1
The Young Irelanders
WHILE HIS COUNTRYMEN wept at the news of his death, James Stephens absorbed the view from atop Ireland’s highest mountain. He might not have been in heaven yet, but the young rebel was closer to it than any man in Ireland.
Shot twice and left to die during a failed uprising against the British Crown, Stephens somehow escaped both death and the enemy that had occupied his beloved island for seven centuries. An outlaw in his own land, he hid from the authorities in the mist-shrouded Macgillycuddy’s Reeks, where he followed in the footsteps of Finn McCool, the mythical Celtic warrior who hunted deer with his five hundred Irish wolfhounds in these mountains. Now, in the summer of 1848, Stephens and his fellow Irish patriots were the prey, with the world’s foremost superpower in pursuit.
To throw the police off the chase, friends and family in the fugitive’s hometown of Kilkenny spread the erroneous news of his death. The Kilkenny Moderator ran an obituary for “poor James Stephens,” who “proved a martyr in the true sense of the word.” To further the ruse, the Irishman’s father staged a mock funeral. In the shadows of Kilkenny’s St. Canice’s Cathedral, which had been ransacked by the British forces of Oliver Cromwell two hundred years earlier, broad shoulders bore a coffin laden with stones. They laid the casket in the turf and erected a simple gravestone that bore the inscription “Here Lies James Stephens.”
The deceased, however, was very much alive as he traversed vast bogs, overgrown moors, and mountain streams swollen from summer downpours on a journey across the south of Ireland—one that he knew could conclude at the end of a noose. A stout man of average height, Stephens had fair skin and noticeably small hands and feet, which gave him an effeminate appearance. A voracious reader, he had few close acquaintances apart from his beloved books, perhaps because of his shifty appearance, thanks to an involuntary twitch in his left eye that caused him to wink constantly.
James Stephens, the founding member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, never wavered in his opposition to any invasion of Canada.
Covering as many as forty miles a day on raw, blistered feet, Stephens left behind a trail of blood drops from County Tipperary to County Kerry and the summit of Ireland’s tallest peak. Surely, he thought, the British combing the countryside for insurgents would not bother to look on the roof of Ireland. From the top of Carrauntoohil, Stephens gazed out at a wondrous panorama of glimmering lakes and rain-scoured mountains.
The beautiful facade, however, belied the rotting death that lurked below the surface of Ireland’s green sod. The same newspapers that had printed the rebel’s obituary also reported that the dreaded “potato disease” had returned for the fourth straight year. Potatoes that had appeared perfectly healthy just weeks earlier now bled a putrid red-brown mucus. A closer inspection of the scenery from Carrauntoohil’s summit revealed a horrific landscape of abandoned potato ridges, walking skeletons, and deserted homes.
Along his trek, Stephens had encountered families dressed in rags and farmers who locked their cows and sheep inside their hovels at night to save them from slaughter by desperate neighbors with empty stomachs. He witnessed his starving countrymen withering away and feared that the revolutionary spirit of the Irish might be wilting too.
For seven centuries, the luck of the Irish was nothing to be coveted. A geographic accident had placed them in the backyard of the most powerful empire in world history. Ever since the Englishman Nicholas Breakspear, who inherited the throne of Saint Peter to become Pope Adrian IV, purportedly granted his countryman King Henry II his divine blessing to invade the island in 1155, Ireland had been occupied—and abused—by its neighbor.
While English politicians watched the richest, most modern economy on earth flourish across the Irish Sea from the poor, starving potato people who spoke a foreign language and practiced an exotic religion, they wrestled with what they called the “Irish problem.” The problem with the Irish, of course, was that they weren’t English.
For nearly a millennium, the English sought to reshape the Irish in their own image and Anglicize what they saw as a savage land populated by people who lacked the intellect and initiative to govern themselves. Following the Reformation, Presbyterians from Scotland and Anglicans from England were transplanted to the north of Ireland. The 1690 defeat of the forces of King James II, the deposed Catholic monarch, at the Battle of the Boyne secured the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.
