Compared with the light touch of Miles Byrne, the prose of John Augustus O’Shea (Nenagh, Co. Tipperary 1839- London, 1905) is slightly overblown. If he is remembered at all today, it is largely for his coverage of the Siege of Paris (1870-1871) from inside the city.

In the late 1860s, O’Shea was living with a group of young Irish Fenians in the Pension Bonnery in rue de Lacépède (5th arrondissement), a street that mostly fell victim to the process of ‘Hausmannisation’ in the late 19th century, after O’Shea’s passage. Among his fellow lodgers were a painter, Nick Walsh, a medical student whose name O’Shea only gives as Nick O’H—, and Hon. Captain Bingham, “brother of Lord Bingham”. Many of these exiles, plus O’Shea, later moved to another address in the rue des Fossés Saint Victor, behind the Pantheon (5th arrondissement, street no longer exists).

O’Shea had arrived in Paris with a letter of introduction from former MP for Meath, John Martin, to the Young Irelander leader John Mitchel, already resident in Paris. Mitchel had turned up there after his forced sojourn in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) after the rebellion of 1848, followed by his escape to New York and then Tennessee, where he established a paper and became a fierce advocate for the Confederate cause, a cause for which his two sons were to sacrifice their lives. In his Leaves from the Life of a Special Correspondent, O’Shea writes that “When he heard of the death of the first son, he gave a natural sigh, but consoled himself with the expression: ‘He could have had no more enviable fate. He died in honourable company.’” According to O’Shea, Mitchel’s daughter, Henrietta, converted to Catholicism but was “cut off in the bloom of youthful beauty, and lies under a mound in a convent of the Sacred Heart in a Parisian suburb”. Other Irishmen that O’Shea came across in Paris were the author James Stephens and Edmond O’Donovan, brother of the Fenian William O’Donovan.

O’Shea’s journalistic career started when he took over from Mitchel - who lived in the same boarding house in the rue Lacepède - as Paris correspondent for a New York newspaper. This was the first of a series of jobs with English-language newspapers, which in O’Shea’s words, “paid their journalists in compliments”. His big break came when he landed a job with the London Standard, for whom he covered the trial of Pierre Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon III, the French Emperor, who had killed a journalist called Victor Noir.

After a stint in London and Bavaria, O’Shea was posted back to Paris in the summer of 1870, just as Napoleon III declared war on Prussia. He followed the French army to Metz, then made it back to Paris via Luxembourg just before Metz was encircled. He found lodgings in a ground-floor apartment in the rue de Clichy (9th arrondissement) with “an aged Austrian housekeeper with a title, who had two aversions after the devil: Prussia and the Republic.”

O’Shea made it through the Siege of Paris by the Prussians in the winter of 1870-1871, but got out before the crushing of the Commune in May 1871. He describes the siege as a period of “debilitating sameness of lengthened misery – cold, privation, baffled hope and an awful tenebrousness of horizon.” A propos privation, O’Shea writes that “it is not surprising that a diet of horseflesh – six days’ rations of which I devoured raw between the butchers and my residence – of garbage and of mahogany-hued bread, in which bran and sand were more plentiful than flour, is apt to derange the stomach after weeks of repetition.”

And yet, despite the years spent in Paris, and despite having shared their worst travails, O’Shea actually felt little empathy with the French. “Why Irishmen should be particularly drawn toward it [the French nation] to me is a mystery,” he writes. “In all that I have seen of it the guiding principle is the love not of humanity but of self. There are exceptions, but the ordinary Frenchman … is as watchful of his own interests to the exclusion of all others as any man I know.”

Of the Franco-Prussian War, in which he became caught up, O’Shea writes: “…I was [before the war] an ardent partisan of the French: but from what I saw later and from what I think now, I believe it was better for civilisation that France was beaten. That she was not beaten fairly and on the merits, none but fools or knaves can maintain. Had Germany been crushed on that occasion, other adventures would have been tried: the French, it is to be feared, would have swollen up with pride as of Lucifer, and have played, as they did in the earlier portion of this century, the European bully. They would have been unbearable”.