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The Year of the French (1979)

par Thomas Flanagan

Autres auteurs: Voir la section autres auteur(e)s.

Séries: Thomas Flanagan Trilogy (1)

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6901133,227 (4.01)1 / 64
In 1798, Irish patriots, committed to freeing their country from England, landed with a company of French troops in County Mayo, in westernmost Ireland. They were supposed to be an advance guard, followed by other French ships with the leader of the rebellion, Wolfe Tone. Briefly they triumphed, raising hopes among the impoverished local peasantry and gathering a group of supporters. But before long the insurgency collapsed in the face of a brutal English counterattack. Very few books succeed in registering the sudden terrible impact of historical events; Thomas Flanagan's is one. Subtly conceived, masterfully paced, with a wide and memorable cast of characters, The Year of the French brings to life peasants and landlords, Protestants and Catholics, along with old and abiding questions of secular and religious commitments, empire, occupation, and rebellion. It is quite simply a great historical novel. Named the most distinguished work of fiction in 1979 by the National Book Critics' Circle.… (plus d'informations)
  1. 00
    Trinité T3 par Leon Uris (charlie68)
    charlie68: Same setting and general outlook.
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» Voir aussi les 64 mentions

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1798. Ireland. It all starts when a school teacher is asked to write a letter to a landlord. Arthur Vincent Broome offers a narrative of the events that followed. Malcolm Elliot writes a memoir. Sean MacKenna shares a diary. Characters from every angle share a voice in the telling. Thus begins a long and tumultuous history of Ireland, starting with the Rebellion of 1798. As with any war, the Rebellion is violent tide that sweeps up anyone in its path, be they Protestant, Catholic, Papist, landowner, landless, landlord, farmer, soldier, blacksmith, teacher, poet, peasant, gentry, French, English, Irish, man, woman, or child. Narratives come from all of the above and readers are cautioned to read carefully, to concentrate on the voices. Flanagan puts you into the plot so well that at any given moment you are either on the side of the Protestants or Catholics. Either the French or the English welcomed you into their camps. Year of the French describes war maneuvers as well as personal rifts between families, struggles in marriages and livelihoods. ( )
  SeriousGrace | Mar 29, 2023 |
During the tumult of the French Revolutionary Wars - before the Great Man himself transformed them into the Napoleonic Wars - the haphazard French attempts to aid Irish rebels in their independence are usually relegated to a footnote. After all, we know how the story ends, and the classically British mix of luck, skill, and sheer ruthlessness which ended those efforts condemned the Irish to over a century more of brutal colonial rule. But in Flanagan's hands this doomed effort to spread the flame of the Revolution to 1798 Ireland takes on a epochal significance. The French generals, British commanders, Catholic peasants, Protestant landlords, and more who populate the novel struggle with their own pieces of the conflict while never seeing quite the whole thing; it's an absorbing study of how warfare works on the ground as well as an effective way to shoe how different a cause seems on each side of the argument. You see the contradictions of French atheists liberating Catholic Irish from Protestant English, as well as the difficulty in replicating the formula of the self-liberation of the French in a country without its institutions and with a very different sense of itself, all while knowing that no matter how important the Irish struggle for self-determination felt to them, that even to their French allies they were a sideshow and a means to a broader end. It begins slowly, but by the end you get that rare sense of visiting a real living world that only the best historical fiction delivers. ( )
  aaronarnold | May 11, 2021 |
It was interesting to read this book alongside Mr. McCauley's History of England, Volume 3, recounting King William's invasion of Ireland a hundred years earlier, and realize how a hundred earlier it was Oliver Cromwell and before that Queen Elizabeth, the more things change the more they stay the same. The Troubles only ended recently in my lifetime. But this was a good book, told from multiple perspectives to give and in-depth account of this 'French Invasion' of Ireland. It is interesting to look on Google Earth and follow this invasion and how the Irish still honor the French General who made it happen. ( )
  charlie68 | Jan 8, 2021 |
It must be said immediately, that [The Year of the French] figures among one of the "hardest" emotional reads of my life--perhaps disproportionately because of my immersion in Irish music (and therefore culture, as the two are completely intertwined)--as I had a strong and relentless emotional reaction the entire time I was reading this novel, which does not read like a novel, but like a first-hand account of what happened, in a few weeks in August 1798, when the French, under General Humbert, landed in Killala, Mayo and made a short, vicious, confused, and ultimately doomed attempt to make their way to Dublin and Irish Independence. It might be possible to read this novel without being deeply affected, but really, I find that unlikely. Frankly, I can't imagine anyone who doesn't care about Ireland bothering to read it, that being the way of things. Be that as it may, Flanagan manages to show EVERY point of view with compassion (with maybe the exception of English people in England--supremely oblivious to their own prejudices), from the schoolmaster poet, to protestant and papist gentry (involved and not involved), to clergymen, and to the women (it must be said, they figure in a minor way, but not shallowly the few who do figure.) I have learned much about how music figures in Irish life, "No people on earth, I am persuaded, loves music so well, nor dance, nor oratory, though the music falls strangely upon my ears, and the eloquence is either in a language i cannot understand or else in an English stiff, bombastic, and ornate . . . More than once I have been at Mr. Treacy's when, at close of dinner, some travelling harper would be called in, blind as often as not, his fingernails kept long and the mysteries of his art hidden in their horny ridges. The music would come to us with the sadness of a lost world . . . " "Terrible people, musicians, wedded to their wood and catgut, caressing them like lovers." The schoolmaster/poet Owen McCarthy: "Moonlight glancing from stone or metal washed across his mind, faded. That was the worst of it with poems. The meaning was right there, in the image itself, and you had no idea what it meant, but the image knew. The image was wiser than the poet. It disclosed itself when it was good and ready, casually, totally." A protestant clergyman sits in his house, one last night before the English take back the town of, with the young man who was both his captor and guard, both knowing the young man will die the next day, in silence and friendship with no words that could possibly said between them. "Neither of us speaks. Men are shouting in the street outside. At last he raises his hand, then drops it again to the table. I have a vivid recollection of the scene, and yet it lacks significance, a random memory. But what if the mysterious truth is locked within such moments?"
This same clergyman concludes we do not learn from history, from experience yes, but each generation starts new. Books can convey something, but not enough. Alas. ***** ( )
3 voter sibylline | Oct 7, 2016 |
Talk about a book freighted with weird and erroneous expectations. I was nine when it was published, twelve when the momentous occasion of the Irish-made (or half-Irish-made) production locked the nation to their screens every Sunday night. It was a big deal. The book was ubiquitous. It seemed to be in every library, bookshop, house, waiting room and - seeing as my Dad was a mechanic - left under the back window of half the cars in Ireland. All I knew was that I wanted nothing to do with it. Irish history is REALLY DEPRESSING. Also bloody. No matter what happens everyone dies in the end. And not peacefully in their beds surrounded by loved ones. They're hanged. Shot. Bayoneted. Blown apart by cannon balls. Ridden down by big cavalryman waving terrifying sabres. There's also the odd burning at the stake, being flayed with whips and, big favourite, being drawn and quartered to go with the hanging. And that's to say nothing of the wretched thousands in a constant state of starvation just filling in the background.

