Thanks to @Time Enough for reminding me of this guy's existence.
Feargus O'Connor came from a fairly illustrious parentage. His father Roger, and uncle Arthur, were Anglo-Irish gentry; despite this, they were radical reformers and members of the Society of United Irishmen, which sought the end of distinctions between Anglican, Dissenter, or Catholic and their unity under a common Irish identity in a spirit of civil and religious liberty. Exasperation at the un-reformable institutions of the old Kingdom of Ireland, dominated by an Anglican aristocratic oligarchy, had turned their Whiggism into republicanism and a devotion to the principles of the French Revolution. Shortly after Feargus' birth, the French general Lazare Hoche led an army to invade Ireland in the name of an independent Irish republic, and promptly the United Irishmen established a republican government. Arthur O'Connor joined the Executive Commission (under its president Wolfe Tone) which sat at the top of the declared Irish republic, and it was in this context, of a new republic in arms against the powerful British monarchy, that Feargus lived his first few years. But alas, in the end, this revolution was defeated. In 1799, Hoche died on the field, and soon afterwards the Irish Republic fell into freefall. Though it took years for the British, the Tories, and the Orange forces to defeat the last of the Croppies, the Irish Republic effectively ceased to exist, and in 1800 Feargus fled with his family to France.
Though the United Irish diaspora is more commonly associated with the United States, where it helped set the religious ecumenism and antislavery tenor of the Irish diaspora there, France also held part of it, following the generations who fled there for the opposite politics of republican religious unity. Feargus' uncle Arthur was perhaps the foremost leader of this Irish community, and he even maintained some semblance of a government in exile. And thus it was that Feargus O'Connor grew up and naturalized in France, speaking French, but in an Irish neighborhood and on horror stories of Tory and Orange outrages against the Irish people; thus, he maintained a proud Irish identity even though he could remember his homeland little. With an undoubted elite position, and with anti-Irish sentiments at a low point in the era thanks to the French Celtomania kicked off by Hoche's invasion, he became an advocate in the court, and despite his intensely abrasive personality he performed well in this role. Known to be an opponent of the oligarchical Sieyesian regime, his name swiftly got elected onto the list of national notables, and from there the College of Conservators selected him for the Tribunate - that is, the designated opposition.
Here, he was well to the left of the First Tribune Benjamin Constant and advocated a restoration of fully democratic government, and this made his name well-known across the country. With France mired in a new war since 1821 against the British, O'Connor also made himself known as a strong supporter of the effort, and he openly advocated an invasion of Ireland. With the outbreak of the Parthenopean Revolution, the expansion of the war into something which encompassed all Europe, and the ensuing Paris Riots of 1824, Grand Elector Roederer and the remainder of the Sieyesian regime saw its downfall, and O'Connor was selected as part of Chauvelin's new Council of State. In this role, he was essentially a backbencher, as he advocated still more democratic reforms than those implemented, and his intensely abrasive personality did not help him make new allies or push his views very much. But nevertheless, his commitment to the war effort, which only grew more intense when he witnessed the Irish Famine of the 1820s and the British regime and Anglo-Irish regime do nothing about it. His hopes that it might at least inspire a revolution came to naught, for the people were too weak, too hungry, to put up a fight, and they maintained their support of the pacifist ideals of Daniel O'Connell even as he was taken to jail and peaceful protestors rotted in the ground at Clontarf.
With the Popular Revolution and the overthrow of the British order in 1827, O'Connor at first hoped that France would invade Ireland when the British regime could not defend it; when it instead sought for peace, he resigned his position. O'Connor's disgust would only cool when, in the halls of the Convention Parliament, Daniel O'Connell and the remainder of the Irish contingent held the revolution hostage by forcing the Convention to grant the Irish people aid, without work requirements, through free soup kitchens across the island. With his French career in a dead end, and the new British government consisting of people the Irish could work with, O'Connor moved to London and took an excited look at the Convention Parliament and its framing of a new order. Indeed, as a natural-born British subject whose father had not been included on an act of attainder, he was eligible to become a Member of Parliament. And so, despite him being raised a Frenchman, and despite him speaking with a French accent only lightly leavened with an Irish brogue, he ran for the Grand Division which most closely resembled his uncle's old constituency and got enough United Irishmen votes to win.
