Start Date
27-5-2026 11:30 AM
End Date
27-5-2026 11:45 AM
Description
This paper draws out the tension between the well-fed leadership of the 1798 rebellion versus reports of hungry reality for poorer rebels. Readers of the unabridged diaries of Theobald Wolfe Tone must be struck by how often the man talks about what he ate, when he ate it and who he ate it with. Emerging from the coffee houses and dining clubs of Dublin and Belfast, the prosperous members of the professional classes and minor gentry who made up the leadership of the United Irishmen spent a good deal of their time around the table discussing the application of the French revolution’s ‘liberté, égalité and fraternité’, but how connected were they to the real food crisis that was happening in Ireland in the years around the 1798 rebellion? Bread was famously the catalyst for the French revolution – between 1787 and 1789, the average French worker went from spending 50% of what he/she earned on bread to 88% in 1789. Seven years later, Tone is on his way from Le Havre to Paris to convince the French government, at war with Britain, to support a rebellion in Ireland, and he is very much focused on food as a symbol of revolutionary France’s success. While food was plentiful for Tone and other leaders, poorer rebels went hungry. By comparing these sources, this paper places food at the centre of this key battle in the history of Irish nationalism.
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Food as Freedom in the 1798 Rebellion
This paper draws out the tension between the well-fed leadership of the 1798 rebellion versus reports of hungry reality for poorer rebels. Readers of the unabridged diaries of Theobald Wolfe Tone must be struck by how often the man talks about what he ate, when he ate it and who he ate it with. Emerging from the coffee houses and dining clubs of Dublin and Belfast, the prosperous members of the professional classes and minor gentry who made up the leadership of the United Irishmen spent a good deal of their time around the table discussing the application of the French revolution’s ‘liberté, égalité and fraternité’, but how connected were they to the real food crisis that was happening in Ireland in the years around the 1798 rebellion? Bread was famously the catalyst for the French revolution – between 1787 and 1789, the average French worker went from spending 50% of what he/she earned on bread to 88% in 1789. Seven years later, Tone is on his way from Le Havre to Paris to convince the French government, at war with Britain, to support a rebellion in Ireland, and he is very much focused on food as a symbol of revolutionary France’s success. While food was plentiful for Tone and other leaders, poorer rebels went hungry. By comparing these sources, this paper places food at the centre of this key battle in the history of Irish nationalism.