The same, it seemed to me, was also true of most Irish literature, whether it be books, poems or plays. Anytime I watch The Importance Of Being Earnest I almost expect it to end with the cast dangling wittily from a highly fashionable yet slightly disreputable gallows. Is it any bloody wonder I preferred the cosier, warmer, gentler escapes of Stephen King and Clive flippin' Barker? Irish history made The Books Of Blood look like See Spot Run.

I also knew, because I was taught history in an Irish school, that we have a way of valorising our struggles, complaining about our oppression, sentimentalising all the death and torture, ennobling the suffering of the peasants, and bitterly blaming it all on the Brits. It seemed only safe to assume that Thomas Flanagan did the same. At best it would be a torrid pot-boiler, at worst it would be a trudging rehearsal of every grievance and injustice inflicted on the long-suffering Gaels, a tragic failure of yet another struggle for freedom.

So, yes, I avoided the book and the series.

Given this attitude, I have no idea why I actually picked the damn thing up and read it. I simply saw a copy and made the decision. It seemed removed enough from my school days and Sunday nights in 1982 running through the living room and stealing glances at the television, terrified lest I see a hanging or a keening widda or a barefoot orphan being bullied by a landlord. The time had finally come to see what all the fuss was about.

If there is a better literary historical novel dealing with the subject of Ireland then I desperately want to read it. Heck, if there are any out there only half as good I want to know about them. This is an astonishing, sweeping, vivid, impassioned portrait of a deeply dysfunctional world thrown into an ugly state of chaos and violence that is as pointless and fruitless as it is sudden and appalling. Written with incredible skill, mimicking the disparate Irish and English voices faultlessly, invoking both the beauty and grim drudgery of the landscape, examining the lives lived on all levels of society and justifying them to the reader without ever trying to apologise or to avoid implicating them for their actions, this is a panoramic novel of intellectual weight and cumulative emotional power. It tackles the ugly sectarian, social, political, economic and cultural divisions that renders conflict and hatred inevitable. The various sections of Irish society are utterly alien to each other and there is no bridging the gaps save through small simple acts of humanity that are dwarfed by the sheer weight of history.

Flanagan deftly creates a series of fully realised characters to serve as witnesses to the tragic events. A poet, a parson, a United Irishman, a Catholic landowner. George Moore, the latter, is one of the few not carried away by the forces unleashed when the French land. His brother, however, is swept along by the tide, and not even his cold aloofness can protect him from the consequences.

As expected, it all ends very very badly for an awful lot of people. Flanagan absolves nobody for their actions, but neither does he withhold judgment from the conditions that make them almost inevitable. The two great powers, Britain and France, regard Ireland as little more than a distraction and the bulk of Irish people as little more than savages ruled by a corrupt, incompetent, self-serving gentry. It's a horrible mess, but a mess it must remain for reasons economic, social, religious and, thanks to the charming theories of Rev Malthus, ideological. It's almost unbearable, and this is only ONE incident, relatively insignificant, in centuries of bloody history. Is it any wonder we hate to think about it? Is it any wonder that those who do think about it are driven nearly half-mad by it?

Strumpet City is getting a lot of attention at the moment, and I hope to read it myself in the next few weeks. For now, though, I think I'll set aside this brilliant, shining, monumental work and pick up something less appallingly upsetting. Something with the end of the world and zombies. That should cheer me up and restore my faith in humanity a little.

( )
2 voter Nigel_Quinlan | Oct 21, 2015 |
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In 1798, Irish patriots, committed to freeing their country from England, landed with a company of French troops in County Mayo, in westernmost Ireland. They were supposed to be an advance guard, followed by other French ships with the leader of the rebellion, Wolfe Tone. Briefly they triumphed, raising hopes among the impoverished local peasantry and gathering a group of supporters. But before long the insurgency collapsed in the face of a brutal English counterattack. Very few books succeed in registering the sudden terrible impact of historical events; Thomas Flanagan's is one. Subtly conceived, masterfully paced, with a wide and memorable cast of characters, The Year of the French brings to life peasants and landlords, Protestants and Catholics, along with old and abiding questions of secular and religious commitments, empire, occupation, and rebellion. It is quite simply a great historical novel. Named the most distinguished work of fiction in 1979 by the National Book Critics' Circle.

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