Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek
In the post-war period another plot, which wedded millenarianism and
radical politics grew out of the land reform movement associated with
Thomas Spence (see Chase 1988; McCalman 1988; Poole 2000). This
involved a faction in the London Corresponding Society, led by Thomas
Evans, who had been associated with the United Englishmen and United
Britons, which aimed at land nationalisation and the parish management of
agriculture, and which eventually became the Society of Spencean Philan-
thropists. It concocted the so-called Cato Street Conspiracy (1820)ledby
Arthur Thistlewood, which sought to provoke a general uprising in London
by assassinating the Cabinet at a dinner (D. Johnson 1974). A lesser-known
Spencean uprising was led by the eccentric John Nichols Tom, aka Count
Moses Rothschild, aka Sir William Courtenay. In 1838, prophet-like, Tom
proclaimed that he had descended from heaven, and promised to ‘annihi-
late for ever the tithes, taxation upon all the shopkeepers and productive
classes, also upon knowledge’, primogeniture, placemen and slavery (A
Canterbury Tale 1888,p.3). He led to disaster a small band, brandishing
poles on which was impaled a loaf of bread, and seeking to distribute
food, and eventually land, to the poor (Courtney 1834;Rogers1962).
Generally disorganised, local, and economic in nature, was the machine-
breaking campaign led by the so-called Luddites, who were particularly
active between 1811 and 1816, and also formed secret organisations with
illegal oath-taking (see Thomis 1972). Fuelled by pover ty, but invoking a
Scottish republican tradition which stretched back to 1792 and beyond, as
well as recent developments in Spain, a short-lived uprising took place in
Scotland in 1820 (Ellis and A’Ghobhainn 1970). Agricultural riots, often
aimed at lowering bread prices, were not uncommon (Peacock 1965). The
movement associated with ‘Captain Swing’, which aimed at the destruc-
tion of agricultural equipment and maintenance of rural wages in 1830,was
similarly neither political in nature nor revolutionary in aim, though repub-
licans were reputed to be amongst its ranks, and the French Revolution of
that year clearly encouraged it (Hobsbawm and Rud
´
e 1973).
After the 1830s trade unionism also developed a much more militant strat-
egy in the form of proposals for a general strike, first formulated by William
Benbow (Prothero 1974). The more revolutionary aspects of Spencean
agrarianism were taken up by a number of Chartists, notably George Julian
Harney. The Chartists also hatched a variety of schemes for violent insur-
rection, including a plan for burning Newcastle (Devyr 1882,pp.184–211),
a plot to seize Dumbarton Castle and, most famously, the Newport Upris-
ing of 1839, when an attempt to rescue Henry Vincent from jail brought
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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism
thousands of Chartists to converge on the small Welsh town of Newport,
only to suffer rapid defeat (The Chartist Riots at Newport 1889; Jones 1985).
Chartism in 1848 also became markedly more internationalist with the for-
mation in the mid-1840s of the Fraternal Democrats and the Democratic
Friends of All Nations, organisations that linked the Chartists to various
European radicals (Lattek 1988,pp.259–82). At the end of this period a
Marxist revolutionary movement also emerged (Kendall 1969,pp.3–83).
4 From tyrannicide to terrorism
The politics of assassination and individual violence
Historians have been unable to agree on any meaningful definition of
‘terrorism’, one person’s ‘terrorist’, notoriously, being another’s freedom
fighter, with the use (or threat thereof) of systematic violence, usually mur-
der and destruction, outside of formally declared wars, to achieve revo-
lutionary ends being the common denominator.
6
But twentieth-century
terrorism is usually recognised to be of a very different character from that
of the preceding century in terms of both its methods and aims (gen-
eral accounts include: Ford 1985;Hyams1974;Parry1976;Paul1951 and
Wilkinson 1974). Most nineteenth-century movements which involved or
promoted acts of individual violence were adjuncts to or supportive of wider
insurrectionary or revolutionary movements aimed at overthrowing despots
like the Russian tsar, or usurpers like Louis Napoleon. Their anti-imperial
component, central in the twentieth century, was much less important until
the end of this period, with the notable exceptions of Ireland and India.
