The historiography of the Irish Revolution is experiencing a memory boom. This is due in part to the opening of two remarkable archives: the Bureau of Military History, made available to researchers in 2003 and more recently digitized; and the Military Service Pensions Collection, released in phases since 2014. While providing possibly the most comprehensive body of sources on any modern revolution, these oral and written statements, recorded by veterans long after the Irish Revolution of 1916–1923, throw up both methodological challenges and valuable opportunities for understanding how memory mediates history. The centenary of the Easter Rising has also prompted a wave of second- and third-generation family memoirs, as well as a growing body of research on the post-independence experiences of the wives and children of leading revolutionaries.
The focus of historians of the Irish Revolution has in addition broadened to encompass the exhilarating years of ferment described by Roy Foster as the “pre-revolution” (Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890–1923 [2014]) as well as the disappointments and frustrations of the postrevolutionary era. One theme that has emerged strongly from these shifting perspectives is the notion of the “lost revolution,” the process by which progressive impulses, including secularism, feminism, and socialism, were obscured as Catholic, socially conservative, and nationalistic representations of the revolution gained ground after independence. In Remembering the Revolution, a fascinating and perceptive study, Frances Flanagan engages with many of these concerns, while further widening the lens by considering them within a broader European context.
The most original aspect of this beautifully written study is Flanagan's close focus on writings on the Irish revolution published during the 1920s and 1930s, and her ability to situate these narratives within a finely nuanced set of biographical, political, intellectual, and transnational contexts. Flanagan structures the book around studies of fictional and historical writings by four individuals: former Irish Volunteer leader Eimar O'Duffy; Fenian turned civil servant P. S. O'Hegarty; artist and theosophist George Russell; and the former St. Enda's boy and journalist Desmond Ryan. None of them were central to the revolution (only Ryan had fought in the Easter Rising) or even to the shaping of its historiography; they can be seen rather as representative of a wider body of intellectuals who lost out in different ways under independence. Flanagan carefully traces how they interpreted the revolution in later life and how and why their narratives changed over time. Her sophisticated, ambitious, and ultimately rewarding aim is to delineate “the complex arcs of disillusionment” they experienced and to map “the dense webs of influence, expectation, and allegiance they inhabited that stretched from Dublin to Moscow, childhood to adulthood, and through a variety of sacred narratives” (49).
Many fascinating themes emerge. The dominant historical narratives may be written by the winners but—as is also the case with memoirs from the more recent Northern Irish conflict—the losers often have more interesting things to say about the past. Beginning with the forlorn figure of an elderly Bulmer Hobson, once the great hope of revolutionary republicanism, standing outside the window of Hodges Figgis bookstore as he contemplates a display of publications marking the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of the Rising (to which he had not been invited), the book introduces a cast of revolutionary losers who had once expected to shape Ireland's future. Disappointment is a recurring motif, not least in the Irish Revolution's failure to deliver the long-awaited cultural, economic, and spiritual renaissance, but the motivations and aims of the conflict's first chroniclers ranged widely from resentment to reconciliation, as did the demands and expectations of their readerships.
The variety of strategies, including fictional representations, deployed by these historians to critique the conflict in an era when dissent was discouraged (or worse) is skillfully delineated. The complexity of their representations is also striking—even within individual accounts, condemnation of violence could sit alongside enthusiasm for militarism, admiration of heroic self-sacrifice with criticism of elitism, unflinching realism alongside exculpatory evasiveness, and Catholic sensibilities with secular ideals—defying attempts to categorize their interpretations as “nationalist” or “revisionist.” Drawing on a wide canvas, Flanagan explores parallels with post-war memorialization and culture in Europe, including intellectuals’ anxieties about modernity, materialism, degeneration, and a fragile civilization.
As with any book, other decisions could have been made here or there. It is not clear why each subject comes from the Treatyite political tradition; perhaps because their disillusionment surfaced earlier, and often seemed greater. Would closer consideration of the experiences of an anti-treaty intellectuals such as Ernie O'Malley, Frank O'Connor, and Seán Ó Faoláin (all of whom feature in Remembering the Revolution) have resulted in different perspectives? In these days of “manels,” the focus on four male writers prompts questions about gendered memory: how did the postrevolutionary experience of female intellectuals differ? To what extent are their concerns even retrievable from the traces of the overwhelmingly masculine intellectual networks so carefully reconstructed here? There is little direct engagement with memory studies theory, such as Marianne Hirsch's potentially suggestive work on “post-memory.” However, these are less criticisms than suggestions for other lines of research.
How does this book shape our understanding of the revolution? Foster's influential Vivid Faces has been criticized for failing to represent the experiences of the great mass of republican activists: the younger, less privileged, more rural, more Catholic and nationalistic wave of men and women radicalized by the Easter Rising who formed the ranks of the War of Independence era Irish Republican Army. But studies such as Flanagan's have much to tell us about the radical urban intellectuals who did so much to set the revolution in train. They illuminate the processes by which such figures made sense of their experiences of revolution, the gradual eclipse of the cosmopolitan impulses for which some of them had struggled, and their consequent alienation from aspects of independent Ireland. Flanagan's study also offers a striking reminder of the extent to which many of the concerns of the first “revisionist” historians to write about Ireland's revolution in the 1970s—particularly debates around the efficacy, morality and impact of violence (not least on the civilians on whom it was so often inflicted)—were quietly if resolutely articulated by many who lived through the revolution. Flanagan's ground-breaking study is essential reading for anyone interested in the historiography of the Irish Revolution, as well as the variety of ways in which that conflict's bitter legacy was negotiated by those for whom Irish history had taken a wrong turn after 1916.
