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The Mystery of the Missing Revolution: Belgium, Poland and Ireland in 1830

12 Feb 2024
Happening On 15/02/2024

Dr Róisín Healy, Department of History, University of Galway

School of History, UCC

Dr Róisín Healy, Department of History, University of Galway

Thursday 15 February 2024, 16:00 (4 PM)

The paper will be delivered via MS Teams. Please, contact Dr Jérôme aan de Wiel, School of History, UCC, for a Teams link or see link below: j.aandewiel@ucc.ie

Click here to join the meeting

Paper The year 1830 was a year of revolutions in Europe. The revolution that broke out in France in July was quickly followed by one in Belgium in August and then another in Poland in November. While the July Revolution in France was a protest against royal attacks on democracy, those in Belgium and Poland were attempts to secede from union and empire respectively. Yet although Ireland’s political and economic arrangements under the Act of Union were at least as punitive as those suffered by Belgium and Poland under the Treaty of Vienna, Irish nationalists did not rise. This paper asks why Irish nationalists were happy to praise revolution abroad but refrain from it at home. It uses the two contemporary models of continental revolution -- the spontaneous uprising in Belgium and the conspiracy in Poland – to explore the various possible reasons for Irish restraint and to highlight the peculiarities of Ireland’s relationship with Britain. Dr Róisín Healy is Senior Lecturer and Head of History at the University of Galway. Her recent research focuses on nations and empires in Europe in the long nineteenth century. She is the author of two monographs, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (2003) and Poland in the Irish Nationalist Imagination: Anticolonialism within Europe (2017) and the (co-)editor of five volumes, including The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe’s Modern Past (2014) and Small Nations and Colonial Peripheries in World War I (2016). She is currently working on a comparison of Prussian rule in Poland with British rule in Ireland from 1840 to 1918. In May 2023, she was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

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