the French Revolution gives the impression of an academic world deeply concerned about the number of prizes the Irish were awarded each year. Dr Plunkett explained that a student 'will be received gratis as soon as he shall win a premium in the university. Should this happen the first year he will have nothing to pay during the course of his studies.' "Irish Catholics," Swords writes, "or at least the strong farmers and well-off shopkeepers who insisted on sending their sons to Paris to be educated – were very loath to pay for them. Dr Charles Kearney, who became superior of the Collège des Irlandais in 1782, complained that often they sent their sons of thirteen or fourteen years of age with only one half-term or quarter-term's fee and that nothing ever followed despite frequent solicitations." Some scholars' financial destitution is further illustrated when, in 1789, Henry Essex Edgeworth wrote to his friend bishop Francis Moylan of Cork on behalf of one Fitzgerald, a medical student who was obliged to borrow five guineas, to persuade his father to send him money to pay his debts and return fare home. Thus it was in a sense liberating for James Blackwell to be a recipient of a burse, and evidence exists supporting the claim that he was in fact a privileged bursary-holder. At 8 am on 29 October 1792 the two deputies who had been authorised to supervise the election of a new administrator by the students arrived at Collège des Irlandais and called upon Truchon, substitute procurator of the Commune, to join them.We assembled all the young Irish bursary-holders of the said establishment in the chapel, we read to them there out loud article 8 of the rules of the establishment and in pursuance of the said article obtained from them the prescribed oath, by which they swore to elect, according to their conscience, the most suitable persons, swayed neither by personal interest nor solicitation and we then proceeded to the nomination of a Provisor-Superior, by means of a ballot. There were nine voters present: Murray, Duckett, Mac Sheehi senior, Mac Sheehi junior, Curtayne, B. Blackwell,, J Oneill, Ferris, MacMahon… Also, an undated document lists Major Blackwell as an individual in receipt of monies from college revenues. The Revolution and subsequent wars caused the closing of the college and the sequestration of the burses. When John Baptist Walsh reopened the college