“Hugon come erindwards”: Finnegans Wake and Ireland’s Huguenots

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses the rich variety of allusions to the Huguenots in Finnegans Wake, and considers the reasons for Joyce’s interest in this group of Protestant émigrés. Joyce makes several references to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the apotheosis of Huguenot persecution at the hands of the French Catholics, and he draws analogy between their experience and that of other groups of heretics and dissenters. Joyce celebrates the social, commercial, and cultural impact made by the migrants and their descendants, which was disproportionately great for the size of the diaspora. I argue that there are several reasons for Joyce’s engagement with the Huguenots. Their story of sectarian persecution, dispossession, and exile recalls the Irish Catholic experience, but it offers balance to the narrative of Catholic victimhood in depicting a Protestant group that suffered comparable oppression. Most importantly, the remarkable success with which the Huguenots integrated into Irish society offers a positive model for the plurality that Joyce espoused throughout his writing career, culminating in his final work.