cover image Ireland: Social, Political, and Religious

Ireland: Social, Political, and Religious

Gustave de Beaumont, , edited and trans. from the French by W.C. Taylor, intro. by Tom Garvin and And. Harvard/Belknap, $35 (419pp) ISBN 978-0-674-02165-5

Beaumont's 1839 book is the forgotten sister of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America . The two liberal Catholic contemporaries were close friends for many decades. They "constituted a two-man Department of Political Sociology" and "discussed every scholarly line they wrote," argue Garvin and Hess—academics at University College Dublin—in their introduction. In order not to overlap, Tocqueville focused by mutual agreement on the constitutional and societal aspects of America, while Beaumont investigated the disadvantaged, the colonialized and the suborned. Beaumont toured Ireland for background on what would become a European bestseller. To a horrified audience, he revealed the brutality, indifference and intolerance of English rule over Ireland. He painted a picture of proselytizing Protestant nobles lording it over a native, nationalist Catholic population, yet Beaumont—a fervent believer in the virtue of British political institutions—paradoxically argued, in Garvin and Hess's words, that London had given Ireland the "constitutional tools necessary to free itself from colonial oppression." In subsequent years, the Irish would pick up those tools. Though it lacks the immortality and balance of Democracy in America , Beaumont's account makes for a worthy rediscovery and deserves wider recognition. (Mar.)