Arthur O'Connor, was a United Irishman who was active in seeking allies for the Irish cause in England and in France. A proponent of radical democratic reform, in Ireland he was distinguished by publishing political appeals to women. Arrested on the eve of the 1798 rebellion, in 1802 he went into exile in France where, after being raised to the rank of General in a force that was to invade Ireland, fell out of favour with Napoleon. Among the positions he maintained publicly in his final years were a defence of the July Revolution in Paris and opposition to what he saw as the clericalism of Daniel O'Connell's movement in Ireland.

The Society of United Irishmen was a sworn association, formed in the wake of the French Revolution, to secure representative government in Ireland. Despairing of constitutional reform, and in defiance both of British Crown forces and of Irish sectarian division, in 1798 the United Irishmen instigated a republican rebellion. Their suppression was a prelude to the abolition of the Irish Parliament in Dublin and to Ireland's incorporation in a United Kingdom with Great Britain.