That wasn’t enough for the Crown, however. It inflicted extra vengeance upon the conquered by attempting to annihilate their Celtic culture. Under the Penal Laws that passed beginning in 1695, Irish Catholics could not openly worship their God. They could not vote or hold public office. They could not send their children to Catholic teachers—or employ Catholic teachers to come to them. They could not own firearms or hold military commissions. They could not own horses valued at more than £5. They could not purchase or inherit land from a Protestant. In fact, they could not inherit anything from a Protestant. They were permitted to own a knife—as long as it was chained to a table to be of no threat to the police.
The English also required inheritances of Catholic-owned land to be subdivided equally among sons, which resulted in Irish Catholic farmers clinging to progressively smaller and smaller parcels of land. An eldest son, however, could take full ownership of his father’s land by converting to the Anglican church. Even in death the Irish could not be free, because their colonial overlords prohibited priests from presiding over graveside services, forcing them to bless handfuls of dirt that they gave to mourners to sprinkle over the deceased.
While they were gradually dismantled during the eighteenth century, the last of the Penal Laws endured until 1829. By that point, Anglo-Irish landlords owned four-fifths of the island, which was ruled directly from London after the abolition of the Irish Parliament by the 1801 Act of Union.
Stubbornness ran deep in Ireland’s old clans, however. Try as the English might to exterminate the proud, ancient Celtic culture, the defiant Irish refused to conform. No matter how many laws were passed, there was one thing no government could take from the Irish—their will to resist.
In parishes across Ireland, hatred of the English was in the mother’s milk. Huddled around fireplaces, boys like Stephens listened to tales of great Irish rebels like Hugh O’Neill, Theobald Wolfe Tone, and Robert Emmet who dared to raise arms against the Crown. The heroes in the stories might not have liberated Ireland, but they achieved immortality by their willingness to resist and fight in the face of overwhelming odds.
For millions of poor Irishmen, the potato was the ultimate superfood. Laden with vitamins, minerals, protein, and carbohydrates, the nourishing tubers flourished in Ireland’s cool, moist soil. The Irish ate potatoes for every meal—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The average adult workingman in Ireland consumed a staggering fourteen pounds of potatoes, equivalent to three thousand calories, per day. The average adult Irishwoman a little over eleven pounds.
Because they required less space to grow than other crops, potatoes became ever more vital to survival as British policies continued to constrict farm sizes at the same time that the island’s population nearly doubled to over eight million people between 1800 and 1845.
In the first days of September 1845, farmers reported that the early potato harvest had never been better. Then, without warning, from County Donegal in the north to County Cork in the south, one-third of the island’s wonder crop suddenly failed. Black spots scorched potato plant leaves. Stalks withered. Bewildered farmers excavated potatoes pockmarked with lesions. Even those tubers that appeared healthy on the outside contained a putrid mush inside.
When the horror reappeared in 1846, the devastation was near total, with more than three-quarters of the crop lost. The potato blight exposed Ireland’s dangerous dependence on a single crop and sparked one of the worst famines in Western European history.
The harsh winter months of early 1847 presaged a year so ghastly that it would go down in history as “Black ’47.” Frantic farmers sprinkled holy water on their fields. Rats feasted on the corpses of the famished who died on the sides of roads as they wandered in search of food. Emaciated figures, tired of a diet of grass and seaweed, dug their frostbitten fingers into the rocky ledges above the crashing Atlantic as they scaled cliff sides to harvest seagull eggs.
The pestilence had arrived in Europe aboard vessels that departed American ports in 1843 carrying the microorganism Phytophthora infestans. After infecting the lowlands of the European continent, the deadly potato spores crossed the English Channel to the British Isles. Ireland’s damp conditions proved a superb breeding ground, and the island’s dependence on the potato greatly magnified its impact.
Through the duration of the Great Hunger, between 1845 and 1852, approximately two million people fled Ireland. They sailed to England, North America, and beyond. Another one million people perished from starvation and diseases such as typhus and dysentery. Jail populations in Ireland exploded as the starving broke the law just so they could dine on the guaranteed meals given to inmates. All of Ireland, however, had become a vile prison, and the truly desperate decided to escape.
In the months following the first appearance of the potato blight, the British prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, reacted quickly with relief measures that prevented mass starvation. Peel’s government established relief commissions, purchased significant amounts of American corn for controlled sale, and persuaded Parliament to repeal tariffs on imported grains. His actions, however, brought about the downfall of his government in June 1846, because merchants complained about government meddling in the marketplace.
