(Brill S Studies in Intellectual History 155) Wyger Velema - Republicans - Essays On Eighteenth-Century Dutch Political Thought-BRILL (2007) PDF

Republicans
Brill’s Studies in
Intellectual History
General Editor
A.J. Vanderjagt, University of Groningen
Editorial Board
C.S. Celenza, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
M. Colish, Oberlin College
J.I. Israel, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
J.D. North, University of Groningen
W. Otten, Utrecht University
VOLUME 155
Republicans
Essays on Eighteenth-Century
Dutch Political Thought
By
Wyger R.E. Velema
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2007
Cover illustration: Holland, seated between Aristocracy and Democracy, holds Monarchy and
Tyranny in chains. From Gregorio Leti, Kort Begrip der Helden-Deugden (The Hague, 1700).
Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all right holders to any copyrighted material used
in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes
communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be
made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A C.I.P record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISSN: 0920-8607
ISBN: 978 90 04 16191 7
Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV
provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center,
222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands

For Pauline
And yet, it always seems to me that we are unfair, too arrogant,
too condescending about eighteenth-century Holland. The deeper
history of our country during that period has never been written.
Johan Huizinga, Nederland’s beschaving in de zeventiende eeuw
Une aubergiste de Helvoet demanda à George II deux guinées

pour deux oeufs. George lui dit: “Est-ce que les oeufs sont si rares
ici?—Non, lui répondit-elle, mais les rois”.
Denis Diderot, Voyage en Hollande
Aber auch noch gegenwärtig ist Freiheit das Allerheiligste dieses

Volks.
Johann Grabner, Über die Vereinigten Niederlande
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Chapter One: Introduction: “The First Republic of Europe” . . . . . . . 1

1. A Republican Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2. The Eighteenth-Century Republic Observed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3. Preliminary Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Chapter Two: Anti-Monarchism in Early Modern Dutch Political

Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1. The Study of Early Modern Dutch Political Thought . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2. True Liberty and Anti-Monarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3. Early Eighteenth-Century Anti-Monarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
4. Anti-Monarchism and Patriot Republicanism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Chapter Three: Early Eighteenth-Century Political Languages. . . . . 53

1. The Neglect of the Early Eighteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
2. Classical Republicanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3. Godly Republicanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
4. Ancient Constitutionalism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
5. The Debate Continues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Chapter Four: Polite Republicanism and the Problem of Decline . . 77

1. Republican Decline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
2. Justus van Effen’s Polite Republicanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
3. A New Orthodoxy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Chapter Five: Republican Readings of Montesquieu: The Esprit

des Lois in the Dutch Republic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
1. The Dutch Reception of the Esprit des Lois . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
2. Montesquieu’s Republican Themes Interpreted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
3. Republicanism Redefined . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
x contents
Chapter Six: Revolution, Counterrevolution and the

Stadholderate, 1780–1795 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
1. A Deep Ideological Divide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
2. The Patriot Revolution and the Stadholderate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
3. In Defense of the Stadholderate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Chapter Seven: The Concept of Liberty in the Dutch Republic,

1780–1787 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
1. “Different Meanings Given to the Word of Liberty” . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
2. The Patriot Transformation of Liberty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
3. Old Liberty Maintained . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Chapter Eight: Contemporary Reactions to Patriot Political

Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
1. On the Need for the Study of Political Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
2. The Blessings of the Established Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
3. Patriot Primitivism and Utopianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
4. The Horrors of Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
Chapter Nine: Dutch Constitutionalism at the End of the

Eighteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
1. Eighteenth-Century Constitutionalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
2. The Patriots Discover that the Republic does not have a
Constitution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
3. Debates over a New Constitution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
4. The Constitution of 1798 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
Chapter Ten: The End of Republican Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

1. Republicanism Defended, 1804–1806. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
2. The Establishment of the Monarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The essays brought together in this book have been written in the
course of almost two decades of research on the history of eighteenth-
century Dutch political thought. Some are published here more or
less as they were originally conceived, some have been substantially
rewritten for this volume, and some have been translated into English
for the first time. In what follows, I have listed all previous publications
I have used in writing the chapters of this book:
Chapter One: “‘De Eerste Republiek van Europa’. Iets over de
politieke identiteit van de Zeven Verenigde Provinciën in de achttiende
eeuw”. Documentatieblad van de Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw, 24 (1992) 29–44;
“Wijnand W. Mijnhardt on the Historiography of Republicanism: A
Reply”. De Achttiende Eeuw. Documentatieblad Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw, 38
(2005) 193–202.
Chapter Two: “‘That a Republic is Better than a Monarchy’: Anti-
monarchism in Early Modern Dutch Political Thought” in: Martin
van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, ed. Republicanism. A Shared European
Heritage. 2 vols. Cambridge, 2002.
Chapter Three: “God, de deugd en de oude constitutie. Politieke
talen in de eerste helft van de achttiende eeuw”. Bijdragen en Mededelingen
betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 102 (1987) 476–497.
Chapter Four: “Beschaafde republikeinen. Burgers in de achttiende
eeuw” in: Remieg Aerts and Henk te Velde, ed. De stijl van de burger.
Over Nederlandse burgerlijke cultuur vanaf de middeleeuwen. Kampen, 1998;
“Ancient and Modern Virtue Compared: De Beaufort and Van Effen
on Republican Citizenship”. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30 (1997) 437–443.
Chapter Five: “Republican Readings of Montesquieu. The Spirit of the
Laws in the Dutch Republic”. History of Political Thought, XVIII (1997)
43–63.
Chapter Six: “Revolutie, contrarevolutie en het stadhouderschap,
1780–1795”. Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 102 (1989) 517–533.
Chapter Seven: “From the Rule of Law to Popular Sovereignty: The
Concept of Liberty in the Dutch Republic, 1780–1787”. Zeitschrift für
Historische Forschung. Vierteljahresschrift zur Erforschung des Spätmittelalters und
xii acknowledgements
der frühen Neuzeit, Beiheft 21 (1998) 69–82; “Vrijheid als volkssoeverei-

niteit. De ontwikkeling van het politieke vrijheidsbegrip in de Repu-
bliek, 1780–1795” in: E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and W.R.E. Velema, ed.
Vrijheid. Een geschiedenis van de vijftiende tot de twintigste eeuw. Amsterdam,
1999.
Chapter Eight: “Contemporaine reacties op het patriotse politieke
vocabulaire” in: H. Bots and W.W. Mijnhardt, ed. De Droom van de
Revolutie. Nieuwe benaderingen van het Patriottisme. Amsterdam, 1988.
Chapter Nine: “Revolutie, Republiek en Constitutie. De ideologische
context van de eerste Nederlandse Grondwet” in: N.C.F. van Sas en
H. te Velde, ed. De eeuw van de Grondwet. Grondwet en politiek in Nederland,
1798–1917. Deventer, 1998; “‘The Childhood of Philosophical Republi-
canism’: Dutch Constitutionalism in Comparative Perspective”. Mede-
delingen van het Nederlands Instituut te Rome, LVII (1998) 69–84.
Chapter Ten: “Lodewijk Napoleon en het einde van de republikeinse
politiek”. De Negentiende Eeuw. Documentatieblad Werkgroep 19e eeuw, 30
(2006) 147–158.
In the course of my research on Dutch republicanism, I have been
generously supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific
Research, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
Huizinga Institute, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in
the Humanities and Social Sciences, the European Science Founda-
tion, and the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen. Over
the years, various versions of the chapters that make up this book have
been presented in Amsterdam, Athens, Atlanta, Berkeley, Bloomington,
Dordrecht, Florence, Glasgow, Göttingen, Groningen, Helsinki, León,
Lisbon, London, Louvain, Macerata, Milan, Munich, Münster, Naples,
New York, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Tampere, Tuscon, and Utrecht. I
am deeply grateful to all those scholars whose questions and sugges-
tions have helped me to develop and refine my views on eighteenth-
century Dutch political thought. Particularly valuable to me have been
the meetings of the European Science Foundation network “Republi-
canism: A Shared European Heritage”, directed by Quentin Skinner
and Martin van Gelderen, my contacts with Hans Erich Bödeker of the
Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen, and the yearly meet-
ings, since 1998, of the History of Social and Political Concepts Group.
From the topics discussed in this book, it will be evident how much
I owe to the two great historians I was fortunate enough to have as
my teachers: John Pocock and the late Ernst Kossmann. In my daily
working environment, the Department of History of the University of
acknowledgements xiii
Amsterdam, I have over the years been supported and encouraged by

