Welsh Journals

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contribution to the provision of a Bible in Welsh, while Eurwyn Wiliam discusses houses in Wales between 1900 and 1920. Of the essays dealing with the modem period, W. G. Evans examines women's education in Victorian times, D. Tecwyn Lloyd discusses how Welsh leaders such as O. M. Edwards, Emrys ap Iwan and Saunders Lewis interpreted the past, and John Davies considers the provision of social services in Wales during the inter-war period.] CYRIL PARRY Bangor YMATEB I CHWYLDRO-RESPONSE TO REVOLUTION. By D. O. Thomas. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1989. Pp. 105. £ 3.95. A Frenchman or woman on the Eisteddfod field is a rare sight: Americans are two a dime. Is this because, for the Welsh, eighteenth- or nineteenth-century 'Utopian' or 'scientific' in their approach to the discovery of the perfect society, America, not France, has always been the land of the free? Some years ago, historians were dipping their pens in vitriol to denounce the concept of an 'Atlantic Revolution', a revolution covering in time and space the second half of the eighteenth century and the western half of the known world. Reading how leading Welshmen (women were still making cawl apparently) responded to the French Revolution, one is tempted to conclude that there were two 'revolutions', divided as much by the forces of language, history, and geography as by those of economics and politics, just as today Britain-including the Welsh-do not really know whether they should be members of the E.E.C. or the more amorphous but equally powerful A.E.C. (American Economic Community). During the 1790s, eminent London Welshmen like Richard Price and David Williams supported both the American and the French versions of revolution; 'Welsh' Welshmen like Morgan John Rhys supported the former, and Rhys enthused about the latter for a couple of years before setting his sails firmly in the direction of America where he was to die in 1804, the year Napoleon Bonaparte decided to call himself an emperor. For Welshmen like Rhys and the equally imaginative and irrepressible Edward Williams ('Iolo Morgannwg'), the French were acceptable so long as they were cutting off the heads of Catholic kings and breaking off relations with the Pope, or the 'Whore of Babylon' as they preferred to describe His Holiness. But it was America which won their hearts, concerned as that fledgling republic was with religious liberty. The French Revolution was refracted in Wales through the prisms of Old Dissent and millenarianism, and there was not a lot of that in the Jacobin Club. Indeed, one wonders what Uncorruptible, musing over his Rousseau in his apartment in the rue Saint-Honoré (now a restaurant-Chez Robespierre-such is the march of history and market forces), would have made of Morgan and 'Iolo', indeed of the entire radical response by the Welsh to the Revolution. He would certainly have denounced the London Welshman, David Williams (who had a hand in framing the abortive Girondin constitution of 1793), as a 'counter-revolutionary'. I have more