text:
James Connolly

James Connolly (Séamas Ó Conghaile; 5 June 1868 – 12 May 1916) was a Scottish born Irish republican, socialist, and trade union leader, executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland. He remains an important figure both for the Irish labour movement and for Irish republicanism.

He became an active socialist in Scotland, where he had been born in 1868 to Irish parents. On moving to Ireland in 1896, he established the country's first socialist party, the Irish Socialist Republican Party. It called for an Ireland independent not only of Britain's Crown and Parliament, but also of British "capitalists, landlords and financiers".

From 1905 to 1910, he was a full-time organiser in the United States for the Industrial Workers of the World, choosing its syndicalism over the doctrinaire Marxism of Daniel DeLeon's Socialist Labor Party of America, to which he had been initially drawn. Returning to Ireland, he deputised for James Larkin in organising for the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, first in Belfast and then in Dublin.

In Belfast, he was frustrated in his efforts to draw Protestant workers into an all-Ireland labour and socialist movement but, in the wake of the industrial unrest of 1913, acquired in Dublin what he saw as a new means of striking toward the goal of a Workers' Republic. At the beginning of 1916, he committed the union's militia, the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), to the plans of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and the Irish Volunteers, for war-time insurrection.

Alongside Patrick Pearse, Connolly commanded the insurrection in Easter of that year from rebel garrison holding Dublin's General Post Office. He was wounded in the fighting and, following the rebel surrender at the end of Easter week, was executed along with the six other signatories to the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.

Early life
Connolly was born in the Cowgate or "Little Ireland" district of Edinburgh in 1868, the third son of Mary McGinn and John Connolly, a labourer, Irish immigrants from County Monaghan. Throughout his life he was to speak with a Scottish accent.

He left the local Catholic primary school at age 10 to seek work. At age 14, following his eldest brother John, he enlisted in the army, falsifying both his name and age. Little is known about his military service. Desmond Greaves learnt that Connolly had reminisced about being on guard duty in Cork harbour on the night in December 1882 when Maolra Seoighe was hanged for the [https://play.acast.com/s/irishhistory/the-maamtrasna-murders-part-i-the-killings-#:~:text=Prior%20to%201882%2C%20Maamtrasna%20a,a%20horrific%20and%20disturbing%20attack. Maamtrasna massacre] (the killing a landlord and his family). This is consistent with Connolly having joined the 1st Battalion, King’s Liverpool Regiment (which counted as an Irish regiment). If this was the case, in the years that followed, the teenage recruit may have helped enforce Land War evictions in Meath, patrolled the streets of Belfast during deadly sectarian riots, and war-gamed the army's defensive plans for Dublin.

In 1889, months before the end of his enlistment, and in advance of rumoured deployment overseas, Connolly "discharged himself". In Dublin, he had met Lillie Reynolds, and in the New Year she followed him to Scotland where, with special dispensation (Reynolds was Protestant) they married in a Catholic church.

Scottish Socialist Federation
Again following in the example of his brother John, in 1890 Connolly joined the Scottish Socialist Federation, succeeding his brother as its secretary in 1893. Largely a propaganda organisation, the Federation supported Keir Hardie and his Independent Labour Party in the campaign for labour representation in Parliament.

Within the SSF, Connolly was greatly influenced by John Leslie, 12 years his senior, but like him born to poor Irish immigrants. While Leslie did not envisage Ireland breaking the English connection before the advent of a socialist Britain, he was to encourage Connolly in the creation of a separate socialist party in Ireland.

In 1896, after the birth of his third daughter, and having lost, while standing for election to the city-council, his municipal carter's job, and then failed as a cobbler, Connolly considered a future for his family in Chile. But thanks to an appeal by John Leslie, he had the offer of employment in Dublin as a full-time secretary for the Dublin Socialist Club, at £1 per week.

Irish Socialist Republican Party
In Dublin, where he first became a navvy and then a proof reader, Connolly soon split the Socialist Club, forming in its stead the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP). In what was then, if briefly, the "literary centre of advanced nationalism", Alice Milligan's Belfast monthly, The Shan Van Vocht, he published a first statement of the party credo, "Socialism and Nationalism"", This suggested that, even if a step toward formal independence, the legislature that the Irish Parliamentary Party wished to see restored in Dublin would be a mockery of Irish national aspirations."If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs."By the same token, Connolly implied that there was little to be expected from the "Irish Language movements, Literary Societies or [ 1798] Commemoration Committees" of Milligan and of their mutual friends in Dublin (Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne, and Constance Markievicz whom Connolly was to join in "to-hell-with-the-British-empire" protests against Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and the Boer War). There could be no lasting progress toward an Irish Ireland without acknowledging that, as a force that "irresistibly destroys all national or racial characteristics", capitalism was the Celtic Revival's "chief enemy".

Milligan, who deferred to the Irish Republican Brotherhood (in 1899 they had her pass her subscription list to Griffith and his new weekly, the United Irishman, the forerunner of Sinn Féin), confined her response to Connolly's ambition to contest Westminster elections. Were the ISRP successful, she predicted "an alliance with the English Labour" no less debilitating than the courtship of English Liberals had proved for the Irish Parliamentary Party. In the event, Ireland's first socialist party, garnering only a few hundred votes, failed to elect Connolly to Dublin City Council and never exceeded more than 80 active members.

Connolly was dispirited and at odds with the ISRP's other leading light, E. W. Stewart, manager of the party's paper, The Worker's Republic and also sometime candidate for the city council. He accused Stewart of "reformism", of failing to appreciate that "the election of a socialist to any public body is only valuable insofar as it is the return of a disturber of the public peace”.  In 1900, Connolly had supported the American Marxist Daniel De Leon in condemning the decision by the French socialist Alexander Millerand, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, to accept a post in Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau’s government of “Republican Defence”.

America: Industrial Workers of the World
In September 1902, at the invitation of De Leon's Socialist Labor Party, Connolly departed for a four-month lecture tour of the United States. Addressing largely Irish-American audiences, he emphasised that he spoke for class, not country:"I represent only the class to which I belong…I could not represent the entire Irish people on account of the antagonistic interests of these classes, no more than the wolf could represent the lambs or the fisherman the fish."On his return, Connolly had his resignation from the IRSP accepted without demur. He returned to Scotland for the Social Democratic Federation, where, after witnessing the organisation's expulsion of "De Leonists", he decided on a future in America.

On arrival in the United States, and before he could call on his family to join him, Connolly lived with cousins in Troy, New York, and found work as a salesman for insurance companies. But by 1905, and after being elected to the national executive of the Socialist Labor Party, he had returned to political work. With De Leon's endorsement, he was an organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the "One Big Union".

Finding employment with the Singer Sewing Machine in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and living in The Bronx, he befriended the young Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (daughter of a neighbouring couple from Galway), who was to become the "Wobblies" chief agitator among the largely immigrant women of the east-coast textile industry. Together they were supported by Mother Jones, "America’s Most Dangerous Woman”, the Wobblies' co-founder and a veteran organiser for the United Mine Workers whom Connolly had learnt to admire from Ireland.

With Flynn, and with ex-ILP member Patrick L. Quinlan, in 1907 Connolly formed the Irish Socialist Federation (ISF) to promote the SLP's message among Irish immigrants. It had branches in New York City and Chicago, and Connolly edited its weekly the Harp.

Under the influence of the IWW, a "mass movement, whose militancy was unequalled", Connolly began to turn away from what was an "unashamedly vanguard party.  In April 1908, and after a bitter dispute in which De Leon accused of being a police spy,  Connolly left the SLP, and at its Chicago conference, the IWW expelled the party.  In the new year, together with Mother Jones, Connolly and the ISF affiliated with the Socialist Party of America, a broader coalition more tolerant of their revolutionary syndicalism.

ITGWU leader in Belfast
Through the ISF Connolly re-established links with socialists in Ireland, and in 1909 he transferred the production of the Harp to Dublin. The following year, James Larkin persuaded the Socialist Party of Ireland (SPI) to raise the funds that would enable Connolly and his family to return. In January 1909, Larkin had established the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, his own model of the One Big Union. The same year, 1911, in which Connolly's occupation was listed on the census return as "National Organiser Socialist Party, Larkin sent him north to Belfast to organise for the ITGWU in Ulster.

In a city in which the Protestant-dominated apprenticed trades were organised in British-aligned craft unions, troops had been deployed in 1907 to break strikes Larkin had called among dock labourers, carters and other casual and general workers. Four years later, Connolly succeeded in bringing dockers out in sympathy with striking cross-channel seamen, and in the process to secure a pay increase. ITGWU membership grew, and Connolly was approached by women toiling in Belfast's largest industry, linen.

The sweated trade engaged thousands of women and girls both in mills and, unprotected by the Factory Acts, as outworkers. A Belfast Trades Council sponsored Textile Operatives Society, led by Mary Galway, concentrated only on the better-paid Protestant women in the making-up sections. In response to the speeding up of production in the mills and, relatedly, the fining of workers for such new offences as laughing, whispering and bringing in sweets (the creation, in Connolly words, of "an atmosphere of slavery"), thousands of spinners went out on strike.