Reluctant to interfere with the invisible hand guiding the free market, the ensuing government under Lord John Russell took a much different path toward Irish relief. It kept stores of corn shuttered. Vowing that “Irish property must support Irish poverty,” the government transferred full responsibility for funding workhouses and relief programs to Ireland’s property owners and tenants. The resulting spike in taxes further exacerbated the problem, because debt-ridden landlords forced out unproductive farmers, causing the eviction rate to soar nearly 1,000 percent between 1847 and 1851. Other landlords found it cheaper to ship tenants abroad than pay for their relief, which forced many of Ireland’s poor into exile.
The British government did feed the starving—as long as they worked for their sustenance. Through a new public works program, the hungry toiled for ten or more hours a day, often on useless tasks. The Irish hammered big rocks into smaller ones. They built roads connecting two points in the middle of nowhere. Projects were grueling and monotonous—intentionally so. Charles E. Trevelyan, the British civil servant in charge of relief measures, didn’t want Irish stomachs to become too full, lest they become dependent on government handouts. “Relief ought to be on the lowest scale necessary for subsistence,” he advised.
Like others in Britain, Trevelyan saw the Great Hunger as a long-sought divine opportunity to depopulate Ireland and transform it from a backward agrarian economy into a modern, dynamic one, like Britain itself. “The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson,” Trevelyan wrote. “That calamity must not be too much mitigated.” Who was he, a mere civil servant, to combat the will of God? The solution to the “Irish problem” had finally been delivered.
Many Irish Catholics believed the British were more concerned about the spread of moral deprivation and idleness than of hunger and disease. For seven centuries, the British had taken away Ireland’s land, its rights, and its independence. Now, as a final indignity, they took away Ireland’s food under armed guards at a time when it needed it most. Although far more food was imported into Ireland than was exported during the Great Hunger, it still galled the Irish that wheat, oats, barley, and other grains left its ports to England and other destinations.
Conditions worsened in 1848, and anger and frustration sprouted from Ireland’s barren fields. A microorganism might have caused the potato blight, but many Irish Catholics, tired of being second-class citizens in their own homeland, placed the blame for the disaster elsewhere.
As the Great Hunger continued to gnaw away at Ireland, support swelled for a movement of youthful, middle-class intellectuals that came to be known as Young Ireland. They embraced Celtic literature, history, and mythology and advocated for a revival of the Irish language. Their weekly newspaper, The Nation, published poems and ballads along with book reviews and articles. Young Ireland was not a sectarian movement but a union of both Protestants and Catholics. The Protestant intellectual Thomas Davis, the first editor of The Nation, was its most powerful voice before his untimely death of scarlet fever at the age of thirty in 1845.
While Young Ireland didn’t preach physical force, it also didn’t disavow its use. The collection of poets, journalists, and barristers believed in the power of words but knew that sometimes action was needed as well. That led to a break with the more moderate Repeal Association headed by Daniel O’Connell, the stalwart nationalist who preached nonviolent constitutional resistance. As nationalists watched Ireland’s people perish or flee in the wake of the British government’s feeble response to the Great Hunger, they grew more radicalized and increasingly viewed O’Connell’s preference to compromise with the British as capitulation.
While O’Connell—known as “the Liberator” for his successful campaign to repeal the last of the Penal Laws and gain the right of Catholics to sit in the British Parliament—advocated the eradication of the 1801 Act of Union and restoration of the Irish Parliament, Young Irelanders sought nothing less than a fully independent republic.
Few Young Irelanders were more militant toward the British than John Mitchel, the son of a Presbyterian minister. When Mitchel’s rhetoric grew too hot for The Nation, he started his own broadsheet, The United Irishman. It sizzled with accusations against the Crown, which he held directly responsible for the Great Hunger.
In his columns, Mitchel advocated a “holy war to sweep this island clear of the English name and nation.” He published directions for street warfare. He referred to Britain’s lord lieutenant as “Her Majesty’s Executioner-General and General Butcher of Ireland” and argued that food grown in Ireland should stay in Ireland.
After seeing famished children as he traveled between Dublin and Galway, he wrote, “I saw Trevelyan’s claw in the vitals of those children; his red tape would draw them to death; in his government laboratory he had prepared for them the typhus poison.”
