The Irish-American press, the Franco-Prussian War and Irish-American identity in the postbellum United States, 1870–71

Abstract

This article explores the Irish-American press’s engagement with the Franco-Prussian War, the unification of Germany and the Paris Commune. The leading papers — the Irish-American, the Irish Citizen, The Pilot and the Irish World — commented extensively on the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath, and made use of widespread Irish-American sympathy for France in an attempt to influence the evolution of Irish-American ethnic immigrant identity after the American Civil War. The article assesses Irish-American editors’ opinions on the French and Prussian causes, and explores the parallels drawn with the Irish national cause. It then considers the Irish-American press's coverage of the American Republican party's pro-German stance after September 1870, which the editors assessed against the context of Reconstruction after 1865 and the attempts by Radical Republicans to achieve multi-racial citizenship in the United States. Finally, it explores Irish-American commentaries on the Paris Commune and the divisions between the editors that this international phenomenon fostered. It contributes to the study of the Irish-American experience of Reconstruction and the history of American engagement with international conflict after 1865.

In the summer of 1870, John Mitchel, the famed Irish nationalist, took up the French cause in the Franco-Prussian War. The war had developed out of a dispute over the succession to the throne of Spain. Following the deposition of the Spanish queen, Isabella, in 1868, the Spanish government identified Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a relative of the Hohenzollern dynasty that ruled Prussia, as their favoured claimant to the throne. The Prussian chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck, recognising that Spanish weakness could cause a conflict with France and provide the conditions to facilitate the unification of Germany under Prussian hegemony, tricked the French into declaring war in July 1870.¹ A few weeks later, in his newspaper, the Irish Citizen, Mitchel announced that ‘the Irish, both in Ireland and all over the world, have at once, and with great unanimity, expressed their good-will to France in this quarrel, and their wishes for the success of the Imperial armies’.² Mitchel shared this pro-French stance with all of the leading Irish-American newspaper editors in the postbellum United States. In the 1870s, the popular press was one of the central institutions that shaped the construction of Irish-American identity. The Catholic Church retained a powerful influence in the country, but the transformative impact of the civil war and the events of 1865‒70, when the Irish-American Fenian Brotherhood had gripped the attention of Irish-Americans throughout the United States, had by 1870 tipped the balance in favour of the popular press. Following the end of the American Civil War in 1865, Irish-American ethnicity, as a collective identification that bound Irish-born immigrants and second-generation immigrants, was in flux. The transformational impact of the war, which included the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of Irish soldiers, upended older certainties and left room for Irish-American ethnicity to mutate.³ Irish-American identity was shaped from multiple directions in the postbellum years — by the church, by local organisations (like the Ancient Order of Hibernians) and by political influences within the Democratic Party, the party that held sway over immigrant voters. However, as Thomas Brown has noted, ‘the principal instrument of instruction in Celticism and the dogmas of nationalism was the Irish-American press’.⁴ From July 1870 until the summer of 1871, the editors of the leading Irish-American newspapers in the postbellum northern United States made the Franco-Prussian War and its consequences into an essential component of the respective worldviews they hoped to foster among their readerships.

One of the pre-eminent ways in which the papers contributed to the development of Irish-American ethnic identity was through regular commentaries on international developments and comparisons between Irish politics and ‘the Irish cause’ against British rule with other causes across the globe. In 1870‒71, the Franco-Prussian War, German unification and the Paris Commune provided editors with the ideal opportunity to direct the worldviews and ethnic identities of their readership. Kathleen Conzen has shown that immigrant ethnic identity was a process ‘of construction and invention which incorporates, adapts and amplifies pre-existing communal solidarities, cultural attributes and historical memories’.⁵ Through constant international engagement, the editors of the Irish-American press contributed to the process by which Irish-Americans could, in Kevin Kenny's formulation, ‘retain, or develop, diasporic sensibilities’ that became ‘integral to their emerging, nationally specific ethnic identities’.⁶ The Franco-Prussian War provided an ideal reference point for the editors of the Irish-American press to shape Irishness in the United States.

The most widely circulated Irish-American newspapers in 1870–71 were published out of New York and Boston. The Pilot, published in Boston, was the most popular and most influential Irish-American newspaper by 1870. Owned and initially edited by Patrick Donahoe, a Boston-based publisher and Democratic Party notable, and later taken over by the escaped Fenian turned constitutional nationalist John Boyle O'Reilly, The Pilot had over 50,000 subscribers, and could claim a circulation of over 100,000 weekly readers. The Pilot had been founded in the 1830s, and had the support of the Boston Catholic diocese, but remained independent from the Church's control. In 1870, The Pilot's leading rival was the Irish-American, a nationalist weekly published out of New York, edited by Patrick Meehan, an Irish revolutionary nationalist. The latter dated back to 1849, and could claim close to 40,000 subscribers by 1870, with Meehan claiming in his editorials that more Irish-Americans read his paper than any other. Priced at five cents an issue, these newspapers were affordable and widely circulated; a six-month subscription to The Pilot cost $1.50.⁷ John Mitchel's Irish Citizen was the most recent iteration of that title. Mitchel, a Protestant Young Ireland revolutionary and exile to the United States after the 1848 Young Ireland Rising, had first published The Citizen in 1854 in New York, before moving to Tennessee and becoming a Confederate propagandist during the American Civil War. After the war, Mitchel was arrested and imprisoned, briefly, at Fort Monroe, Virginia. In 1867, he re-founded the Irish Citizen in New York. His history with the Confederacy impeded the success he had hoped for, and he had only achieved a circulation of 6,300 by 1870. Nonetheless, he had a core readership that stood by him despite his pro-Confederate history, and his articles on the Franco-Prussian War are worthy of consideration. ⁸

