ABSTRACT
On 23 February 1797, a Roman Catholic Irish American landed on the North Pembrokeshire coast with the légion noire, a force recruited amongst ex-convicts. While the existence of a threat seemed incontrovertible, its meaning was subject to much speculation. Reconstructing the production of alarm in that era is all the more problematic because people are dealing not with logistical events alone, but also with imaginary scenarios, and because these resonate with both earlier and later invasion threats. The telescope enlarges but it also narrows the field of vision. It might stand, for the purposes of this investigation, as a figure for certain discursive repertoires, notably exaggeration and selection, bringing some things closer and keeping some out of sight. In privileging the empirical over the cultural and imaginative, Favret's assumptions become obstacles to comprehending the signification of war in Napoleonic Britain even as she calls attention to 'aphasia about war in current romantic studies'.