As they did not yet have the union organisation and the strike funds to sustain the action, Connolly persuaded the women to return to work and apply tactics he had learned as an organizer for the IWW.They should collectively the rules, so that "if a girl is checked for singing, let the whole room start singing at once; if you are checked for laughing, let the whole room laugh at once". He then sought to capitalise on the relative success of the tactic by building up, first with Marie Johnson and then Winifred Carney as its secretary, a new – effectively women's – section of the ITGWU, the Irish Textile Workers' Union (ITWU).

In June 1913, while claiming that "the ranks of the Irish Textile Workers’ Union are being recruited by hundreds", with Carney, Connolly produced a Manifesto to the Linen Slaves of Belfast (1913) that revealed their frustration as organisers: if the world deplored their conditions, the women were told that it also deplored their "slavish and servile nature in submitting to them".  The Textile Workers' membership may not have greatly exceeded the 300 subscribed under Johnson in Catholic west Belfast.  To Carney, Connolly conceded that the union's survival was largely a matter of "keeping the Falls Road crowd together".

Sectarian division within the labour movement in Belfast had been heightened by the return of Home Rule to the political agenda (from 1910, a Liberal government was again dependent on Irish votes). When, in the summer of 1912, a Home Rule Bill was introduced, loyalists forced some 3,000 workers out of the shipyards and engineering plants: in addition to Catholics, 600 Protestants targeted for their non-sectarian labour politics. In this environment, Connolly found himself increasingly confined to organising, and to addressing meetings, in the Catholic districts of the city.  Even here he was pursued by what he described as "social and religious terrorism".

Connolly had to find some "corner of the Catholic ghetto outside the political preserve of Joseph Devlin MP". Although a sometime ally (Devlin initiated Home Office inquiry into conditions in the linen mills),  the Belfast West MP  was leader both of those Connolly viewed as "the conservatives of a belated Irish capitalism", the United Irish League, and those who he dismissed as "Green" Orangemen, the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Together, Connolly found them capable of bringing "every species of intimidation and bribery . . . to bear upon Catholics who refused to bow to the dictates of the official Home Rule gang".

Dublin lock-out
On 29 August 1913, Larkin recalled Connolly to Dublin. The success of the ITGWU in signing up thousands of unskilled men and women had elicited a particularly aggressive reaction from employers. Beginning with, and led by, the owner of the tramway company, William Murphy, they dismissed those who refused to renounce the union and replaced them with scab labour brought in from elsewhere in the country or from Britain. By the end of September, the combination of the "lock out", the sympathetic strikes Larkin called for in response, and their knock-on effects, had placed upwards of 100,000 people (workers and their families, a third of the city's residents) in need of assistance.

Early in the conflict Connolly freed himself from police detention through a week-long hunger strike, a tactic borrowed from the British suffragettes. However, from October Larkin was held on charges of sedition. This left Connolly to respond to an intercession by the Catholic Church.

In the hope of replicating a tactic that for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had turned the tide in the recent, and celebrated, textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Dora Montefiore had devised a children's "holiday scheme". The poorly nourished children of the locked-out and striking workers were to be billeted with sympathetic families in England. On the grounds that their hosts were not guaranteed to be Catholic, the Church objected and Hibernian crowds gathered at the docks to prevent the children's "deportation". Connolly, who had been wary from the first, cancelled the scheme, but nonetheless sought to score a point the against the clericalist opposition by telling his people to ask the archbishop and priests for food and clothing.

Connolly and Larkin had shown a willingness to negotiate on the basis of an inquiry into the dispute by the Board of Trade. While critical of the ITGWU's employment of the "sympathetic" strike, it concluded that employers were insisting on an anti-union pledge that was "contrary to individual liberty", and that "no workman or body of workmen could reasonably be expected to accept”. The employers were unmoved.

After the ITGWU-controlled Dublin Socialist Party failed in the January 1914 municipal elections to register support for the strike, and the Trade Union Congress in England had declined Larkin and Connolly's plea for additional support and funding, the workers began to drift back, submitting to their employers. Exhausted, and falling into bouts of depression, Larkin took a declining interest in the beleaguered union, and eventually in October accepted the invitation of "Big Bill" Haywood of the IWW to speak in the United States. He did not return to Ireland until 1923. His departure left Connolly, in charge not only of the ITGWU with its headquarters at Liberty Hall, but also of a workers' militia.

Irish Citizen Army

First floated as an idea by George Bernard Shaw, the training of union men as force to protect picket lines and rallies was taken up in Dublin by "Citizens Committee" chair, Jack White, himself the victim of a police baton charge. In accepting White's services, Connolly made reference to the national question: "why", he asked "should we not train our men in Dublin as they are doing in Ulster". In the north, the Unionists, labour men among them, were forming the ranks of the Ulster Volunteers. The Irish Citizen Army (ICA) began drilling in November 1913, but then, after it had dwindled like the strike to almost nothing, in March 1914 the militia was reborn, its ranks supplemented by Constance Markievicz's Fianna Éireann nationalist youth.

After the return to work, the command of the ICA divided on the militia's future, and in particular on policy toward the Irish Volunteers, the much larger nationalist response to the arming of Ulster Unionism (and of which Markievicz was also a member). Secretary to the ICA Council, Seán O'Casey, described the formation of the Irish Volunteers as "one of the most effective blows" that the ICA had received. Men who might have joined the ICA were now drilling – with the blessing of the IRB – under a command that included employers who had locked out men trying to exercise "the first principles of Trade Unionism". When it became apparent that Connolly was gravitating towards an IRB strategy of cooperation with the Volunteers, O'Casey and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, the Vice President, resigned, leaving Connolly in undisputed command.

On 4 August 1914, Britain's declared of war on Germany. The Home Rule Bill received royal assent, but with a suspensory act delaying implementation for duration (and with the reservation that the question of Ulster's inclusion had still to be resolved). Leader of the IPP, John Redmond, then split the Irish Volunteers by urging them (in the hope of securing Britain's good faith) to rally to the British Army's colours. The vast majority heeding his call – some 175,000 men – reformed themselves as the National Volunteers. This left 13,500 to reorganise under the nominal command of Eoin MacNeill of Gaelic League but, in key staff positions, directed by undercover members of the IRB's Military Council: Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett.

Urges "revolutionary action"
In October 1914, Connolly assumed the presidency of the Irish Neutrality League (chairing a committee that included Arthur Griffith, Constance Markievicz and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington), but not as a pacifist. He was urging active opposition to the war, and acknowledged that this amounted to "more than a transport strike". Stopping the export of foodstuffs from Ireland, for example, might involve "armed battling in the streets". In the Irish Worker he had already declared that if, in the course of Britain's "pirate war upon the German nation", the Kaiser landed an army in Ireland "we should be perfectly justified in joining it". A further editorial in the ITGWU paper betrayed his exasperation with the "jingoism" of the British labour movement. It suggested that insurrection in Ireland and throughout the British dominions might be required “to teach the English working class they cannot hope to prosper permanently by arresting the industrial development of others”.

In December, the Irish Worker was suppressed and in May 1915 Connolly revived his old ISRP title, Workers' Republic. Accompanied by the martial-patriotic poetry of Maeve Cavanagh, Connolly's editorials continued to urge Irish resistance, and on the express understanding that this could not "be conducted on the lines of dodging the police, or any such high jinks of constitutional agitation". He cautioned that those who oppose conscription (the prospect that was drawing crowds to the meetings, the marches and parades of the Irish Citizen Army and of the Volunteers) "take their lives in their hands" (and, by implication, that they should organise accordingly). In December 1915, Connolly wrote:“We believe in constitutional action in normal times, we believe in revolutionary action in exceptional times. These are exceptional times".

In February 1916, Connolly proposed, that with "thousands of Irish workers" volunteering to fight for British Crown and Empire, only the "red tide of war on Irish soil" would enable the nation to "recover its self-respect".

Relations with the IRB
Connolly was aware of, but not privy to, discussions within the IRB on prospects for a national rising. Patrick Pearse cautioned his colleagues on treating with Connolly: "Connolly is most dishonest in his methods. He will never be satisfied until he goads us into action, and then he will think most of us too moderate and want to guillotine half of us".

By the New Year, believing the Irish Volunteers were dithering, Connolly was threatening to rush Dublin Castle, around which he had already deployed his ICA on nightly manoeuvres. Determined to safeguard their plans for an insurrection at Easter, Seán Ó Faoláin claims that the IRB had Connolly "kidnapped. A unit of Volunteers had been mobilised to arrest Connolly had he refused to meet with the IRB Council, but Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke and the other IRB leaders resolved matters by finally taking Connolly into their confidence.

Connolly was conscious that his new allies had, for the most part, been silent during the lock-out in 1913. Labour was not their cause, so that when he himself had proposed a programme for the Irish Volunteers in October 1914, he had confined it to political demands: "repeal of all clauses of the Home Rule Act denying Ireland powers of self-government now enjoyed by South Africa, Australia or Canada". According to Desmond Greaves, a week before the Rising Connolly advised his 200 ICA volunteers that, as they were "out for economic as well as political liberty", in the event of victory they should "hold on to" their rifles.

Easter week 1916
On 14 April 1916, Connolly summoned Winifred Carney to Dublin where she prepared his mobilisation orders for the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). Ten days later, on Easter Monday, with Connolly commissioned by the IRB Military Council as Commandant of the Dublin Districts, they set out for the General Post Office (GPO) with an initial garrison party from Liberty Hall. Carney (armed with a typewriter and a Webley revolver) served as Connolly's aide de camp with the rank of adjutant She was seconded in that role, for the first two days, by Connolly's 15 year-old son Roddy.