This case study of engagement with the Franco-Prussian War reveals the extent to which the editors of the Irish-American press urged their immigrant readers to view their own ethnic identity within an international context. It highlights the importance of thinking beyond the nation for scholars of immigrant ethnicity in the United States. As Sophie Cooper has noted, Irish-American ‘newspapers provided a medium through which transnational conversations took place as well as the construction and promotion of ethnic symbolism’.⁹ Irish migrants did not arrive as a blank canvas. In May 1871, the Pilot reminded them that they had brought with them ‘memories that link[ed] their thoughts, affections, aspirations, and hopes strongly to the land they leave behind’. Nonetheless, the editors intended to shape these memories into a functioning American-Irish identity, so that ‘remaining a distinct class, for Irish purposes, they are not less truly American for all American purposes.’¹⁰

In this context, the editors all made the effort to Celticise the Franco-Prussian conflict. The French became, in their framing, the symbol of Celtic, Catholic, progressive civilisation and they selectively interpreted the war as a conflict between Celtic progress and Protestant, Saxon/‘Teutonic’ militarism, exemplified by the Junker aristocrat Bismarck. A French triumph in the Franco Prussian War could, the editors hoped, offset the disappointments of the last few years and instil a sense of Celtic pride amongst Irish-American readers.¹¹ Though the French were not Celtic by any identifiable metric and though, apart from their common Catholicism, there was little that united the French with the Irish, this claimed Irish-American Franco-affinity was imposed onto the European circumstances to aid the editors’ attempts to direct their readers’ interest in the war.

I

The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870 came at an auspicious time for the editors of the Irish-American press in the north. The war provided the opportunity to attempt to offset a series of humiliations that Irish-Americans had experienced in the previous years. During the American Civil War, American soldiers had fought and died for the Union, and in 1865, hopes were high, exacerbated by hopeful articles in the Irish-American press, that the tide would soon turn, and that the inspiration from across the Atlantic would reach Ireland. For example, Meehan claimed in the Irish-American that an army of Irishmen stood ready ‘on both sides of the Atlantic’ for a ‘dash at John Bull’, half a million of the ‘finest fighting material under the sun, the same that has given to the Union so many heroic defenders’. If the United States would say the word, ‘the red flag of oppression and spoliation’ would fall ‘before the banner of Freedom’.¹² Instead, the next few years would disappoint this hope. In the spring and summer of 1866, the Irish-American nationalist society, the Fenian Brotherhood, attempted to launch daring raids into New Brunswick, Canada West, Canada East and Quebec. The Canadian raids were attempts to destabilise British rule in North America, divert British troops and provide the conditions for the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ireland to instigate a republican revolution.¹³ Instead, the raids had been dismal failures, and captured Fenians were left to stew in British prisons, treated as British subjects rather than American citizens.¹⁴

The failures of Fenianism had become a source of pain and embarrassment for Irish-Americans. Irish revolutionary nationalism was not the majority force that the Fenians had claimed in their propaganda since 1865 — most subjects in Ireland and in Canada had failed to rise for an independent Irish republic. Whilst many Irish-Americans sympathised with the principles and aspirations of the Fenian Brotherhood, only a minority had volunteered for active duty. Instead of securing an independent Ireland, the Fenian expeditions had only soured American opinion on the Irish cause. Not all the editors were ardent Fenians. Mitchel had rejected the brotherhood's offer to become the president, whilst Patrick Donahoe had largely avoided taking a stand on the movement so as to not antagonise the powerful conservative influences in the Boston diocese. Nonetheless, in response to the ease by which the Fenian raids had been defeated, the editors all recognised that it was imperative to dispel the negative associations with ‘Irishness’ — incompetence, factionalism and cultural backwardness — that had long been prevalent in American popular culture and had been seemingly corroborated by the Fenian embarrassment.

Therefore, when the first reports of war between France and Prussia reached them, the editors set out to convert the war into a proxy for the Irish cause. Taking the side of France, the editors all intended for their readers to see themselves in the French, in the hope that a French victory would convince their Irish-American readers that the Irish too, despite the evidence of the last years, still possessed the capacity eventually to fight successfully for their own liberty. According to the Irish Citizen, France was ‘the authentic representative of all that is free and really liberal In Europe’.¹⁵ France ‘is the realized ideal of Democracy: Prussia is the great European champion (next to England itself) of monarchical and oligarchical tyranny’.¹⁶ No true Irishman could support Prussia, the closest European power to England. The Irish-American announced that ‘Napoleon III fights for the pre-eminence of France in European affairs’, and ‘we have no hesitation in saying that — supported as he is by the whole French nation — our sympathies go with him’. In contrast, ‘there is nothing in accordance with constitutional government in the record of Prussia’.¹⁷ In this model, France served as an analogy for Ireland, Prussia for the British. Meehan informed his readers that the Irish nation should take inspiration from the examples of Napoleon and the French nation fighting against the representative forces of arbitrary rule and aristocratic governance.

From the mid nineteenth century onwards, Anglo-American theorists and political commentators had been busy constructing a narrative of Anglo-Saxon cultural supremacy, wherein native-born, Protestant, English-speaking Americans stood at the top of a cultural hierarchy and Catholic, Celtic immigrants from Ireland stood a rung below. Whilst never a hegemonic position, and one resisted by numerous American figures including Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party who welcomed Irish-born Catholics as equal members of a ‘white race’ throughout the 1850s and 1860s, notions that the United States was an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation were widespread across the United States.¹⁸ The Whig Party and the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings had been particularly committed this worldview, but even the Republican party had many within its ranks that accepted the notion of Celtic inferiority. However, as recent work by Cian McMahon has shown, Irish-Americans, facing the ‘supranational threat’ of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic sentiment, responded with a ‘supranational’ identity that ‘portrayed Irish Celts as an international community joined by blood, customs, and history’. The Irish-American community embraced the language of ‘Celts’ and ‘Anglo-Saxons’, but sought to turn this division to their advantage, by arguing that it was precisely their Celtic origin that made them suitable Americans. Irish-Americans ‘simultaneously picked up on the pluralist rhetoric of American republicanism: the United States was a racial mosaic to which the fiercely loyal Irish were perfectly fitted. The Irish Celts were, in sum, a global nation capable of expressing dual loyalty to both home and host.’¹⁹ This motif of Celtic virtue and Saxon/Teutonic militarism became central to how the Irish-American press approached the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.

