The Celts: A Modern History of Freedom in Modern Life is a new history of the Celts that reveals how this once-forgotten people became a pillar of modern national identity in Britain, Ireland, and France.
What was your purpose in writing The Celts: A Modern History?
Ian Stewart: This book began as an attempt to write the history of the late nineteenth-century Pan-Celtic movement (what is now Part III), which connected different kinds of nationalists from across the Celtic nations: Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Brittany, the Isle of Man, and eventually Cornwall. Straightforwardly enough, I thought that I should first understand what ‘Celtic’ meant before trying to get to grips with the ideology behind Pan-Celticism. Lo and behold, the possible meanings and understandings behind ‘Celts’, ‘Celtic’, etc. turned out to be extremely variable, and they changed according to where, when, and by whom they were articulated. That meant that I kept following threads of evidence back in time and across national, and often linguistic, boundaries. It was necessary to look for the origins of ideas of the Celts—or ‘Celticism’—in the ancient classical sources, but I was most concerned to understand the ways in which they were shaped and for what purposes in the modern period. That’s why, although the Celts were an ancient people, this is a ‘modern’ history. What I ended up with was a history of ideas of the Celts in their major intellectual and cultural contexts, stretching across the European continent and the British and Irish Isles from the Renaissance to the Present. So the purpose behind the book changed over time as a result of the research; however, I think the main takeaways are that ‘national identities’ are the products of intra and international negotiation over generations, and that these kinds of ideas are shaped through a process of triangulation of what is plausible to scholars and what is expedient to the political and cultural figures claiming the Celts as their ancestors.
The book is quite wide-ranging and moves quickly between those Celtic nations you mentioned, as well as England, and much of Europe. Why is this?
IS: In many ways the book is really an intellectual and cultural history of European (including Britain and Ireland) nation-building and nationalism over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through a Celtic prism. Including the European aspect was really important because I believe that contexts should be extended as far as necessary in order to understand the subject at hand, and it would be impossible to holistically understand the history of Celticism without such an approach that traces ideas and individuals across borders.
To give an example: there was a sort of crisis of faith in France following the Revolution, in which anti-clerical liberals looked for spiritual alternatives to Christianity. Since Gaul was seen as the foundation of the French nation, and since the Gauls were recorded by Caesar to have their own priestly class called the Druids, some hoped a version of their religion could be resurrected as a sort of new national religion; however, the Gauls left behind no written texts (apart from short inscriptions), and so alternatives had to be sought. They were found in the bardic writings of the eccentric Welsh stonemason named Iolo Morganwg, who claimed to preserve druidic secrets and manuscript sources; they were, however, forgeries. This was unbeknownst to the respectable French scholars who thus drew on a body of fake sources for their historical and literary works on French national history.
To give another example: there developed an archaeological approach to studying the ancient Celts in central Europe—Switzerland, Austria, and southern Germany—in the middle decades of the nineteenth century that sought to map the extent of ancient Celtic territory through similarities in material culture. Drawing on this work, antiquarians and art historians from Britain and Ireland pointed to a shared artistic style that allowed them to trace the Celtic map from Austria in the East all the way to Ireland in the West. That picture was the dominant one in Celtic studies and popular history from the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1980s, and it was only made possible through international scholarly cooperation. Everything I have just mentioned was shaped not only by the knowledge background but the political imperatives of individuals investigating these places and things.
But are France and Germany ‘Celtic’ Countries? Is that why they figure so often in the book?
IS: In some ways France is the country where the most consistent and strongest claims to Celtic heritage have been made since the Renaissance. Because ancient Gaul—made famous by the classical authors and Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars above all—was basically accepted by everyone to be an ancient Celtic country, France had an obvious and robust claim to this ancient past. Still, this came under sustained challenge especially from scholars who came from Germanic cultures. In fact, the first major modern dispute about the ancient Celts developed between scholars in France and scholars in the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century over who the Gauls really were, what language they spoke, and whose vernacular resembled it most closely (and therefore who could really claim to be the true descendants of the Celts). That same dispute rumbled on well into the twentieth century, and though it is no longer freighted with political implications, it still remains a point of scholarly differences of opinion.