(Latin and South American revolutionary movements rarely employed such
tactics.) We cannot here consider state-sanctioned assassination of political
opponents, which has always been common, as has been torture, which can
also be considered as ‘terrorist’. Not examined here, either, is state terror-
ism, sometimes termed ‘enforcement’ or ‘repressive’ terrorism, as opposed
to ‘agitational’ or ‘revolutionary’ terrorism, such as that first initiated by
Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety as the ‘Reign of Terror’ (1793–
4), where some 17,000–40,000 people were directly executed, among them
6 On some definitional problems see Wardlaw 1982,pp.3–18. Wardlaw calls ‘political terrorism’ ‘the
use, or threat of use, of violence by an individual or group, whether acting for or in opposition to
established authority, when such action is designed to create extreme anxiety and/or fear-inducing
effects in a target group larger than the immediate victims with the pur pose of coercing that group
into acceding to the political demands of the perpetrators’ (p. 16).
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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek
1,158 nobles, though thousands more died of disease and neglect. This
introduced the vocabulary of ‘terrorism’ into political language (first evi-
dently positively by the Jacobins, then as a term of abuse, by c.1795), which
was then extended to other regimes, like Francia’s in Paraguay (see Robert-
son and Robertson 1839). Nor can we treat the ‘normal’ functioning of
autocracies in which thousands may lose their lives by political repres-
sion, as in tsarist Russia, where women could be beaten to death with
the knout for ‘sedition’, or the ‘normal’ mistreatment of native popula-
tions. The notion that imperial rule was as such proto-totalitarian because
it institutionalised brutality on a massive scale, kept large populations in
terrorem as a substitute for quartering much larger bodies of troops upon
them, and enforced draconian penalties for minor but ‘seditious’ criticisms
of such rule, cannot be examined here. (But the ‘Negro Code’ of the late
seventeenth-century French, with its routine beatings, mutilations and tor-
ture of virtually the entire subject population, and the astonishingly cr uel
Belgian policy towards the Congolese in King Leopold’s late nineteenth-
century slave state – see Morel 1906 – were clearly ‘terrorism’ personified,
and belong in any account of the pre-history of twentieth-century total-
itarianism.) We need also to distinguish between political assassination as
a means of regime change, which has been extremely common, even the
norm, throughout history (from Commodus to Constantine the Great,
twenty-seven out of thirty-six Roman emperors were assassinated), and the
justification of the overthrow of tyrants in the name of the common good,
or tyrannicide.
Nineteenth-century terrorists often took as their point of departure much
older historical justifications for the assassination of tyrants by private indi-
viduals in the name of the common good. This doctrine has a lengthy
pedigree which stretches back to the ancient world (see Laqueur 1979,
pp. 10–46). In classical Greece, Xenophon composed a dialogue on tyranny
which honoured the slayer of despots. At Rome, Cicero and Seneca, among
others, lauded the killing of usurpers. An extreme anti-Roman party of
Zealots engaged in individual murder and destruction as part of the Jew-
ish resistance. Caesar was the most famous victim of justifiable tyrannicide
in antiquity, Henry IV, killed by Ravaillac in 1610, of the early modern
epoch. During the Middle Ages the doctrine continued that tyrants lack-
ing a legitimate title might be killed, though legitimate rulers who became
despots were a much more difficult case (Jaszi and Lewis 1957). The Renais-
sance and early modern period expressed such doctrines in works such as
George Buchanan’s De Jure Regni apud Scotos (c.1568–9), the Vindiciae contra
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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism
Tyrannos (c.1574–6) and Mariana’s De Rege et Regis Institutione (1599). These
insisted that if the contract between king and people upon which legitimate
rule rested were violated the king could be removed. Amongst many mid-
seventeenth-century British works were John Milton’s The Tenure of Kings
and Magistrates (written 1649), and Killing No Murder (1657). The French
Revolution witnessed the slaying of Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday –
the first modern instance, perhaps, of the use of individual ‘terrorism’ against
state terror, and the renewed justification by Babeuf’s supporters that ‘Those
who usurp sovereignty ought to be put to death by free men . . . The people
shall take no rest until after the destruction of the tyrannical government’
(Jaszi and Lewis 1957,p.128). This was the point, thus, at which older
doctrines of regicide gave way before more modern ideals of individual
terror, though there would still be many attempts on European sovereigns
(notably that by the Corsican Fieschi on Louis Philippe in 1835)priorto
the revolutions of 1848.
