Seamus Deane
Chronology 2
FRANCE; IRELAND; CATHOLIC CHURCH c.1805-1905
As in Chronology 1, many events of importance are not included; those that are
included are there to highlight the narrative of the Course. Dates and names of artists
and intellectuals, mostly writers, in bold; titles in italic. Music scandalously
ignored—Berlioz, Chopin, Verdi, Debussy—in particular.
1801 Act of Union comes into effect.
Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, anomalous mix of the novel of manners and
what is to be later known as the historical novel. Crucial text for the understanding of
Irish fiction in the nineteenth century.
1806 Construction of Arc de Triomphe. Central Paris is reconstructed throughout the
century, at least until 1870, to be the centre of the world. French ‘gloire’a political
reality that should not be slighted.
Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl Costume-drama, but historically significant
because of the stage props of native sentiment, female sensibility—all very Maureen
O’Hara.
1807 Mme.de Staël, Corinne, ou l’Italie; first European novel to portray analogies
between gender and national culture, including Protestant and Catholic typologies
which remain important in her work and beyond, as far as Max Weber.
1808 Napoleon establishes a system of National Education [l’Université]. Opposition
to it, or, more precisely, opposition to its secular nature and organization, dominates
Montalembert’s career and is a leading cause for Liberal Catholicism.
Papal States declared annexed to French Empire; Pius VII excommunicates
Napoleon; Napoleon arrests Pius VII [that ‘raving lunatic’].
Thomas Moore, first of 8 volumes of Irish Melodies, most influential volumes of
poetry in Irish history. Also influential in Europe and in confirming the general
association between romantic and liberal causes, from which Greece, Poland and
Ireland profited.
Thomas Newenham, A View of the Natural, Political and Commercial
Circumstances of Ireland. First of the many fact-finding surveys after the Union.
Félicité de Lamennais, Réflexions sur l’état de l’Église pendant la dix-huitième
siècle et sur sa situation actuelle; Reflections on the state of the Church during the
18th Century and on its present condition. Copies seized by Bonapartist
police.Beginning of Lamennais’ long attack on 18th century spirit of irreligion, as
epitomised in Voltaire, and of his theory of persecution’s function in the history of the
Church. Ireland is an example of the vitality of spiritual life under the sword. The
anti-Voltairian animus remains embedded in Catholic discourse. ‘Il n’a pas vu ce qu’il
a fait, mais il a fait tout ce que nous voyons.’ ‘He did not see what he did, but he did
all that we see.’[Lamennais quoting Condorcet on Voltaire]
1810 Mme. de Staël, De l’Allemagne; On Germany; 10,000 copies destroyed by
Napoleon’s police. Introduces the Germany of Kant, Weimar, Hegel and the intense
feeling of Northern European melancholy and profundity to ‘rational’ France.
1812 Napoleon withdraws from Moscow. Breaks the Concordat. Imprisons Pius VII
at Fontainebleau.
Edward Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, statistical and political. (2 vols.)
‘Contains many important errors’. A pathbreaking survey.
Edgeworth, The Absentee, schematic, ‘improving’ discourse, very typical of early
post-Union sentiment.
1813 New Concordat of Fontainebleau. Pope submits to ‘Gallican’ articles that
subordinate papal to monarchical (imperial) power.
1814 Treaty of Paris; Napoleon abdicates; Louis XVIII, brother of executed Louis
XVI, becomes king; signs the Constitutional Charter (La Charte). Congress of Vienna
opens.
William Shaw Mason, Statistical Account or parochial survey of Ireland (vol.2
1816, 3 in 1819). With Wakefield, instance of the remeasurement and quantification
of Ireland as a new part of the United Kingdom. See also Richard Griffith’s
geological report on Irish coalfields in Leinster.
Benjamin Constant, De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation;On the spirit of
Conquest and Usurpation.[Defence of idea of individual liberty]
1815 Napoleon escapes from Elba; the Cent Jours (100 days); defeat at Waterloo on
June 18; abdicates again, king returns again, second Treaty of Paris.
O’Connell warns Vatican and Irish hierarchy against any Veto negotiation that would
make priests salaried servants of the State. This is for long afterwards cited and
admired in European liberal Catholic circles as an example of moral leadership in the
face of the kind of State interference that France especially had to submit to in the
Concordat of 1802.
