Frank Rynne (CY Cergy Paris University): ‘The Most Wanted tourist, the Invincible Frank Byrne in France, 1883’

Frank Rynne is a historian of Irish republicanism specialising in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Land War and C.S. Parnell. He completed his doctoral thesis on The IRB and the Land War in Cork under the direction of W.E. Vaughan at Trinity College Dublin. He is a senior lecturer at CY Cergy Paris University and a Visiting Research Fellow at TCD.

This lecture is based on recent research at the Archives de la Préfecture de Police in Paris and the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. It focuses on Frank Byrne, a senior organiser of the Home Rule movement and the Land League in the UK who was also a director of the London branch of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and a founder of their radical off-shoot, The Irish National Invincibles. The Invincibles organised and executed the most notorious political assassination of the period, killing the newly appointed Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and undersecretary Thomas H. Byrne in the Phoenix Park, Dublin in May 1882.

This lecture will examine Frank Byrne’s time 'on the run' in France where he was ostensibly evading British justice in a most unusually open manner. His cover was shadowing the UK prime minister W.E. Gladstone in the south of France and then Paris as a correspondent for a UK wire service. Once arrested his case became a cause celebre for the French left who rallied in support. The lecture will also detail his short spell in custody in France and the failed UK attempt to extradite him from France.

Despite the global notoriety of the murders, the Byrne case highlights the support in France amongst an intellectual left-wing elite including Victor Hugo for an Irish radical suspected of being one of the ringleaders in the most notorious political assassination of the era. It also highlights the intrepid aptitude for propaganda and the utilisation of the popular press to advance the cause of Irish nationalism in the late 19th century by radical nationalists and Byrne’s understanding of the French political situation regarding extradition in the period.

This seminar is available both in-person and online via MS Teams.

Register here