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From Socialist Review, No. 186, May 1995, pp. 28–29.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Fenianism in mid Victorian Britain
John Newsinger
Pluto Press £6.95
The impact of the potato famine of 1845–48 on Irish society was profound.
Yet amidst all the hunger and desperation resistance began to grow, and the bitter memories of the awful devastation were to act as a spur to the rebirth of militant Irish Republicanism, and to one of its most important chapters: the growth of the Fenians.
The Fenian movement has not had a great press from historians.
Yet the movement was one of real influence, with support capable of mounting a significant challenge to British rule. Furthermore it was overwhelmingly a movement of the working class of the towns and sections of the rural poor.
At its height this ‘secret society’ had anywhere between 50,000 and 80,000 members, with strong support in the United States.
Its leaders, of whom the most significant was James Stephens, were mainly products of the lower middle classes, and were widely influenced by the great upsurge of revolutionary waves that swept Europe in the 1840s.
Nor were they rabidly anti-British. Indeed sections of the radical movements in Britain were drawn into their confidence – Stephens himself joined Marx’s First International.
When it came to drawing up the proclamation of the Republic the Fenians, under the influence of English radicals and unlike the 1916 leaders, did not include references to God or religion, but did call for solidarity from British workers.
Sadly their rising in 1867 was badly timed, tactically naive, and relatively easily crushed. Two years before the movement seems to have been much better placed, but a loss of nerve by Stephens, and a completely diversionary and calamitous attempt to invade Canada by the American wing of the movement, meant that by far the best opportunity to strike a blow against English rule was lost.
John Newsinger’s excellent little book outlines and analyses these events well, doing justice to the movement and its leaders, examining their strengths and weaknesses. It is an easy and enlightening read from a revolutionary socialist standpoint. The book is not helped by a rather grandiose claim on the back page blurb about ‘new and distinctive interpretation’ of the period.
This claim is based on two things: firstly Newsinger argues that Fenianism should not be seen as ‘part of an unbroken nationalist continuum’ and secondly he attacks Irish revisionist historians.
As to the first of these claims, Newsinger doesn’t, it seems to me, make clear exactly where this course takes us. He explains rightly that each major uprising against the British (1798, 1867, 1916–22, and 1968–95) arose out of quite specific and different events and conditions.
Nevertheless a continuum does exist. Each movement arose out of the failure to resolve the national question: Tone’s failed bourgeois revolution of 1798 meant that conditions were still in place for the horrors of the famine, and thus the birth of Fenianism.
The failure of the Fenians meant that the national question was still not resolved and would again produce the background to 1916. The ultimate failure to bring complete independence in 1921 created the sectarian Northern Ireland state.
Of course each new explosion involved different sections and classes of Irish society in different ways, just as each requires different methods and solutions. The bourgeois Republican ideals of Tone offer little by way of resolving the conflict in the North today, a conflict which, nevertheless, has its roots in the past. After rereading the passages closely I am still not clear as to whether Newsinger disputes this.
His demolition of the revisionist historians, however, is excellent and entertaining. He mocks their attempts to downplay and write off the Fenians, rightly seeing it as part of the ongoing attempt by sections of today’s Southern Irish intelligentsia to downplay the importance of physical force revolution in Irish history.
Yet this whole section lasts no more than three pages, and at the end of the book one couldn’t help feeling that the author was being cut short just as he was getting into his polemical stride. Nevertheless an enjoyable and informative read.