Welcome aboard the World Express, our musical journey through Europe and beyond.
It may be a complicated question requiring the analysis of a knowledgeable historian of European History to answer what the general native Irish opinion of Napoleon Bonaparte was during the late 18th century but there is no doubt many Irish saw Napoleon as a champion for Irish freedom and longed for the Liberal Dictator to end their oppression under the English through invasion.
Between the end of the War of the First Coalition (1792 – 1797) and before the start of the War of the Second Coalition (1798-1802) during the French Revolutionary War (1792-1802), Ulster Scots Presbyterian political intellectuals, who were inspired by the Enlightenment ideas of the American and French revolutions, and Irish Catholics, both of whom faced severe discrimination under the laws of the Anglo-Irish ruling class of Ireland, joined a common cause and rebelled in the Great Uprising of 1798 that summer.
Bliain na bhFrancach--The Year of the French: A small French military force of 1,500 men landed in August 1798 in County Mayo in the far northwest of Ireland to assist the rebels but they were easily defeated by the British Army led by the English General Lord Charles Cornwallis and the Great Uprising of 1798 was violently crushed.
The tune Madame Bonaparte is named after Napoleon's first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, better know in history as the Empress Josephine. Josephine was born in Trois-Îlets, Martinique to a wealthy French colonial family which owned a sugar plantation. Josephine's mother's maternal grandfather, Anthony Brown, may have been Irish.
The Irish journalist Donal Hickey states that the tune of Madame Bonaparte was composed by the blind piper James Gandsey, known as the “the Killarney Minstrel,” who was the son of a Ross Castle soldier and a native Irishwoman from Killarney.
Gandsey contracted smallpox as an infant and as a result became blind. Back then, as even today, blind persons often have become musicians as a means to support themselves.
Irish-born Victorian journalist Samuel Carter Hall and his wife Anna Maria Hall, in their travelogue of Ireland published in 1841, stated of James Gandsey “that to hear him play is one of the richest and rarest treats of Killarney” and wrote that their evening spent watching him perform on the Irish uilleann (pronounced ill-en) pipes was “among the greatest treats of our lives.” *1
Join us again next time on the World Express!
Copyright 2020 Josiah Wales USA
1. Mr. S.C. Hall and Mrs. S.C. Hall, Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, &c. 3 vols. (London: How and Parsons, 1841), 1:195