The Irish-American editors used this language of Celts and Saxons to explain the significance of the European conflict to their readers. The American Irish had integrated into ‘an Anglophobic, anti-monarchist environment’ where they could ‘nurture ‘Celtic’ hatred of their ‘Saxon’ oppressors’.²⁰ In 1870, they turned this rhetoric towards the European war. The Irish-American editors informed their readers that they had a cultural affinity with the French, and that the British, the sworn enemies of any true Irishman, had an affinity with the Prussian German forces. In championing the French cause, Irish-American newspapers incorporated Irish identity into a larger transnational framework of Catholic, Celtic valour and centralised a conception of Irishness as defined by hostility to the British empire. In focusing on the symbolic proof that Celts could win, these Irish-American editors wanted their readerships to centralise the history of Ireland's struggle against Britain within their sense of identity.

Irish-Americans, as a solid voting bloc for the Democratic Party, had already developed a strained relationship with the German-American population, particularly the community of radical democrats who had fled the German lands after the failed revolutions of 1848–9 and had become a reliable bloc for the Republican Party.²¹ This divergence was exacerbated when German-Americans universally championed the Prussian cause.²² The Franco-Prussian War was a transformative international event for the German-American immigrant population in 1870, a ‘turning point in the political and social trajectory of the German element in America’.²³ Francis Lieber thanked god to ‘have lived to see this rising or resuscitation of Germany’, and claimed that German-Americans ‘will sing a still louder Te Deum when the German nation places the imperial crown on William's head’.²⁴ As Allison Clark Efford has shown, the Franco-Prussian War gripped the attention of German-Americans across the United States, and ‘gave rise to a more essentialist notion of Volk’ amongst them: ‘its members were believed to share more innate, perhaps biological, characteristics.’ They came to the conclusion that the German people were ‘naturally suited to self-rule and destined for greatness, while the degraded French were not’.²⁵ Whilst enthusiasm was ‘tempered by a healthy scepticism about conditions in the new Reich’, as Hans Trefousse has argued, the visible presence of German-American celebrations only hardened the Irish-American resolve for France.²⁶

The Francophile Irish-American editors, however, faced the problem that the majority of Americans sympathised with Prussia. American popular opinion was hostile to France in 1870, because of Protestant aversion to Louis Napoleon as a defender of papal temporal power, and because of the memory of French intervention in Mexico whilst the United States was distracted between 1861 and 1865. According to the New York Tribune, ‘the American press sympathizes with the Germans in their struggle against the French Emperor. Nearly all the leading journals of the country — those which control public opinion and express themselves according to their convictions — have taken ground against the pretensions of Napoleon.’²⁷

The Irish-American press's willingness to Celticise the conflict was partly influenced by Protestant American arguments that the conflict was a civilisational clash between Celtic Catholic backwardness and Teutonic, Saxon Protestantism. E. L. Godkin, the editor of The Nation, published a letter from the former Forty-Eighter Friedrich Kapp, who had become a staunch supporter of the idea of a united Germany under Prussian hegemony, a Nationalstaat. Kapp lauded the Prussians for fighting against ‘the infuriated hordes of duped Frenchmen’ in a ‘war between the Teutonic and Latin races’; according to Godkin, any true Anglo-Saxon American had to support the Teutonic cause.²⁸ For Charles Dana of The Sun, ‘the rising power of German civilization, while it excites the jealousy of the Gauls, and lures them into the present conflict, will thus have for its first effect to wipe out the last remnant of mediaeval institutions by extinguishing the temporal sovereignty of the Papacy.’²⁹ Furthermore, the American Protestant press of the northern states framed the war as a religious conflict. A ‘Native American’, writing to the New York Times, derided France as ‘a nation that upholds Popery’, saying ‘this Popish power, and any national Government that upholds it, is doomed by the word and spirit of prophecy’.³⁰ The Irish-American editors sought to use this to their advantage, endorsing the framework of Celtic and Teutonic conflict but inverting its logic, positioning the French as the superior side. As the representatives of a predominantly Catholic bloc, they committed to rejecting the Prussian cause and attempted to discredit the notion that the Prussians were fighting a holy war against Catholic despotism.

The Irish-American editors informed their readers that true Irishmen in the United States had a duty to support the French and to see their own cause reflected in the French cause. The editors cultivated the collective memory of the Franco-Irish relationship in earlier conflicts and stoked the legacy of Anglo-French rivalry. As the Irish-American explained in August 1870, the ‘Irish people have a quarrel of seven hundred years to fight out with England — now the underhand ally of Prussia – and it is only natural that the Irish people should wish success to France, which has always been their friend and the foe of England’.³¹ The Irish Citizen celebrated France as the nation that had ‘endeavoured to befriend and redeem our country more than once in former days’. France, for generations, ‘gave a hospitable welcome and an honorable career to myriads of Irish exiles; and Irish hands have carried the standards of France deepest into the ranks of all her enemies.’ These memories ‘make an international brotherhood’. Furthermore, without France, the United States ‘would never have been free nor a Republic’ and, thus, France had ‘secured a shelter and a home for the expatriated Irish’. In contrast, ‘it was mercenary bands of North Germans, called Hessians (but they were from all parts of North Germany), that were the most savage and brutal enemies of the American colonists’. Therefore, the Irish ‘have had nothing but generous friendship from France’ and ‘nothing but enmity and outrage from the brutal soldiery of North Germany’.³²