Herman Beliën, Eco Haitsma Mulier, Paul Knevel, and Niek van Sas.
My dear friend Bill Kuhn’s refreshing contempt for egalitarian repub-
licanism has forced me to think harder about its meaning and value.
My debt to my wife Pauline, finally, can only be expressed through the
dedication of this book. Without her, it would not have been written.
Wyger R.E. Velema

The Hague, January 2007
chapter one
INTRODUCTION: “THE FIRST

REPUBLIC OF EUROPE”
1. A Republican Identity
In 1793, two leading Dutch conservatives published their views on the

current political situation of the Seven United Provinces. Both pointed
out that their country, although severely shaken by the revolutionary
turmoil of recent years, still belonged to the happiest states known
to mankind. There was very little reason to contemplate fundamen-
tal changes in its excellent and free political system. Above all, however,
it was altogether undesirable to elevate the stadholders to a monar-
chical position, since such a move would entirely ruin the unique and
glorious republican constitution. Even the stadholder himself, Adriaan
Kluit remarked, could not possibly have any interest in such an increase
of his power, for it would in fact degrade him and make him “instead
of the richest citizen and Stadholder of the first Republic into the poorest
regent and Sovereign of one of the smallest Kingdoms”.1 Johan Meer-
man fully agreed. There could be no doubt whatsoever that being the
“Stadholder of the first Republic of Europe” was incomparably prefer-
able to being the “Sovereign of a negligible Kingdom”.2 Some ten years
earlier, the opponents of Kluit and Meerman had made quite similar
observations, albeit from an altogether different political point of view.
Thus the authors of one of the most important texts to come out of
the Dutch Patriot reform movement of the 1780s, Constitutional Restora-
tion, had pointed out that the elevation of the stadholders to a higher
position would turn the proud Republic into a “pathetic little Monarchical
Country that would soon be eaten by its Monarchical Court”.3
Despite all their fundamental differences, it is clear from the above
that late eighteenth-century Dutch conservatives and reformers shared
1 [Kluit] De rechten van den mensch in Vrankrijk, 367.

2 Meerman, De Burgerlyke Vryheid, 20.
3 Grondwettige Herstelling, van Nederlands Staatswezen, I, 181–182.
2 chapter one
one essential political conviction: they agreed that the republican form
of government was the only one appropriate for the Seven United
Provinces. The same had been true for their political predecessors,
the Staatsgezinden and Orangists, whose incessant political quarrels had
produced thousands of publications since the second half of the seven-
teenth century. Indeed, the attempt to define the essential characteris-
tics of a free republic was probably the only common feature of all the
various political languages spoken by the Dutch during the eighteenth
century. Regardless of all their differences, the notion of being “free-
born republicans” bound the eighteenth-century Dutch together and
constituted a large part of their sense of identity.4 In this book, the many
different eighteenth-century interpretations of what it meant to be a
freeborn republican will occupy a central place. To keep things in a
proper perspective, however, this introductory chapter starts with a look
at the republican identity the Dutch all shared. The nature of this iden-
tity may be clarified by a discussion of the way in which the eighteenth-
century Dutch compared their political life with that of other European
countries. It may, however, also be approached through the commen-
taries of contemporary foreign observers on the salient characteristics
of the Dutch Republic and its inhabitants.
Although they often made an exception for England, a country
where “the republic hides under the form of the monarchy”, the eigh-
teenth-century Dutch generally regarded the monarchies surrounding
them with deep distrust.5 Whereas the first generations of Dutch repub-
licans had—for obvious reasons—regarded Spain the best illustration
of the sad fate of liberty under a single-headed government, in the
course of the seventeenth century the Dutch gradually came to focus
more and more on the threat to liberty posed by absolutist France.6
Since the days of Louis XIV at the latest, the French monarchy was
viewed as the perfect embodiment of all the evils of monarchical rule
and the very opposite of everything republicanism stood for. Already
in the early 1660s the brothers De la Court had depicted France as a
state utterly lacking in liberty, ruled by a corrupt and ever expanding
4 E.g. Engelberts, Verdediging van de Eer der Hollandsche Natie, 104.

5 The quotation is, of course, from Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, book V, chapter 19:
Oeuvres complètes, II, 304. Some eighteenth-century Dutch views of England are discussed
in Chapter Three.
6 On Dutch views of Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see e.g
Van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt and Meijer Drees, Andere landen,
andere mensen.
introduction: “the first republic of europe” 3
court, and in which it was the fate of the inhabitants “to be skinned
by Courtiers and Soldiers”.7 Louis XIV’s subsequent aggressive for-
eign policies and religious intolerance certainly did nothing to improve
this estimate.8 During the first half of the eighteenth century, the clas-
sical republican theorist Lieven de Beaufort took France as his prime
example whenever he discussed the oppression and aggression charac-
teristic of the modern absolute monarchy.9 The same era also added a
new element of criticism to its discussions of the perils of French abso-
lutism. Deeply worried by the rapid rise of French politesse as a cultural
ideal in Europe, Dutch Spectatorial writers from the 1730s did their
utmost to present it as the ideological outgrowth of absolutist monarchy
and entirely unsuitable for free republicans. What the Dutch Repub-
lic needed, they argued, was not the imitation of fashionable French
courtly politesse, but a return to the true and sober republican politeness
of the seventeenth-century golden age.10 This combined political and
cultural detestation of France survived relatively unchanged until the
very end of the French ancien régime in 1789. It was only then that politi-
cal developments in France became an inspiring example to the Dutch
revolutionaries who were attempting to transform their old republic.11
Until that time, however, even the Patriots who, for reasons of inter-
national politics, were forced to seek its support against their Orangist
opponents viewed the French monarchy with undiminished suspicion.
Indeed, it was a Patriot historian who perhaps best summed up the
negative view the Dutch still had of France in the 1780s.
In the sixth and final volume of his voluminous Inquiry into the Causes
of the Rise, Decline and Regeneration of the Most Important Ancient and Modern
Peoples, published in 1784, Cornelis Zillesen found it hard to deny
that the French had some reason to boast of their achievements in
recent times. Yet as so many Dutch commentators had done before
him, he immediately added that the final judgment about this country
and its politics could only be negative. The French political system,
Zillesen believed, was a perfect illustration of Montesquieu’s theory
that monarchies entirely revolved around the principle of honor. French
social and political life resembled a steep pyramid, with the king at the
7 [De la Court] Consideratien van Staat, Ofte Polityke Weeg-schaal, 235–247.

