La légende noire de l'IRA: entre historiographie "révisionniste" et mythologie unioniste

Résumé

Vers la fin du vingtième siècle, plusieurs historiens concluent que pendant la guerre d’indépendance irlandaise (1919-1921) l’IRA aurait traqué les rescapés de la Première Guerre mondiale pour les punir de leur participation auprès des Britanniques pendant le conflit. Or, cette légende noire repose sur des interprétations erronées, sur des omissions inavouées et constitue aujourd’hui un rempart intellectuel puissant à toute compréhension détaillée du rôle des rescapés de 1914-1918 pendant la guerre d’indépendance. Plus important encore, elle reste indissociable des trois décennies de violences communautaires en Irlande du Nord (1969-1990) et s’inscrit également dans une période de renouveau historiographique dit « révisionniste ». Alors qu’une nouvelle génération de chercheurs travaille à la démythification de l’historiographie irlandaise, des historiens issus de cette mouvance façonnent un récit qui se nourrit du vide historiographique qui entoure la contribution déterminante de rescapés de 1914-1918 à la guerre d’indépendance.

Mots clefs : Irlande, anciens combattants, IRA, légende noire, historiographie

Title

The Distorted Vision of the IRA: between Historiographical revisionism and unionist mythology

Abstract

From the 1990s till this day, the overwhelming and almost unanimously shared distorted vision of the Irish Republican Army targeting the survivors of the First World War considerably contributed to portray Irish veterans of the Great War as a severely persecuted community during the Irish War of Independence. In portraying them as victims, not of collateral and indiscriminate political violence, but as victims of selective violence in wartime, historians projected onto the IRA the image of a paramilitary organisation hunting, intimidating, torturing, when not executing, the veterans of the European conflict. However this interpretation and portrayal of them being a severely persecuted group does not bear scrutiny when the empirical evidence from the period is examined. The enumeration of all veterans assassinated by the IRA cannot help us understand the reasons why they suffered (alongside other communities). It appears necessary to rely on primary sources to properly appreciate the reasons for their executions. Irish veterans of the Great War formed a heterogeneous community with diverse motivations and expectations. When the War of Independence broke out, some of them staunchly supported the British Crown, others supported the revolution, while the overwhelming majority aspired to a peaceful and quiet reintegration within their local community. As such, to use the appellation ‘Irish veterans’ already presents some flaws given that the post-war trajectories of this community varied greatly. In addition, the present article argues that the distortion cannot be dissociated from the three decades of communal violence and republican insurrection in Northern Ireland (1969-1990). The representation of the IRA hunting down veterans of the Great War emerged after thirty years of sectarian violence and illustrates that the historians who shaped it belonged to their time. Nonetheless, those historians also belonged to the second generation of revisionists who advocated professional scholarship and a ‘mental war of liberation from servitude to myth’ to achieve Ireland’s historiographical revolution. While challenging traditional literature and cleansing Irish history from republican mythology, professional historians’ dissatisfaction with republicanism led some of them to shape a distorted vision of the IRA persecuting the survivors of the Great War at a time when contemporary Unionism rediscovered and explored its historical consciousness. In the later 1960s, the Northern Irish state celebrated its founders and sought to strengthen its unionist sense of belonging through overt acts of identification, historical re-enactments, demonstrations, and the revival of loyalist mural art. A new unionist iconography sought to cement the distinctive Northern Irish heritage and culture and consequently generated its own unionist myths while professional historians begged for the demystification of Ireland’s history. That the new revisionist stream and the illumination of the historical consciousness of modern Unionism alike are the breeding grounds of that distorted vision of the IRA systematically targeting veterans of the Great War comes as no surprise. The constant confrontation with and denunciation of republican mythology helped to introduce a unionist rhetoric. However, while many detractors of the revisionist historiography lamented that heroic figures had been cleansed from the Irish past, and accused revisionist historians of launching a historical counter-revolution, they did not seem to deplore that the IRA was portrayed as an entity deliberately persecuting veterans of the Great War. Furthermore, if the advocates of the revisionist stream highlight the necessity to rely on primary sources and historical evidence, they seem to deliberately neglect another historical evidence; the determinant role played by veterans of the Great War during the War of Independence. Hundreds of them joined the IRA to fight for the independence of Ireland. The largely-spread, and now accepted, legend of the IRA tormenting the survivors of the European conflict contributed to dissociate veterans of the Great War from the republican movement whereas they did train, supervise, and fight with the IRA. That distortion fed on the total absence of historical research dealing with their determinant role in shaping the organization. The Centenary of the Irish War of Independence represents an unexpected yet welcome moment to challenge traditional narratives by bringing to light the genesis of that distorted vision of the IRA persecuting and hunting down veterans of the Great War.

Key words:

Ireland, veterans of the Great War, IRA, distorted vision, historiography