoche sought to disentangle religion from politics and to be more tolerant towards priests who were conscientious objectors. On the other hand, he ruthlessly suppressed at Quiberon in 1795, with the help of his lieutenant, Joseph Humbert, and with little quarter given, a chouan rising assisted by émigré troops just landed. This event, to which Maurice Hayes drew attention in the Independent last summer, sparked a fusillade of purple prose characteristically directed at republican pieties from Kevin Myers (The Irish Times, July 29th).
The intended 1796 expedition to Ireland was revenge for Britain's role in the Vendée. Indeed, it was sometimes referred to as the Irish Vendée, and it was intended, if successful, to cut Britain down to a second-rate power. The selfish strategic interests of both France and Britain were at play in the Ireland of the late 1790s. Nothing in the dealings of either Hoche or Humbert with Ireland suggested any improper behaviour towards their Irish allies or any desire to interfere with the beliefs and customs of the Irish peasantry. Both had great empathy with Irish aspirations to enjoy the same democratic national freedom as the new United States and republican France.
Particularly during the Consulate, which coincided with a period of peace, much was done to re-establish order and institutions, many of which have lasted to this day. Although casualties were nowhere near as high as in the world wars of the 20th century, nevertheless the human, political and economic price of Napoleonic glory was high. After 1815, French dominance was over.
Statues are often erected to point to a moral. The inscription on the statue in the Place Hoche in Versailles, after listing the exploits of the young general who died at 29 in 1797, including the expedition to the coast of Ireland, cited his genius and his humanity and states pointedly that he died too soon for France: "If he had lived, his ever-increasing glory would never have cost anything to the liberty of his country".
At the other end of the ideological spectrum, a statue to Louis XV was erected under the Restoration in the coronation city of Reims. It cited the battle of Fontenoy, underscoring the fact, as Chateaubriand noted, that the "weakest of our kings" had succeeded in defeating the British (with Irish help), something which had always eluded the "conqueror of the world". It quoted his words to his son, surveying the carnage of the battlefield: "See what a victory costs. The blood of our enemies is still the blood of men. The true glory is to spare it".
Eighteenth-century France had close relations with the Ottoman empire. It is ironic that certain French statesmen, whose republicanism demands the strictest separation of church and state and no reference to the Christian heritage in the European Constitution, want to keep Turkey out of the EU because it does not share France's Christian values. Worse still is the Christian Democrat opposition in Germany to Turkish accession, after all that Turkish guest workers have contributed to the German economy. Following recent upheavals in Ukraine, de Gaulle's vision of a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, peacefully united and not by conquest, begins to look credible again.