8 Malssen, Louis XIV d’après les pamphlets répandus en Hollande.
9 [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaat, passim.
10 Chapter Four; Hietbrink, “De deugden van een vrije republiek”; Okel, Der Bürger,
die Tugend und die Republik.

11 Rosendaal, Bataven!
4 chapter one
very top and substantial barriers and gradations between the various
groups constituting society. Not only did this result in an undesirable
and exaggerated respect for social superiors, but also in an unequal
system of justice, since “nobility, rank, birth, or favor” determined the
outcome of everything. French manners were admittedly polite, but also
appallingly insincere and entirely dominated by external and superficial
appearances. This perverse code of conduct had gradually spread from
the absolutist court to even the most humble peasant abode. Without
doubt, most French problems were ultimately caused by the presence
of this court. The French had been taught to regard their king as the
sole bearer of political power and as the living image of God on earth.
They were not allowed to think for themselves, to openly express their
wishes or to practice the religion of their preference. As a result
true love of country, flowing from the freedom of thought and from
respect for a form of government, laws and customs ultimately based
on the will of the people, is unknown to them.
Instead, the French were spending their days in slavish submission

to the king’s every wish and whim, and were forced to watch how
despicable courtiers squandered the people’s hard earned money “in
vortices of eroticism, entertainments, luxury, and splendor”. For the
citizens of a free republic, even of a republic by now in a state of
deep crisis, France until 1789 clearly remained the prime example of
everything to be avoided.12
France, of course, was not the only European monarchy the Dutch
could compare their republican political system to. In a recent brilliant
discussion of eighteenth-century European political culture, Timothy
Blanning has convincingly argued that French absolutism was funda-
mentally unable to adapt to the changing circumstances of the eigh-
teenth century and therefore met a particularly dire fate in the revo-
lutionary era. Other monarchies, Frederick the Great’s Prussia promi-
nently among them, were less isolated from society and showed them-
selves capable of creatively responding to the libertarian demands of
enlightenment culture.13 Yet the Dutch, although they showed them-
selves appreciative of the evident increases in liberty under enlight-
ened absolutism, persisted in emphasizing the inherent limitations of
all monarchical forms of government. Frederick’s Prussia was a case in
12 Zillesen, Onderzoek der Oorzaaken, VI, 42–46.

13 Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture.
point. It was certainly regarded with a considerable measure of sympa-

thy by many Dutch republicans. When, in 1749, the enlightened polit-
ical and legal theorist Elie Luzac published his radical defense of the
freedom of thought and expression, he specifically praised the Prus-
sian monarch for his extraordinary understanding of the importance of
this fundamental human right.14 Several decades later the Post van den
Neder-Rhyn, perhaps the most important political journal of the Patriot
movement, also lauded the enlightened Prussian king for his incessant
efforts to increase the welfare and happiness of his subjects and for
his tolerant policies. All these things, the author of the article signif-
icantly continued, had undoubtedly made the inhabitants of Prussia
perfectly happy. Yet they had not made them into “free republicans”, for
these blessings were ultimately dispensed as favors of the king. And who
was to say what the next king would do? Indeed, the crucial difference
between a “free citizen” and the “subject of a monarch” was that the for-
mer had the protection of his rights and liberty in his own hands and
was not dependent upon the will of another.15 The message was clear.
The eighteenth-century Dutch detested absolute monarchy, were will-
ing to concede that an enlightened monarchy could bring considerable
happiness to a people, but remained convinced that the only form of
government that could be called free was a republic.
Yet when they turned to the study of other historical and contem-
porary republics, the Dutch soon realized that it was quite hard to
bring all these different political systems under a meaningful com-
mon denominator. Obviously, they first of all focused their attention
on the famous republics of classical antiquity. Dutch eighteenth-century
culture, although in many respects modern and enlightened, retained
a substantial admixture of the humanism that had flourished during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.16 The Dutch, therefore, were
steeped in classical literature, historiography and political thought and
made an intensive use of this knowledge in analyzing their political sys-
tem in comparative perspective. Lieven de Beaufort’s 1737 Treatise on
Liberty in Civil Society took the decline and fall of the Roman Repub-
lic as its main example and point of reference; before turning to the
14 [Luzac] Essai sur la Liberté de Produire ses Sentimens, e.g. 104.

15 De Post van den Neder-Rhyn, VIII, nr. 400, 774–777. On this journal see Theeuwen,
Pieter ’t Hoen.
16 Duyvendijk, De motivering van de klassieke vorming; Mijnhardt, Tot Heil van ’t Men-
schdom; Grijzenhout and Tuyll van Serooskerken, Edele eenvoud.

6 chapter one
history of his own country, Cornelis Zillesen discussed the rise, flour-
ishing and decline of the classical states at length; Johan Meerman was
the author of a comparison between the Seven United Provinces and
the Achaean Confederacy; and as late as 1792 Elie Luzac attempted to
demonstrate the dangers of radically changing a well-established gov-
ernment through the use of mainly classical examples.17 Classical antiq-
uity, in short, was omnipresent.
But what exactly did it mean to the eighteenth-century Dutch? In its
ambivalence, their attitude to the ancient republics in some ways may
be said to resemble the thought of that great contemporary theorist,
Montesquieu. Like him, many Dutchmen felt admiration for the repub-
lican political virtue on which they thought the most famous and suc-
cessful ancient republics had been built. Also like Montesquieu, how-
ever, a considerable number of Dutchmen doubted the viability of clas-
sical republican ideals in the modern European world and distanced
themselves from them.18 Both these views were a constant presence in
eighteenth-century Dutch political thought and existed in a mutual ten-
sion. Thus, as a number of chapters in this book will demonstrate, there
was a clear strand of classical republicanism in Dutch political thought,
running from Rabod Scheels through Lieven de Beaufort to the Patriot
reformers and the Batavian revolutionaries of the end of the eighteenth-
century. Yet at the same time there were those, from the brothers De
la Court in the late seventeenth century, via the Spectatorial writers
of the first half of the eighteenth century, to political theorists such as
Dirk Hoola van Nooten and Elie Luzac at the end of the Dutch ancien
régime, who for various reasons seriously doubted the wisdom of vener-
ating the republics of classical antiquity. Indeed, as was the case with
Montesquieu, these contradictory attitudes frequently coexisted in the
political thought of one and the same person.
It is therefore quite difficult to determine exactly how important
the example of the classical republics still was to eighteenth-century
Dutch republicans. In the end, however, it seems most of them real-
ized that, fascinating as the classical world remained, the differences
with the modern world were too substantial to be overlooked. Perhaps
the greatest of these, many thought, was the absence of a highly devel-
17 [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaat; Zillesen, Onderzoek der
Oorzaaken, I, 112–276; Meerman, Discours qui a remporté le prix; [Luzac] Lettres sur les
Dangers.
18 The Dutch reception of Montesquieu is discussed in Chapter Five.
oped system of commerce in antiquity. It was frequently pointed out