With many deeply unnerved at the violence of the Popular Revolution and unnerved at the possibility of a British Reign of Terror, this Frenchman speaking in a French accent devoted to absolute republican principles and the nephew of a high ranking Irish revolutionary sitting in the new House of Commons did not help things. A popular Guelphite cartoon in 1831 portrayed him standing aft as the new Robespierre of the new British Republic at the top of a Franco-Irish conspiracy, with the title
Fearguise Eau-Conneaux[1]; or London Turned to Pandemonium. That many of his proposed reforms were very, very French in nature - for instance, he advocated forced testation - did not really help things. These accusations reached their very peak when, during the Orange Riots of 1834, the Orange mob that burned and looted Parliament cried out "Death to Feargus" - O'Connor himself was undeterred, however, and he regarded them as simply the modern iteration of the Orangists and Tories his father and uncle fought against.
And though O'Connor initially very much admired Daniel O'Connell for his role in forcing the British government to grant aid, which no doubt limited the death toll of the Famine to 250,000, he increasingly regarded his unshakeable pacifism and closeness to the Radical government of Samuel Whitbread - far too moderate to O'Connor's liking - as the act of a sellout. Furthermore, O'Connor was raised in the United Irishmen tradition. He believed that all religious identities - Anglican, Dissenter, and Catholic - should be abandoned in the name of the common identity of Irishmen, and he regarded O'Connell's wearing of Catholicism on his sleeve as mere sectarianism, and it reminded him of the French clerical establishment - that O'Connell was a firm believer in separation of church and state and advocated Dissenter rights as eagerly as those of Catholics did not really change that for him. In one instant, he jeered O'Connell as a "Jesuit". This caused widespread accusations of religious bigotry, but O'Connor denied this. He stated he was a proud advocate of religious unity as per the ideals of the United Irishmen, and that he despised not Catholicism but the presence of religion in politics. It did not help among a vote base which regarded O'Connell as a near-god, and O'Connor did not win re-election.
Out of office, O'Connor instead wedded himself to the land reform movement. His advocacy of French-style forced testation, going beyond the abolition of primogeniture, had already made himself known among it. With Crown and many Church lands being sold off, a land boom had been formed, and O'Connor swiftly sought to make use of it by creating a National Land Company with himself as one of its directors. Its plan was to buy up Crown and Church lands and establish homesteads for the people, to be given to shareholders through lottery - that such homesteads would make people so enlisted eligible for the ballot certainly fueled it. For a while, this plan was successful. Though the influential Associationist thinker James Bronterre O'Brien opposed this plan of small homesteads out of a belief in land nationalization, it was wildly successful.
O'Connor's political career saw a revival during the repeal wave of 1843. With the Radicals out of power, Daniel O'Connell lost his influence in government, and he was instead forced to return to his tactics of mass protest, in part because the Young Ireland movement - dominated by people who found him too moderate - saw growing steam. Amid this, O'Connor won election from Cork City, defeating an O'Connellite. In power, O'Connor called for immediate repeal - through peaceful means, or otherwise - and he promoted his National Land Company. Eventually, in the 1846 election, the Radicals came to power, and O'Connell was able to achieve the concession of the re-establishment of an Irish Legislature with limited power - which he regarded as the first "instalment" to full repeal. In reaction, O'Connor furiously denounced this as a betrayal, as the act of a sellout taking the scraps of the English. In the 1847 election, kicked off by the Lords' veto, Young Ireland won seats at the expense of O'Connellites - but in the end, O'Connell achieved broad-reaching autonomy for Ireland, and as the Irish legislature met at the old seat of Grattan's Parliament he won the praises across the board. O'Connor swiftly got elected to the new Irish Legislative Assembly, to bully the British and O'Connell into making this the first step to full repeal - however, he found himself in a minority in the ensuing elections. Instead, O'Connell saw his very apotheosis, sworn in as an MLA - and then died. The resulting outpour of grief, overpowering in Ireland and strong even in Britain (strong enough he lay in state in the reconstituted Westminster Hall) was enough that, with great reluctance, O'Connor praised Daniel O'Connell.
O'Connor remained an Irish MLA amid a collapsing O'Connellite movement that became entirely subsumed into the British Radical movement, and he kept with his efforts in the National Land Company. However, eventually, the land boom came crashing down. By the 1850s, the best Crown lands had been sold off, or endowed to land-grant universities, and the Church of England was selling much less land similarly. And so, by 1854, the Company collapsed and died. With his wealth destroyed and reputation in tatters, O'Connor instead retired to France. Here, he got elected purely as an honor as a National Notable - in the context of the considerably more democratic France he had returned to, this gave him direct admission into the halls of government - or rather, as a diehard opponent of Consul Menabrea, he became an opposition Tribune and became a figure of much amusement before retiring shortly before his death. His funeral saw a grand crowd from both France and the British Isles, and his resting place in Paris with a Celtic cross atop his tombstone gave him, at last, a glorious moment in his bizarre life, no doubt greatly hemmed by his tendency towards sheer abrasiveness
[1] Thanks to @Walpurgisnacht for this bit.