In Germany philosophical justifications of terrorism have been claimed to
have originated as early as 1842, when Edgar Bauer extended the method of
Hegelian criticism to propose the revolutionary overthrow of the existing
social and political system.
7
Romantic justifications for assassination cer-
tainly occur as early as Karl Ludwig Sand’s killing of August von Kotzebue
at Jena in 1819, ostensibly for being a Russian spy. The use of terror as an
instrument of insurrection was considered by the League of the Just, which
later became the Communist League, and was involved in Blanqui’s 1838
uprising in Paris. It formally examined the proposition that individual terror
might be a useful tactic in the form of Wilhelm Weitling’s suggestion that
20,000 thieves and murderers could form a useful revolutionary vanguard,
only to reject the idea.
Such threats palled, however, besides the theses of another German rev-
olutionary. It was Karl Heinzen (1809–80) who provided what has been
termed the first ‘full-fledged doctrine of modern terrorism’ (Laqueur 1977,
p. 26). This took the form of a defence, in a tract entitled Der Mord (Mur-
der), originally published in 1849, not merely of tyrannicide as ‘the chief
means of historical progress’ (Wittke 1945,p.73), but of the murder of
hundreds and even thousands, at any time or place, in the higher interests of
humanity. If ‘the destruction of the life of another’ was always ‘unjust and
7 Luft 2006,pp.136–65; though this account does not distinguish adequately between revolutionary
violence and ‘terrorism’, nor sufficiently clarify whether Bauer proposed violence against possessors
of state and religious power, or a much wider body of ‘innocents’.
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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek
barbarous’, Heinzen contended that ‘If one man is permitted to murder, all
must be permitted to do so.’ No distinction could be drawn between war,
insurrection, assassination and murder. Calculating the ‘murder register of
history’, Heinzen estimated that the most immoral killing had been per-
formed in the name of Christianity. In round numbers, he thought, some
two thousand million people had died in the name of religion; by contrast,
the number of individual murders throughout human history was minute.
The leading murderers of the present day were the three great emperors of
Prussia, Austro-Hungar y and Russia, and the Pope; their collective mes-
sage, thought Heinzen, was t hat ‘We murder in order to rule, as you must
murder to become free.’ Moreover, Heinzen asserted, ‘murder in the most
colossal dimensions has been and still is the chief means of historical devel-
opment’. Used against despots, it could never be a crime, but was only
self-defence (Heinzen 1881,pp.1–2, 5, 8, 10, 15, 24). Considering that
‘The safety of despots rests wholly on the preponderance of their means
of destruction’, Heinzen considered ‘the greatest benefactor of mankind’
to be ‘he who makes it possible for a few men to wipe out thousands’
(Heinzen 1881,p.24; Laqueur 1979,p.59). He applauded every new tech-
nical means of achieving these ends, including the use of Congreve rockets,
mines and poison gas capable of destroying entire cities at once. Naturally
he lauded Orsini extravagantly in 1858,andreprintedDer Mord on the
occasion.
Various efforts to associate Marx with these ideals were made (e.g. Schaack
1889,pp.18–19). But Marx’s comment on the Fenian explosion at Clerken-
well was that ‘Secret, melodramatic conspiracies of this kind are, in general,
more or less doomed to failure’, with Engels replying that ‘it is the misfor-
tune of all conspiracies that they lead to such acts of folly’ (Marx and Engels
1987,pp.501, 505). (In 1882 Engels did, however, concede to Eduard Bern-
stein that while an Irish uprising did not have the ‘remotest prospect of success’,
‘the lurking presence of armed Fenian conspirators’ might actually aid the
‘only recourse’ of ‘the constitutional method of gradual conquest’; Marx
and Engels 1993a, pp. 287–8.) The one real point at which an exception
was admitted was Russia, about which Engels, writing to Vera Zasulich
in 1885, said that ‘It is one of those special cases where it is possible for
a handful of men to effect a revolution . . . if ever Blanquism, the fantasy
of subverting the whole of a society by a small band of conspirators, had
any rational foundation, it would assuredly be in St Petersburg, (Marx and
Engels 1993b, p. 280). Marxism never adopted terror as a central aspect of its
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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism
strategy, though mass executions (some two million by 1925) characterised
the Bolshevik Revolution, heralding much greater blood-letting later in the
twentieth century.
