It seems like we are in constant, almost endless, anniversary mode these days. For some strange reason the years ending in “5” and “15” encompass more “significant” anniversaries than most – in the last week alone we have seen WB Yeats’s 150th marked as well as the 800th of Magna Carta, and yesterday the 200th of the Battle of Waterloo. A day much beloved by our neighbours for the trouncing of the Napoleon-le d French, but which was also an intensely Irish occasion. But once again we must draw the distinction between commemoration and celebration.
In recalling Waterloo, we can, as with the first World War, remember the contribution of Irishmen without dwelling on – or even deciding definitively – whether they were on the wrong side of history. Does it really damage the national narrative of Ireland’s march to freedom to acknowledge that the Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, was one of our own? That the Irish made up 40 per cent of his army during the Peninsular war and 30 per cent of his troops at Waterloo?
There is, of course, a rich irony in the British "celebrations" within a week of both a key defeat for monarchy in the barons' forceful wrenching of Magna Carta from King John, and the effective restoration by Waterloo of France's Bourbon monarchy. Hardly consistency. Indeed some historians point to the post-battle whisking of Napoleon to St Helena without allowing him set foot in England as an attempt to avoid a messy habeas corpus – of Magna Carta fame – row in the English courts. Rendition it might be termed today.
Waterloo brought to an end 20 years of war in Europe, but did so through the triumph of its feudal crowned heads over the republican spirit of the French revolution, so important to our own and the American revolutions. Napoleon, complex and dictatorial and today still the subject of deeply mixed feelings in France, was no angel but his decisive defeat on that day was a major setback in Britain and Europe, as much as in France, for the ideas of democracy and equality.
That François Hollande should find himself otherwise occupied on the day is hardly surprising.