James Bartholomew Blackwell (1763–1820) was an Irish officer in the service of France who received commissions from Louis XVI, the First French Republic and later Emperor Napoleon. A friend of Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, he had taken part in the storming of the Bastille in July 1789. Following service in defence of the Republic, at the behest of United Irish emissaries he twice sailed for Ireland: in advance of the Rebellion of 1798 with General Hoche in December 1796, and with Napper Tandy in September 1798. Following this second aborted expedition, he was interned in Hamburg and extradited to Ireland. The Peace of Amiens secured his release at the end of 1802. He returned to French service rising to the rank of Chef de bataillon.
Education James Bartholomew Blackwell was born on Barrack Street in Ennis, County Clare, Ireland. Records of his year of birth vary between 1763 and 1765. He was closely related to Dr Bartholomew Murray, who died in Paris on 8 January 1767. Dr Murray had been a generous benefactor of the Irish College in Paris, and in his will left further rich bequests towards the education of Irish students destined for the priesthood to serve on the mission in Ireland. At the age of eleven, James left Ennis for Paris, and there he entered the Collège des Lombards on the burse founded by his late granduncle, Dr. Murray, and he began his ecclesiastical studies.
At this time there were approximately 600 Irish students, secular and regular, studying for the priesthood in thirty colleges throughout Europe. Of this number, France accounted for over a half and Paris one third. Liam Swords informs us that: "Numerically [the two Irish colleges in Paris] represented the largest concentration of Irish in the city and, more importantly, all the other Irish were in one way or another linked with them and regarded them as the focus of Irish society."Swords, Liam, The Green Cockade: The Irish in the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Dublin, 1989), p. 10. About 11,000 Irish students were educated in Paris in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, equaling the number of priests ordained in Maynooth during the two centuries of its existence to date.Brookliss & Ferté, 'Irish clerics in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a statistical survey.' Proc.R.I.A. pp. 536–7. Lecky observed that they returned to Ireland 'with a real and varied knowledge of the world ... the manners and feelings of cultivated gentlemen and a high sense of clerical decorum.'Lecky, History of Ireland in the eighteenth century, 3 pp. 354–5.
Both the universities and students alike suffered from continuing financial problems. Correspondence during the decade preceding the French Revolution gives the impression of an academic world deeply concerned about the number of prizes the Irish were awarded each year. Dr Plunkett explained that a student 'will be received gratis as soon as he shall win a premium in the university. Should this happen the first year he will have nothing to pay during the course of his studies.'Cogan, The Bishops of Meath, 3 p. 6. "Irish Catholics," Swords writes, "or at least the strong farmers and well-off shopkeepers who insisted on sending their sons to Paris to be educated – were very loath to pay for them. Dr Charles Kearney, who became superior of the Collège des Irlandais in 1782, complained that often they sent their sons of thirteen or fourteen years of age with only one half-term or quarter-term's fee and that nothing ever followed despite frequent solicitations."Swords, Liam, The Green Cockade: The Irish in the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Dublin, 1989), p. 14. Some scholars' financial destitution is further illustrated when, in 1789, Henry Essex Edgeworth wrote to his friend bishop Francis Moylan of Cork on behalf of one Fitzgerald, a medical student who was obliged to borrow five guineas, to persuade his father to send him money to pay his debts and return fare home.England, T. R. Letters from Abbé Edgeworth, p. 47. Thus it was in a sense liberating for James Blackwell to be a recipient of a burse, and evidence exists supporting the claim that he was in fact a privileged bursary-holder.
At 8 am on 29 October 1792 the two deputies who had been authorised to supervise the election of a new administrator by the students arrived at Collège des Irlandais and called upon Truchon, substitute procurator of the Commune, to join them.We assembled all the young Irish bursary-holders of the said establishment in the chapel, we read to them there out loud article 8 of the rules of the establishment and in pursuance of the said article obtained from them the prescribed oath, by which they swore to elect, according to their conscience, the most suitable persons, swayed neither by personal interest nor solicitation and we then proceeded to the nomination of a Provisor-Superior, by means of a ballot. There were nine voters present: Murray, Duckett, Mac Sheehi senior, Mac Sheehi junior, Curtayne, B. Blackwell,, J Oneill, Ferris, MacMahon…I. C. P. 14 A. Mémoire pour Walsh, pp. 27–8.
Also, an undated documentD. D. A. 121/9. nd. lists Major Blackwell as an individual in receipt of monies from college revenues.
The Revolution and subsequent wars caused the closing of the college and the sequestration of the burses. When John Baptist Walsh reopened the college after the Treaty of Amiens (1802), instead of founding bursaries 'which experience had taught him, proved of little value to the Irish mission', he devised what he called 'annual pensions of encouragement.'
Shortly after entering Collège des Lombards however, Blackwell discovered that he had no vocation to the priesthood, and we find him studying medicine at the Bicêtre Hospital. "Irishmen were particularly strong in the medical faculty," Swords informs us. "[They] also achieved prominence in court circles: John MacSheehy and John O'Reilly were both physicians to Louis XVI. As well as theology and law, medicine and surgery could be studied by burse-holders in the Irish college and Irish doctors had established a number of substantial foundations there expressly for these disciplines."Swords, Liam, The Green Cockade: The Irish in the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Dublin, 1989), p. 15.