July 12, Orange riots in Belfast. Still at it.
1816 Constant, Adolphe [sometimes called the first psychological novel]. Law
making divorce legal—first passed in 1792—is rescinded.
First famine of the century in Ireland, followed by typhus epidemic which kills 50,000
in three years.
Edgeworth, Ormond
Catholic Missions begin in France, starting in the provinces. These religious
revivals—mass, preaching, public prayer, processions, the erection of mission crosses
on the site of former executions, or acts of sacrilege—lasted six weeks at a time; they
were also acts of expiation , asking forgiveness for the murder of the king and queen,
the insults to the church. They ceased in 1831, after the February anti-clerical riots.
1817 Lamennais, De l’indifférence. Powerful attack on ‘atheistic’ principle of
tolerance, which gives equality to all beliefs on ground that none are true. Lamennais’
reputation among his peers henceforth equal of that of Bonald or of Joseph de
Maistre.
1819 Lamartine, Méditations poétiques; First notable volume of French romantic
poetry, now remembered only for the (awful) poem ‘Le lac’ (The Lake).
1821 Napoleon dies in exile at St.Helena (in southern Pacific); ashes returned to
France in 1840, placed in Les Invalides in 1861.
1823 O’Connell’s Catholic Association founded. Survives despite government
attempts to outlaw it.
1824 Louis XVIII dies, replaced by his brother Charles X.
Thomas Moore, Memoirs of Captain Rock ; Satiric analysis of English propaganda
about Irish ‘disturbances’ and the persecutory reality they challenged.
1825 Augustin Thierry, Histoire de la conquête de l’Anglettere par les
Normands…History of the Conquest of England by the Normans. First great narrative
history to absorb the techniques of the historical novel, (Walter Scott) and to give race
and class priority over political events. Ireland’s role important in this light.
John and Michael Banim, Tales of the O’Hara Family, affectionate view of Ireland
but shadowed by disruptive tragic history.
Thomas Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland. Irish
tourism, anthropological journeys, travel literature by natives a curious but fertile
genre that includes in later years Oscar Wilde’s father and, arguably, W. B. Yeats.
1827 Victor Hugo, Preface to Cromwell, one of the most important of romantic
manifestos, introducing one of the worst of romantic plays.
1828 Lamennais founds , along with monthly journal Mémorial Catholique, and in
imitation of the Irish Catholic Association, L’Association pour la défense de la
religion catholique, [Association for the Defence of the Catholic Religion]; the
weekly journal Le Correspondant is funded by it. Later the organisation becomes
l’Agence génerale. The mid-to-late 1820s see the formation of the Mennasian school.
1829 Catholic Emancipation (Roman Catholic Relief Act), O’Connell’s great
triumph, cancels sectarian basis of British Constitution, but not all of its provisions;
this is the greatest triumph of revitalised Catholicism in Europe. Endlessly celebrated
in Catholic circles; example of the ‘constitutional’ as against the ‘revolutionary’ path.
Gerald Griffin, The Collegians, based on a notorious murder, is basis for the opera
‘The Lily of Killarney’ more than 30 years later; a troubled work, too vexed to be a
parable, too summary to be a novel—a brilliant example of the Irish ‘tale’ that cannot
find an answering literary form.
Lammenais, Progrès de la révolution et de la guerre contre l’Église, The Progress of
the Revolution and of the War against the Church. This work marks the birth of
Liberal Catholicism; decisive in its characterisations of gallicanism on one side and
liberalism on the other. Between these two, Liberal Catholicism finds its place.
1830 French army takes Algiers on 5 July. Universal celebration (in Paris). Te deum,
Mass celebrated by archbishop of Paris. This is the ancien régime’s contribution to
the French Empire in Africa; military policy towards the Algerian civilian populace
is pitiless. Catholic missionaries come in to ‘christianize’ the country.
Premiere of Hugo’s play Hernani (25 February) ignites famous battle, won by
romantics against defenders of French classical traditions. Particular uproar when an
alexandrine, instead of being end-stopped, runs on into the next line.
‘Les Ordonnances’ issued on behalf of Charles X, abolishing freedom of press and, in
effect, trying to re-establish the ancien régime.
