Stephen and Patrice drank in "the bar MacMahon," named for
the Irish Frenchman Patrice de Mac Mahon, perhaps the most
illustrious descendant of the Wild
Geese who left Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries.
He was Duke of Magenta, Marshall of France, and President of
the Third Republic.
MacMahon's forebears descended from the Dalcassians, lost ancestral
lands during Cromwell's depredations in the 1650s, and left
Ireland in the 1690s after the Catholic lords' disastrous
support for England's deposed
Stuart king, James II. Groomed for a career as a
military officer, Patrice rose through the ranks of the French
army from the 1820s through the 1850s and achieved the rank of
Marshall in 1859. As a conservative politician in the 1870s,
he remained committed to the ancient French aristocratic order
but positioned himself somewhat precariously as a figure who
could rise above the struggle between monarchists and
republicans. His term as the French president ended unhappily
in 1879 with a Republican electoral triumph. He died in 1893.
The Avenue Mac-Mahon in the 17th arrondissement is
one of the dozen major Parisian thoroughfares that converge on
the Arc de Triomphe, and has been so named since 1875. I have
not been able to learn anything about the "bar MacMahon" that
Joyce knew.
