Year of the French (Part 2) – Frank McNally on the colourful career of Fenian general Gustave Paul Cluseret

This year’s bicentenary of the death of General Humbert has been well marked, coinciding as it does with the 225th anniversary of 1798.

But a similar milestone passed unnoticed in June, when it was 200 years since the birth of an arguably even more remarkable French fighting man, who also had a short but intense involvement in Ireland’s struggles for freedom.

A rebel with many causes, Gustave Paul Cluseret (1823-1900) enjoyed an up-and-down military career, matching the trajectory of the magnificent moustache with which he was photographed as a general in the American Civil War. He was in between jobs when, soon after that, the Fenians invited him to lead their planned uprising of 1867.

Cluseret accepted on condition they supply him with 10,000 armed men, a demand later reduced to 5,000. Neither promise was delivered and the hoped-for mass insurrection never happened. In the meantime, unlike Humbert, Cluseret earned a death sentence for his part in the affair. As with all his misadventures, however, he survived.

Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

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In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

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Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

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Frank McNally on royal typos, Tennyson’s Tories, and the mystery of ‘Operation Sonnet’

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Born on June 13th, 1823, near Paris, the future general cut his fighting teeth in the revolutionary year of 1848. Alas for his later socialist leanings, he was on the wrong side there, helping suppress the June Days Uprising by “carrying 11 proletarian barricades”. It earned him the Legion of Honour. Not all his subsequent allies were impressed.

A year later, he was demoted from captain for backing an anti-Bonapartist demonstration, then had to flee France in 1851 after Louis-Napoléon’s coup. Reappointed to the army as a lieutenant in 1853, he went on to fight in Algeria and to be wounded at Sebastapol during the Crimean War.

But his increasingly colourful reputation had by then extended to misuse of army provisions. A tendency to hoard food earned him the designation “Captain Tin Can”. Another resignation followed.

He retained his bad habits during a short return to civilian life, getting himself sacked as an aristocrat’s estate manager after a flock of sheep went missing. When he again returned to the front line, this time across the Atlantic as a Union general in the Civil War, he was widely considered a soldier of fortune. Unpredictable behaviour, less than fluent English, and a perception that he couldn’t understand US institutions, earned enemies.

Forced to resign his commission eventually, he next resorted to journalism, co-founding a newspaper in New York. That was where and when the Fenians came calling.

Cluseret appointed two other civil war veterans as adjutant generals for his Irish campaign, laying plans for the seizure of strategic positions and the deployment of flying columns. Then, using US documents and with the unwitting cooperation of British officials, he sailed to England for a tour of military inspections, at such sites as Woolwich Arsenal and Aldershot Barracks.

His ideas included fomenting civil war in Britain, allying workers there with the cause of Ireland. Literally or metaphorically, his fingerprints were all over a declaration leaked to and published by the London Times in March 1867: “Republicans of the entire world, our cause is your cause. Our enemy is your enemy . . . As for you workmen of England, it is not only your hearts we wish but your arms. Remember the starvation and degradation brought to your firesides by the oppression of labour. Remember the past, look well to the future, and avenge yourselves by giving liberty to your children in the coming struggle for human freedom. Herewith we proclaim the Irish Republic.”

Thanks to Fenian disorganisation, spies, and the usual bad luck, the uprising was doomed before it began. A disillusioned Cluseret returned to France, where he became a leader in the Paris Commune, on the socialist side of the barricades this time. That too ended in recrimination.

He later took part in yet another foreign war – the Russo-Turkish one of 1877-8 – before settling into a political career as a socialist deputy, while gradually drifting rightwards. By the time of his death, he had developed an anti-Semitic streak, siding with the anti-Dreyfusards in the great French split of the period.

Cluseret was described variously as “tyrannical”, “vain”, “cantankerous”, with “a weakness for describing his colleagues as imbeciles”. But even his enemies agreed he was a good fighter and able organiser.

As for Ireland, his experiences had persuaded him that it would never win freedom through violence.

In an 1872 feature for a London magazine, he warned his former allies here they could expect no help from France, nor from the US. Their only hope was to “learn the true significance of SOLIDARITY” [his capitals] and make common cause with English labour.

“Until then it is in vain that, like a squirrel in a cage, thou turnest to and fro in thy insurrections without any chance of escape,” he wrote, sounding more like a preacher than a general.

On a note that Fr Mathew would have approved, he added: “Above all, it is thy love of strong drink that makes thee poor: in it thy poor head and thy country also are alike drowned.”