July 27-29, ‘Les trois glorieuses’, the July Revolution; Charles X flees.
Louis-Philippe d’Orléans becomes the ‘King of the French’ (not the French
King). July Monarchy, 1830-1848.
1830-31 The daily newspaper, L’Avenir, edited by Lamennais appears; becomes the
centre of the Liberal catholic movement. Lasts only one year, under pressure from the
French gallican episcopacy, royalists, the Vatican. Has a sustained debate and
exchange with the Saint-Simonian journal Le Globe, in which some of the positions
later adopted by Christian Socialists and Democrats begin to form. Montalembert and
Lacordaire become, with Lamennais, the chief contributors. They are priests,
Montalembert a layman. Ultramontane catholicism, giving Pope priority over
monarch or any secular ruler, expounded as a new revitalising system for Church.
February riots destroy St. Germain-l’Auxerrois and the archiepiscopal palace beside
Notre Dame, which is itself also damaged. Appalling devastation, recorded by many
famous writers. Lamennais and Montalembert write on these events in L’Avenir.
1831 The three editors undertake the ‘pilgrimage’ to Rome to get the approval of
Pope Gregory XVI for the policies of l’Avenir. They are delayed in Rome for months,
finally get a breif interview with Pope who says nothing of substance. On their way
back to Paris via Munich, they are sent the condemnatory Encyclical Mirari Vos.
They submit, journal is closed, the Agence catholique ceases.
Stendhal, Le rouge et le noir, The Red and the Black, the famous novel, obliquely
about 1830, of Julien Sorel’s proletarian career, ended by the guillotine; an
anticipatory parable perhaps of 1848 as well.
William Carleton, Traits and stories of the Irish Peasantry 3 vols., (1830-33). The
world of Irish Catholics appears in fiction.
1831 Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, ‘medievalist’, anti-medievalist story of the
cathedral and the hunch-back.
Balzac, La peau de chagrin, The Fatal Skin, the famous parable of desire and power,
with eager youth defeated by a vegetating older generation.
1832 Cholera outbreak in Paris; 18,000 dead. (Another the year after 1848
revolution.)
1832-34 Insurrections in Paris and Lyons. Heavy casualties. July Monarchy secures
itself, but at a brutal price. Hugo’s Les Misérables (1861) is based on the Paris
outbreak of 1832.
1834 Lamennais, Paroles d’un croyant; Words of a believer. ‘Poetic’ annunciatory
work that declares Christianity a religion of the people and of the poor. Condemned
by Pope who is enraged at Lamennais’ failure to submit. His separation from the
Church and from Montalembert and Lacordaire deepens.
St Vincent-de-Paul Society founded/ renewed by Frederic Ozanam. Sisters of
Charity led by Soeur Rosalie (d.1837) in XIIe arrondissement of Paris.
1835 Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, second volume in 1840, the
famous prophesy-account-analysis of American democracy and the reign of
equality—by an aristocrat who liked neither but knew he had to accept both.
1836 The Egyptian Obelisk of Luxor is erected in Paris in the Place de la Concorde,
which used to be Place Louis XV, Place Louis XVI, Place de la Charte, Place de la
Révolution. It was where Louis XVI and Marie-Antionette had been beheaded.
Chateaubriand says that one day there will be nobody left to forget what the July
monarchy did not want the French to remember.
1835-36 Lacordaire begins his ‘Conférences’ at Notre Dame; these regular sermons
become celebrated in Paris. By 1838, a Jesuit, Father Ravignan, joins him as a
preacher. Ravignan continues after Lacordaire leaves for Italy to study to become a
Dominican.
1840 Lacordaire returns, tonsured, wearing white robe of the teaching order, to
begin his preaching again at Notre Dame. Sensation of the Parisian season. He
continues until 1851, and the coup d’état. Benedictine order also established again in
France. Ultramontane catholicism, now operating through the teaching orders,
reorganises liturgy, ritual, pronunciation of Latin, Gregorian chant, to conform to
Roman system.
Louis Blanc, L’organisation du travail, The Organisation of Labour, one of the many
‘utopian’ versions of the solution to the ‘social problem’ of capitalism.
George Sand, Indiana, one of a triptych of novels on the marriage question and on
the problems of gender by the complex ex-Saint-Simonian and admirer of Lamennais.