The British were feeding three million people per day at the height of the Great Hunger, and it permitted hundreds of thousands of refugees to resettle inside Great Britain. Still, Mitchel’s accusations of genocide took root. The seven-hundred-year history of English rule had fueled Irish nationalism—at home and abroad with the diaspora—and would for decades to come.
In the first months of 1848, another contagion swept across Europe that eventually settled in Ireland. That February, the French overthrew King Louis Philippe in a relatively bloodless affair that led to the establishment of the Second Republic. The political earthquake sent shock waves across the Continent as liberals revolted against monarchies and absolutist governments in Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Prague, and Budapest.
The “springtime of the peoples” shook the British government and inspired members of Young Ireland to launch their own revolution. Their bitterness toward the British, always at a low simmer, finally bubbled over.
By May 1848, the British government had heard enough from Mitchel. It introduced a new crime—treason felony—just to lock him up. On July 22, the British Parliament suspended habeas corpus, allowing authorities to imprison rebels indefinitely. They raided The Nation and issued warrants for the arrest of Young Ireland’s leaders.
The rebels were determined to resist. Irish republicans weren’t going to starve like dogs. If they were going to die, it would be on the battlefield.
The sound of iron striking iron rang across the Irish countryside during the summer of 1848 as blacksmiths hammered out pikes on their anvils. By the light of the summertime moon, Stephens and his fellow rebels gathered on Moll Mackey’s Hill outside the medieval town of Kilkenny to perform military drills and practice formations. Few of the Irishmen owned rifles or muskets, so they armed themselves with improvised spears, pitchforks, and scythes they had grabbed from their barns.
On the evening of July 25, Stephens attended a Young Ireland meeting at Kilkenny’s town hall and became swept up by patriotic fervor. He heard that the British had suspended the right to bear arms in cities such as Dublin, Cork, and Kilkenny. Persuaded to lend his voice to the cause, Stephens delivered his maiden speech as a rebel. “Treasure your arms as you would the apples of your eyes, and bury them safely in the hope of a happy resurrection!”
After the meeting, Stephens heard a rumor that a detective had arrived in town with a warrant for the arrest of William Smith O’Brien, a Young Ireland founder who had fled to Kilkenny and its environs. The time for action had arrived. Stephens returned home, grabbed his dagger, and rushed out into the Irish night.
Accompanied by other rebels, Stephens found O’Brien the next morning in Cashel at the house of the Young Irelander Michael Doheny. A longtime member of the British House of Commons, the forty-four-year-old O’Brien had an atypical pedigree for an Irish revolutionary. Although descended from the medieval Irish high king Brian Boru, who defeated the Vikings at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, the Cambridge-educated, Protestant landlord looked, talked, and worshipped more like an Englishman than an Irishman. The patrician was a politician, not a soldier. Yet while other Young Irelanders urged him to delay any uprising until after the harvest, O’Brien wanted to wait no longer. He asked for volunteers, and Stephens stepped forward.
Even in battle, O’Brien adhered to a set of manners. He first targeted a police barracks in the County Tipperary village of Mullinahone. Stephens, who had been named an aide-de-camp, stormed through the door with O’Brien and another rebel, taking the six constables inside by surprise. The chief constable begged the rebels to return with a larger force because he and his fellow officers would lose their jobs if they surrendered to only three rebels. His appeal to O’Brien’s sense of decency worked. O’Brien ordered his men to leave and come back in fifteen minutes with more insurgents. Sure enough, as soon as the rebels departed, the policemen darted out a back door, never to return.
Two days later, Stephens took charge of thirty Young Irelanders in Killenaule when news arrived of an approaching cavalry. Clad in a white coat, Stephens cut a conspicuous figure as he ordered the construction of a makeshift barricade of turf carts and timber beams. As the cavalry galloped up to the barrier, Stephens pointed the rebels’ only rifle at the commanding officer of the dragoons. The captain insisted he didn’t have a warrant for O’Brien’s arrest and simply wanted to pass through.
Stephens ordered his men to hold, but they craved a fight. “General, in the name of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin, will you give the word?” one of them implored. “Steady,” whispered Stephens, who faced the decision of whether a gunshot would strike a blow for Ireland or lead to more deaths of his fellow citizens. He lowered his gun and allowed the authorities to pass through one at a time.
