Avant propos / Foreword: Writing the history of the revolutionary 1790s during the “Troubles”: historiographical and moral dilemmas

Until the publication in 1983 of Marianne Elliott’s Partners in Revolution: the United Irishmen and France 1793-1815 (Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1983), it is fair to say that historical writing on Ireland and France was rather slim. The major writers, l’Abbe Geoghegan in the eighteenth, and J.C. O’Callaghan, Mathew O’Conor and J.P. Lambert in the nineteenth century, did produce lengthy volumes but their researches were confined almost exclusively to the Irish soldiers who fought...