From the steps of the GPO, Patrick Pearse (President and Commander-in-Chief) read the "Proclamation of the Irish Republic". Connolly had contributed to the final draft, which declared "the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland" and, in a phrase that he had often been used, a "resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts". In a further symbolic gesture of labour's stake in the rebellion, Connolly sent the Starry Plough flag, the symbol of Irish labour, to be hoisted by his men over the Imperial Hotel, owned by the man who had organised their defeat in 1913, William Murphy.

By some accounts the rebel strategy of occupying the GPO and other public buildings in the city centre, had been informed by Connolly's belief that British were unlikely to rely on artillery, that a regular bombardment of the city would have been possible only if, abandoning their businesses and property, the section of the population loyal to the government was outside insurgent lines. Connolly's biographer, Samuel Levenson records an exchange between Volunteers after a British gunboat began shelling their positions from the Liffey: "General Connolly told us the British would never use artillery against us". "He did,did he? Wouldn't it be great now if General Connolly was making the decisions for the British".

Leading men on the street and supervising the construction of barricades, he was twice wounded on the Thursday. Carney refused to leave his side, and was with him the following day, Friday 29 April, when, carried on a stretcher, he was among the last to evacuate the GPO to Moore Street. There Pearse issued the order for the ICA and Irish Volunteer fighters, now under constant British bombardment, to "lay down arms".

As he was being returned to a stretcher to be carried toward the British lines, Connolly told those around him not to worry: "Those of us that signed the proclamation will be shot. But the rest of you will be set free."

Court martial and execution
Connolly was among 16 republican prisoners executed for their role in the Rising. Executions in Kilmainham Gaol began on 3 May 1916 with Connolly's co-signatories to the Proclamation, Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke and Thomas McDonagh, and ended with his death and that of Seán Mac Diarmada on 12 May. Roger Casement, who had run German guns for the Rising, was hanged at Pentonville Prison, in London, on August 3. Unable to stand because of his combat injury, Connolly had been placed before a firing squad tied to a chair. His body was placed, without rite or coffin, with those of his comrades in a common grave at the Arbour Hill military cemetery.

In a statement to the court martial held in Dublin Castle on 9 May, he proposed offering no defence, save against "charges of wanton cruelty to prisoners”, and he declared: "We went out to break the connection between this country and the British Empire, and to establish an Irish Republic. We believed that the call we then issued to the people of Ireland, was a nobler call, in a holier cause, than any call issued to them during this war, having any connection with the war. We succeeded in proving that Irishmen are ready to die endeavouring to win for Ireland those national rights which the British Government has been asking them to die to win for Belgium. As long as that remains the case, the cause of Irish freedom is safe."The night before his execution, he was permitted a visit by his wife Lillie and their 8 year old daughter, Fiona (whose abiding memory of her father was to be his laughter). He is said to have returned to the Catholic Church in the few days before his execution. A Capuchin, Father Aloysius Travers administered absolution and last rites.  Asked to pray for the soldiers about to shoot him, Connolly said: "I will say a prayer for all men who do their duty according to their lights."

There was disquiet at Connolly's execution: in Parliament the government was pressed as to whether there was "precedent for the summary execution of a military prisoner dying of his wounds". But at the time, the greater outrage was over the executions of William Pearse, put to death, it was thought, simply because he was the brother of the rebel leader, and Major John MacBride who played no part in planning the Rising but had fought against Britain in the Boer War.

Despite the initial public hostility toward the rebels and the destruction they had brought upon Dublin, after the first executions of Pearse, Clarke and MacDonagh, John Redmond warned the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, that any further executions would make his position, and that of any other constitutional party or leader in Ireland, "impossible”.

Socialism and nationalism
The nature of Connolly's socialism, and its role in his decision to join the IRB in the Easter Rising, was disputed by his Socialist contemporaries in both Europe and the United States. It is the central point of contention in the extensive literature that has developed since on his political life and thought.

Writing in 1934, Seán Ó Faoláin described Connolly's political ideas as:"an amalgamation of everything he had read that could, according to his viewpoint, be applied to Irish ills, a synthesis of Marx, Davitt, Lalor, Robert Owen, Tone, Mitchel and the rest, all welded together in his Socialist-Separatist ideal. He favoured Industrial unionism as the method of approach to what he called variously, the Workers' Republic, the Irish Socialist Republic, the Co-operative State, the Democratic Co-operative Commonwealth... [The unions] would be he means of popular representation in the Workers' Parliament; and they would be the power controlling the national wealth ... In a word he believed in vocational representation combined with 'all power to the Unions'."While he never had the opportunity to apply and test his principles even on a small scale, Connolly "at least [had] a point of view" and a "definite idea of what he meant by such terms as 'a Republic', 'Freedom', 'Emancipation' [and] 'Autonomy'". But Ó Faoláin argues that in the end Connolly's social-emancipatory ideas proved to be secondary to his nationalism. The night before he was shot, Connolly said to his daughter Nora: "The Socialists will not understand why I am here; they forget I am an Irishman". For Ó Faoláin this was an admission that "he had, in point of fact, gone over to nationalism and away from socialism".

Some of Connolly's contemporaries suggested that there was no inconsistency: Connolly's socialism was itself merely a form of militant nationalism. Invoking Connolly at the inaugural meeting of Fianna Fáil in 1926, in support of his protectionist programme for national development, Éamon de Valera implied that Connolly's principal purpose in calling for a worker's republic was to complete the break with England. Constance Markievicz was also to interpret Connolly's socialism in purely national, purely Irish, terms. Seizing on Connolly's portrait of Gaelic society in The Reconquest of Ireland, she summarised his doctrine as the "application of the social principle which underlay the Brehon laws of our ancestors".

At the same time, there were writers who, convinced that "Connolly's Irish Catholicism had not been irrevocably blemished by atheistic Marxism", found parallels between his commitment to industrial unionism and the corporatist doctrines Pope Leo XIII enunciated in his encyclical Rerum novarum (1891).

Beginning in 1961, with the publication a major new biography by Desmond Greaves, there was a concerted effort to rehabilitate Connolly as a revolutionary socialist,  Greaves proposed that with the onset of the European war, Connolly's thought had run "parallel with Lenin's"; and reached the same conclusion:   "Whoever wishes a durable and democratic peace must be for civil war against the governments and the bourgeoisie" (Lenin, "Turn Imperialist War into Civil War", 1915). Greaves is the source for Connolly's oft-quoted "hold on to your rifles" admonition to his ICA volunteers, which might suggest that Connolly did see the Easter Rising as the prelude to this larger revolutionary struggle.

While The Life and Times of James Connolly remains a standard reference,  there have been objections to pressing Connolly into a Leninist mold. Connolly revolutionary outlook remained that of the syndicalism he had acquired in America, although in 1916 he entertained no suggestion of Irish workers being organised to seize control of their workplaces. He was concerned, rather, with their quiescence in the war against Germany. This was viewed by Connolly, not as a contest of rival imperialisms with no democratic principle at stake, but as a war in which, as the primary aggressor, Britain had presented an Ireland willing to strike for its freedom with a legitimate continental ally. Connolly's understanding of the agrarian nature of nationalist Ireland, and of unionism, which deprived it of Belfast and its industrial hinterland, has also been subject to comment and revision.

Revolutionary syndicalism
Greaves concedes that there are formulations in Connolly's thinking that "smack of syndicalism" —that is, of faith in the ability of the working class to secure a socialist future on the strength, not of a revolutionary party, but of their own labour-union democracy. Lenin had praise for De Leon's contribution to socialist thought, but Connolly broke with De Leon precisely on the issue of industrial unionism.

In 1908, Connolly accused De Leon of knocking "the feet from under" his party's alliance with the IWW by arguing that, as prices rise with wages, the gains the union secures for labour are only nominal. The implication was that the One Big Union was merely a "ward-heeling club" for the SLP, a place from which militants could be recruited to the real task: building a party to take state power.

Since it suggests that within capitalism there is no prospect of the working class improving its position, Connolly allowed that the "theory that a rise in prices always destroys the value of a rise in wages" sounds "revolutionary". But it was not Marxist and not true. The value of labour is not fixed, but is the subject of a continuous struggle. It is in this struggle that workers acquire the organisational strength and the confidence to bring capital to heel, and to extend their own control of production and distribution.

In a last statement of his credo, The Re-conquest of Ireland (1915), Connolly affirmed that the outcome of this struggle, the worker's republic, it not an overweening state but an industrial commonwealth in which "the workshops, factories, docks, railways, shipyards, &c., shall be owned by the nation, but administered by the Industrial Unions of the respective industries". An early compiler of his ideas, notes that Connolly "nowhere attempts to explain how the general interests of the State, as distinguished from specific interests of the Industrial Unions, are to be provided for". It was only certain that Connolly was not "state socialist". Connolly was, himself, confident that his: :"... conception of Socialism destroys at one blow all the fears of a bureaucratic state, ruling and ordering the lives of every individual from above, and thus gives assurance that the social order of the future will be an extension of the freedom of the individual,and not a suppression of it."In his last six years, Connolly had devoted his energies almost entirely to the ITGWU and to the Irish Citizen Army. A "pairing of union and militia" is central to syndicalist scenarios for social revolution. But Connolly knew that "his union, the ITGWU . . ., weakened by the industrial struggles of 1913-14, was not up to the effort of seizing docks, railways, shipping etc.". He made no attempt, prior to or during the Rising, to appeal to workers to join the insurgency. In address published just one week before the Rising on forthcoming congress of the Irish TUC scheduled for later that year in Sligo, there is no intimation of the impending action. In reference to the war, Connolly's only advice was that the congress should proceed in August as planned.

