When the Wild Geese arrived in France in 1691 and 1692, they were not welcomed by Louis XIV out of sentiment. They were welcomed because they were useful. France was fighting England and its allies across multiple theatres. Irish infantry with battle experience was exactly what the French army needed. The sentiment came later.
The Irish Regiments — there were six of them, known collectively as the Irish Brigade — became a fixed feature of the French military establishment for the next century. They were not assimilated into the French army. They were maintained as Irish units, with Irish officers, Irish customs, and the expectation that they would be Irish in the way that mattered most: that they would fight with the desperate effectiveness of men who had nothing to go home to.
They served at Steenkerque, at Marsaglia, at Blenheim, at Ramillies, at Malplaquet, at Fontenoy. They served in the Jacobite campaigns that attempted to restore the Stuart monarchy to Britain, the campaigns that failed and that ended the last realistic hope of a Catholic Irish return to power. They served in the Seven Years War, in the American War of Independence — Irish officers serving France, fighting alongside American colonists against the British crown.
The French Revolution dissolved them as formal units in 1791. The regiments had existed for exactly a century.
By that point, the Irish Brigade had fought in more battles, across more countries, over a longer period, than almost any other military unit in European history. They had started as exiles with nowhere to go. They ended as one of the most decorated formations in the French army.
Exile does not always destroy what is sent into it. Sometimes it makes it harder.
