Le texte : Ireland and the French revolution
From “A memorial to the French Government “dated February 1796 and included in The Autobiography
Among the innumerable blessings procured to mankind by the French Revolution, arose the circumstance which I am about to mention, and to which I do most earnestly entreat the particular attention of the French Government, as it is, in fact, the point on which the emancipation of Ireland may eventually turn.
The Dissenters are […] sincere and enlightened republicans […] At length, in the year 1790, the French Republicans produced a powerful revulsion in the minds of the most enlightened men amongst them. They saw that whilst they thought they where the masters of the Catholics, they were in fact, but their jailers, and that, instead of enjoying liberty in their own country, they served as but a garrison to kred it in subjection to England; […] Eager to emulate the glorious example of France, they saw at once that the only guide to liberty was justice, and that they neither deserved nor could obtain independence, whilst their Catholic brethren, as they then, for the first time, called them, remained in slavery and oppression. Impressed with these sentiments of liberality and wisdom, they sought out the leaders of the Catholics, whose cause and suffering were in a manner, forgotten. […] The leaders on both sides saw that they had but one common country, they had but one common interest; that while they were mutually contending and ready to sacrifice each other, England profited of their folly to enslave both, and that it was only by a cordial union and affectionate cooperation that they could assert their common liberty and establish the independence of Ireland. They therefore resisted and overcame every effort to disunite them, and in this manner has a spirit of union and regard succeeded to 250 years of civil discord- a revolution in the political morality of the nation of the most extreme importance, and from which under the powerful auspices of the French Republic, I hope and trust her independence and liberty will rise.
[…] The conduct of the English Government, though atrociously wicked, is by no means deficient in system and arrangement. They had begun by seizing almost the whole of the Chiefs of the people, and now, they are about to draw the sword in order to anticipate the possibility of assistance, and to reduce them to that state, that, if assistance should at length arrive, they may be unable to profit by it. In this last design, however, I am sure they will find themselves mistaken; the spirit is I think, too universally spread to be checked now, and the vengeance of the People, whenever the occasion presents itself, will only be the more terrible and sanguinary.
