Belfast and the French Revolution – the "Belfast Review and Celebration", 14 July 1792

This is an oft-repeated account of a major "military and civil procession" celebration in Belfast on 14 July 1792 – online here, in The United Irishmen: Their Lives and Times by Richard R Madden (1857 edition). I'm not as enamoured with the 1789 French Revolution as others appear to be, as it soon descended into a bloodbath - just six weeks after the Belfast event, the massacres in Paris began. 

An important first-hand account is by Archibald Hamilton Rowan in his autobiography (see previous post here). A big story I do think needs to be unpicked is the philosophy of the Belfast dissenters and Whigs of the 1700s, and the Patriot Party in Dublin Parliament, who were advocates of many of the achievements of the 1688 Glorious Revolution. 

Edmund Burke famously critiqued the French Revolution; the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his 2020 book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times explains that the French Revolution said that rights came from the state, whereas the American Revolution said that rights came from God –

“It is genuinely sad to see how, almost without people noticing, Britain and the United States have abandoned their own unique tradition, that of (John) Locke and (Thomas) Jefferson, and instead embraced the Rousseau-esque French revolutionary model of rights as claims against the state, instead of ***rights as the protection of individuals from the state*** so that they could achieve by their own local, cooperative, altruistic efforts what politics and power cannot achieve, namely a devolved sense of responsibility for the welfare of others”. 

The 1792 Belfast event was more complex and varied than one might assume. The participants carried "the colours of five free nations" which were Ireland, America, France, Poland and Great Britain - a Dutch flag was also prepared, but not used, perhaps because the War of the First Coalition had just begun.

Among the individuals who were celebrated were John Locke, George Washington, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Grattan and William Molyneaux. The Belfast Address to the People of Ireland reads a lot like the many documents that were published in the 13 Colonies during the 1760s & 1770s:

We have not to innovate, but to restore. The just prerogatives of our monarch we respect and will maintain. The constitutional power of the peers of the realm we wish not to invade. We know that in the exercise of both, abuses have grown up; but we also know that those abuses will be at once corrected, so as never again to recur, by restoring to us, the people, what we, for ourselves, demand as our right, our due weight and influence in that estate, which is our property, the representation of the people in parliament.