The villagers hailed Stephens as a hero for getting the troops to back down without firing a shot. “We want the little man in the white coat!” they shouted. “Fellow countrymen,” Stephens replied, “this is not the time for words but for deeds.”
The next day, Stephens crouched along the road to Ballingarry, where the rebels had erected another blockade. He watched as a forty-five-man unit of the Irish Constabulary, the British-controlled paramilitary police force, approached, then suddenly swerved at a fork in the road. Armed with pikes, pitchforks, and two dozen guns, the rebels ran in pursuit of the police, who took refuge inside a two-story gray stone farmhouse on a small crest.
To barricade the farmhouse’s entryways and windows, the police smashed doors and broke apart wooden furniture. Outside, eighty rebels surrounded the house and hurled rocks behind the protection of a five-foot garden wall. Stephens and Terence Bellew MacManus, a Liverpool shipping agent who packed up his green-and-gold uniform and abandoned his business when he heard of the planned uprising, took cover in the stables in the rear of the house. MacManus dragged hay bales to the back door with plans to set them ablaze, in order to smoke out the enemy, only to find that his ragtag insurgents lacked matches. Instead, MacManus fired his revolver into the hay, until a spark caused the bales to smolder.
O’Brien immediately ordered the fire doused, explaining that the house’s owner, the widow Margaret McCormack, had arrived in hysterics because five of her young children were trapped inside. The Young Ireland leader opted instead to tramp through the widow’s cabbage garden, approach the parlor window, and shake hands with the police through a firing gap in the barricade.
“We are all Irishmen, boys. I am Smith O’Brien, as good a soldier as any of you,” he said before demanding their guns. The police refused the order. As O’Brien backed away, a voice from the mob yelled, “Slash away, boys, and slaughter the whole of them!” The rebels fired rocks, and the police fired their guns. Although at a disadvantage in ammunition, the Young Ireland leader refused to call a retreat. “An O’Brien never turned his back on an enemy!” he declared. Displaying cooler heads, Stephens and MacManus forcibly removed their commander from the line of fire as bullets kicked up dirt all around them.
Young Ireland rebels including James Stephens exchange gunfire with policemen during the 1848 rebellion in what became derided as the Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch.
As the rebels scattered, Stephens spotted a mounted policeman on the scene. He forced the officer to dismount, swapped his nondescript hat for O’Brien’s flamboyant green-and-gold one, and told him to gallop away from danger.
Stephens directed the remaining rebels to hide on both sides of the road in order to ambush arriving police reinforcements. In the ensuing gunfire, Stephens watched two rebels drop dead next to him. He felt a searing pain in the fleshy part of his right thigh and another on his left hip. Stephens crumpled to the ground with two gunshot wounds, playing dead until the policemen continued their march.
Having survived what was sardonically called the Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch, Stephens recovered at a friend’s house. But with the authorities closing in, he went in search of another Young Irelander, a man who would become a brother in arms for the next twenty years.
Stephens had met John O’Mahony at a war council the night before the shoot-out at the Widow McCormack’s. With handsomely chiseled features and shaggy dark brown hair flowing toward his broad shoulders, the thirty-three-year-old O’Mahony was an athletic man and an excellent horseman. His admirers still told the tale of the time many years earlier when he wrestled a bull to the ground with his bare hands. He was descended from the chieftain of the O’Mahony clan, and the peasants in the mountainous region on the border of County Cork and County Tipperary still considered him “Chief of the Comeraghs.”
Following the example of his grandfather, father, and uncle who were local leaders of Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen in 1798, O’Mahony supported the Repeal Association and then Young Ireland after it broke apart. The Great Hunger had further hardened him against British rule. While O’Mahony subscribed to The Nation, like Stephens, he had not been active in Young Ireland until recent weeks. “I kept away from any public adhesion to the party,” O’Mahony recalled. “I wished to wait until the time for action had come.”
That time had now arrived. When Stephens limped to the door of his Ballyneale farmhouse, O’Mahony’s most immediate concern was getting him to safety. The pair spent the night in the house of one of O’Mahony’s plowmen before venturing to the cabin hideout of the Young Ireland compatriot Doheny. The three rebels ventured to greater safety in the more remote Comeragh Mountains, where most of the population was loyal to O’Mahony. There they would make a vow.