A two-stage struggle
At the beginning of 1916, Connolly drew "a crucial distinction between the struggle for socialism and for national liberation". In the Irish Worker (23 January) he wrote:"Our programme in time of peace was to gather in the hands in Irish trade unions the control of all the forces of production and distribution in Ireland . . . [but] in times of war we should act as in war. . . . While the war lasts and Ireland still is a subject nation we shall continue to urge her to fight for her freedom. . . . The time for Ireland's battle is NOW."His calculation was not based alone on the strategic opportunity presented by Britain's engagement in France. Connolly had described John Redmond's pact with the government as "the most gigantic, deep-laid and loathsome attempt in history to betray the soul of a people". At the beginning of February 1916, he acknowledged that the pact was delivering the working class, and not least by means of simple bribery: "We have said that the Working Class was the only class to whom the word 'Empire' and the things for which it was the symbol did not appeal . . . [and] therefore, from the intelligent working class could alone come the revolutionary impulse. . . . But if the Militant Labour Leaders of Ireland have not apostatised the same cannot be said of the working class as a whole . . . . For the sake of a few paltry shillings per week thousands of Irish workers have sold their country in the hour of their country's greatest need and hope. For the sake of a few paltry shillings Separation Allowance thousands of Irish women have made life miserable for their husbands with entreaties to join the British Army."In Erin's Hope (1897), Connolly had claimed that socialists would succeed where the Fenians, and the Young Irelanders before them, had failed, in preparing "the public mind for revolution". For this, they would rely on the militant organisation of labour, neither seeking nor accepting the cooperation of men whose ideals were not their own, and with whom they might therefore "be compelled to fight at some future critical stage of the journey to freedom". To this category, Connolly assigned "every section of the propertied class". John Newsinger argues that such talk was now put aside. Connolly embraced "the conception of revolution that prevailed in the inner circles of the IRB: that a small minority must be prepared to sacrifice itself in order to save the soul of the nation". It was, he suggests, the "politics of despair". Austen Morgan similarly concludes Connolly "collapsed politically as a socialist. Unable to sustain his faith in proletarian action, that he died "unapologetic Fenian".

Noting that, two weeks before the Rising, Connolly, was still affirming that "the cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour" and that the two "cannot be dissevered", Greaves continued to insist that little had changed in Connolly's fundamental thinking. R.M. Fox considers the view that Connolly "allowed himself to be dragged away from his labour convictions" to be "foolish" and "superficial", writing that under the unique conditions of World War 1 he was compelled to "force the independence issue to the point of armed struggle". But, for Richard English, while this may have been so, it is Connolly's failure "to persuade any but a tiny number of the Irish people" of his argument that accounts for his "gesture" in 1916. Acceding to the IRB's "inclusive, cross-class approach to the nation", his hope was only of an "eventual" vindication of his belief that, once national rebellion had secured "the national powers needed by our class", social revolution would follow.

Farm-labour cooperation
Apart from what he may have witnessed as a soldier, Connolly's only sustained experience of rural Ireland was three weeks spent in County Kerry in 1898 reporting on famine conditions for De Leon's Weekly People. Connolly concluded that "the root cause" of the distress was not landlordism per se or an "alien government", but rather a "system of small farming and small industry" in which the Irish peasant "reaps none of the benefits of the progress . . . [and] organisation of industry".

This was the seemingly orthodox Marxist view to which Connolly was already committed. In Erin's Hope (1897) he had proposed that "the day of the small farmers, as of small capitalists, is gone" and that salvation lay in "the nationalisation of land in the hands of the Irish state". From Kerry, he wrote more loosely of the Socialist Republic organising greater "co-operative effort",  but in either case it was an analysis that suggested that "the most important struggles for the Irish peasantry would occur not in the countryside, but between labour and capital in the cities". There is no discussion of the role the rural population itself might play in the creation of the new republic.

By the time of his return from America in 1910, the combined effects of continued emigration and land reform was effecting a profound social transformation. In Labour in Irish History (1910), Connolly recalls the words of Wolfe Tone: “Our freedom must be had at all hazards. If the men of property will not help us they must fall; we will free ourselves by the aid of that large and respectable class of the community – the men of no property.” But after the Wyndham Act (1903), the peasant "was, or else was well on the way to becoming, a freehold farmer--a man of property". Unmoved by what Connolly supposed was their "memory of the common ownership and common control of land by their ancestors", it was a status they would defend it with tenacity.

A "large self-confident class of farmer owners" was shifting the balance of class forces in Catholic Ireland against Connolly's identification of the national cause with labour. Their emancipation from taxation imposed in working-class interest would be "the main economic achievement of independence". This was not a prospect admitted by Connolly. He suggested rather a farm-labour alliance. A feature of the transition the tenancy to ownership in countryside was the establishment of creameries and other agricultural co-operatives. Participation was often reluctant, and generally failed to support broader networks, but the image was created abroad of Irish farmers as "co-operative trailblazers". In The Reconquest of Ireland (1915), Connolly celebrates the development and, recalling the co-operative stores his union had opened in Dublin after the Lock-out, "confidently" predicts that, "in the very near future", the labour movement will create its own "crop of co-operative enterprises". The stage would then be set for town and country to heal their "latent antagonism" and converge on a common ideal — the "Co-operative Commonwealth".

Ulster unionism
In 1898 Connolly had cited "the Protestant workmen of Belfast so often out on strike against their Protestant employers and their Protestant ancestors of 100 years ago [1798] in active rebellion against the English Protestant Government" as a demonstration of what "precious little bearing" the question of religious faith has in the struggle for freedom. Later, when in Belfast for the Socialist Party and the ITGWU. he identified "religious bigotry" as the one obstacle remaining to the acceptance of Irish self-government and thus to the achievement of socialist unity on a separate all-Ireland basis. But he understood this as a political force arising, not from confessional differences, but from the deliberate recall and accentuation of ancient native-planter divisions.

As the new Home Rule bill safely progressed through Westminster, Connolly appeared to concede the objection of William Walker, the Protestant leader of the Independent Labour Party in Belfast, who argued for British Labour and British social legislation. Having "voted against the Right to Work Bill, the Minimum Wage for Miners, and the Minimum Wage for Railwaymen, [and] intrigued against the application to Ireland of the Feeding of Necessitous School Children and the Medical Benefits of the Insurance Act,: Home Rulers, in a parliament of their own, would likely set a bad example to "reactionists everywhere". He also allowed religious bigotry was not alone the mark of Empire loyalists: Connolly had applauded the even-handedness of the Grand-Master of the Independent Orange Order, Lindsay Crawford, in castigating sectarian influences — both "Orange and Green". But in an "ill-tempered and discursive" exchange with Walker, Connolly admitted no case for labour sticking with the Imperial Parliament.

Labour unionism was still unionism and, no matter how reactionary nationalism might appear under its current leadership, unionism was more reactionary still. It represented an Orange-inflected Protestantism that had become "synonymous" with what Catholicism represented in much of the rest of Europe; that is, with "Toryism, lickspittle loyalty, servile worship of aristocracy and hatred of all that savours of genuine political independence on the part of the lower classes". Thus it was that he had encountered in Ireland's industrial capital, not what socialist theory would have predicted, its most politically-advanced working class, but rather those he despairingly characterised as "least rebellious slaves in the industrial world".

Walker maintained that it was as an internationalist that he supported the union with Great Britain. Connolly replied that "the only true socialist internationalism lay in a free federation of free peoples". That the Protestant working people of Ulster could regard themselves as a free people within the United Kingdom, he dismissed, effectively, as "false consciousness". But as it served only the interest of their landlords and employers, it could not be long sustained. Already, in 1913, in series strikes in Belfast and Larne, Connolly saw evidence of Protestant workers returning to the class struggle. He confidently predicted that suspicion of their Catholic fellow workers would "melt and dissolve", and that their children would come to laugh at the Ulster Covenant.

In April 1912, four of the five Belfast branches of the ILP attended a unity conference called by the SPI in Dublin and agreed to form an Independent Labour Party of Ireland. But sensitive to the unpopularity of Home Rule they did not carry their commitment over, when in May, Connolly secured a resolution at the Irish Trades Union Congress in favour of an Irish Labour Party without ties to the ILP or other British groups. Instead (joined in time by Winifred Carney) they adhered to what in Belfast became, after partition, the Northern Ireland Labour Party.

