John Allen and the Long Revolution of Irish Republicanism

John Allen and the Long Revolution of Irish Republicanism, 1780-1855

Born in the artisan Liberties of Dublin around 1780, John Allen grew up in a household saturated with the radical politics of the United Irishmen, his father a dyer and republican organiser in Pimlico. Arrested at Margate in 1798 while carrying a secret diplomatic mission to revolutionary France, Allen was acquitted at the Maidstone treason trial through the extraordinary solidarity of Father James Coigly, who chose execution over betrayal. Returning to Dublin, Allen became one of Robert Emmets most trusted lieutenants in the doomed insurrection of July 1803, commanding a rebel column of three hundred men before the rising collapsed in confusion and violence. Escaping with a price of 300 on his head, he reached France and joined Napoleons Irish Legion, the exile force created to liberate Ireland through French military power. Over a decade of distinguished Napoleonic service, Allen rose from sous-lieutenant to chef-de-bataillon, earning the Legion of Honour for leading a forlorn hope assault at the siege of Astorga in 1810. Surviving capture, the catastrophic Bober River disaster of 1813, and the post-Waterloo extradition crisis, he spent four decades in French retirement, secretly returning to Ireland in the 1840s to bring his elderly sisters to Caen, where he died in 1855.