Introduction : L’Irlande et la France à l’époque de la République atlantique : historiographie et nouvelles approches

“To the United States of France and Ireland”: revolutionary circulations between France and Ireland during the Age of the Atlantic Republic

“…In the prevalent historiography in English -not to mention the almost non-existent historiography in French for the last century -dealing with the links between revolutionary France and 'rebellionist' Ireland, the Defenders are presented as depending upon the United Irishmen to receive the revolutionary dynamics that France then embodied. 2 The discontentment of the Defenders was supposedly conservative, parochial ; and they have been pictured as clinging superstitiously to their religious Catholic identity and to cultural traditions that were the hallmarks of a vanished, ahistorical world. The Defenders were, in this sense, not a part of history.…”