Socialism and religion
In 1907, Connolly confessed that while he "usually posed as a Catholic", he had not done his "duty" for fifteen years, and had "not the slightest tincture of faith left". Yet he could not accept De Leon's insistence that a socialist party be as "intolerant as science" of deviations from strict materialism. Connolly opposed clericalism. He argued that Irish Catholics could in all conscience reject their bishops' dealings with the British authorities, and  proposed that Irish schools be free of church control. But claiming "conformity with the practice of the chief Socialist parties of the World", he declared religion a private matter outside the scope of socialist action. "Socialism, is a bread and butter question. It is a question of the stomach; it is going to be settled in the factories, mines and ballot boxes of this country and is not going to be settled at the altar or in the church."In 1910, he published Labour, Nationality and Religion in which he defended socialists against the clerical charge that they are "beasts of immorality". He noted, for example, that the "enormous increase of divorces [in the United States] was almost entirely among the classes least affected by Socialist teaching". But, at the same time, he argued that there was an egalitarian and humanitarian impulse in Christianity that provided a moral bridge to socialism, and could positively contribute to its advance.

In either case, Connolly believed it was an unnecessary and strategic mistake for socialists to risk popular support by deliberately outraging religious opinion. He had refused to join De Leon in entertaining August Bebel's ideas on polyamorous marriage. Doing so, he argued, was simply putting "a weapon" into the hands of their enemies "without obtaining any corresponding advantage".

Emancipation of women
In a campaign to raise funds for the Dublin strikers in 1913, Connolly shared a platform at London's Royal Albert Hall with Sylvia Pankhurst. He took the occasion to declare that he stood for "opposition to the domination of nation over nation, of class over class, or of sex over sex". He had supported the Suffragette movement, and worked alongside women in the labour movement. His Irish Citizen Army had the distinction of giving women officer rank and duty  Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was convinced that, of "all the Irish labour men", Connolly was "the soundest and most thorough-going feminist".

In The Reconquest of Ireland (1915), Connolly traced oppression of women, like the oppression of the worker, to “a social and political order based upon the private ownership of property”. If the "worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave". He would have little use for any form of Irish state that did not not "embody the emancipation of womanhood?". However, socialism would solve only "the economic side of the Woman Question": "the question of marriage, of divorce, of paternity, of the equality of woman with man are physical and sexual questions, or questions of temperamental affiliation as in marriage," would "still be hotly contested". There was still a private sphere in which women themselves would complete the struggle for their own emancipation. "None", he remarked, is "so fit to break the chains as they who wear them, none so well equipped to decide what a fetter is”.

Antisemitism
During his 1902 election campaign in the Wood Quay ward in Dublin, in which many streets were occupied by Jewish immigrants from Russia, Connolly's campaign became the first in Irish history to distribute leaflets in Yiddish. The leaflet condemned antisemitism as a tool of the capitalist class.

Connolly sharply criticised the overtly anti-semitic tone of the British Social Democratic Federation's publications during the Boer War, arguing that they had attempted to "divert the wrath of the advanced workers from the capitalists to the Jews". His own editorship, however, did not exclude the possibility of anti-Jewish tropes. In the Workers Republic readers were asked to place themselves in the position of the Boers: "Supposing your country was invaded by a mob of Jews and foreign exploiters ... What would you do?". During the Cork lock-out of 1909, Connolly's Harp (the journal of the Irish Socialist Federation) featured an article denouncing "patriotic Irish capitalists" for importing "wholesale scab Jews to break the strike of Irish workers".

In 1898, Workers Republic published an article "The Ideal Government of the Jew", advocating "the establishment of an Isrealitish [sic] nation in Palestine". But two years later, Connolly himself was to write positively about the "remarkable" development in the Russian Empire of the Jewish Labour Bund. Part of Russian Social Democracy, the Bund was anti-Zionist.

Family
James Connolly and his wife Lillie had seven children. The eldest, Mona, died on the eve of the family's departure to join Connolly in America in 1904 at the age of 13, the result of an accident with scalding laundry water.

In Belfast, Nora and Ina (1896–1980) were active, with Winifred Carney, in Cumann na mBan and carried reports from the north to Pearse and their father the week before the rising in Dublin. Later, Nora was involved with her younger brother Roddy in efforts to promote a republican-socialist movement, but after the splintering of the Republican Congress in 1934 they went their separate ways. Roddy ended his political life as chairman of the Irish Labour Party and, the year before her death, Nora made an appearance at the Ardfheis of (Provisional) Sinn Féin.

In Belfast, Aideen (1895–1966) was also in Cumann na mBan. She married a Hugh Ward in Naas and had five children. Moira (1899–1958) became a doctor and married Richard Beech (an English syndicalist who, like Roddy, in 1920 attended World Congress of the Comintern). Connolly's youngest daughter, Fiona Connolly Edwards (1907–1976) also married in England, was active in the trade-union, and anti-partition, movements and assisted Desmond Greaves in his biographies both of her father and of the executed anti-Treaty republican, Liam Mellowes.

Brian Samuel Connolly Heron (Brian o h-Eachtuigheirn), the son of Ina Connolly Heron and Archie Heron, Connolly's grandson, was an organiser for the United Farm Workers in California. He was also a founding member in the United States of the National Association for Irish Justice which, in 1969, gained recognition as the U.S. support group for the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.

In their last interview, Connolly urged his wife to return with the younger children to the United States, but she failed to secure the necessary passport. This was despite the assurance of General Sir John Maxwell that she was "a decent humble woman who would be incapable of platform oratory in America".

Remaining in Dublin, in August 1916 Lillie Connolly was received into the Catholic Church, Fiona her sole witness. She did not make public appearances but when she died in 1938 she was accorded a state funeral.

Ireland
In 1966, to mark 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, Connolly Station, one of the two main railway stations in Dublin, and Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown, were named in his honour.

In 1996, a bronze statue of Connolly, backed by the symbol of the Starry Plough, was erected outside the Liberty Hall offices of the SIPTU trade union, in Dublin.

In March 2016, a statue of Connolly was unveiled by Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure minister Carál Ní Chuilín, and Connolly's great-grandson, James Connolly Heron, on Falls Road in Belfast.

In July 2023, a plaque was unveiled by the Dublin City Council at Connolly's former residence on South Lotts Road in Ringsend.

Scotland
In the Cowgate area of Edinburgh where Connolly grew up there is a likeness of Connolly and a gold-coloured plaque dedicated to him under the George IV bridge.

United States
In 1986, a bust of Connolly was erected in Riverfront Park in Troy, New York, where he had lived on first emigrating to the United States in 1904.

In 2008, a full-figure bronze of Connolly was installed in Union Park, Chicago near the offices of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers.

Writings

 * Connolly, James. 1897. "Socialism and Nationalism". The Shan van Vocht. 1 (1).
 * Connolly, James. 1897. Erin's Hope: The Ends and the Means (republished as The Irish Revolution, c. 1924)
 * Connolly, James. 1898. "The Fighting Race". Workers' Republic, 13 August.
 * Connolly, James. 1901. The New Evangel, Preached to Irish Toilers, (first appeared in Workers’ Republic, June–August 1899).
 * Connolly, James. 1909. Socialism Made Easy, Chicago.
 * Connolly, James. 1910. Labour in Irish history (republished 1914)
 * Connolly, James. 1910. Labour, Nationality, and Religion (republished 1920)
 * Connolly, James. 1911. "Plea For Socialist Unity in Ireland". Forward, 27 May
 * Connolly, James. 1913. "British Labour and Irish Politicians". Forward, 3 May.
 * Connolly, James. 1913. "The Awakening of Ulster's Democracy". Forward, 7 June
 * Connolly, James. 1913. "North East Ulster". Forward, 2 August.
 * Connolly, James. 1914. "Labour in the new Irish Parliament". Forward , 14 July
 * Connolly, James . 1914. "The hope of Ireland". Irish Worker, 31 October.
 * Connolly, James. 1914. The Axe to the Root, and, Old Wine in New Bottles (republished 1921)
 * Connolly, James. 1915. The Re-Conquest of Ireland (republished 1917)
 * Ryan, Desmond (ed.). 1949. Labour and Easter Week: A Selection from the Writings of James Connolly. Dublin: Sign of the Three Candles
 * Edwards, Owen Dudley & Ransom, Bernard (eds.). 1973. Selected Political Writings: James Connolly, London: Jonathan Cape
 * Anon. (ed.). 1987. James Connolly: Collected Works (Two volumes). Dublin: New Books
 * Ó Cathasaigh, Aindrias (ed.). 1997. The Lost Writings: James Connolly, London: Pluto Press ISBN 0-7453-1296-9

Biographies

 * Allen, Kieran. 1990. The Politics of James Connolly, London: Pluto Press ISBN 0-7453-0473-7
 * Anderson, W.K. 1994. James Connolly and the Irish Left. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. ISBN 0-7165-2522-4.
 * Collins, Lorcan. 2012. James Connolly. Dublin: O'Brien Press. ISBN 1-8471-7160-5.
 * Cronin, Seán. 2020. James Connolly: Irish Revolutionary. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 978-1-4766-3997-0
 * Edwards, Ruth Dudley. 1981. James Connolly. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-7171-1112-1
 * Fox, R.M. 1946. James Connolly: the Forerunner. Tralee: The Kerryman.
 * Greaves, C. Desmond. 1972. The Life and Times of James Connolly (2nd ed.). London: Lawrence and Wishart. ISBN 978-0-85315-234-7
 * Levenson, Samuel. 1973. James Connolly, a Biography. London: Martin Brian and O'Keefe. ISBN 978-0-85616-130-8
 * Metscher, Priscilla. 2002. James Connolly and the Reconquest of Ireland. Minneapolis: MEP Publications, Univ. of Minnesota. ISBN 0-930656-74-1
 * Morgan, Austen. 1990. James Connolly. a Political Biography. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. ISBN 0-7171-3911-5
 * McNulty, Liam. 2022. James Connolly: Socialist, Nationalist and Internationalist. London: Merlin Press. ISBN 0-8503-6783-2.
 * Nevin, Donal. 2005. James Connolly: A Full Life. Dublin: Gill & MacMillan. ISBN 0-7171-3911-5.
 * O'Callaghan, Sean. 2015. James Connolly: My search for the Man, the Myth and his Legacy. ISBN 9781780894348
 * Ransom, Bernard. 1980. Connolly's Marxism, London: Pluto Press. ISBN 0-86104-308-1.

title: James Connolly


text:
Daft Punk

Daft Punk were a French electronic music duo formed in 1993 in Paris by Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. They achieved early popularity in the late 1990s as part of the French house movement, combining elements of house music with funk, disco, techno, rock and synth-pop. The duo garnered further acclaim and commercial success and are now regarded as one of the most influential acts in dance music history.