While Stephens, O’Mahony, and Doheny remained on the run, the Crown arrested O’Brien and other Young Irelanders. Their rebellion quickly petered out. In the midst of starvation, Ireland was simply too weak to rise up against the British. It would take years before the spirit of Ireland’s discouraged people could be rekindled, but the three fugitives pledged to devote their lives to the expulsion of the British from their land.
By August 13, with arrests continuing, O’Mahony determined it was no longer safe for Doheny and Stephens to remain in the mountains. The pair left O’Mahony and began a journey on foot across the south of Ireland as Stephens’s friends spread the erroneous news of his death. The rebels spent nights sleeping in haystacks, churchyards, and rude mountain cabins. They begged for food and a place to dry out their sodden clothes and warm themselves around a fire.
Although two decades separated them in age, Stephens and Doheny forged a bond on their trek. Stephens lifted the older man’s spirits by singing tunes as they hiked west from the Irish Sea in County Waterford to the Atlantic Ocean in County Kerry. Faced with the threat of execution, the two realized that their journey might be their last in Ireland, so they soaked in the beauty of the island, from the Lakes of Killarney to the peaks of Macgillycuddy’s Reeks.
Finding shelter in Kenmare with a sympathetic attorney after nearly a month battling storms, mosquitoes, and hunger, Stephens finally found a means to escape Ireland. He would disguise himself as a servant boy and accompany to London the lawyer’s sister-in-law, the popular poet Mary Downing, who signed her works as “Christabel.” (Stephens rejected a notion that he dress up as a maidservant, although Doheny wrote that “he was well fitted for such disguise, being extremely young and having very delicate features.”)
On September 12, Stephens ascended the plank to a waiting ship in Cork Harbor. He had cause to worry. His twitching left eye could quickly arouse suspicion. In addition, two weeks earlier, MacManus had been snatched off the deck of an American ship in Cobh just as he was ready to escape Ireland, leading to a conviction for high treason and banishment to Tasmania.
Assuming the identity of Mr. Thomas Cussens from Tralee, Stephens carried a little boy in his arms, looking as best he could like a doting father, although he couldn’t help but monitor the policemen eyeing every passenger boarding the vessel. “All the time that I appeared so much taken up with the child, my eye continued to watch the movements of these beasts of prey,” he wrote. Safely aboard the ship, he watched Ireland fade from view.
After traveling across England, Stephens arrived in Paris on the night of September 16. Paris became a home in exile for Stephens, who still suffered from his wounds and feared his foot might need amputation. He immersed himself in books and culture during his seven-year stay in France. He learned French and attended logic and metaphysics lectures at the Sorbonne. He wandered the galleries of the Louvre and the gardens of Versailles. He imbibed Kant and Descartes. He taught English and found work as a translator and journalist.
Several months following Stephens’s arrival, he was reunited with O’Mahony, who took refuge in Paris after leading an unsuccessful guerrilla campaign against police barracks and military posts in Tipperary, Waterford, and Kilkenny. In August 1849, O’Mahony and Stephens became roommates in a rickety boardinghouse on Rue Lacépède, a narrow, crooked street in the Latin Quarter. Inside their derelict room, two broken stools flanked the ends of a three-legged table, propped against a plaster wall covered with charcoal diagrams. They slept on straw woven into a rug. They lived in poverty, but they consumed the riches of knowledge evidenced by the books and piles of paper littering a corner of the apartment.
Following the political upheaval that engulfed Europe in 1848, the French capital teemed with revolutionary groups that, according to Stephens, offered him a useful education in plotting his next rebellion. “Once I resolved that armed insurrection was the only course for Ireland,” he recalled, “I commenced a particular study of continental secret societies.” Whether or not the Irishmen mounted the barricades to prevent the fall of the Second Republic in Louis-Napoleon’s 1851 coup d’état, they witnessed the activity as bullets flew.
For his portion, O’Mahony scratched out a living teaching Irish, Latin, Greek, and English and occasionally contributing to French newspapers. Four years of a Parisian exile, however, did nothing to banish the misery of the Great Hunger from his mind, and once Louis-Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor of France, Paris was no longer so hospitable to democrats and revolutionaries such as O’Mahony.
By the end of 1853, the Irishman wanted to shift his exile elsewhere. O’Mahony packed up his few belongings and set sail for the most Irish metropolis in the world outside Dublin.