The Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, edited by Thomas Bartlett, Lilliput press 1,002pp, £40/£20
William Hazlitt, son of a Tipperary father, once observed: "If your enemies cannot find a flaw in your reasoning, they will find it in your reputation." Theobald Wolfe Tone's place in Irish history is a striking example of Hazlitt's thesis. Because he has been fetished as the founding father of Irish republicanism, he has been frequently dismissed by those opposed to that project. While his Bodenstown grave attracts shoals of summer soldiers, his life and work are little known. Frequently cited, his reputation rests on a few crisp soundbites, cut adrift from the body of his work.
Tone's reputation has always been a political barometer. Consigned to convenient amnesia by cautious O'Connellites, he was rehabilitated by Thomas Davis, admired by the Fenians, and eventually elevated to cult status as a secular saint of modern Irish nationalism. He became a target for revisionist iconoclasm, once more dragged to the dock as a culpable begetter of violent republicanism. By the 1880s his reputation was in the doldrums - dismissed as a colonial misfit, a frustrated flibbertigibbet, lacking personal or ideological consistency. A failed novelist, failed lawyer and failed politician, he drifted into accidental republicanism as a product of exile and personal disillusion. He was also a mere second-hand seditionist, who contributed nothing original to Irish political thought.
As the angry floodwaters of revisionism recede, Tone's reputation has risen apace. Recent scholarship restores him to a pivotal position in the 1790s. This claim rests on three major achievements. The first was his separatism. Tone welded his mainstream 18th-century republicanism to an espousal of separatism as the only possible basis for a secluraised civic virtue, free of the corrupting influence of England in maintaining a sectarian state in Ireland. Tone, then, was the first Irish separatist. And despite revisionist pooh-poohing, his claims as founder of the United Irishmen are secure: he supplied its name, its political agenda and the crucial link between Dublin and Belfast.
His second achievement was more pragmatic than glamorous - his remarkably successful job as agent to the Catholics. Here he showed classic backroom talents as an organiser (of the Back Lane Parliament), as spin-doctor and as sophisticated political strategist. His alleged inconsistencies are in fact proof of his consummate mastery of politics - notably that tactics are required as well as principles, and that, in Brecht's aphorism "Where there are obstacles, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line." His third achievement was as United Irish diplomat in Paris. This absolute outsider, with poor French, succeeded in persuading the Directory to send a formidable invasion fleet to Ireland.
How did this young man ("with his long aquiline nose, rather handsome and genteel looking") achieve so much? His modest Dublin Anglican background and personal probity ill-equipped him for a career in law (he instinctively hated the Irish Bar, "the most scandalously corrupt and unprincipled body, politically speaking, that I ever knew"). But he was endlessly convivial and charming. He possessed the rarest of all social skills - that of being equally attractive to men and women. He had classic 18th-century lightness and flair - a Mozartian sparkle and sprezzatura. He was a social success in Dissenting Belfast (then, as now, a difficult trick for a Dubliner to pull off), in popish Dublin (with its endlessly prickly individuals such as John Keogh) and in Paris (where he formed firm friendships with Hoche and Carnot). To his formidable social and political skills were added writing abilities of the first order. He commanded a plain, direct prose perfectly suited to political advocacy. The spy, Leonard McNally, was to lament its stunning success in bringing puritan and papist together in political terms: "They have been brought to think alike."
By 1798, however, Tone was becoming isolated: his information supply dried up as the United Irishmen shifted focus from the French to an indigenous strategy. In retrospect, his greatest failure was with the inscrutable Napoleon: he failed to avert his gaze from the Sphinx to Caitlin Ni hUalachain. Devoid of substantive French backing, the Rebellion was crushed with the loss of 30,000 lives (over 95 per cent on the popular side). Tragically, the two principal aims of the United Irishmen - parliamentary reform and Catholic rights - were granted a generation later in 1829 and 1832. How much bloodletting could have been averted had the British state acted generously in the 1790s! Tone's subsequent efforts in 1798 were a prelude to his Senecan suicide in Dublin - a death which rebuked the moral credentials of those who sought to judge him: let him who is without sin cast the first Tone.
His subsequent reputation rested on the two-volume Life and Writings issued in Washington in 1826, carefully edited by his son William, under the tutelage of his impressive wife Matilda. Tone accurately described his diaries as "a faithful transcript of all that passes in my mind, of my hopes and fears, my doubts and expectations in this important business". Their immediacy, honesty and self-mockery has caused them to endure and to make Tone the most likeable of Irish historical characters. This new Lilliput volume, scrupulously edited by Thomas Bartlett, provides a first-rate modern edition. The editor has restored (from the originals in Trinity College, Dublin) the excisions made by William - including the constant unflattering references to America, which Tone hated for its "boorish ignorance".
This volume also has, for the first time, a detailed index of its thousand pages, as well as a judicious introduction which situates Tone where he properly belongs in the 18th-century world, and which therefore elegantly bypasses the whiffling discussion of whether appropriate use has been made of his legacy in subsequent generations - much of which is little above the level of wondering what Wolfe Tone would have thought of the mini-skirt. The result is a volume that is indisputably indispensable to any serious student of Irish history.
Bartlett sets Tone studies on a markedly higher ground. And this volume has one other eminent virtue: at £20, the paperback has got to be the best value in town.
Kevin Whelan is Michael J Smurfit Director of the University of Notre Dame Keough Centre in Dublin; his most recent book is Fellowship of Freedom: The United Irishmen in 1798