The symbolic and sentimental reasons for the Irish-American press's Francophilia operated in parallel to the editors’ aspirations that the war would degenerate into a general European conflict. A European war could then provide Ireland's opportunity for independence. According to The Pilot, Irishmen were ‘hungry for England's complication and the intense, universal craving is patent of the belief that England must be involved’. The Irish-American press, throughout the summer of 1870, fixated on ‘the question of peace or war for England as synonymous with life or death for Ireland’.³³ Patrick Donahoe and John Boyle O'Reilly were hopeful but sceptical proponents of the ‘Ireland's opportunity’ mantra in 1870. According to The Pilot, whilst ‘the highest military authorities declare that it will be of necessity a short struggle’, should it be protracted, ‘there is more than a probability that events arising from it will entangle England, in the difficulty’, as ‘neutrality will be a difficult game to play, with her immense commercial relations’.³⁴ Likewise, the Irish Citizen's perception of the Franco-Prussian war was underscored by the belief that the war would escalate into a larger conflict. According to Mitchel, the most important question, greater than ‘sympathies and old recollections’, was ‘which of these two belligerent Powers (supposing it at war with England) could render effective aid to Ireland.’ France was the ‘only one of the two which could do Ireland any good, by furnishing a base of operations and facilitating an invasion by the Irish Americans.’³⁵ The Citizen noted that whilst ‘the policy of England is to keep out of European complications generally’, her ‘ancient prestige, her solemn treaties, her commercial interests, even, require at her hands a certain degree of attention to the grand drama now enacted in Europe’.³⁶

Patrick Meehan of the Irish-American, a devoted Fenian and long-term opponent of British rule, took this optimism for Ireland's opportunity further than both The Pilot and Irish Citizen. For the Irish-American, if the war ‘should go on even for a brief period, it is difficult to see how it can continue otherwise than as a universal war’.³⁷ Meehan claimed that England was kept from declaring for Prussia only ‘by her fears and impotency; for she has at this moment only 60,000 regular troops available at home; and of these the greater part would be required to keep Ireland down the moment she struck the first blow’. However, ‘the moment approaches in which she must either join in the fray or eat the dirt of national humiliation’.³⁸ Meehan informed his readers that the Irish people ‘now have it in their power to wrest from England's necessities the recognition of their separate nationality and they should set shout it in earnest’, and ‘the crisis, in which our country will call on all her children for aid may be on us’.³⁹

The three leading Irish-American newspapers, at the onset of the Franco-Prussian War, were unanimous in their Francophilia and their optimism that the war would revert positively for Irishmen in Ireland and in the United States. Whilst they differed in their emphasis on the extent to which the war would directly benefit Ireland, the editors all agreed that the war had an inescapable symbolic value. French success could be mutated, in the editorials of the Irish-American press, into a judgement on the potency and legitimacy of the Irish cause. Their hopes for French victory were to be disappointed.

II

In September 1870, Americans received two shocking pieces of news from Europe in short succession. First, the Prussians had won a significant victory at Sedan, Louis Napoleon had been taken captive, and the prospect of a Prussian victory and the ultimate unification of Germany was essentially a fait accompli. Secondly, once the news of Sedan reached Paris, French citizens had declared a republic on 4 September. The Second Napoleonic Empire had fallen. The Prussians shifted to waging a war of conquest and the conflict suddenly, and unexpectedly, entered a new phase.⁴⁰

These events marked a turning point for the Irish-American press. The prospect of England being drawn into a general war was now off the table. Instead, the symbolic value of the conflict grew significantly for the Irish-American editors between September 1870 and March 1871. The Irish-American editors utilised Irish-American support for France to persuade their readers that Irish-Americans had now been vindicated for their earlier Francophilia; that Irish-Americans were now the pre-eminent champions of republicanism in the United States; that Irish-American identity was defined by this republican sentiment; and that the war had now unequivocally become a European manifestation of the conflict between Saxon oppression and Celtic freedom.

The Irish-American response to events in Europe after September 1870 must be situated in the domestic context of Reconstruction in the United States after 1865. Reconstruction was the political project of the Republican Party to rebuild the nation after the Confederate defeat in 1865, punish the rebels, consolidate the destruction of slavery in the United States by introducing civil rights, national citizenship and voting rights for African-Americans in the South, and impose a free labour economy.⁴¹ This was a process that the Irish-American press had followed intensively since 1865; almost every edition of every Irish-American newspaper had at least one detailed article on Reconstruction. And crucially, every commentary on Reconstruction in the Irish-American press was unanimously hostile to the Republican agenda.⁴²

The Pilot, Irish-American and Irish Citizen all impressed on their readers a worldview that defined Reconstruction as a tyranny comparable only to British rule in Ireland — Black civil rights, the occupation of the south and the Radical Republican control of Congress all received extensive criticism. The Irish-American press saw these developments as a degradation of the United States as the symbol of hope for the rest of the world, and a direct threat to Irish-American security in the United States.⁴³ For the editors, Reconstruction was a violation of the founding generation's plans for the United States. Meehan, Donahoe and Mitchel all agreed that the Republicans in Congress were attempting to enhance their own power at the expense of the conquered south. The editors’ hostility to Reconstruction was further underscored by a concerted hostility to racial equality. The Irish-American, Pilot and Irish Citizen all argued that multi-racial citizenship would mark the destruction of the United States and would threaten the integrity of ‘the Irish race’.⁴⁴ According to the Irish-American, with ‘negro equality, once really established’, with ‘Negroes in the House of Representatives’ and ‘Negro Governors’, the ‘next step would be the Negro in the homes of the white race — at their firesides, claiming their sisters and daughters in marriage’.⁴⁵