Daft Punk formed after Bangalter and de Homem-Christo's former indie rock band, Darlin', disbanded. Their debut studio album, Homework, was released by Virgin Records in 1997 to positive reviews, backed by the singles "Around the World" and "Da Funk". From 1999, Daft Punk assumed robot personas for public appearances, with helmets, outfits and gloves to disguise their identities; they made few media appearances. They were managed from 1996 to 2008 by Pedro Winter, the head of Ed Banger Records.

Daft Punk's second album, Discovery (2001), earned acclaim and further success, with the hit singles "One More Time", "Digital Love" and "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger". It became the basis for an animated film, Interstella 5555, supervised by the Japanese artist Leiji Matsumoto. Daft Punk's third album, Human After All (2005), received mixed reviews, though the singles "Robot Rock" and "Technologic" achieved success in the United Kingdom. Daft Punk directed an avant-garde science-fiction film, Electroma, released in 2006. They toured throughout 2006 and 2007 and released the live album Alive 2007, which won a Grammy Award for Best Electronic/Dance Album; the tour is credited for broadening the appeal of dance music in North America. Daft Punk composed the score for the 2010 film Tron: Legacy.

In 2013, Daft Punk left Virgin for Columbia Records and released their fourth and final album, Random Access Memories, to acclaim; the lead single, "Get Lucky", reached the top 10 in the charts of 27 countries. Random Access Memories won five Grammy Awards in 2014, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year for "Get Lucky". In 2016, Daft Punk gained their only number one on the Billboard Hot 100 with "Starboy", a collaboration with the Weeknd. In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked them the 12th greatest musical duo of all time; the same publication has included two of their albums on their list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. They announced their split in 2021.

1987–1992: Early career and Darlin'
Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter met in 1987 while attending the Lycée Carnot secondary school in Paris. The two became friends and recorded demos with others from the school. In 1992, they formed a band, Darlin', with Bangalter on bass, Homem-Christo on guitar, and Laurent Brancowitz on guitar and drums. The trio named themselves after the Beach Boys song "Darlin", which they covered along with an original composition. Both tracks were released on a multi-artist EP under Duophonic Records, a label owned by the London-based band Stereolab, who invited Darlin' to open for shows in the United Kingdom.

Darlin' disbanded after around six months, having played two gigs and produced four songs. Bangalter described the project as "pretty average". Brancowitz formed another band, Phoenix. Bangalter and Homem-Christo formed Daft Punk and experimented with drum machines and synthesizers. The name was taken from a negative review of Darlin' in Melody Maker by Dave Jennings, who dubbed their music "a daft punky thrash". The band found the review amusing. Homem-Christo said, "We struggled so long to find [the name] Darlin', and [this name] happened so quickly."

1993–1996: First performances and singles
In September 1993, Daft Punk attended a rave at EuroDisney, where they met Stuart Macmillan of Slam, the co-founder of the Scottish label Soma Quality Recordings. They gave him a demo tape, which formed the basis for Daft Punk's debut single, "The New Wave", a limited release in 1994. The single also contained the final mix of "The New Wave" called "Alive", which appeared on Daft Punk's first album.

Daft Punk returned to the studio in May 1995 to record "Da Funk". After it became their first commercially successful single, they hired a manager, Pedro Winter, who regularly promoted them and other artists at his Hype nightclubs. They signed with Virgin Records in September 1996 and made a deal to license tracks through their production company, Daft Trax. Bangalter said that while they received numerous offers from record labels, they wanted to wait and ensure that they did not lose creative control. He considered the deal with Virgin more akin to a partnership.

In the mid-to-late nineties, Daft Punk performed live at various events, without the costumes they later became known for. In 1996, they made their first performance in the United States, at an Even Furthur event in Wisconsin. In addition to live original performances, they performed in clubs using vinyl records from their collection. They were known for incorporating numerous styles of music into their DJ sets.

1997–1999: Homework
Daft Punk released their debut album, Homework, in 1997. That February, the UK dance magazine Muzik published a Daft Punk cover feature and described Homework as "one of the most hyped debut albums in a long long time". According to The Village Voice, the album revived house music and departed from the Eurodance formula. The critic Alex Rayner wrote that it combined established club styles and the "burgeoning eclecticism" of big beat. In 1997, Daft Punk embarked on an international concert tour, Daftendirektour, using their home equipment for the live stage. On 25 May, they headlined the Tribal Gathering festival at Luton Hoo, England, with Orbital and Kraftwerk.

The most successful single from Homework was "Around the World". "Da Funk" was also included on The Saint film soundtrack. Daft Punk produced a series of music videos for Homework directed by Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Roman Coppola and Seb Janiak. The videos were collected in 1999 as D.A.F.T.: A Story About Dogs, Androids, Firemen and Tomatoes.

Bangalter and Homem-Christo created their own record labels, Roulé and Crydamoure, after the release of Homework, and released solo projects by themselves and their friends. Homem-Christo released music as a member of Le Knight Club with Eric Chedeville, and Bangalter released music as a member of Together with DJ Falcon and founded the group Stardust with Alan Braxe and Benjamin Diamond. In 1998, Stardust released their only song, the chart hit "Music Sounds Better With You".

1999–2003: Discovery
Daft Punk's second album, Discovery, was released in 2001. The duo said it was an attempt to reconnect with the playful, open-minded attitude associated with the discovery phase of childhood. The album reached No. 2 in the UK, and its lead single, "One More Time", was a hit. The song is heavily autotuned and compressed. The singles "Digital Love" and "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" were also successful in the UK and on the US Dance Chart, and "Face to Face" hit number one on the US club play charts.

Discovery created a new generation of Daft Punk fans. It also saw Daft Punk debut their distinctive robot costumes; they had previously worn Halloween masks or bags for promotional appearances. Discovery was later named one of the best albums of the decade by publications including Pitchfork and Resident Advisor. In 2020, Rolling Stone included it at number 236 in its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 2021, Pitchfork cited Discovery as the centrepiece of Daft Punk's career, "an album that transcended the robots' club roots and rippled through the decades that followed".

Daft Punk partnered with the Japanese manga artist Leiji Matsumoto to create Interstella 5555, a feature-length animation set to Discovery. The first four episodes were shown on Toonami in 2001, and the finished film was released on DVD in 2003. That December, Daft Punk released Daft Club, a compilation of Discovery remixes. In 2001, Daft Punk released a 45-minute excerpt from a Daftendirektour performance as Alive 1997.

2004–2007: Human After All and Alive 2007
In March 2005, Daft Punk released their third album, Human After All, the result of six weeks of writing and recording. Reviews were mixed, with criticism for its repetitiveness and darker mood. "Robot Rock", "Technologic", "Human After All" and "The Prime Time of Your Life" were released as singles. A Daft Punk anthology CD/DVD, Musique Vol. 1 1993–2005, was released on 4 April 2006. Daft Punk also released a remix album, Human After All: Remixes.

On 21 May 2006, Daft Punk premiered a film, Daft Punk's Electroma, at the Cannes Film Festival sidebar Director's Fortnight. The film does not include Daft Punk's music. Midnight screenings of the film were held in Paris theaters starting from March 2007.

For 48 dates across 2006 and 2007, Daft Punk performed the Alive 2006/2007 world tour, performing a "megamix" of their music from a large LED-fronted pyramid. The tour was acclaimed and is credited for bringing dance music to a wider audience, especially in North America. The Guardian journalist Gabriel Szatan likened it to how the Beatles' 1964 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show had brought British rock and roll to the American mainstream.

Daft Punk's performance in Paris was released as their second live album, Alive 2007, on 19 November 2007. The live version of "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" was released as a single, with a video directed by Olivier Gondry comprising audience footage of their performance in Brooklyn. In 2009, Daft Punk won Grammy Awards for Alive 2007 and its single "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger".

2008–2011: Tron: Legacy
Daft Punk made a surprise appearance at the 50th Grammy Awards on 10 February 2008, and appeared with rapper Kanye West to perform a reworked version of "Stronger" on stage at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. It was the first televised Daft Punk live performance.