Military career The officers serving in the Irish regiments in the French army were the other Irish community of significance that sought the services of the Irish colleges. General Count Daniel O'Connell and Charles Edward Jennings de Kilmaine, later General Kilmaine, were among the many officers for whom the Irish college issued certificates.Walsh, Micheline, 'Irish soldiers and the Irish college in Paris' in Swords, The Irish-French Connection, pp. 63–87. "Many of the students who entered the Irish college at a tender age did not persevere to the priesthood and some opted for a military career," Swords continues. Presumably this is what happened to James Blackwell as in 1786 he subsequently joined the Regiment de Walsh, part of the Irish Brigade (France) in the French army, becoming, at the same time, a naturalized citizen of his adopted country, a fact that undoubtedly saved his life later on. He remained with this regiment until it was finally disbanded in 1791.
The French Revolution According to the Irish historian Richard Hayes (politician), "Before the outbreak of the Revolution, Blackwell had associated himself with the reform party, becoming an intimate friend of Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins and the other leading spirits of the clubs who helped to precipitate the insurrection of the fourteenth of July 1789."Hayes, Richard, Ireland and Irishmen in the French Revolution (Dublin, 1932), p. 29.
On that morning twelve cannons and 40,000 muskets were seized from Les Invalides for the new militia. The Bastille, a state prison, containing a sizeable quantity of ammunition, including 250 barrels of powder, too, posed an irresistible temptation for the militant-minded of the revolutionaries. In the popular mind, the Bastille was conceived as a symbol of royal despotism, as attested to by Eoghan O Néill's comment: 'Whatever the designs of the founders the use of it is in the end a disgrace to any nation.'This paper is among the family papers of Col. Eoghan O Néill. O Néill, Gleann an Óir, pp. 94–7. Hayes relates that: "Early on that day a section of the Faubourg Saint Antoine – a district noted as the nursery of Paris revolutions – chose James Bartholomew Blackwell as their leader for the attack on the Bastille." When the attackers reached the Bastille that morning this contingent was the first to move against the formidable fortress with its walls, its turrets and its mounted cannon. "The taking of the Bastille constituted the first great journée of the French Revolution, marking the collapse of absolute monarchy. It resulted in 98 killed, including the governor, 73 wounded, seven freed and several unemployed." James Bartholomew Blackwell's name, however, is absent from the official list of heroes, les vainqueurs de la Bastille consisting of 863 other signatures.Cf. Nolan, Pierce L. Dublin Review 1890 & Hayes, op. cit. pp. 28–9. His unit was also stationed on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean at the time.Gough, Hugh "The Strange Career of the Man from Ennis: James Bartholomew Blackwell," The Old Limerick Journal 25, (1989): p. 45.
Hussards Braconniers, or Poacher Hussars When the Regiment de Walsh disbanded in 1791 Blackwell became a captain in the Hussards Braconniers, or Poacher Hussars, an irregular cavalry corps raised by Jean Landrieux 'who placed it at the disposal of the Jacobin committees that were then relentlessly pursuing the proscribed nobles as traitors to France.' This corps was raised to the official status of the Twenty-first Cavalry Regiment in 1793 and became part of the Army of the North commanded by Charles Francois Dumouriez. On 20 September they won a decisive victory over the Prussians in the Battle of Valmy. On the same day, the National Convention met for the first time in the Tuileries Palace and its first act was to abolish the monarchy. They also won a decisive victory over the Austrians in the Battle of Jemappes on 6 November, 'which placed the country at their mercy and made clear their intentions of carrying their revolution abroad.'Swords, Liam, The Green Cockade: The Irish in the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Dublin, 1989), p. 66. During this campaign Joachim Murat, who afterwards became a Marshal of France and King of Naples, served as a lieutenant under Blackwell. Murat too, had been intended for the priesthood.
Captain Blackwell was also, at this time, one of the Irish 'rebel' students who personally presented the petition denouncing his superiors at a sitting of the convention on 2 December 1792. On 29 October, during the month between the two above engagements, Blackwell was present at Collège des Irlandais committed to the student election there. The purpose of this election was to appoint a new administrator in the place of Kearney against whom the commissioners of the Commune made a report and the municipality dismissed.
Blackwell and his peers denounced Kearney to the Committee of Public Safety, accusing him of encouraging the students to join the army of the Princes and of giving them money and letters of recommendation for that purpose; of receiving refractory priests, giving them food and lodgings, allowing them to preach against the constitution and 'poison the minds of the students with aristocratic maxims' and permitting ordinations by refractory bishops; of misappropriating and squandering college revenues, running the college into debt, reducing the bursary-holders to destitution and failing to present accounts; and finally of receiving and harbouring the property of émigrés.D. D. A. 121/8, 21 November 1792.