This hostility to Reconstruction intersected with, and reinforced, the papers’ attempts to use the Franco-Prussian war to influence the consolidation of Irish-American ethnic identity. According to the Irish-American papers, the war and the German invasion and exploitation of France after September 1870 directly paralleled the Reconstruction policies of the Republican Party. From the outbreak of the war, the Irish-American press attempted to incorporate the European conflict into their rejection of Reconstruction, by fixating on the marked preference of the Republican Party for Prussia over France. As the Irish-American editors celebrated the advent of French republicanism and claimed that their Francophilia proved the inherent Irish preference for republicanism over monarchy, they also claimed that the Republicans steered towards the Prussians because of their shared love of centralisation and subjugation. For the Irish-American press, the Republican party's taking ‘the side of Prussia, as against France, in the struggle now going on in Europe’, was further proof of their innate preference for militaristic, oppressive rule.⁴⁶

The Republican Party at first celebrated the foundation of the French Republic. The Republican convention in New York passed a resolution that hailed ‘with unmingled joy a new Republic in France’.⁴⁷ However, as John Gazley has pointed out,

when the new French government refused to cede territory or to pay an indemnity, and persisted in carrying on the war, and when the republican leaders in France gave vent to mock heroics and at the same time hesitated to call a constituent assembly, the leaders of the Republican party in the United States attacked the new government in France and again gave their unqualified support to the German cause.⁴⁸

E. L. Godkin's The Nation announced that France's decline, ‘terrible and full of suffering as the process is’, alongside ‘the rise of Germany and of German habits of thought into supremacy’, was ‘one of the greatest gains humanity has made’.⁴⁹ President Grant informed Elihu B. Washburne, the U.S. ambassador to France, that ‘every unreconstructed rebel sympathizes with France, without exception, while the loyal element is almost as universally the other way’.⁵⁰

From the declaration of the republic, The Pilot, Irish Citizen, and Irish-American each claimed that their unequivocal sympathy for France made Irish-Americans better Americans than their Republican foes who preferred a monarchy to the new and embattled European republic. From September onwards, Irish-American commentaries on the war were prefaced by the clarification that ‘the present struggle in Europe is between popular liberty in France and absolute monarchy in Germany’.⁵¹ Mitchel condemned how ‘most of our organs of opinion will assuredly glorify King William and the Junker policy’ because of the upcoming elections, and ‘the stupid, beery Teutonic mind is now only to be placated with palaver about its Fatherland’.⁵² For The Pilot, while ‘Imperial France had no claim on the blood and lives of Irishmen’, Irish-Americans had a duty to venerate the French Republic. Republicanism was ‘not a party but a brotherhood’.⁵³ In contrast to their Republican Party antagonists, the editors all claimed, Irish-Americans would remain committed to the virtuous cause of republicanism in France and the United States.

The declaration of the French Republic provided the editors of the Irish-American press with a golden opportunity to enhance their pre-existing attempts at cultivating Irish-American identity contrapuntally against the Republican Party and the Reconstruction agenda. The war's escalation allowed their papers to promote a worldview where their hostility to the Radicals could be framed as one component of their broader affinity with republican liberty, as represented by the newly emerged Third Republic. The connection the Irish-American press made between Reconstruction in the United States and European developments demonstrates the selective use of international engagement by the editors to present a particular worldview to their readers. The Republicans in Congress, whilst they did sympathise more with the German cause than the French, and made occasional statements to that effect, were far less invested in a German victory than the Irish-American press suggested. The domestic question of the restoration of stable government in the south was their true concern. The editors, anxious to prevent their readers from voting Republican or accepting Republican explanations, creatively connected European developments to their critique of Reconstruction, to advance their views on Irish-American ethnic identity.

III

It was at this moment that a new Irish-American editor arrived on the scene in New York, Patrick Ford.⁵⁴ Ford, who had immigrated to the United States from Galway as a child, founded the Irish World, an Irish nationalist newspaper in the autumn of 1870, seeking to ‘confront the pretensions of Anglo-Saxon ascendancy’, to challenge ‘a floating prejudice in this country, imported from England, that the Irish are an inferior race’ and to prove that the Irish were ‘not on this soil as intruders’.⁵⁵ Before founding the Irish World, Ford had worked for William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist and editor of the Boston anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator. Ford had then edited the Boston Tribune, an abolitionist newspaper, in 1861. Between 1866 and 1870, Ford had briefly edited the South Carolina Leader and the Charleston Gazette, two papers that supported the Reconstruction Amendments. Ford quickly became the most famous, and infamous, Irish-American celebrity. He endorsed the Irish nationalist dynamite campaigns against the British and promote John O'Donovan Rossa's ‘Skirmishing Fund’ in the Irish World, and became the voice of revolutionary nationalism for Irish-Americans.⁵⁶ Furthermore, in his paper, Ford gradually endorsed a more expansive vision of American citizenship and belonging than his predecessors had, one that included African-Americans. Over the course of his career, Ford became increasingly opposed to systematic mistreatment of African-Americans.⁵⁷

The Franco-Prussian War was essential to the formulation of the early political identity of Patrick Ford and the Irish World. In December 1870, Ford claimed that ‘the enthusiasm which Ireland manifests in her sympathy on behalf of France, in this hour of France's humiliation, finds perhaps no parallel in the records of history’.⁵⁸ According to Ford, ‘the French are of the same blood stuck as we: in religion, too, we are one: and the traditional enemy of both nationalities, England is the same’. However, ‘the cause of Ireland's sympathy is not to be looked for altogether in the gravitation of affinity existing between the two peoples’. For Ford, ‘the noble attitude which France has assumed as the champion of oppressed nationalities must touch a chord in every generous breast, and challenges the admiration of all the friends of liberty everywhere’.⁵⁹ He became a champion of the French cause and used France's plight to highlight the hypocrisy of the American government. Whereas most nations were ‘known to grow indifferent to the rights and callous to the miseries of their weaker neighbor’ (the case ‘even of the United States’), France was ‘the solitary and glorious exception’. France had given ‘freedom to America’, had ‘confronted and defied the despots of Europe combined’ and had ‘sent them scudding back to their slaves’.⁶⁰