In Britain in the 1850s this controversy crystallised around the issue
of the illegitimate nature of the rule of Louis Napoleon after his 1851
coup d’
´
etat, and specifically Orsini’s attempt to kill Napoleon III on 14
January 1858. As the debate about justifiable tyrannicide grew, the secularist
George Jacob Holyoake (who had helped to test Orsini’s bombs) repr inted
a variety of seventeenth-century tracts on the subject. A leading radical
lawyer, Thomas Allsop, privately offered £100 to any would-be assassin,
and helped to provide Orsini with rudimentary bomb-making equipment
(Holyoake 1905,p.41). In the best-known British defence of Orsini –
whose own inspiration or iginally came from Tacitus (Orsini, 1857,p.23;
Packe 1957) – by W. E. Adams, entitled Tyrannicide: Is It Justifiable? (1858),
it was asserted that
Every moment of oppression is a state of war; every forcible denial of right is a casus
belli. War, then, prevails wherever a despot reigns or a people is enslaved; hostilities can
be commenced at any moment, whenever the people has the strength of fortitude and
the hope of success; neither truce nor treaty is broken. Revolution is the ambuscade of
the people. (Adams 1858,p.6)
Young Italy was also accused of assassinations, notably of Count Rossi, but
later vindicated of the charge (Frost 1876, ii,p.180). Mazzini, who had been
accused of plotting to kill the Austrian emperor in 1825, and of another
assassination in 1833 (Mazzini 1864, i,p.224), now reconsidered the ‘theory
of the dagger’ in an open letter to Orsini (a member of Young Italy). But
he rejected the idea.
Systematic terrorism
Systematic or strategic terrorism as such is a product of the second half of
the nineteenth century. While there were relatively small groups active in
many countries, including the Ku Klux Klan in the American South, the
Molly Maguires in the US labour movement, Poles, Indians, Spaniards and
Armenians, the principal groups of this period were in Russia and Ireland.
Russia
Russian terrorism was intimately interwoven with anarchist doctrine, but
this does not as such explain its character. Much terrorist activity in this
239
Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek
period was directly linked to revolutionary movements, but as a leading anar-
chist, Sergius Stepniak noted, it was because revolution in Russia became
regarded as ‘absolutely impossible’ that terrorism emerged as a strategy
(Zenker 1898,p.121). Promoted by intellectuals when a peasant uprising
seemed unlikely, and in the face of severe repression (Hardy 1987,p.161), it
was thus, as a modern historian puts it, ‘with the downturn in revolutionary
expectations after 1860 that the sense of separation from the mass clientele
became most acute and that terrorist philosophy, in the modern sense, was
born’ (Rubinstein 1987,p.145).
The most famous Russian group to advocate this strategy was Narodnaya
Volya, which emerged from the populist Land and Liberty par ty (Seth
1966). Relatively indifferent to the form of centralised government, it aimed
at the revival of the mir, or peasant commune, as the foundation of Russian
justice and freedom. Its activities from January 1878 to March 1881 included
the shooting of the governor-general of St Petersburg by Vera Zasulich, the
killing of the head of the tsarist secret police, General Mezentsev, in August
1878, and most famously, the assassination of Tsar Alexander II himself on
1 March 1881. But it also justified the killing of
the most dangerous personages in the government...punishing...the most noted
cases of oppression and arbitrariness on the part of the government, administration,
and so on . . . The goal is to break the spell of governmental omnipotence, to provide
uninterrupted evidence of the possibility of a struggle against the government, in such
a manner as to raise the revolutionary spirit of the people (Naimark 1983,p.13)
In the late 1880s Narodnaya Volya and social democratic thought began
to merge, and the advocacy of terrorism became linked increasingly with
organising the working class for socialist ends (Venturi 1960,pp.700–2).
Some Narodniki in this period, such as Abram Bakh, now dismissed terror
as ineffectual, counterproductive and incompatible with true revolutionary
principles (Naimark 1983,p.230). But such views did not predominate.