that although the ancient republics had of course been familiar with
commercial activity, commerce had nonetheless never become the basis
of their entire social and political system. As a result, the republics of
antiquity had heavily depended on domestic slavery and foreign con-
quests for their survival. Both these aspects of the ancient world the
Dutch judged to be highly objectionable and incompatible with mod-
ern republican notions of liberty. Whatever the other deficiencies of the
Dutch Republic might be, the authors of the late eighteenth-century
Patriot Constitutional Restoration observed, at least—and contrary to clas-
sical antiquity—“with us there are no longer masters or slaves; the laws
give the rights of Civil liberty to all the inhabitants”.19 As to territorial
expansion and violent conquests, it was clear that these were reprehen-
sible phenomena, as unacceptable in ancient republics as they were in
modern monarchies.
Their way of life had moreover caused the citizens of the ancient
republics to adopt manners that were, in the eyes of most eighteenth-
century Dutchmen, excessively martial. When Dutch Spectatorial writ-
ers tried to formulate an answer to the early eighteenth-century threat
posed by monarchical politesse, they therefore did not primary look back
to classical antiquity, but developed the notion of a modern and com-
mercial republican politeness.20 Even to the Dutch Patriots, who had a
tendency to idealize classical political virtue and who openly pleaded
for the defense of republican liberty by armed citizens, “ancient heroic
virtue” seemed somewhat over the top:
If everybody were driven by such Virtue! Would any insult remain with-
out revenge? Would not everybody constantly compete for power? In-
deed, would there be any peace and quiet before everybody was dead?21
The ancient republics, in short, were generally characterized by an

agrarian economy dependent upon slave labor, by aggressive expan-
sionism, and by military virtue; the modern republics, on the other
hand, were commercial and therefore inclined to peace, were based on
equality before the law, and had developed a more sociable and polite
version of republican virtue. Elie Luzac, never a man to mince his
words, concluded from all this that the ancient republics “have nothing
19 Grondwettige Herstelling, van Nederlands Staatswezen, I, 308.

20 See Chapter Four.
21 Paape, Grondwettige Herstelling van het Geluk der Nederlandsche Maatschappy, 95–96.
8 chapter one
in common with us except the name of republic”.22 Although his views

were rather extreme, it should be clear from the above that he was far
from alone in casting doubt upon the relevance of the example of the
ancient republics for the Seven United Provinces.
Thus Dutch eighteenth-century republicans found themselves left
with nothing but the other contemporary European republics as poten-
tial cases for fruitful political comparison.23 Even there, however, the
differences turned out to be greater than the similarities. The first obvi-
ous group of states to look at was the Italian city republics. Most of
these, of course, were no longer republics at all, but had succumbed to
monarchical or semi-monarchical government. Those that still existed,
moreover, were hardly encouraging examples of republican vigor and
seemed to be in a process of irreversible decline. Yet the Dutch felt a
clear sympathy for the republics of Venice and Genoa. Two factors,
however, prevented them from regarding these states as entirely sim-
ilar to the Seven United Provinces. First of all, the Italian republics
were single cities, whereas the Dutch Republic had a much more com-
plicated political structure. It was the author of the first philosophical
history of the United Provinces, Simon Stijl, who emphatically pointed
out this crucial difference. Indeed, he thought that this constituted an
additional argument for the rejection of the classical republics as suit-
able examples for the Dutch Republic, since they had also generally
consisted of single cities:
Most examples which are generally adduced from the Greek and Roman
authors would be much more relevant to us if we were talking about
Venice or Genoa, cases in which we are dealing with a single city, not
unlike Rome, Carthage, Athens, or Sparta, in which the Citizenry as
an indivisible body stands opposed to the Aristocracy, rather than about
Holland in former times or the entire Netherlands in modern times.24
But it was not only the structure of the state that made the Italian
republics—and, for that matter, the Free Cities of the Holy Roman
Empire—different, it was also their form of government. Many Dutch
commentators pointed out that whereas closed aristocracies ruled the
Italian republics, the form of government of the Dutch Republic al-
22 Montesquieu, Esprit des Loix, I, 187.

23 On the eighteenth-century history of these republics see Durand, Les Républiques
au Temps des Monarchies; Venturi, Utopia and Reform; Koenigsberger, Republiken und Repub-
likanismus; Everdell, The End of Kings.
24 Stijl, Opkomst en Bloei der Vereenigde Nederlanden, 87. On Stijl see Leeb, Ideological
Origins of the Batavian Revolution, 122–136.

lowed for citizen participation. To early eighteenth-century writers such

as Lieven de Beaufort, this participation primarily consisted in the
theoretical accessibility of political office to all virtuous citizens. In our
republic, De Beaufort observed,
the office of City Councilor is not hereditary, but based on election,
and everybody from the People or the Citizenry, provided he has the
proper qualifications, can be elected to it, from which it is evident that
the Citizenry is not excluded from the government, as it is in Venice and
Genoa.25
To the Patriot reformers of the late eighteenth century, citizen partici-
pation increasingly came to mean the permanent and active rule of the
sovereign people. In order to illustrate the fact that this type of partic-
ipatory republicanism had absolutely nothing to do with the oligarchic
political practices of the Venetian republic, the Post van den Neder-Rhyn
even made an imaginary Venetian visit the revolutionary Dutch Repub-
lic in the early months of 1787. The visitor is deeply disappointed and
evidently shocked. “For more than two Centuries”, he remarks to his
revolutionary Dutch hosts,
your Compatriots were the only ones in the whole of Europe to which
we Venetians could reach out our hand in brotherhood:—we were both
delighted with the name of Republic, of Liberty, whereas in fact we were
both the vilest of slaves.
It had always been a great comfort to the Venetians, he continues, that
there existed another equally servile nation. Yet now all of a sudden he
is forced to witness
that your nation for the FIRST TIME shows a real concern for the
establishment of liberty,—that it wants to have a Republic not in name
and in appearance, but in actual fact.
Since this spectacular development would undoubtedly make the Vene-
tians, who were unable to follow such an example, completely lose
their self-respect, the Venetian visitor unsuccessfully proceeds to beg
his Dutch hosts to return to their old oligarchic ways and to abandon
all ideals of active citizen participation.26
Perhaps, then, the Swiss confederation offered more promising pos-
sibilities for republican comparisons. At first sight, this indeed seemed
to be the case. Because it was a confederation, Montesquieu had men-
25 [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaat, 129.

26 De Post van den Neder-Rhyn, XI, nr. 560, 847–852.
10 chapter one
tioned the Swiss republic in one breath with the United Provinces as
a “république éternel” in the Esprit de Lois.27 There could also be lit-
tle doubt that the Swiss form of government, with its strong admixture
of direct democracy, offered ample opportunities for republican citizen
participation. Yet even this variety of republicanism could not entirely
count on the approval of the Dutch. Whereas they thought the Italian
city republics to be overly aristocratic, they judged the Swiss form of
government to be too democratic. Many eighteenth-century Dutchmen
were perfectly willing to acknowledge that this in itself was a noble form
of political organization. The problem simply was that it was unsuitable
as a source of inspiration and imitation for the Dutch Republic, given
the size of its population, its international position, and the nature of
its economic life. The conservative theorist Johan Meerman, who had
previously compared the confederative structures of the Swiss and the
Dutch republics, thus formulated the difference:
That in the Democratic Cantons of Switzerland, where there are neither
international relations of any significance, nor complicated domestic
arrangements, and where the happy inhabitants do not live in Cities,
but devote themselves to agriculture around their scattered villages or
take their cattle out to graze on the juicy slopes of the Alps: that there
the entire body of the Nation assembles once a year to perform the
simplest acts of sovereignty, and for the rest of the time leaves the daily
administration of affairs in the hands of elected Officials, will not strike
anybody as strange, just as it is far from strange that small Republics,
consisting of little more than a single city, are governed in this way.
But that any State of importance in Europe, that this Commonwealth
is suited for such a form of government is simply unthinkable.28
Similar thoughts could be found even in the camp of the republican

reformers of the late eighteenth century. The authors of Constitutional
Restoration, for instance, generously praised the “completely democratic
Government” that could be found in a number of Swiss cantons as
singularly happy. They however added, with some regret, that such a
form of government could only survive in a very small state, under
conditions of almost complete social equality and “extreme simplicity
of manners”. That the much larger and commercial Dutch Republic
could not possibly meet these criteria was evident to all but the most
fanatical revolutionaries.29
27 Montesquieu, Oeuvres complètes, II, 369–370 (book IX, chapter 1).