As Ford was establishing the Irish World, John Boyle O'Reilly increasingly took full control of the editorship of The Pilot from Patrick Donahoe. Donahoe was a staunch Democrat and opponent of the Republican Party. O'Reilly, whilst still a supporter of the Democratic Party, was less invested in constantly criticising the Republicans for their Reconstruction agenda than his employer. After 1870, The Pilot's coverage of Reconstruction became less regular and less visceral. The founding of the Irish World, and the concurrent emergence of John Boyle O'Reilly as the spokesman for the Boston Irish in the final months of 1870, thus, marked a decisive turning point for the Irish-American press.

This was also a decisive moment for the Irish-American press's coverage of the European conflict. From October 1870 until February 1871, the French situation looked increasingly bleak with every month of continued bombardment. The Irish-American press shifted from predicting a French resurgence to gradually realising that France had little chance of success. In December, The Pilot announced that ‘it makes one despair of the future of France, to see the men at the head of her affairs so forgetful of all that is expected from them’.⁶¹ Ford lamented that three months earlier, ‘France was the arbiter of Europe, and held the place of the advance guard of civilisation: now she fights for bare life, and her capital is shut out from the world’. He claimed that no-one who ‘remembers her past glory, her military greatness, her services to the Holy See and Catholicity, what she has wrought for struggling nationalities, as well as her achievements in science and the arts — will refuse to drop a tear in this, her hour of black misfortune’.⁶²

In February, this phase of Irish-American engagement came to a sudden end. The Irish-American published the news that Paris had surrendered to the Prussian onslaught, which it recognised ‘will bring sorrow to many an Irish heart’. France, ‘the out-spring of noble ideas’, the ‘bulwark of freedom in the Old World, has fallen before the overwhelming force of feudalism, revived in the new Germanic Empire’. For the Irish-American, ‘black is the day that witnessed that overthrow of true manhood before the embodiment of tyrannical power’.⁶³ Mitchel agreed that ‘the surrender of Paris’ was a ‘grand and dismal event’. He announced to his readers that ‘Feudalism’, by which Mitchel meant the oppression of the people, ‘has its day of triumph, and leads captive for the present, in the very heart of Europe, a noble and high-spirited population bound to its chariot wheel’.⁶⁴

As France capitulated, Bismarck consolidated the German states into a federal empire with Prussia at its centre.⁶⁵ In February, President Grant announced that ‘the union of the States of Germany into a form of government similar in many respects to that of the American Union is an event that can not fail to touch deeply the sympathies of the people of the United States’.⁶⁶ For the New York Times, ‘that the great German Confederation should be practically complete, is unquestionably a matter on which the civilized world may well offer their congratulations.’⁶⁷ The New York Tribune celebrated ‘the restoration to Nationality and power of that reunited race which has ever been the greatest civilizing force of Europe’.⁶⁸

Thereafter, the French republic of Adolphe Thiers ceased to serve as a source of positive inspiration for the Irish-American press. Instead, the editors informed their readers that they should take heart that Irish-Americans had been the only community in the United States that supported the French when all others betrayed the cause of liberty: they were, therefore, the only pure republicans in the United States. John Mitchel insisted that whereas ‘all the bitterest enemies of France, especially our Yankee-Radical Papers, are anxiously and eagerly impatient to see France submit to any debasing terms to make peace’, the Irish-American newspapers had remained loyal to the French. The editors all continued to agree that ‘the struggle in Europe and in France by no means ceases and sinks with the fall of Paris’.⁶⁹

IV

In the early months of 1871, Americans learned that revolutionaries had seized control of Paris and had formed a revolutionary commune.⁷⁰ The Irish-American response to the commune took form in the context of a hostile information climate in the United States. As Philip Katz has argued, the vast majority of American commentators, both Democratic and Republican, condemned the commune for ‘turning its back on the salutary example of the United States’.⁷¹ According to the New York Times, the commune was a disaster for republicanism and democracy worldwide, as ‘for many years to come the crimes of the Parisian socialistic Democracy will be charged upon liberty’, and the righteous demands of the masses ‘will be confused with the wild ideas and savage crimes of the French Communists’.⁷²

The Pilot, Irish-American and Irish World all condemned the commune as a terrible aberration from the respectable new republic they had celebrated in the previous months. John Boyle O'Reilly informed his readers that ‘the enemies of France are the abettors of the interior war that is now rending the unhappy nation’. O'Reilly asked: ‘who that has sympathized with France during her late struggle has not felt more than sorrow — felt shame for the action of her people since the peace?’ It was ‘shameful and dishonoring at such a crisis’ to see ‘that the enemies of liberty, the enemies of religion and order, should succeed in their designs by alarming the credulous and fickle people, by shouting the ever-telling cry of the demagogue, “Your rights are in danger”’.⁷³ For the Irish-American, the ‘situation for unfortunate France appears to grow more deplorable with each proceeding day’. In Paris, ‘those scourges of humanity, the Red Republicans, now engaged in a fierce struggle amongst themselves, with no check upon their unbridled licence, are making the streets of the city, but one short year ago the centre of civilization, the best of the arts and sciences, reek with bloodshed and rapine’.⁷⁴ For these editors, the commune spelled disorder and ruin.