A second wave of Russian terrorism followed the founding of the Social
Revolutionary Party, commencing with the assassination of the Minister of
the Interior, Sipyagin, in 1902, rising to fifty-four attentats in 1905,eighty-
two in 1906 and seventy-one in 1907, then declining. This group offered an
elaborate justification of terrorism which was melded with Marxist theory,
the aim of terrorist acts being not the glorification of the individual act
of will, but revolutionising the masses (Geifman 1993,p.46). The many
attempts to kill a succession of tsars thus fit the classic practice of tyran-
nicide, which was then extended to other members of the regime, with
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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism
terrorism eventually permeating the entire anarchist and socialist left in
Russia. The first person to advocate conspiratorial violence as a means of
arousing and educating the masses rather than as a means of seizing power
was Sergei Nechayev (1848–82), widely regarded as the practical ‘founder’
of modern terrorism (see Rapoport and Alexander 1989,p.70). He is
often quoted for his assertion that ‘The Revolutionary knows only one
science – destruction...Day and night he may have only one thought,
one purpose: merciless destruction’ (Jaszi and Lewis 1957,p.136); ‘For him
exists only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, one satisfaction, the
reward of revolution’ (Zenker 1898,p.137). To Nechayev everything could
beregarded‘asmoralwhichhelpsthetriumphofrevolution...Allsoftand
enervating feelings of relationship, friendship, love, gratitude, even honor,
must be stifled in him by a cold passion for the revolutionary cause’ (quoted
in Carr 1961,p.395). The character of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime
and Punishment is based upon him.
The idea that ‘The urge of destruction is at the same time a creative
urge’ was as we have seen thereafter developed practically by the principal
anarchist leader of this period, Michael Bakunin, who shared a sense of
historical inevitability with Marx. Its philosophical expression was further
expanded by Georges Sorel (1847–1922), whose Reflections on Violence was
published in 1912, and was indebted to t he philosopher Henri Bergson (see
Arendt 1969). By the 1890s, too, there emerged what we would today term
the psychological profiling of the terrorist ‘type’ as a special brand of deviant
criminal or ‘anti-authoritarian’ personality, in which a lust for power, sexual
impropriety and anti-Semitism could be wedded into a seemingly scientific
political psychology (see Kreml 1977; Lombroso 1896). This was countered
by the glorification of the Robin Hood robber type, such as the Rus-
sian Stenka Razin, as a form of what Eric Hobsbawm has described as a
‘primitive rebel’ or ‘social bandit’, where the boundaries between criminal,
or brigand, as Nechayev would have it, and revolutionary, are more than
uncommonly blurred (Hobsbawm 1959, 1972). It was also met with the
plea of the reasonableness of violent reaction to circumstances of extreme
oppression and official violence or state terror (Goldman 1969b, pp. 79–
108). At the end of the century some revolutionaries, such as Plekhanov,
sought to restrict the use of terror to special circumstances. Others, such
as Morozov, favoured ‘pure terror’ as a strategy superior to both individ-
ual assassination and spontaneous uprising, because it ‘punishes only those
who are really responsible for the evil deed’ (Laqueur 1979,p.74), though
Morozov still aimed at a socialist end-point. By 1879 the latter view came to
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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek
triumph in Narodnaya Volya, and met with increasing support amongst the
wider public. By 1905 such tactics were used by a wide variety of political
groupings, including the Bolsheviks.
Fenianism
The most important Western European insurrectionary movement
throughout the nineteenth century was that linked to Irish nationalism.
While there had been many groups operating in Ireland beforehand, such
as the Whiteboys and Ribbonmen (Clark and Donnelly 1983; Whelan 1996;
Williams 1973), the movement known as Fenianism built upon efforts of the
Young Ireland party (Davis 1987; Duffy 1896). (Modern studies of the move-
ment include Comerford 1998;Davis1974; Garvin 1987; Newsinger 1994;
Quinlivan and Rose 1982; Walker 1969.) Young Ireland emerged in 1842
around the jour nal, the Nation. It included John Mitchel, Charles Gavan
Duffy, Thomas Davis and William Smith O’Brien, and left-leaning radicals
like Fintan Lalor (see Lalor 1918)in1848, and their later followers, notably
Michael Doheny. Socially some of these men were fairly conser vative and
backward looking, romantically viewing a lost past of peasant-proprietors
as a goal to be recaptured; Mitchel also opposed the French ‘Red Repub-
licans’ in 1848. Later generations of nationalists were more sympathetic to
seeking some compromise between capitalism and socialism, while James
Connolly, though somewhat isolated, plumped for socialism tout court (Con-
nolly 1917). Like the Poles, many Irish republicans also remained Catholic,
by contrast to the anti-clericism of many French and Italian revolutionaries.