28 Meerman, Discours qui a remporté le prix; Meerman, De Burgerlyke Vryheid, 27.
The conclusion to be drawn from all these attempts at historical and

international comparison was quite clear. While their hostility to vir-
tually all types of monarchy and their own form of government evi-
dently placed the Dutch in the company of other republics ancient and
modern, they found it quite difficult to see more than a rather general
family resemblance in these states. Indeed, although the eighteenth-
century Dutch made every effort to compare their own history and
political arrangements to those of other European republics, they gen-
erally concluded that theirs was a unique case. In his Rise and Flourishing
of the United Provinces, Simon Stijl observed that Dutch history was a
story without precedent, which could not be explained out of any pre-
vious historical circumstances, but only pointed forward to the future.30
Similarly, the authors of Constitutional Restoration emphasized the unique
nature of the Dutch republican constitution. It was different from
totally Popular Governments, in which the entire people possesses and
exercises sovereignty, as is the case in some Cantons of Switzerland, and
from Aristocratic Government, in which Nobles hold the sole right to
rule, as is the case in Venice and Genoa, and finally also from Mixed
Monarchy, in which a single person has the power to give force to the
laws, to wage war, and to make peace, as is the case in England.31
The question that must now be asked is whether or not foreign observ-
ers shared the strong views the Dutch held about the unique nature of
their republic.
2. The Eighteenth-Century Republic Observed
In what has perhaps become the best-known seventeenth-century ac-

count of the Dutch Republic by a foreigner, Sir William Temple fa-
mously described the United Provinces as “the Envy of some, the Fear
of others, and the Wonder of all their Neighbors”.32 That the last part
of this oft-quoted observation was certainly true may be demonstrated
from the travelogues and other writings of dozens of seventeenth-cen-
tury foreign commentators. The Dutch Republic was widely regarded
30 Stijl, Opkomst en Bloei der Vereenigde Nederlanden, 88.

32 Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces, 1. For other British views on the
Republic see Haley, The British and the Dutch, 107–124; Van Strien, British Travellers in
Holland; Van Strien, Touring the Low Countries.
12 chapter one
as something quite exceptional, by many even as an outright miracle.33

That this should have been the case is, of course, hardly surprising.
The Dutch, who dwelled in a tiny, unattractive and watery region of
Europe, had for many decades resisted an extremely powerful monar-
chical overlord and had finally, against all odds, succeeded in perma-
nently establishing their own independent state in the middle of the
seventeenth century. The way of life they had chosen for themselves
was in many respects highly unusual. Whereas most European coun-
tries were still largely agrarian, the Dutch lived mainly from their com-
merce and accumulated untold riches in doing so. But it was not only
through their predominant economic activity and their great wealth
that the inhabitants of this new state distinguished themselves from
surrounding countries. Compared to its neighbors, seventeenth-century
Dutch society was also remarkably open and egalitarian. In a world of
religious persecution, the Dutch proclaimed the freedom of conscience
and admitted large numbers of religious refugees to their tolerant coun-
try. Instead of being dominated by a high-living aristocracy, moreover,
Dutch society was largely run by sober urban burgher elites. Perhaps
most extraordinary of all, however, was the fact that the inhabitants of
this new state rejected the monarchical form of government so clearly
on the rise in the rest of Europe. They vigorously defended the view
that their hard-won political and religious liberty could only be secure
under a republican form of government. Indeed, the Dutch of the sec-
ond half of the seventeenth century unhesitatingly extolled the superi-
ority of republics and republicanism.34
Seventeenth-century foreign observers regarded all this not only with
astonishment, but in many cases also with evident sympathy and ap-
proval. So laudatory were their descriptions of the Dutch miracle that
the Dutch, it has recently been suggested, derived a substantial part of
their self-image as freedom-loving, egalitarian and commercial republi-
cans from the praise lavished upon them in texts written by foreigners.35
By the eighteenth century, however, the most spectacular phase in the
history of the Dutch Republic was over. To modern historians, it is
clear that Dutch commerce was gradually being overtaken by foreign
33
Swart, The Miracle of the Dutch Republic.
34
For recent general interpretations of Dutch seventeenth-century history see Scha-
ma, The Embarrasment of Riches; Israel, The Dutch Republic, 231–957; Frijhoff and Spies,
1650. Bevochten eendracht; Prak, Gouden Eeuw; Van Deursen, De last van veel geluk. A most
valuable comparative perspective is offered in Davids and Lucassen, A Miracle Mirrored.
35 Frijhoff and Spies, 1650. Bevochten eendracht, 130.
competition, that Dutch international political power slowly declined,

and that the Dutch Republic to a certain extent shared in the general
institutional and political malaise of the eighteenth-century European
republics.36 Eighteenth-century Dutchmen however, although certainly
not unaware of the fact that their country was experiencing problems,
continued to celebrate the glories of its unique republican nature, as
we have seen above. Did contemporary foreign observers also persist
in ascribing extraordinary and praiseworthy characteristics to Dutch
republican life throughout the eighteenth-century? The answer to this
question will be provided in the remaining part of this section, in
which texts written by eighteenth-century Italian, French, and German
observers of the United Provinces will be discussed.37
Let us start with two authors coming from the cradle of early mod-
ern European republicanism, Italy. In 1700, at the very beginning of the
eighteenth century and close to the end of his own life, Gregorio Leti
published the definitive edition of his Raguagli Historici e Politici, a book
dealing with many topics, but above all with the love a true citizen
should feel for his country and with the way this ideal was almost per-
fectly realized in the Dutch Republic. Leti was in many ways a typical
member of a certain group within the late seventeenth-century Repub-
lic of Letters, halfway between hack and scholar, restlessly on the move
through Europe, a not too trustworthy and rather troublesome, but tal-
ented adventurer with an astonishing literary output.38 Born in Milan
in 1630 and raised by the Jesuits, Leti turned away from Catholicism
and became a Protestant citizen of Geneva in the 1660s. Accused of
immorality and disrespect, he was forced to leave this republican city
in 1679. Having indignantly turned down an offer to return to Catholi-
cism and become historiographer royal for Louis XIV, Leti soon after
found himself occupying that same position for Charles II. Since his
36 Israel, The Dutch Republic, 957–1130; De Vries, De economische achteruitgang der Repu-
bliek; De Vries and Van der Woude, Nederland 1500–1815; Carter, Neutrality or Commitment;
Van Nimwegen, De Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden als grote mogendheid; Venturi, Utopia
and Reform.
37 The literature on early modern travel and travel writing is, of course, immense. I
have found the following works to be particularly helpful: M˛aczak, Travel in Early Modern
Europe; Wuthenow, Die erfahrene Welt; Bausinger, Beyrer, and Korff, Reisekultur; Elsner and
Rubiés, Voyages & Visions; Hulme and Youngs, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing;
Bödeker, “Reisebeschreibungen”.
38 A wonderful account of this milieu is provided by Goldgar, Impolite Learning. On
Leti see Morpurgo, “Leti en Nederland”; Horodisch, “Gregorio Leti: seine Neubewer-
tung”; Barcia, Un politico dell’età barocca; Israel, “Gregorio Leti (1631–1701)”.
14 chapter one
Teatro Brittanico, published in 1683, turned out to offend many sensibil-