1842 Balzac writes his ‘Foreword’ to his collected fiction, La comédie humaine (The
Divine Comedy). This was to be to capitalism what Dante’s epic was to Catholicism.
1843 Marx arrives in Paris.
1845-50 The Great Famine. Death of O’Connell. Death of ‘the land of song’. Irish
emigration to the USA henceforward to be a political factor in relations with Britain;
basis for later Fenian movement.
Montalembert meets with and makes a short speech of gratitude honouring O’Connell
who is on his way to Rome to meet Pius IX. (He dies en route at Genoa).
O’Connell’s death elicits from Father Ventura in Rome a funeral oration spread over
2 days and a famous eulogy from Lacordaire in Notre Dame to a packed
congregation. This is an O’Connell later unrecognisable to Sean O Faolain.
Death of James Clarence Mangan, obscurely famous ‘The Man in the Cloak’.
1848 24-26 February. Two days of rioting. Fall of Louis-Philippe. (‘Just like Charles
X’ he says in disbelief as he flees.) The Second French Republic proclaimed. Right to
vote to French males over 21.
22-26 June, The June Days, Rising of workers. Crushed by bourgeoisie, with help of
its ‘African’ army; 20,000 dead. Montalembert and Hugo on side of ‘party of order’,
Hugo very actively so. Lamennais and Baudelaire among writers on side of workers.
10 December, Louis Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon, elected president.
1849 John O’Daly, Poets and Poetry of Munster. Beginning of the Mangan cult
which has in Joyce its most notable adherent. Also the first outlining of ‘The hidden
Ireland’ and the Munster poets, to be realised in full by Daniel Corkery and in the
ideology of the Irish Free State.
1850 La Loi Falloux. Regarded by Montalembert as his greatest achievement. In
virtue of this, the Church is restored to certain teaching functions within the State.
Right-wing catholics, like Louis Veuillot, think it a betrayal; the Left thinks it a
disgrace. But many anti-clericals, after 1848, decide to support the arrival of clergy in
teaching. Long-term opposition between ‘schoolteacher’ and ‘curé de campagne’
(country [parish] priest), lasts until 1940s.
1851 2 December, coup d’état by Louis Napoleon. See Hugo’s (rather belated)
Histoire d’un crime; History of a Crime (1877).
Hugo’s 1831 play Le roi s’amuse,The King’s Diversion, provides the basis for
Verdi’s opera Rigoletto.
Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient, Journey to the Orient, classic instance of
‘orientalist’ discourse, claiming to seek fusion with this ‘antithesis’ of Europe which
the crumbling Ottoman Empire was making temptingly available.
1852 Plebiscite on 2 December, Louis Napoleon, first plebiscitary dictator of modern
times, announces himself as Emperor Napoleon III. The Second Empire 1852-70. The
redevelopment of Paris begins on a vast scale under Haussmann, continues until 1870.
Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis-Napoléons, The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Napoleon; ‘the first time tragedy, the second time farce’.
Montalembert, Catholic Interests in the Nineteenth Century; Ill-timed but widelyread claim that catholicism had made a comeback of miraculous proportions since
1800. A British protestant journal called it ‘the Romanist song of triumph’. Beginning
of Montalembert’s reputation in English-speaking world.
Flaubert, Madame Bovary; with the Empire, the depoliticised life begins;
investigations produce a baffling ‘meaninglessness’.
Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, Flowers of Evil; malaise rather than ‘mal’, although a
ferocious boredom produces and is produced by a fearful squalor, sexual and spiritual.
1854-63 French empire in Asia (‘Indo-China’) consolidated; begins with occupation
of Saigon 1859, remains until defeat by the Viet Mihn army at Dien Bien Phu in
1954. French extend possessions in Africa, join with British in Crimean war (185456) against Russia.
1854 Ernest Renan, La poésie des races celtiques, The Poetry of the Celtic races
Became a founding text for the Irish Revival, a race theory conjugation which
Matthew Arnold conjugated in an even more slippery fashion in 1867 and which
Yeats made the basis of his famous 1893 essay on Celtic literature. Catholics made
the best Celts—like the Bretons—but the authentic Celts were pre-Christian and race
was destiny; this was the religion of empire, still is.
