However, it was not until 1842 (, June) that the first reports concerning the distress and misery of the working-classes in the manufacturing districts in Britain and of people in Ireland were published. Here a family has been found dead in its miserable hut, having sold or pawned down to the rags covering their nudity; there a father who dies worn out with need, a shovel in his hand, on the work he was employed for; elsewhere, a riot of people who want to stop grain from leaving the country, and blood shed; elsewhere again, a landlord who is assassinated, a farmer’s horses are killed as he is suspected of wanting to take his harvest to market in the nearby town; it is a troop of men in rags, but armed, who come on Sunday to placard on the walls of the church a proclamation full of death threats to those who pay their rent to the landlord, and so that no one can argue ignorance, armed sentinels watch all day over this manifesto and prevent it from being taken down. (Journal des Débats, 7th November 1846). On 13th September 1846, an editorial was devoted entirely to Ireland’s plight and to the short-termism which presided over recurrent problems of poverty in Ireland (reproduced in full below). The use made of these two papers by the. His papers are kept i, Who should one believe? 1One of the first histories of the Great Famine remarks on the role of the press in relaying the stories of the famine, noting that the English thought Irish sources were unreliable. It will no doubt be remembered, it was when England had just reformed its Corn Laws, when the protectionists were still filling Parliament with their lamentations and announcing that English agriculture would be ruined by the low prices to which all basic stuffs would fall due to foreign competition, that it was following a spring which appeared to promise a wonderful harvest, that England suddenly found itself threatened by shortage, that famine with all its horrors came to Ireland and to the Highlands in Scotland. These lines are followed by the apparently more important two-column report on the trial and conviction of John Francis, who had attempted to shoot and kill the Queen on 30, July 1842, lamenting the inaction of Peel’s government after three bad harvests and predicting ‘some strange calamity’, was reported on in full (, In 1843, Irish issues raised in the columns of the, By a curious circularity and reversal of the flow of news and opinion, the pages of the, reprint a verbatim translation of a speech made by Daniel O’Connell himself denouncing the bias and venality of the, under the thumb of French Prime Minister Guizot. In August, the Journal des Débats relayed the Lords’ Debates in which there was acknowledgement of the crisis which had been averted by the purchase of maize which saved the country from ‘incalculable ills’ according to the French, but coming food shortages were forecast with certainty by the paper (4th August 1846). To complete the recursive nature of this episode, O’Connell read in the Times of the Journal’s opinion that he, O’Connell, “like Frankenstein, was staring in fear at the monster he had created”9 but that Repeal agitation had ceased. (Journal des Débats, 19th November 1845). Last year, the crop was two-thirds lost, and it was thought that this was a passing ill, but it has returned, even more cruel, more deadly, more widespread, and hit the food of the people, not waiting until the potato was ripe, it has attacked its roots and stifled its flowers, and today, it is announced throughout Ireland, that there is no trace of greenery, and that in December, there will not be one single potato in the country. Nainital – Ranikhet – Almoda Cycling Expedition 2020, Follow This Day in History on WordPress.com, Nainital – Ranikhet – Almoda Cycling Expedition 2020, This Day in History (29-Feb-1904) – Theodore Roosevelt, appoints 7-man Panama Canal Commission to proceed with completing a canal at the Isthmus, This Day in History (28-Feb-1935) – Wallace Carothers invents nylon at the DuPont Experimental Station near Wilmington, Delaware, This Day in History (27-Feb-1931) – Chandrashekhar Azad shot himself to avoid British police arrest at Alfred Park, Allahabad, This Day in History (26-Feb-1815) – Napoleon Bonaparte Escapes from Elba, This Day in History (25-Feb- 1932) – Adolf Hitler obtains German citizenship by naturalization, which allows him to run in the 1932 election for Reichspräsident, This Day in History (28-Jun-1846) – Saxophone is patented by Antoine Joseph Sax.