ities, the king decided to have it burned and to banish its author. Leti
then decided to settle in that safe haven for the persecuted, the Dutch
Republic, where he spent the last decades of his life as city historiogra-
pher of Amsterdam and developed a great admiration for the country.
Indeed, as Jonathan Israel has observed, he went further than any of
his contemporaries “in elevating the Dutch Republic to the status of a
political ideal”.39
In his Historical and Political Treatise, dedicated to the Burgomasters
of Amsterdam, Leti set out to study the conditions under which the all-
important love of the citizen for his country could flourish.40 It was clear
to him that there was a fundamental difference in this regard between
monarchies and republics, for in kingdoms
the subject slaves and toils, yes does everything for the Prince, because
there the Prince is everything; and such a Prince has no other object of his
interest, and glory, than himself.41
Since these were hardly circumstances conducive to the development
of the love of country, Leti at an early stage in his work announced
that he would concentrate on “citizenship in Free Countries, that is to say
Republics”.42 Yet most republics ancient and modern did not meet with
his approval either. Contemporary aristocratic republics such as Venice
and Genoa, for instance, he judged to be little better than monar-
chies, since their government was equally “arbitrary and absolute” and
their inhabitants were treated as “subjects”.43 The decisive point was
the extent to which the citizens were allowed to participate in govern-
ment.
It was only in republics where the distance between the governors
and the governed was reduced to a minimum, where the citizens alter-
nated between ruling and being ruled, that true love of country, which
could also be defined as the willingness to contribute to the common
good, or virtue, could develop. And this was precisely what the form
of government of the United Provinces was all about. Indeed, Leti was
39 Israel, “Gregorio Leti (1631–1701)”, 268.

40 I have used the Dutch translation published in 1700: Historische en Staat-kundige
Verhandeling. In 1690, Leti had already devoted an entire work to the Dutch Republic:
Teatro Belgico, o vero ritratti historici, chronologici, politici, e geografici, delle Sette Provincie Unite. It
is discussed in Morpurgo, “Leti en Nederland”.
41 Leti, Historische en Staat-kundige Verhandeling, II, 5.
42 Ibidem, I, 11.
43 Ibidem, I, 143–146.
convinced that the Dutch Republic had the best republican govern-
ment ever devised:
We may truthfully say that never has there been a Republic in the entire
world with a better form of government than Holland, or one better
suited to satisfy everybody and to ignite the love of Country in every
single inhabitant … The richest and most powerful people are satisfied
because all matters go through their hands and are administrated by
them in turns: the common people are satisfied because their Magistrates
are mild and humble and because they themselves may hope one day to
become part of the Government: since there is no law denying anybody
access to political office.44
With such a form of government in place, the rest of the Dutch miracle
was easily explained. Living in ideal political circumstances, the Dutch
had all the incentive they needed to ceaselessly devote themselves to
the common good. One of the best ways to do so, Leti suggested,
was to engage in commerce, since commerce was “the soul of the
Republic” and rich citizens were “the treasure-chest of Free Countries”.45
This salutary accumulation of commercial riches, which simultaneously
benefited the individual citizen and the common good, was in turn
furthered by a mild and reasonable system of justice, a large measure
of religious toleration, and a willingness to keep admitting new citizens
to the country. For Leti, it is clear, the modern commercial republic of
the Seven United Provinces had for the first time in history succeeded
in truly realizing the highest ideals of classical republicanism. Indeed,
there was no better example on the face of the earth of the truth of
Cicero’s famous dictum: Communis utilitatis derelictio contra naturam est.46
Eighty years after this ecstatic praise for the republican blessings of
the United Provinces, Carlo Antonio Pilati di Tassulo published the
two volumes of his Lettres sur la Hollande. Born in Northern Italy in
1733, Pilati became one of the leading Italian thinkers of the Enlight-
enment. During the late 1760s and the early 1770s, he acquired Euro-
pean fame with the bold proposals for the reform of Italy he formu-
lated in his Di una riforma d’Italia.47 Pilati was an eminent legal scholar
and a tireless advocate of legal reform, a productive author of legal and
44 Ibidem, 158.
45 Ibidem, I, 341; II, 66.
46 Ibidem, II, 576.
47 The work is discussed in Carpanetto and Ricuperati, Italy in the Age of Reason, 277–
283.
16 chapter one
historical works, and a man known for his virulent anti-clericalism.48

He published many of his books in the Dutch Republic and got to
know the country quite well during several extended visits, the first one
being in 1767. “My first voyage through this flourishing land filled me
with admiration”, he wrote of that occasion.49 It was a sentiment that
would remain with him, for some ten years later Pilati was tremen-
dously relieved when he once again arrived “in a country that has prac-
tically no resemblance to the other countries of Europe”.50 Having just
come from Germany, where he had only seen “servitude, oppression,
the embarrassing humiliation of the common people, and the haughty
brutality of the nobles”, he was overjoyed with the “natural politeness”
and the “republican spirit” displayed by the Dutch.51
For Pilati, who in good Enlightenment fashion detested “the cruel
stupidity of tyrants, the interests of the clergy in general, and the rage
of furious monks in particular”, the Dutch Republic at the end of the
eighteenth century was still a haven of liberty, tolerance and civiliza-
tion.52 Perhaps it was only a widely traveled person, he suggested, who
could truly appreciate these extraordinary conditions:
One has to have been in countries where superstition, despotism, and
brutality are on the throne and keep the subjects in chains in order to
appreciate the liberty that reigns in the assemblies and the conversations
of the Dutch, and the pleasure a reasonable man is able to find there.53
Yet filled as he was with admiration for Dutch republican civilization,
Pilati also had an open eye for the problems the eighteenth-century
Republic was confronted with. Through his intensive contacts with
Dutch scholars and publicists, he possessed an intimate knowledge of
the economic and political debates the Dutch were conducting among
themselves, and in his Lettres sur la Hollande he expressed firm opinions
on the issues at stake. That the Dutch were worried about the seeming
decline of their commerce and the simultaneous rise of luxury, he
perfectly understood, but he saw no reason for excessive pessimism.
The late eighteenth-century Republic still seemed to him a “a frugal,
sober, and wise nation, as far removed from avarice as it is from
48 On Pilati’s life and work see Rigatti, Un illuminista trentino del secolo XVIII ; Venturi,
The End of the Old Regime in Europe, II, 535–554; Ferrari and Romagnani, Carlantonio Pilati.
49 Quoted in Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, II, 536.
50 [Pilati] Lettres sur la Hollande, I, 1.
51 Ibidem, 5, 129, 220.
52 Ibidem, 248.
53 Ibidem, 52.
luxury”.54 Its commerce, although increasingly suffering from foreign

