Napoleon’s other love affair - with the legend of Oisín
FROM meetings with Wolfe Tone ahead of the 1798 rebellion, to recounting the glory days to his Irish doctor while exiled – Napoleon has a movie’s worth of Irish connections that didn’t make it into Ridley Scott’s epic film released in cinemas this week.
The veteran director’s new film, simply called Napoleon and with Joaquin Phoenix in the title role, focuses mainly on the rise to power of one of history’s most famous leaders and his relationship with Empress Joséphine, played by Vanessa Kirby.
But author Stephen McGarry, who has written a non-fiction book and a novel about Irish regiments abroad during Napoleonic times, said Napoleon had a ‘soft spot’ for Ireland, partly thanks to his fascination with the ancient legends of Oisín.
‘He was a big, big fan of those and he used to bring [Scottish writer James Macpherson’s embellished books on the subject] into battle,’ Mr McGarry told the Irish Mail on Sunday.
Napoleon supported or contemplated support for multiple Irish rebellions, which Mr McGarry said at least partially came from the French Revolution’s principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.
‘They would have liked to be successful in Ireland and then use Ireland as a platform to invade Britain. If it fails, it’ll upset the British and it’ll take the pressure off us on the continent. So it was a bit of a diversionary manoeuvre as well.’
Napoleon met Wolfe Tone and other United Irishmen in 1796, agreeing to lend support to the disastrous Bantry Bay expedition in
‘He supported multiple Irish rebellions’
the same year, in which 15,000 French soldiers failed to make any impression on Irish soil owing to fierce weather conditions.
Tone’s next uprising two years later also received support from the French but again ended in disaster – the 35-year-old Tone was captured off Donegal and would die in prison weeks later.
Napoleon himself was not overly supportive of the 1798 effort and had already set out for Egypt – which he saw as a more viable way to destabilise Britain – at the time of the ill-fated rebellion.
Decades later, while exiled on St Helena, Napoleon told his Irishborn doctor and biographer Barry O’Meara that he hadn’t been impressed with the Irish revolutionaries, hence his lack of enthusiasm for the rebellion.
‘I think he was very impressed with Wolf Tone and with Arthur O’Connor,’ Mr McGarry said. ‘But some of these Irish revolutionaries, they were hot heads, there was a lot of infighting between themselves. They had to take an oath of allegiance to Napoleon and a lot of the Irishmen refused, saying it would compromise their allegiance to Ireland.’
Napoleon remained appreciative enough of Tone’s efforts to grant his widow Matilda a pension for life and a commission in the cavalry school in Paris for her son William.
After 1798, revolutionaries seeking refuge in France lobbied Irish generals in the French army to set up an Irish regiment – rubber stamped by Napoleon in 1803 as the Légion Irlandaise, to operate under Dublin-born general Bernard MacSheehy. ‘It was mostly Irishmen or sons of Irishmen,’ Mr McGarry explained.
‘The intention was to establish this Irish unit for a new anticipated invasion of Ireland. The rank and file were planned to swell the numbers upon landing in Ireland.’
The regiment wore green uniforms with yellow cuffs and collars and had a flag made up of four harp emblems on a green background.
‘The reason for that was so that when they landed in Ireland, they’d be seen as an army of liberation rather than of conquest, purposely made to be as Irish as possible.’
Napoleon used his influence to spare the life of Napper Tandy in 1802, by threatening to call off peace talks with England if the Irish revolutionary was hanged.
But the British naval victory over the invading French and Spanish at Trafalgar in 1805 put Ireland firmly on the backburner, and the regiment would only ever see military action on the continent.
‘Napoleon said at one point that the Irish legion gave more trouble than the whole rest of the French army together and he put an Italian commander in command,’ Mr McGarry said. ‘It wasn’t a very successful unit.’
The legion disbanded a few months after the Battle of Waterloo, which provides its own Irish connections to Napoleon – around 9,000 Irishmen fought for Britain in the battle, making up 40 combatants under the Duke of Wellington, himself a Dubliner.
‘It’s ironic that so many Irishmen contributed to his downfall,’ Mr McGarry said. ‘Irishmen who took the king’s shilling only to maintain British bondage back home in Ireland, scuppering Napoleon’s plans for the country’s liberation.’
There are other Irish connections to Napoleon: that his brother married Julia Clary, the daughter of a Franco-Irish silk merchant; that Napoleon was once engaged to her sister Desirée and that his niece Letitia married Irishman Thomas Wyse, whose grandson Andrew Bonaparte Wyse became the first Catholic permanent secretary in the Northern Ireland civil service in 1927.
Irish Brigades Abroad: From the Wild Geese to the Napoleonic Wars (2013) and Napoleon’s Blackguards (2019), both by Stephen McGarry.