John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University. The exposition of a ‘liberal’ ideal of
university education offered as a founding document of the new Catholic University
in Dublin—regarded as another instance of Catholic recovery in Europe.
John Mitchel, Jail Journal, prisoner and prolix analyst of the squalid British Empire
and of Irish Catholic servility. The theme of Ireland as servant of two masters—
British and Roman—emerges here; later absorbed into Joyce’s fiction.
1856 Montalembert, The Political Future of England Montalembert’s admiration for
the English system that preserved aristocracy, conceded to democracy and avoided
revolution reaches a gratified English audience.
1859 Montalembert, A Debate on India in the English Parliament this is many
things at once—a defence of British and French colonialism, coupled with a denial
that any atrocities had been committed by the British in putting down the Indian
Mutiny; a promotion of Anglicanism from heresy to ‘positive belief’; a denial that
England any longer mistreated Ireland; a defence of the British-French alliance in
Europe as a triumph of ‘liberal civilization’. It also has Montalembert arrested for
insulting the Emperor; he gets a prison sentence, suspended on appeal, generally wins
the public relations game as liberal victim of a dictatorship he once asked his Catholic
constituents to vote for.
1863 Montalembert, L’Église libre dans l’état libre: A Free Church in a Free State.
Text of a lecture given at a catholic Congress in Malines, Belgium. Montalembert’s
last stand for liberal catholicism against the ‘infallibilist’ policies of the Vatican.
1861 Wagner’s Tannhäuser produced in Paris; lasts 3 nights only because legitimists
use it to protest at Napoleon III and jeer at Wagner, formerly a radical. General debate
on Wagner in 1860-61, in which Baudelaire lays ground for theories of symbolism.
1862 Renan, La vie de Jésus; the Life of Jesus. The famous best-seller that shocked
traditional Christian believers. Is in fact a script for the ‘heresy’ of modernism.
1864 First International, led by Marx.
1869 Suez Canal opened after 10 years work on De Lesseps’ project.
Baudelaire, Petits poèmes en prose, Little poems in prose contains ‘Assommons les
pauvres!’, ‘Let’s smash/crush (the) poor people’.
Flaubert, L’éducation sentimentale, Sentimental Education, about the disconnect
between ‘art’ and ‘life’ in the 1848 revolution.
1870 France declares war on Prussia in July, defeated at Sedan in September.
Fall of Louis Napoleon, end of Second Empire, Beginning of Third Republic, (18701940).
Death of Montalembert. First Vatican Council. Decree of Infallibility. Prussians
surround Paris.
1871 Germany proclaims Second Reich at Versailles. Commune formed in Paris, first
socialist programme in Europe enacted. Commune suppresssed by French armies in
the ‘Bloody Week’ of May, with 25,000 dead, 40,000 deported.
Marx, The Civil War in France Key pamphlet, widely translated and supplemented;
analysis of the significance of the Commune.
Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer, A Season in Hell. Announcements and
slogans about poetry or the future or life that lose some of their gnomic quality and
gain in anger when transposed to the utopian/catastrophic ‘season’ of the Commune,
like graffiti. ‘Only I have the key to this savage parade’.
1874 Claude Monet painting ‘ Impression—soleil levant’ gives rise to term
‘Impressionists’.
1877 Émile Zola, L’assommoir, The Laundress, ‘working-class novel’ prompts
furious reactions, so soon after the Commune,with its portrayal of repressed aspects
of human bodies and the lower classes that seem to have grosser bodies than other
classes do.
1878-80 Standish O’Grady, History of Ireland. Heroic period. Now this is what
Yeats calls history; the Celtic heroes loom in the mists of pre-Christian Ireland, lords
of the land before there were landlords.
Charles Kickham, Knocknagow, or The homes of Tipperary; most popular of Irish
novels. The Irish peasantry is for the first time the narrator of its own experience, not
an object of folkloric wonder or derision or anthropological curiosity.
1882 James Joyce born.
1883 Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse; Memories of childhood and
youth. His emotional attachments with the old, folk world of Britanny and
Catholicism; his intellectual fidelity to Reason and Science.
Wagner dies.
1884 Paul Verlaine, Jadis et naguère; Once and Yesterday –‘De la musique avant
toute chose’, ‘Music above everything’; the acoustic moment in poetry; poetry as
hypnosis.
