This chapter traces the origin of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland to that great destabilization in the Atlantic world provoked by Britain’s stunning victories in the Seven Years’ War, and the consequent acquisition of a worldwide Empire. These impacted on Ireland in that the quest for recruits to garrison this empire led directly to a repeal of many of the most stringent Penal Laws against Catholics, for Irish Protestants, a deeply unsettling development. In their turn, these triggered a continual political crisis in Ireland that was sharpened by the American crisis and the attendant whiff of British vulnerability. The French Revolution sent out mixed but powerful messages. Its Jacobin promise of liberty and equality found an eager audience in Ireland and elsewhere among those who were educated but marginalized. Among some Presbyterians the incredible events in France were viewed as a preliminary to the downfall of the Anti-Christ and as a prelude to the Second Coming. For many Irish Catholics, the message was also clear: the Jacobite moment had come and with it the real prospect of deliverance by a French invasion force. These mixed, sometimes contradictory strands led inexorably to armed rebellion in 1798.

This chapter explores the cultural significance of the optical telegraph in Ireland. Following the institution of the Chappe télégraphe in revolutionary France, this long-distance communications technology was widely innovated and subsequently adopted by numerous governments including, briefly, the British administration at Dublin Castle. The chapter begins by discussing the promotion, in the Belfast Northern Star, of the telegraph designed by the ‘improving’ Ascendancy landlord, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. It then considers the politics of telegraphic discourse in Ireland in the years leading up to the Rebellion of 1798, with a particular focus on the associations between telegraphy and the United Irish press. Finally, it suggests some points of affinity between Maria Edgeworth’s tale ‘The White Pigeon’ (1800) and her father’s telegraph. In its connection with competing ideas of Irish nationality, security, and surveillance, I argue, the telegraph offers valuable insights into the relations between literature and technology in late eighteenth-century Ireland.

The hopes of the French Revolution were most keenly felt by their Catholic coreligionists in Ireland. Using revolutionary universalism to surmount long-standing religious differences, the United Irishmen were founded in 1791 to create a new political network for substantive reforms. The network faced suppression after the 1793 Declaration of War, however, and reorganized into militant underground militia cells. Seeking aid from the French government for a militant uprising, the United Irish ultimately rose with disastrous results in 1798.