Patrimoine/Cultural Heritage in France and Ireland

Abstract

Eamon Maher and Eugene O'Brien although practised in very different ways, a heritage that shaped them in ways of which they were sometimes unaware.Irish seminarians went to France to study for the priesthood during the Penal Laws; the French were Ireland's closest ally in its centuries-old struggle against England and, more recently, in their support of Irish agriculture within the European Union, a goal that was closely aligned to France's own national interests.(With Brexit looming on the horizon, the entente cordiale between the Celtic cousins will assume an even greater importance).Strangely enough, with all the movement of Irish people to France, the language barrier does not seem to have caused as much difficulty as one might expect, because Irish exiles in general appear to have become adept at the language quite quickly.A good example of this is the writer George Moore , who arrived in Paris as a young man with little or no knowledge of the French language and went on to become one of the best known figures in Parisian artistic circles during the 1870s.In Confessions of a Young Man, he describes his excitement at the prospect of living in Paris, where he hoped to become a famous painter -he would subsequently discover that he did not possess the requisite talent to succeed as an artist and took up writing instead.Before embarking on the boat that would bring him to his chosen destination, Moore remarked: France!The word rang in my ears and gleamed in my eyes.All my senses sprang from sleep like a crow when the man on the look-out cries, 'Land ahead!' Instantly I knew I should, that I must, go to France, that I would live there, that I would become as a Frenchman.1Moore's enthusiasm for France was predicated on the fact that he knew it to be a country which cherished artists and valued learning.His experience of Ireland was very different: he found the insular attitudes and superstitious religiosity of his home country inamicable at best to his artistic sensibility.He believed that he could be happy and comfortable in the type of setting that Paris would provide, a belief that proved well founded, as Moore 1 George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (Glamorgan, South Wales: Leaf Classics, 2013), no page numbers supplied.became an integral part of the influential group of writers and artists who congregated in the Café Athènes, a place he describes with much fondness in Confessions of a Young Man.His biographer Adrian Frazier quotes the artist Manet saying to Moore on one occasion: 'There is no Frenchman living in London who occupies the same position as you do in Paris', a definite compliment to the son of a landlord and parliamentarian from the West of Ireland.2Moore definitely made an impression during his period in Paris and he mined the experiences he had in the French capital to fuel his creative imagination.Moore learned from French writers such as Balzac and Zola the importance of place in good fiction.Place and patrimoine are closely linked and many renowned French and Irish writers are known for their ability to capture the essential details of the settings in which they locate their fictions: one need only think of Mauriac's reproduction of the Landes district around Bordeaux, Joyce's Dublin, Heaney's Bellaghy, Flaubert's Normandy, Zola's Paris, Balzac's representations of Paris and provincial France, McGahern's Leitrim/Roscommon, Yeats' Sligo.Heaney once remarked that associations with place are created through language and ideology: Instead of just identifying with one place, and telling the story of a people in that place, poetry is also able to create, through language and imagery, another place 'where the mind could take shelter from the actual conditions'.3Taking shelter 'from the actual conditions', as Heaney puts it, is something that many artists seek to achieve in their work.Place is an essential trigger in this process, as it has within it the power to resuscitate images and memories that can open out onto some higher artistic plane.The 'other' place that is reached through art is infused with the personal memories of the writers, and thus, over time, often assumes a mythical status.In this way, art fulfils some of the same functions as 'terroir', by encapsulating the 2

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