Editing Daniel O'Connell (section)

===Eulogies and interpretation===
[[File:OConnellMonument.JPG|thumb|[[O'Connell Monument, Dublin|O'Connell Monument]] on [[O'Connell Street]] in Dublin]]
Calling O'Connell an "incarnation of a people", [[Honoré de Balzac]] noted that for twenty years his name had filled the press of Europe as no man since Napoleon. Gladstone, an eventual convert to Irish Home Rule, described him as "the greatest popular leader the world has ever seen".<ref name=":9" />{{rp|11–12}}

O'Connell had his imitators. In the [[German Confederation|German states]] (where he counted [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|Goethe]] and [[Ludwig I of Bavaria|Ludwig I]] of [[Kingdom of Bavaria|Bavaria]] among his admirers), O'Connell became a "folk hero" among Catholics (his portrait hanging in many homes and taverns), particularly in the [[Rhine Province|Rhineland]] where the Catholic majority grated upon their union with [[Lutheranism|Lutheran]] [[Prussia]]. Beginning in 1848, his Catholic Association served as a model for the mass-membership ''Katholischer Verein Deutschland''.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Grogan |first=Geraldine |date=1991 |title=Daniel O'Connell and European Catholic Thought |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/30091513 |journal=Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review |volume=80 |issue=317 |pages=56–64 |issn=0039-3495}}</ref>

In France, [[Flora Tristan]], mocked as "O'Connell in petticoats", imitated the Liberator's rhetorical flourishes and his policy of nominal subscriptions in support of a very different emancipatory project, her Chartist-inspired vision of a single "Workers' Union".<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Collins |first=Marie M. |last2=Weil-Sayre |first2=Sylvie |date=1973 |title=Flora Tristan: Forgotten Feminist and Socialist |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23535978 |journal=Nineteenth-Century French Studies |volume=1 |issue=4 |pages=(229–234) 232 |issn=0146-7891}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Cross |first=Máire |url= |title=In the Footsteps of Flora Tristan: A Political Biography |date=2020 |publisher=Liverpool University Press |isbn=978-1-802078824 |location=Liverpool |pages=3 |language=en}}</ref>

[[Frederick Douglass]] said of O'Connell that his voice was "enough to calm the most violent passion, even though it were already manifesting itself in a mob. There is a sweet persuasiveness in it, beyond any voice I ever heard. His power over an audience is perfect".<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/frederick-douglass-and-ireland-in-his-own-words-a-compelling-account-of-a-historic-moment-1.3632025|title='Frederick Douglass and Ireland: In His Own Words': A compelling account of a historic moment|newspaper=[[The Irish Times]]|access-date=4 July 2020|archive-date=28 February 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200228202627/https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/frederick-douglass-and-ireland-in-his-own-words-a-compelling-account-of-a-historic-moment-1.3632025?mode=amp|url-status=live}}</ref>

O'Connell's [[Eloquence|oratory]] is a quality to which [[James Joyce]] (a distant relative) plays tribute in [[Ulysses (novel)|''Ulysses'']]: "a people", he wrote, "sheltered within his voice."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Joyce |first1=James |title=Ulysses |date=1921 |location=Paris |pages=121}}</ref> Other Irish literary figures of the independence generation were critical. For W.B Yeats found O'Connell "too compromised and compromising" and his rhetoric "bragging".<ref name=":15" />{{rp|327–328}} [[Seán Ó Faoláin]] sympathised with the Young Irelanders but allowed that if the nation O'Connell helped call forth and "define" was Catholic and without the Protestant north it was because O'Connell was "the greatest of all Irish realists".{{sfn|Ó Faoláin|1938}}

In 1922, following the creation of the [[Irish Free State]], O'Connell was honoured in the renaming of [[Sackville Street (Dublin)|Sackville Street]], Dublin's broadest thoroughfare. Yet the [[Chairman of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State|chairman of the new government]] (until his assassination later in the year), [[Michael Collins (Irish leader)|Michael Collins]], was damning in his assessment. O'Connell had been "a follower and not a leader of the people". Urged on by "the zeal of the people, stirred for the moment to national consciousness by the teaching of [[Thomas Davis (Young Irelander)|Davis]], he talked of national liberty, but he did nothing to win it". O'Connell's aim had never risen above establishing the Irish people as "a free Catholic community".<ref>{{Cite book|last=Collins|first=Michael|title=The Path to Freedom: Articles and Speeches by Michael Collins|publisher=Mercier Press|year=1985|isbn=1856351262|location=Dublin|page=120}}</ref> Those who declared their continued fealty to the [[Proclamation of the Irish Republic|Republic that had been proclaimed in 1916]] on what was now [[O'Connell Street]], dismissed his legacy in similar terms.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Donncha |first=Mícheál Mac |date=29 August 2019 |title=Daniel O’Connell was not a ‘liberator’ of the people |url=https://www.anphoblacht.com/contents/27657 |access-date=2025-01-18 |website=www.anphoblacht.com |language=en}}</ref>

The predominant interpretation of O'Connell in the last generation may be that of a liberal Catholic, as portrayed in Oliver MacDonagh's 1988 biography.<ref>{{cite book |last1=MacDonagh |first1=Oliver |title=O'Connell: The Life of Daniel O'Connell |date=1991 |publisher=Weidenfeld and Nicolson |location=london |isbn=9780297820178}}</ref><ref name="Bew and Maune" /> This builds on the view of the historian Michael Tierney who proposes O'Connell as a "forerunner" of a European [[Christian Democracy]].<ref>Michael Tierney, "Daniel O'Connell", ''Collier Encyclopedia'' (1996)</ref> His more recent biographer Patrick Geoghegan seeks to return O'Connell to the national story. Echoing a reassessment that was offered by [[Éamon de Valera|Eamon De Valera]],<ref>{{Cite web |last=Ireland |first=Office of the President of |date=1997 |title=Address by President Mary Robinson Tribute to Daniel O'Connell the Reform Club London 15th May. |url=https://www.president.ie/en/media-library/speeches/address-by-president-mary-robinson-tribute-to-daniel-oconnell-the-reform-cl |access-date=2025-01-20 |website=president.ie |language=en}}</ref> he has O'Connell forging "a new Irish nation in the fires of his own idealism, intolerance and determination" and becoming for a people "broken, humiliated and defeated" its "chieftain".<ref name=":15" />{{rp|346}}