In 2008, Daft Punk returned to Paris to work on new material. Winter also stepped down as their manager to focus attention on his Ed Banger Records label and his work as Busy P. He stated in a later interview that Daft Punk were working with an unspecified management company in Los Angeles. The duo held its Daft Arts production office at the Jim Henson Studios complex in Hollywood. In 2008, Daft Punk placed 38th in a worldwide official poll of DJ Mag after debuting at position 71 in the year before. Daft Punk provided new mixes for the video game DJ Hero, and appeared in the game as playable characters.

At the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con, it was announced that Daft Punk had composed 24 tracks for the film Tron: Legacy. Daft Punk's score was arranged and orchestrated by Joseph Trapanese. The band collaborated with him for two years on the score, from pre-production to completion. The score features an 85-piece orchestra, recorded at AIR Lyndhurst Studios in London. Joseph Kosinski, director of the film, referred to the score as a mixture of orchestral and electronic elements. Daft Punk also make a cameo as disc jockey programs wearing their trademark robot helmets within the film's virtual world. The soundtrack album was released on 6 December 2010. A music video for "Derezzed" premiered on the MTV Networks on the same day the album was released. The video, which features Olivia Wilde as the character Quorra in specially shot footage, along with images of Daft Punk in Flynn's Arcade, was later made available for purchase from the iTunes Store and included in the DVD and Blu-ray releases of the film. Walt Disney Records released a remix album, Tron: Legacy Reconfigured, on 5 April 2011.

In 2010, Daft Punk were admitted into the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, an order of merit of France. Bangalter and Homem-Christo were individually awarded the rank of Chevalier (knight). On October of that year, Daft Punk made a surprise guest appearance during the encore of Phoenix's show at Madison Square Garden in New York City. They played a medley of "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" and "Around the World" before the song segued into Phoenix's song "1901". The duo also included elements of their tracks "Rock'n Roll", "Human After All", and "Together", one of Bangalter's releases as a member of Together. They produced N.E.R.D.'s 2010 song "Hypnotize U".

2011–2015: Random Access Memories
In 2011, Soma Records released a previously unpublished Daft Punk track, "Drive", recorded while they were signed to Soma in the 1990s. The track was included in a twentieth anniversary multi-artist compilation of the Soma label. In October 2012, Daft Punk provided a 15-minute mix of songs by blues musician Junior Kimbrough for Hedi Slimane's Yves Saint Laurent fashion show. Daft Punk recorded their fourth studio album, Random Access Memories, with musicians including Julian Casablancas, Todd Edwards, DJ Falcon, Panda Bear, Chilly Gonzales, Paul Williams, Pharrell Williams, Chic frontman Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder. Daft Punk left Virgin for Sony Music Entertainment through the Columbia Records label.

Random Access Memories was released on 17 May 2013. The lead single, "Get Lucky", became Daft Punk's first UK number-one single and the most-streamed new song in the history of Spotify. At the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, Daft Punk debuted a trailer for their single "Lose Yourself to Dance" and presented the award for "Best Female Video" alongside Rodgers and Pharrell. In December, they revealed a music video for the song "Instant Crush", directed by Warren Fu and featuring Julian Casablancas.

At the 56th Annual Grammy Awards, Random Access Memories won the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronica Album, Album of the Year and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, while "Get Lucky" received the Grammy for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance and Record of the Year. Daft Punk performed at the ceremony with Stevie Wonder, Rodgers, and Pharrell, as well as Random Access Memories rhythm section players Nathan East, Omar Hakim, Paul Jackson, Jr. and Chris Caswell. That same night Daft Punk hosted a large Grammys afterparty at the Park Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, inviting many notable celebrities and with no photography allowed.

Daft Punk co-produced Kanye West's sixth studio album, Yeezus (2013), creating the tracks "On Sight", "Black Skinhead", "I Am a God" and "Send It Up" with West. They provided additional vocals for Pharrell's 2014 single "Gust of Wind". On 10 March 2014, an unreleased Daft Punk song, "Computerized", leaked online. It features Jay-Z and contains "The Son of Flynn" from the Tron: Legacy soundtrack; it was once intended to be a single promoting Tron: Legacy. In April 2015, Daft Punk appeared in a short tribute to Rodgers as part of a documentary on his life, Nile Rodgers: From Disco to Daft Punk. In June, a documentary, Daft Punk Unchained, was released.

2016–2020: Final projects and appearances

Daft Punk appeared on the 2016 singles "Starboy" and "I Feel It Coming" by Canadian R&B singer the Weeknd; "Starboy" topped the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Daft Punk's only US number-one song, and "I Feel It Coming" reached number four. In 2017, Soma Records released a previously unreleased remix of the Daft Punk track "Drive", as part of a compilation featuring various artists.

In February 2017, Daft Punk launched a pop-up shop in Hollywood, California, featuring memorabilia, artwork, and a display of the various costumes the duo has worn over the years. The duo also performed with the Weeknd at the 59th Annual Grammy Awards on 12 February 2017.

In the years following the Starboy collaborations, Bangalter and Homem-Christo worked solo as producers appearing on several projects. On 21 June 2017, the Australian band Parcels released the song "Overnight", produced and co-written by Daft Punk. It was written after Daft Punk saw Parcels perform and invited the members to their studio. This became Daft Punk's final production as a duo. Between April 9 and August 11, 2019, an electronic exhibition based on Daft Punk's song "Technologic" was displayed at the Philharmonie de Paris, featuring costumes, guitars and other elements.

In an interview with alt.news 26:46 in early 2024, W. F. Quinn Smith, a session musician who had served as the percussionist on Random Access Memories, claimed Daft Punk had begun work on another studio album in 2018, saying he had participated in experimental early recording sessions. Quinn said he has continued to check in on the status of the album, but the project has remained in limbo.

2021–present: Disbandment and post-breakup activity
On 22 February 2021, Daft Punk released a video on their YouTube channel titled "Epilogue". The video features a scene from their 2006 film Electroma, in which one robot explodes and the other walks away; a title card created with Warren Fu reads "1993–2021" while an excerpt of Daft Punk's song "Touch" plays. Later that day, Daft Punk's longtime publicist Kathryn Frazier confirmed that they had split, but did not give a reason. The news led to a surge in Daft Punk sales, with digital album purchases rising by 2,650%. Their friend and collaborator Todd Edwards confirmed that Bangalter and Homem-Christo remained active separately. He later said that the duo were "going in different directions", and that Homem-Christo was more drawn to hip-hop and Bangalter was interested in film. Bangalter and Homem-Christo still share a studio and equipment.

On 22 February 2022, one year after their disbandment, Daft Punk announced a 25th-anniversary edition of Homework. It included a remix album, Homework (Remixes), which was later released in physical formats. The same day as the anniversary announcement, Daft Punk broadcast a Twitch stream of their performance at the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles from their 1997 Daftendirektour. The video featured previously unreleased footage of the duo without costumes. Daft Punk released behind-the-scenes "archives" from the D.A.F.T. DVD and album reissues throughout 2022.

On 22 February 2023, Daft Punk announced a 10th-anniversary edition of Random Access Memories. The reissue was released on 12 May 2023 and contained a second disc with 35 minutes of previously unreleased outtakes and demos. "Infinity Repeating (2013 Demo)", featuring Julian Casablancas and the Voidz, was released as a single. The song had previously been talked about by Casablancas in interviews years prior. It was released alongside a music video and was called the duo's "last song ever" in press releases. Later that year, the duo also announced a "Drumless Edition" of the album which released on 17 November 2023, removing all drums and percussive elements from the original album's 13 tracks.

In April 2023, Bangalter released a solo work, the orchestral ballet score Mythologies. He gave interviews about the project and allowed himself to be photographed without a mask. He cited concerns about the progress of artificial intelligence and other technology as to why Daft Punk split, saying: "As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot." Bangalter said Daft Punk had wanted to not "spoil the narrative" while they were active, but now felt more comfortable revealing parts of their creative process. Reflecting on the split, Bangalter said he was "relieved and happy to look back and say: 'Okay, we didn't mess it up too much.'"

On 22 February 2024, commemorating the third anniversary of their split and coining the term "Daft Punk Day", Daft Punk announced a Twitch broadcast of Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. In addition to this broadcast, a vinyl repress of the film's tie-in single "Something About Us" will be released on Record Store Day in 2024. A 4K remaster of the film premiered in June 2024 and was shown at Tribeca Festival.

Musical style
Daft Punk's musical style has mainly been described as house, French house, electronic, dance, and disco. Sean Cooper of AllMusic describes their musical style as a blend of acid house, techno, pop, indie rock, hip hop, progressive house, funk, and electro. The Guardian critic Alexis Petridis described their approach to music and art as "magpie"-like, with extensive sampling. Daft Punk saw their style as "retrofuturist", incorporating genres from earlier decades into what the New York Times described as "an increasingly grand vision of joyful populism".

In the early 1990s, Daft Punk drew inspiration from rock and acid house in the UK. Homem-Christo referred to Screamadelica by Primal Scream as the record that "put everything together" in terms of genre. In 2009, Bangalter named Andy Warhol as one of Daft Punk's early influences. On the Homework track "Teachers", Daft Punk list musicians who influenced them, including the funk musician George Clinton, the rapper and producer Dr Dre, and Chicago house and Detroit techno artists including Paul Johnson, Romanthony and Todd Edwards. Homem-Christo said: "Their music had a big effect on us. The sound of their productions—the compression, the sound of the kick drum and Romanthony's voice, the emotion and soul—is part of how we sound today."

