THE BRITISH–IRISH UNION OF 1801

Abstract

FOR anyone so improbable as a historian of France to presume to address aconference about a landmark in British and Irish history requires someexplanation. It lies in a bizarre twist of professional history which left me,for the best part of twenty years, teaching late eighteenth-century Ireland asa special subject. My research interest, however, has always lain in the ancien régimein France.