In a marked contrast to Patrick Ford's later career as a supporter of revolutionary principles, in 1871, he took a conservative position on international events. The commune's radicalism and political atheism horrified Ford. Ford reported that ‘nothing but the boldest front and the most rigid despotism — there is no use to mince the word — on the part of Thiers can save order in France’.⁷⁵ Ford complained that ‘a few bold, audacious, bad men, appealing to the ferocious instincts of a bloody mob, have wretched the reins of power from Old Thiers in Paris and hold a reign of terror over the people of that unfortunate city’.⁷⁶ The Irish World agreed with The Pilot that ‘the men who have so disturbed France’ were ‘hungry, corrupt minds whose ambition it is to ape the wolf Marat, or the abler Danton or Robespierre’.⁷⁷

John Mitchel alone took the side of the commune. Mitchel's Francophilia was undeniably greater than that of his contemporaries and he was not prepared to abandon the French republicans. Mitchel had an affinity for France; he had lived in Paris in the early years of the American Civil War, where he had spread pro-Confederate propaganda, and again in 1866 after his release from prison. Furthermore, he had supported the French Revolution of 1848 whilst he himself was attempting to instigate a revolution in Ireland.⁷⁸ In contrast, John Boyle O'Reilly, Patrick Meehan and Patrick Ford had never visited France, and their support for France during the previous year had been more opportunistic. Mitchel's primary purpose in supporting the French throughout 1870–71 remained the utility he could draw in disseminating his vision for Irish-American identity among his readers, and his hope that the British would somehow be drawn into the conflict, but this should not overshadow the personal affinity he continued to hold for France.

Mitchel wrote in the Irish Citizen that the object of the commune was ‘simply to get rid of the dubious and characterless Government now subsisting’, a government ‘which is stained and damned all over, by the mere fact of concluding a base peace, and to establish a real Republic in its place’.⁷⁹ For Mitchel, ‘Thiers and Favre are mere puppets set up by Bismarck, first to make a shameful peace, and next to abandon Alsace and Lorraine, and secure to Prussia the enormous money fine’.⁸⁰ Instead, the commune was the true representative of republicanism in France.

From April 1871, the Paris Commune became a source of polarisation for the Irish-American press. For the Irish-American, Pilot and Irish World, the commune was a bastardisation of true republicanism, which no true Irish-American could support. The commune allowed them to articulate a vision virtue, by arguing that Irish-Americans rejected the impure Parisian republicanism, and instead supported the republicanism of the American founders, which both the Parisians and the Radicals in Congress, would do well to emulate. The Irish-American preached that ‘if ever an ism has cursed humanity it is Red Republicanism’.⁸¹ According to the Irish-American, red republicanism (a phrase with particular resonance after 1848 among United States conservatives who feared the importation of radicalism from Europe) ‘thrives only amid bloodshed and riot; and, with the name of liberty to cloak its nefarious designs, it outrages the first principles of common decency, and in its blind fury, and with envenomed bate, invades the sacred precincts of religion’. The Irish-American despaired that ‘the men who profess this most blighting of political heresies are (temporarily) masters of the situation in Paris’.⁸² Only ‘with France purged of such firebrands’ and ‘with law and order once more holding sway, and true Republican principles guiding the councils of the nation’ would prosperity return to Paris.⁸³

In contrast, Mitchel argued that the commune represented true republicanism. Mitchel chastised how ‘the Press of the United States, almost without exception, is desperately hostile to all effort and aspirations for civil freedom and human rights in Europe’. It was ‘a sad mistake for Revolutionists in Ireland struggling against British despotism’, or for ‘French Republicans striving to make good the grand idea of 1789’ to count upon ‘any sort of sympathy in these United States.’ This was ‘never before so gracefully exemplified as in the sort of tone which our newspapers use in writing of the Republican struggle of the Parisian at the present moment against the Bismarck-Thiers Government’.⁸⁴

Mitchel's argument rested on the claim that the ‘enemies of France and many ignorant persons confound the Paris Commune with Socialism or Communism’. Instead, ‘the real meaning of the effort of the Parisians’ was merely to ‘establish a genuine Republic, which would be both a security to France and a menace to monarchical Europe’. Mitchel argued that the Versailles government was a tool of Bismarck, who was ‘goading forward his Versailles puppets and offering the aid of German forces to crush the Commune in blood’. Therefore, ‘the City of Paris, in its resistance to the Thiers Government at Versailles, is desperately in earnest; and the military situation at this moment is decidedly adverse to Versailles, that is to Bismarck, and the disgraceful peace which purported to abandon some of the fairest provinces of France’.⁸⁵

Mitchel dedicated extensive effort to discrediting the ‘phraseology of Versailles and the London despatches’ — which he saw the American press taking uncritically — that labelled the Parisians as communists. Instead, it was imperative for Mitchel to prove that the Parisians were true republicans. According to the Irish Citizen, criticisms of the commune were intended to ‘intimate that the genuine Republicans of Paris are Socialists, or enemies of all private property; for Socialists and Communists, in the current speech of all English-speaking people, are one and the same’. This was ‘a libel, carefully kept up, repeated and harped upon by the enemies of French Republicanism’, just as the English press stigmatised all Irish nationalists as ‘Fenians.’ The people of Paris were ‘fighting to overthrow the Versailles Government, or the Bismarck Government’.⁸⁶ Noting how ‘our morning papers are perfectly scandalized at the horrible principle and proceeding of the people of Paris, whom they choose to term “Communists”’, Mitchel claimed that ‘the “Commune” for which Paris is now heroically fighting is the ancient local organization, as opposed to centralized government; and the actual struggle at this moment in Paris (which must necessarily spread all over France) is the wholesome reaction against centralization’.⁸⁷ For Mitchel, this opposition to centralisation had self-evident parallels with the efforts of the south during Reconstruction.

