The ‘Foreign Affections’ of the United Irishmen. France and the French Revolution in Arthur O’Connor’s The Press

The events of the 1790s in Ireland were closely linked to the foreign policy of the French direc¬torate, to the extent that they have been described as «partners in revolution» [Elliott 1982]. This partnership has been described in some detail with regard to the lobbying of the French Directorate on the part of Irish revolutionaries such as Theobald Wolfe Tone. The extent to which the support¬ers of Irish independence looked to France in political and cultural matters can also be observed in the pages of a short-lived newspaper published in Dublin between September 1797 and March 1798 edited by the aristocratic republican Arthur O’Connor. This newspaper, The Press, published three times a week during this period, was a curious hybrid of literary journal, chronicler of events in Ireland and observer of the progress of the French Directorate and its armies. This article doc¬uments the material in this newspaper relating to France and deriving from French sources. The extent of the «foreign affections» of the United Irishmen emerges strongly, as does the reliance of the newspaper on texts in translation. The cosmopolitanism underlying the revolutionary move¬ments of the 1790s, it is suggested, entailed a pervasive activity of translation which has not yet been fully acknowledged.