Joris-Karl Huysmans, A rebours, Against nature Realism begin its exotic gradation
(degradation?) into aestheticism, symbolism and thence to Catholicism.
1885 Hugo dies. General relief among French writers. ‘He confiscated’, said
Mallarmé, ‘from anyone who thinks, discourses or narrates almost the right to
speak.’
Yeats founds Dublin Hermetic Society
1888 Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry Yeats is now combining
world of folk with world of ancient hermetic wisdom to produce a strange and
powerful alternative religion which he regards as peculiarly Irish—rather than just
peculiar.
1889 Centenary of the French Revolution. Second International at Paris. Eiffel Tower
inaugurated at World’s Fair. The ‘Marseillaise’ is made the national anthem.
Henri Bergson, Les données immediates de la conscience; Time and Free Will. The
attack on postivism intensifies.
Ernest Renan, L’Avenir de la science; the Future of Science The bright twin of
Celticism.
1891 Death of Parnell. Ireland’s second great symbolic leader of the century. Yeats
and Joyce conspire (independently) in the aftermath to create a cult of the lost
aristocratic leader of a dishevelled mob, party, people, race, community. ‘The
unfinished man among his enemies’, as Yeats said of Cuchullainn.
Oscar Wilde meets Mallarmé. Starts writing his Salomé (in French), published in
Paris in 1893, but production banned in London in 1892 by British censor.
1893 Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice) ‘One must paint,
not the thing itself, but the effect it produces.’
Yeats, The Celtic Twilight Yeats opens a new space-time in a new heavily-folded but
lightly-worn prose. Ireland now is a modernist (not a modern) nation.
1893-96 Lugné-Poe’s experimental, minimialist stage productions in Paris, including
Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (1896); after seeing the première in Paris, Yeats remarked:
‘After us the Savage God’. These remained as part of WBY’s theatrical enterprise.
1894-1904 The Dreyfus Case. Emergence of Charles Maurras and Action
Française. Proust’s deep engagement with the Affair, enhancing his twin ‘curses’ of
Jewishness and homosexuality, so central to Jean Santeuil (written early, not
published until 1952) and A la recherche du temps perdu, Remembrance of Things
Past (1913-27).
1897 Bram Stoker, Dracula The living dead awaken in a sort of Celtic twilight; the
satanic and lascivious count, who has dreams of world domination, done down by
Anglo-American stalwarts who will not have their actual domination challenged-certainly not by a Slav.
1898 Zola, J’Accuse; I Accuse. The affair’s most famous, but not its most fascinating
document. His novel Vérité, Truth (1903), published the year after his death,
combines the Affair with the campaign for the secularization of schools. The anticlerical effect of the Affair is profound.
1902 George Moore, The Untilled Field Moore, the worshipper of all things French,
artistic and shocking returns to Ireland to accelerate (he would say to inaugurate) the
revival. A centrally important writer, outbid on the one hand by Yeats and on the
other by Joyce, for the laurel wreath.
1903 Yeats, In the Seven Woods A beautiful example of the esoteric book, one of the
early limited editions of modernism’s great sequences of big books for small
audiences—and for bibliophiles. The Yeats sisters and the Dun Emer Press, later the
Cuala Press, follow the pre-Raphaelite example; in fact, the whole family does.
French aesthetic pratices, rooted in notions of medieval religious restoration, arrive in
Ireland via England. The ‘Great Archer’ now ‘but awaits his hour to shoot.’
Apocalypse now and it’s still eleven years to the Great War!
1904-05 Third Republic’s offensive against the Church. (Jesuits had been banned
already, in 1880). Religious orders bannned from teaching; diplomatic relations with
Vatican broken; Law of Separation of Church and State. Anatole France becomes the
leading writer and advocate of Separation
1904 Proust essay, ‘La mort des cathédrales’, ‘The Death of the Cathedrals’ and
Maurice Barrès’ essay, ‘La mort de Venise’, ‘The Death of Venice’, realign the
question of the relation of art to faith.
The fictional year of Ulysses.
1907 Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon marks the birth of Cubism. Pope declares
modernism a heresy.
Synge, The Playboy of the Western World. The great play has perhaps the greatest
title that a national revival movement could wish for. Irish-English achieves
independence.