This early-modern disagreement had important religious implications, but the Celtic origins of the French and Germans took on an increasingly political hue in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Basically, the French nobility claimed descent from the Germanic Franks, who had invaded and subdued the (at this point very Romanised) Gaulish population, and in the eighteenth century they argued that this gave them special privileges over the common people (identified as the descendants of the subjugated Gauls). The Gaulish interpretation then triumphed with the revolutionary overthrow of the monarchy and nobility by the Third Estate in the 1790s.
Meanwhile, some Germans who wanted to resist Prussian hegemony and creeping centralisation argued that their regions were actually descended from the Celts (sometimes made possible by the archaeological evidence I mentioned above). There was also the fact that in the nineteenth century many of the scholarly breakthroughs were made by German scholars, who were recognised to be the leaders in this field. Many of them also harboured sympathy for the Celtic regions of Brittany, Ireland, and Wales, and thought they should be freed from French and English imperialism (on the principle that they constituted organic racial communities with their own histories, languages, and cultures). These elements reached a dramatic and surprising climax in the Third Reich. The Nazis were willing to view the Celtic peoples as a part of their European ‘Nordic’ master race, and sought to buoy the nationalist movements in the Celtic countries in order to weaken their French and British enemies; one of their main cultural embassies was through scholarship.
I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned Ireland yet. What is their place in this history?
IS: Ireland’s relationship to Celticism is surprising and complicated. Although it is now often thought to be the most Celtic of nations, it was only in the late eighteenth century that Irish Gaelic scholars began to understand themselves, their language, and their nation as ‘Celtic’. The vitality of intellectual culture in medieval Ireland is well-known, and I believe that the strength of Irish tradition that survived in the early-modern era impeded somewhat the acceptance of the theory of Celtic origins (because its own robust native tradition drew the Irish from a different source). Once the Celtic status of Ireland did come to be fully accepted in the nineteenth century, the strength of the Irish nationalist movement buoyed the cultural resonance of Celticism through the twentieth century. However, because of the idiosyncrasy of Irish history and its tenuous place within the United Kingdom, advanced Irish nationalists tended to prioritise their Gaelic identity rather than adopt a Celtic perspective (which entails the other five Celtic nations, four of which were quite happily incorporated into union with England). What became one of the world-leading centres for the study of Celtic topics, the School of Celtic Studies within the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, was originally intended as an Irish School until Éamon de Valera personally interceded and made its focus more broadly Celtic.
Can you bring us back where you started and explain the significance of Pan-Celticism?
IS: As national pride linked to Celtic difference (and racialization by the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ English and Lowland Scots) grew over the nineteenth century, individuals in the Celtic nations started to believe that they could better press their claims for cultural and sometimes political autonomy through international, ‘Pan-Celtic’, cooperation. Because linguistic scholarship had shown the two main language branches (Irish, Scots, and Manx Gaelic on the one hand, and Welsh, Breton, and Cornish on the other) to be relatives, Pan-Celticists argued that they were all members of one ancient race that could be reunited once again. Different nations brought different things to the table; for example, although the Irish were emphatically the most political, the Welsh seemed to have best preserved their Celtic identity through their language and other cultural features. Meanwhile, Brittany had a relatively strong political movement (that became violent in the twentieth century), with a decidedly more conservative cast as a result of its battles with the French state and republican centralisation. At the outset of the twentieth century, E.E. Fournier d’Albe brought representatives from all the Celtic nations together in a series of Pan-Celtic Congresses. While the Pan-Celtic polity that he envisioned never came to pass, the cultural mould that he and his collaborators constructed based on shared language (above all) and culture gave the predominant shape to Celtic culture and politics that continues to exist to this day.
About the Author
Ian Stewart is an intellectual and cultural historian of modern Europe and a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.