competition, had such a solid basis that it would continue to flourish,
except in the highly unlikely case that the Dutch should decide “to
become subjects of a king”.55
More worrisome perhaps was the fact that substantial numbers of
Dutchmen seemed to believe that the presence of a stadholder with
monarchical ambitions within their republican system was to blame for
most of the problems they experienced. This, Pilati explained at length
and with arguments that clearly echoed the writings of Elie Luzac and
other enlightened Orangists, was a complete misunderstanding.56 One
of the attractive features of Dutch political arrangements was the fact
that this state was largely composed of many semi-independent city
republics. To keep such a loose conglomerate together, however, and
to assure that at least some decisions could be taken with the required
speed, a unifying force was absolutely necessary. That force was the
stadholder.57 But the stadholderate also served another crucial function.
Without it, the country would soon fall into the hands of an oppres-
sive and despotic oligarchy.58 Pilati contemptuously dismissed every sug-
gestion that the stadholderate might develop into a full-blown monar-
chy. The interests of the Orange stadholders were identical to those of
the Dutch people. Their very position depended on the maintenance
of liberty, since without liberty “this people is nothing”. Indeed, Pilati
was entirely convinced that this extraordinary nation “if it ever fell into
slavery, would immediately start to decline, and would soon after com-
pletely disappear”.59
Praise and admiration for the republican liberty of the Dutch also
remained a main theme in French eighteenth-century commentaries
on the United Provinces.60 Some of these texts were written by famous
philosophes such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot, many more
by relatively obscure authors who have now largely been forgotten.61
54 Ibidem, II, 189.

55 Ibidem, 122.
56 See Chapter Six.
57 [Pilati] Lettres sur la Hollande, II, 283–284.
58 Ibidem, 278, 284–285.
59 Ibidem, 288–289.
60 For eighteenth-century French views of the Dutch Republic see Murris, La Hol-
lande et les Hollandais; Van Strien-Chardonneau, “Le Voyage en Hollande”; Van Strien, De
ontdekking van de Nederlanden.
61 On Voltaire and the Republic see Van der Sterre, Voltaire en de Republiek; on
Montesquieu see Chapter Five.

18 chapter one
All shamelessly plundered earlier descriptions of the United Provinces:

Guicciardini’s Description de tout le Païs-bas, Temple’s Observations, and
Parival’s Délices de la Hollande, to mention just a few.62 Yet although
there was plenty of repetition of what by the eighteenth-century had
become tired commonplaces about the Dutch, one can also discern
new themes and new ways of discussing old themes in these French
writings. Antoine la Barre de Beaumarchais’s Le Hollandois, ou Lettres
sur la Hollande ancienne et moderne, published in 1738, for instance clearly
reflected the interests and conventions of the new eighteenth-century
genre of Spectatorial writing. La Barre, a former Parisian canon who
had moved to the Dutch Republic in 1723 and had taken up journalism
there, announced at the beginning of his Hollandois that almost all
French texts on the Dutch Republic were too dry and scholarly, too
preoccupied with historical and political details. As a result, there was
nothing available for the “man of spirit and taste”.63 He considered it
his task to remedy this situation and therefore provided his readers with
a text in which boring details were eschewed and manners and morals
occupied as central a place as they did in contemporary Spectatorial
literature. La Barre, who was familiar with the work of Justus van Effen,
did not entirely refrain from discussing Dutch history, the structure of
the Dutch state, or the growth of Dutch commerce, but he primarily
focused on the cultural aspects of Dutch republican liberty.64 Although
often implicit, the comparison between the manners and morals of the
Dutch republican citizen and those of the courtly French nobleman,
between republican politeness and monarchical politesse, was a constant
theme in these letters.65
La Barre pointed out that sovereignty was so diffuse in the United
Provinces that the political system was almost impossible to define. In
the end he decided to describe the country as an aristocratic republic,
albeit one in which the rule of law was strictly maintained, and the
distance between rulers and ruled was minimal. The citizens therefore
enjoyed a high degree of liberty.66 To this French journalist, perhaps the
most impressive aspect of Dutch liberty was the freedom of expression.
Whenever you came across a group of Dutchmen sitting together in
62 Van Strien-Chardonneau, “Le Voyage en Hollande”, 89–94.

63 La Barre de Beaumarchais, Le Hollandois, Discours préliminaire.
64 Ibidem, Discours préliminaire; II, 184, 187. On Van Effen see Buynsters, Justus van
Effen and Chapter Four.

65 Van-Strien-Chardonneau, “La Barre de Beaumarchais en Justus van Effen”.
66 La Barre de Beaumarchais, Le Hollandois, II, 9–11, 47.
one of their many cafés, he observed, you would find them freely
discussing matters of religion and politics. And why not? They had no
persecution to fear.
The clergy has no tribunals on which the life and fortune of laymen
depend. And the Magistrates, at least as long as the most extreme license
is avoided, regard the liberty of expression as an honorable sign of their
own moderation & moreover laugh about matters that elsewhere would
enrage the Government.67
Liberty pervaded every aspect of Dutch life. The love of liberty was evi-
dent in the freedom of conscience and the general religious toleration
practiced by the Dutch, but also in the mutual respect between differ-
ent groups in society.68 Thus the Dutch nobility took care not to offend
average citizens with superfluous ostentation, while these citizens in
turn showed great respect for their own domestic servants.69 The love of
liberty even affected the education of children, who were never beaten
because this was considered “too shameful for freeborn citizens”.70
Indeed, it determined Dutch national character, which was serious, fru-
gal, honest, sincere, and “more civil than polite, more humane than
gracious”.71 To La Barre, one might say, the free republican society of
the Dutch represented the triumph of genuine humanity over empty
politesse.
Some thirty-five years after La Barre published his book, Denis Di-
derot visited the Dutch Republic—and, of course, Saint Petersburg—
on the only trip he ever took outside France. His Voyage en Hollande,
not published until 1819, amply demonstrated the resurgence of repub-
lican sentiment in France during the second half of the eighteenth
century.72 Although substantial parts of it were copied from previous
French descriptions of the Dutch Republic, Diderot added a strong
element of uncompromising republicanism to these older texts.73 To
Diderot the commercial Dutch Republic, a state whose goal it was “to
67 Ibidem, II, 58.

68 Ibidem, 91–137.
69 Ibidem, 142, 152.
70 Ibidem, 151–152.
71 Ibidem, 154.
72 Venturi, Utopia and Reform, 70–95; Monnier, Républicanisme.
73 On Diderot’s liberal use of previous descriptions of the Dutch Republic see
Charlier, “Diderot et la Hollande”. Other discussions of Diderot’s Voyage may be

found in Brugmans, “Diderot”; Pelckmans, “Le Voyage en Hollande”; Van Strien-
Chardonneau, “Le Voyage en Hollande”.
20 chapter one
enrich itself, not to expand”, came close to being a political paradise.74

He was deeply moved by the fact that in this country he encountered
“neither poverty, nor the spectacle of tyranny”.75 These blessings he
largely ascribed to the wisdom of Dutch political arrangements. The
form of government of the Republic was a happy mixture of democ-
racy and aristocracy.76 It was dominated by the propertied, but this
was a state where in theory sovereignty resided in the people and in
practice “the people are more important than elsewhere”.77 Thus the
Dutch possessed the form of government most suited to a commercial
republic, namely the one “that is closest to a pure democracy”.78 The
only flaw in this otherwise nearly perfect situation was the presence of
a stadholder, since it could not be doubted that “the wish of a stad-
holder is to become a king”.79 Diderot advised the Dutch immediately
to get rid of this ridiculous office, for in a well-ordered society positions
should never be held on the basis of the hereditary principle, but only
on the basis of talent.80 Should they decide to ignore his suggestion,
he ominously added, they would soon find themselves in “slavery and
misery”.81
Diderot’s words turned out to be prophetic. During the late 1780s,
after the collapse of the Patriot attempt to reform the country on the
basis of a new understanding of the meaning of republicanism, many
exiled Dutch revolutionaries were convinced that the United Provinces
had indeed sunk into slavery under the restored rule of stadholder
William V. It was under the influence of a number of these Dutch exiles
that Mirabeau, together with the team of writers he had working for
him, composed his Aux Bataves sur le Stadhouderat, published in 1788.82
This highly intriguing text was meant to incite the Dutch to take up
arms against the restored Orangist regime, but also clearly served a
function in French political debate. With its early enumeration of the
rights of man, it was a direct precursor of the French Declaration of the
74 Diderot, Voyage en Hollande, 56.

