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Lisa Maguire's avatar

Wow, you sent me down a fascinating rabbit hole. François de Fitz James was the son of James FitzJames, Catholic general at the Battle of the Boyne, and the defeat at Aughrim, that marked the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. This Catholic disaster was commemorated by Irish Protestants in the July 12th Orange Parades that ended in riots in the 1870s in New York and other cities, including Montreal (I wrote about the 1878 Orange Crisis in Montreal here on Substack). And this Fitz James was part of the "Flight of the Wild Geese" of defeated Irish Catholic forces to France and elsewhere.

I had no idea that an Englishman, even a Catholic one raised in France, could be made a French bishop.

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Lisa Maguire's avatar

Thanks! And what a great Substack! I subscribed.

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David Gemeinhardt's avatar

I really enjoy Pallavi Ayyar’s writing.

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David Gemeinhardt's avatar

Happy to help (?). There are more rabbit holes for you to go down. There are lots of Catholic Jacobites in France during what I call the Versailles Century. You can look up the Dillon family, for instance. One of them became an archbishop.

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