What united them, it has been claimed, was the fact that the movement was
‘avowedly republican and separatist from the very first’ (Henry 1920,p.33).
Following the failure of O’Connell’s Repeal Association in the mid-
1840s, and the suppression of a brief insurrection in 1848, Fenianism com-
menced in the United States and Ireland in the late 1850s. It was led by
two Young Ireland members exiled in Paris, James Stephens, who returned
to Ireland, and John O’Mahony, who went to the US. Under the name of
‘Fenian’, adopted from Fianna Errinn by O’Mahony (Pigott 1883,p.99),
invoking a legendary pre-Christian warrior order, and first used around
1859, it was thereafter often associated interchangeably with the ‘Irish
Revolutionary Brotherhood’ and then the ‘Irish Republican Brotherhood’
(IRB), which lasted until 1924. (A ‘Constitution of the Fenian Brother-
hood’ is dated 1865.SeeThe Fenian’s Progress: A Vision, 1865,pp.68–91.)
The Fenian organisation began recruitment in 1858, held its first national
meeting in 1863, and became linked with another American organisation,
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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism
the Clan-na-Gael, founded in 1869, by which time it had over 200,000
members. It existed separately in Ireland from 1858, under the name of
the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The Fenians were organised around a
‘centre’ or ‘A’, who was supported by nine ‘Bs’, or captains, each of whom
had nine ‘Cs’ or sergeants, each leading a group of nine privates, every
level knowing only those immediately closest to it. This scheme Stephens
probably copied from the Blanquists and other French conspirators, though
it has been alleged (in a suspect source) that Stephens’ plans differed from
those of continental plotters in that he sought the long-term arming of a
substantial portion of the population in order to defeat the British army,
rather than a brief insurrection (Rutherford 1877, i,pp.61–2). Members
were sworn to secrecy, obedience to superiors and loyalty to the goal of
making Ireland a democratic republic.
Associated in the first instance with an abortive attempt to invade Canada
in May 1866, and an equally fruitless uprising in Ireland in 1867, the Fenians
began in the early 1870s to plot a lengthy campaign of violence, but were
for a time overshadowed by both the Land League and Parnell’s Home Rule
movement, to whom they deferred tactically (Henry 1920,p.34; Samuels,
n.d.). A plan to seize Dublin and defend it by barricades was hatched
early in the struggle (Bussy 1910,p.26). In 1873 the Fenians adopted a
resolution not to attempt another armed insurrection until support from
the majority of the Irish people was evident. By 1876 O’Donovan Rossa,
disgusted at Fenian inactivity, mounted his own plan of violently resisting
England by raising a ‘Skirmishing Fund’ to strike it at ‘any vulnerable point’
(The Times-Parnell Commission Speech 1890,p.56). He was quoted as saying
‘I go in for dynamite. Tear down English cities; kill the English people.
To kill and massacre and pillage is justifiable in the eyes of God and man’
(Adams 1903, ii,p.565). From this time onwards the ‘dynamite propaganda’
or ‘propaganda of terrorism’ (Davitt’s phrase: The Times-Parnell Commission
Speech 1890,p.100) was to be more closely associated with Rossa than
anyone else. (Davitt himself rejected the ‘dynamite theory’ as ‘the very
abnegation of mind, the surrender of reason to rage, of judgment to blind,
unthinking recklessness’, The Times-Parnell Commission Speech 1890,p.408;
see F. Sheehy-Skeffington 1908,p.141.)
From 1878 the Fenians supported Home Rule and the policy of obstruc-
tion in Parliament, as well as the Land War, which commenced in 1879,
led by Parnell’s National Land League. This coalition lasted until 1882,
when Parnell broke from the Fenians and established the Irish National
League. The Fenians’ most notorious success in this period was the
243