In May, The Pilot, Irish World and Irish-American all condemned the revolutionaries further still, when they received news that the archbishop of Paris, George Darboy, had been detained — some reports even alleged that the communards had executed him. In doing so, their editors echoed pervasive condemnations from the mainstream press. The New York Herald declared that ‘of all the diabolical atrocities of the hideous Paris Commune, its purely devilish assassination of the Archbishop and sixty-nine priests of Paris appears to us the most shocking’.⁸⁸ In contrast, Mitchel argued that ‘certain priests in Paris were arrested’, but only because ‘the clergy in France being generally Orleanists, or monarchists in some form’ and were, therefore, ‘enemies to the Commune, which is the Republic pure and simple’. Mitchel used the analogy of Ireland to justify the commune: if Ireland was at war with England, and the cities were under the control of a revolutionary government, and ‘Mr. Gladstone's friends, Cardinal Cullen and Bishop Moriarty, were known to be keeping up traitorous correspondence with the enemy’, the Irish would ‘seize upon them and lock them up’.⁸⁹ The communards were simply doing what the Irish had yet to find the strength to do.

The polarisation of the Irish-American press over the commune was seen in May, when Patrick Ford directly challenged Mitchel, claiming that ‘a certain would-be-wise and learned fellow assures us that the Reds In Paris are not bad-fellows — but they-are-not socialists, nor even “Communist” in the bad sense of that term’, and that ‘they are good republicans, in fact the only true republicans in France, and that their design is a very laudable one, which is to overthrow what the learned editor calls the “Prussian” government of M. Thiers, and establish instead a genuine French government’.⁹⁰ For the editors of the anti-Commune Irish-American newspapers, it was essential that their readers rejected Mitchel's perspective: Irish-American identity had to be conditional on a respect for true republicanism, and the commune had to serve as a foil, an international opponent to match the internal foes in Congress. Ford condemned Mitchel, claiming that ‘the Reds have defied and contemned the will of the French people, legally expressed, and have usurped power not entrusted to them.’ The Parisians ‘insulted the emblem of French nationality, the glorious Tri-color, and in its stead have run up the Red flag’. Ford was a committed Catholic, and his political opinions were shaped by his faith. He, therefore, chastised the commune for insulting ‘the name of Christ’, and for declaring ‘open war against Christianity — the religion of the French nation’ when they ‘arrested bishops, priests, and religious women’, mocked and pillaged churches, and ‘committed other sacrileges and profanations too numerous to mention’.⁹¹

Mitchel took these criticisms as a vindication of his position, and proof of ‘the frightful ignorance (to say nothing of malice) which rampages through the columns of our public instructors’. For the Irish Citizen, ‘we cannot call to mind any cause, so gallantly supported as that of the Commune, which has been the object of calumny so brutal and unscrupulous as this’. Derided as radicals, the ‘real meaning of the Paris Commune was a protest against the disgraceful “Peace”’. For Mitchel, the Parisians ‘have made their fight — they have failed — but this is no reason why we should overwhelm and bury them under mountains of calumny and obloquy’.⁹² Ultimately, both sides of the debate recognised the value in tying their visions of Irish-American identity to the commune. For Mitchel, a true Irish-American should celebrate the commune, as the communards were the type of republicans all Irish-Americans should strive to emulate. In contrast, Mitchel's critics informed their readers that the communards were dangerous radicals that true American republicans had to shun.

In June, the Irish-American papers announced to their readers that the commune had fallen. Ford celebrated that ‘after eleven months of war and bloodshed, France has peace at last in the Franco-Prussian war, and in the Red revolt just suppressed’.⁹³ The Pilot celebrated that ‘all the blasphemy, the Godlessness, the ferocity of the priest-slayers, have failed them; the regiment of old Communists has been ineffective; the parades of the Freemasons have been fruitless; the battalion of Amazons has done nothing; the entire hopes of the rebels have been crushed, and the foundations of their Red Republic scattered to the winds’.⁹⁴

V

For the Irish-American editors, the Franco-Prussian War had served as a proxy for the Irish cause; the French were morphed into the Irish, the Prussians into the hated Anglo-Saxon British. In 1870, the editors had all hoped that the war would end with the proof they desperately wanted that a Catholic, Celtic people could fight and win. Instead, the war's outcome was a profound disappointment. After 1871, the German Kaiserreich quickly began a programme of anti-Catholic discrimination, the Kulturkampf, a state-sponsored attempt, pushed by Bismarck and by Prussian minister for education, Adalbert Falk, to subject the Catholic Church in the German Empire to state controls and break the power of the Catholic Zentrum party. Meanwhile, the French Third Republic failed to provide any assistance to the Irish people.⁹⁵ The Irish-American press continued to publish criticisms of Bismarck's policies, especially the Kulturkampf, and continued to use the German ‘Teutonic’ anti-Catholic persecutions as a foil for Irish-American identity throughout the 1870s. But for the rest of the 1870s, the Irish-American press largely turned away from drawing clear parallels or finding inspiration in continental Europe.

This should not diminish, however, the centrality of the Franco-Prussian War and the French cause for Irish-Americans in 1870 and 1871. By 1871, the Irish-American press no longer wrote about the situation in Europe with the same optimism as they had in 1870, when the prospect of a French victory was conceivable. The Franco-Prussian War, and all its possible consequences, galvanised the imagination of John Mitchel, Patrick Meehan, Patrick Donahoe and Patrick Ford, offering as it did an opportunity to promote and to vindicate a sustained vision of Irish-American virtue, belonging and worldliness. Furthermore, Reconstruction by the early 1870s had put the issues of American national identity, the acceptable extent of federal power and the limits of the executive branch front and centre for the editors of the Irish-American press. This had opened the space for the editors to argue that the Republican agenda threatened overwhelming political centralization, societal militarisation, and the dilution of American republicanism. The international spectre of Prussian militarism and the emergence of the French Republic from September 1870, enhanced this commitment. Ultimately, from July 1870 until the summer of 1871, the conflict between France and Prussia, first between the French Second Empire and the North German Confederation, and later between the French Republic and the German Empire, was a mainstay of the Irish-American press.⁹⁶