James Bartholomew Blackwell (1763–1820) was an Irish officer in the service of France who received commissions from Louis XVI, the First French Republic and later the Emperor Napoleon. A friend of Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, he had taken part in the storming of the Bastille in July 1789. Following service in defence of the Republic, at the behest of United Irish emissaries he twice sailed for Ireland: in advance of the Rebellion of 1798 with General Hoche in December 1796, and with Napper Tandy after its defeat in September 1798. Following this second aborted expedition, he was interned in Hamburg and extradited to Ireland. The Peace of Amiens secured his released at the end of 1802. He returned to French service rising to the rank of Chef de bataillon. Education James Bartholomew Blackwell was born on Barrack Street in Ennis, Co. Clare, Ireland. Records of his year of birth vary between 1763 and 1765. He was closely related to Dr Bartholomew Murray, who died in Paris on 8 January 1767. Dr Murray had been a generous benefactor of the Irish College in Paris, and in his will left further rich bequests towards the education of Irish students destined for the priesthood to serve on the mission in Ireland. At the age of eleven James left Ennis for Paris, and there he entered the Collège des Lombards on the burse founded by his late granduncle, Dr. Murray, and he began his ecclesiastical studies. At this time there were approximately 600 Irish students, secular and regular, studying for the priesthood in thirty colleges throughout Europe. Of this number, France accounted for over a half and Paris one third. Liam Swords informs us that: "Numerically [the two Irish colleges in Paris] represented the largest concentration of Irish in the city and, more importantly, all the other Irish were in one way or another linked with them and regarded them as the focus of Irish society." About 11,000 Irish students were educated in Paris in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, equaling the number of priests ordained in Maynooth during the two centuries of its existence to date. Lecky observed that they returned to Ireland 'with a real and varied knowledge of the world ... the manners and feelings of cultivated gentlemen and a high sense of clerical decorum.' Both the universities and students alike suffered from continuing financial problems. Correspondence during the decade preceding