Discovery saw Daft Punk integrating influences from 70s disco and 80s crooners, and featured collaborations with Romanthony and Edwards. A major inspiration was the 1999 Aphex Twin single "Windowlicker", which Bangalter said was "neither a purely club track nor a very chilled-out, down-tempo relaxation track". The duo used vintage equipment to recreate sounds from older artists, such as the use of a Wurlitzer piano to evoke Supertramp on "Digital Love".

For the Tron: Legacy soundtrack, Daft Punk drew inspiration from Wendy Carlos, the composer of the original Tron film, as well as Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, John Carpenter, Vangelis, Philip Glass and Maurice Jarre. For Random Access Memories, Daft Punk sought a "west coast vibe", referencing acts such as Fleetwood Mac, the Doobie Brothers and the Eagles, and the French electronic musician Jean Michel Jarre.

Image
For most public and media appearances, Daft Punk wore costumes that concealed their faces. Bangalter said they wanted the focus to be on their music, and that masks allowed them to control their image while retaining their anonymity and protecting their personal lives. He said that the 1974 film Phantom of the Paradise, in which the title character prominently wears a mask, was "the foundation for a lot of what we're about artistically". Daft Punk were also fans of the 1970s band Space, known for wearing space suits with helmets that hid their appearance. The mystery of Daft Punk's identity and their elaborate disguises added to their popularity. The costumes have been compared to the makeup of Kiss and the leather jacket worn by Iggy Pop.

During promotional appearances in the 1990s, Daft Punk would conceal their faces with an assortment of masks. Although they allowed a camera crew to film them for a French arts program at the time, Daft Punk did not wish to speak on screen. According to Orla Lee-Fisher, the head of marketing at Virgin Records UK, in their early career Daft Punk would only consent to photographs without masks while they were DJing. In 1997, Bangalter said they had a "general rule about not appearing in videos".

In 2001, Daft Punk began wearing robot costumes for promotional appearances and performances for Discovery, debuted in a special presentation during Cartoon Network's Toonami block. The helmets were produced by Paul Hahn of Daft Arts and the French directors Alex and Martin, with engineering by Tony Gardner and Alterian, Inc. They were capable of various LED effects. Wigs were originally attached to both helmets, but Daft Punk removed them moments before unveiling them. Bangalter said the helmets were hot but that he became used to this. Later helmets were fitted with ventilators to prevent overheating.

With the release of Human After All, Daft Punk wore simplified helmets and black leather jackets and trousers designed by Hedi Slimane. Bangalter said Daft Punk did not want to repeat themselves and were interested in "developing a persona that merges fiction and reality". On the set of Electroma, Daft Punk were interviewed with their backs turned, and in 2006 they wore cloth bags over their heads during a televised interview. They said the use of cloth bags had been a spontaneous decision, reflecting their willingness to experiment with their image. Daft Punk wore the robot costumes in their performances at the 2008, 2014, and 2017 Grammy Awards. During the 2014 ceremony, they accepted their awards on stage in the outfits, with Pharrell and Paul Williams speaking on their behalf.

Daft Punk used the robot outfits to merge the characteristics of humans and machines. Bangalter said that the personas were initially the result of shyness, but that they became exciting for the audience, "the idea of being an average guy with some kind of superpower". He described it as an advanced version of glam, "where it's definitely not you". After Daft Punk's split, Bangalter likened the robot personas to a "like a Marina Abramović performance art installation that lasted for 20 years". He denied that the robots represented "an unquestioning embrace of digital culture", and said: "We tried to use these machines to express something extremely moving that a machine cannot feel, but a human can. We were always on the side of humanity and not on the side of technology."

Media appearances
Daft Punk's popularity has been partially attributed to their appearances in mainstream media. The duo appeared with Juliette Lewis in an advertisement for Gap, featuring the single "Digital Love", and were contractually obliged to appear only in Gap clothing. In 2001, Daft Punk appeared in an advertisement on Cartoon Network's Toonami timeslot, promoting the official Toonami website and the duo's animated music videos for their album Discovery. The music videos later appeared as scenes in the feature-length film Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, in which Daft Punk make a cameo appearance as their robot alter-egos. The duo later appeared in a television advertisement wearing their Discovery-era headgear to promote Sony Ericsson's Premini mobile phone. In 2010, Daft Punk appeared in Adidas advertisements promoting a Star Wars-themed clothing line. Daft Punk made a cameo in Tron: Legacy as nightclub DJs.

In 2011, Coca-Cola distributed limited edition bottles designed by Daft Punk. Daft Punk and Courtney Love were photographed for the "Music Project" of fashion house Yves Saint Laurent. The duo appeared in their new sequined suits custom-made by Hedi Slimane, holding and playing instruments with bodies made of lucite. In 2013, Bandai Tamashii released an S.H. Figuarts (SHF) action figure for Daft Punk coinciding with the release of Random Access Memories in Japan. Following a series of teaser trailers, Daft Punk made a rare public appearance at the 2013 Monaco Grand Prix in May on behalf of the Lotus F1 Team, who supported the duo by racing in specially-branded cars emblazoned with the band's logo.

Footage of Daft Punk's 2006 performance at the Coachella Festival was featured in the documentary film Coachella: 20 Years in the Desert, released on YouTube in April 2020. Daft Punk were scheduled to appear on the August 6, 2013 episode of The Colbert Report to promote Random Access Memories. They were unable to do so because of contractual obligations regarding their later appearance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards. According to Stephen Colbert, Daft Punk were unaware of any exclusivity agreement and were halted by MTV executives the morning prior to the taping. In 2015, Daft Punk appeared alongside several other musicians to announce their co-ownership of the music service Tidal at its relaunch.

Eden, a 2014 French drama film, has as its protagonist a techno fan-turned-DJ-turned recovering addict. It features Daft Punk (portrayed by actors) during different stages of their careers. Daft Punk's helmets can be worn by the player in the 2022 video games Pokémon Scarlet and Violet.

Daft Punk are set to appear in collaborator Pharrell Williams's 2024 biographical film Piece by Piece.

Legacy
Daft Punk are regarded as one of the most influential dance acts in history. In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked them the 12th greatest musical duo of all time. The chief Guardian music critic Alexis Petridis named Daft Punk the most influential pop artists of the 21st century. Their collaborator Pharrell Williams said they were responsible for the rise of contemporary EDM, though Bangalter was noncommittal about this, saying only that other acts were using "gimmicks that at the time [Daft Punk used them] were not really gimmicks". The New York Times credited Daft Punk with helping make dance music "fully mainstream".

In "Losing My Edge", the first single by LCD Soundsystem, singer James Murphy jokingly bragged about being the first to "play Daft Punk to the rock kids". LCD Soundsystem also recorded the song "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House", which reached No. 29 in the UK and was nominated for Best Dance Recording at the 2006 Grammy Awards. The Soulwax remix of the song also contains samples of many Daft Punk tracks as well as tracks by Thomas Bangalter.

Daft Punk tracks have been sampled or covered by other artists. "Technologic" was sampled by Swizz Beatz for the Busta Rhymes song "Touch It". In a later remix of "Touch It" the line "touch it, bring it, pay it, watch it, turn it, leave it, start, format it" from "Technologic" was sung by R&B and rap artist Missy Elliott. Kanye West's 2007 song "Stronger" from the album Graduation borrows the melody and features a vocal sample of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger". Daft Punk's robotic costumes make an appearance in the music video for "Stronger". The track "Daftendirekt" from Daft Punk's album Homework was sampled for the Janet Jackson song "So Much Betta" from her 2008 album Discipline.

The track "Aerodynamic" was sampled for Wiley's 2008 single "Summertime". "Veridis Quo" from Discovery was sampled for the Jazmine Sullivan song "Dream Big" from her 2008 album Fearless. Daft Punk's "Around the World" was sampled for JoJo's 2009 song "You Take Me (Around the World)". The song "Cowboy George" by The Fall contains a clip of "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger". A cappella group Pentatonix performed a medley of Daft Punk songs, released as a YouTube video. As of November 2021, the video had been viewed over 355 million times. The medley won for Best Arrangement, Instrumental or a Cappella of the 57th Grammy Awards.

A Daft Punk medley was played at the 2017 Bastille Day parade by a French military band, in front of French President Emmanuel Macron and his many guests, which included US President Donald Trump.

Baicalellia daftpunka, a species of flatworm, was named after Daft Punk in 2018 because part of the organism resembles a helmet.

In February 2024, Madame Tussauds New York unveiled their wax figures of Daft Punk.

Discography

 * Studio albums
 * Homework (1997)
 * Discovery (2001)
 * Human After All (2005)
 * Random Access Memories (2013)

Concert tours

 * Daftendirektour (1997)
 * Alive 2006/2007 (2006–07)

Awards and nominations
In October 2011, Daft Punk placed 28th in a "top-100 DJs of 2011" list by DJ Magazine after placing in the 44th position the year before. On 19 January 2012, Daft Punk ranked No. 2 on Mixmag's Greatest Dance Acts of All Time, with The Prodigy at No. 1 by just a few points.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Daft Punk