75 Ibidem, 39.
76 Ibidem, 45.
77 Ibidem, 51, 69, 71.
78 Ibidem, 58.
79 Ibidem, 56.
80 Ibidem.
81 Ibidem, 58.
82 The genesis of Aux Bataves is discussed in Rosendaal, Bataven!, 239–248. On the life
and work of Mirabeau see Chaussinand-Nogaret, Mirabeau and Furet, “Mirabeau”.

Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789.83 In Aux Bataves, Mirabeau depicted

the Dutch as being at the forefront of an international struggle for
the establishment of true republican liberty, based on the inalienable
rights of man and the sovereignty of the people. They had been able
to take on this crucial role because they were “the oldest of the free
nations”.84
Not that the form of government of the Dutch Republic had ever
been perfect. It had come closest to embodying liberty, Mirabeau ex-
plained, during the two Stadholderless Eras. Indeed, it was during the
years of Johan de Witt’s “purely republican” rule that the Republic
had reached its “highest point of grandeur and prosperity”.85 Under
this aristocratic form of government, the inhabitants of the United
Provinces had admittedly not enjoyed “the most beautiful right of free
nations, that of electing their own magistrates”. Yet the government
could “neither tyrannize, nor humiliate the people”, there was “not a
single citizen who could not aspire to political office”, and the regents
themselves were subjected to the laws they promulgated.86
It was a form of government that deserved respect and won over the
hearts of good citizens; since the least imperfect aristocracy is the one
closest to democracy; and in order for a democracy to be reasonable,
it needs to approach aristocracy through the mechanism of representa-
tion.87
Unfortunately, however, during the longest period of its history the
Dutch Republic had been burdened with the stadholderate. Mirabeau
so detested this institution, that he could hardly find words strong
enough to describe its abominations. As Van der Capellen had fa-
mously done some years before, he discussed and condemned the
monarchical ambitions and the political usurpations of every individual
stadholder since William the Silent, to end with the conclusion that
the present situation under William V, “born with fewer talents than
any of his predecessors” yet possessing greater power, was worse than
ever before.88 The Patriots, who had almost succeeded in getting rid
of the stadholder and in opening up the regent aristocracy through the
83 Mirabeau, Aux Bataves, 117–138; Rials, La Déclaration des droits de l’homme.

84 Mirabeau, Aux Bataves, 3.
85 Ibidem, 53.
86 Ibidem, 86.
87 Ibidem, 87.
88 [Van der Capellen] Aan het Volk van Nederland; the quotation is in Mirabeau, Aux
Bataves, 97.
22 chapter one
institution of elections, would now have to redouble their efforts. Taking

up arms against the slavery to which William V had reduced the proud
Dutch republicans in 1787 was the only way left to honor the Dutch
tradition of liberty. Bloodshed there would certainly be,
but of all the causes which divide mankind, that of liberty is the only one
which legitimates, the only one which necessitates, the only one which
sanctifies the spilling of blood.89
It would take several more years and a momentous revolution in France
before the Patriots were able to act upon Mirabeau’s words and bring
about the fall of the Dutch ancien régime. During those last years of the
Dutch Republic, the remarkable German scientist, scholar, and traveler
Georg Forster paid an extended visit to the country in the company
of the young Alexander von Humboldt.90 Foster, who as a youth had
sailed around the world with James Cook and who would end his life
as a revolutionary politician exiled in Paris, recorded his experiences
in the Views from the Lower Rhine.91 Although just a few years later he
had mastered all the finer details of revolutionary republican rhetoric,
very little of this showed in his discussion of the United Provinces in
1790.92 Forster, it is true, deeply regretted the Orangist repression that
had followed the defeat of the Dutch Patriots in 1787, yet nowhere did
he show much sympathy or understanding for the political program of
these innovative republicans.93 He regarded the conflict of the 1780s as
little more than a power struggle between political elites and empha-
sized that the time was not yet ripe for a political revolution, since
the “mild, beneficent diffusion of the Light of Reason” had still insuf-
ficiently reached the people.94 He also showed almost no interest in
the details of the form of government of the Dutch Republic. Yet, like
other contemporary German observers of the United Provinces such as
Johann Affsprung and Johann Grabner, Forster far preferred the Dutch
Republic to the European monarchies.95 Indeed, upon entering the first
Dutch village of his trip, its cleanliness and order, and the general pros-
89 Mirabeau, Aux Bataves, 144.

90 On Forster see Uhlig, Georg Forster.
91 Forster, Ansichten vom Niederrhein. The work is discussed in Pütz, “Zwischen Klassik
und Romantik” and Peitsch, Georg Forsters “Ansichten vom Niederrhein”.

92 See, for instance, Forster, “Rede bei der Errichtung des Freiheitsbaumes”.
93 Forster, Ansichten vom Niederrhein, 430, 439–440.
94 Ibidem, 438–439.
95 German travellers in the eighteenth-century Republic are discussed in Bientjes,
Holland und der Holländer and Chales de Beaulieu, Deutsche Reisende in den Niederlanden.
perity of its inhabitants immediately convinced him that he had arrived

in “the country of true, not of imaginary liberty”.96 The contrast with
most other European countries was stark.
Can one look at these people and still seriously wonder whether it is
better that proud palaces for tyrants are erected with the blood and sweat
of peasants, who are forced to spend their entire miserable lives in abject
dwellings?97
Forster demonstrated a strong interest in the commerce that had

brought about Dutch prosperity and described the feverish economic
activity he observed in the harbors of Rotterdam and Amsterdam in
almost lyrical terms.98 His main theme, however, was the national char-
acter of the Dutch, characterized by “republican virtue” and “inerad-
icable love of liberty and country”.99 While he noticed that commerce
was declining and that luxury was on the increase, Foster thought that
Dutch morals and manners at the end of the eighteenth century still
showed strong traces of the old “republican simplicity and virtue”.100
But what perhaps most impressed this German observer was the fact
that republicanism brought out the best in the individual.
In republican states the individual character of people and their freedom
to act for themselves are respected, whereas despotic states are based
on the false presupposition that people are entirely created for the state
and are therefore no more than cogs in a machine driven by one person
only.101
To many eighteenth-century foreign observers, it is clear from the

above, the United Provinces remained a fascinating and extraordinary
example of republican liberty. Although the seventeenth-century com-
monplaces regarding Dutch national character were endlessly repeated,
new themes also emerged. The analysis of the cultural aspects of Dutch
republican liberty became more elaborate, the problem of Dutch com-
mercial decline was discussed and, at the end of the century, writ-
ers such as Mirabeau recognized that new forms of republicanism
were emerging in this old republican country. Yet whatever their angle
of approach to the Dutch and their Republic, practically all foreign
96 Forster, Ansichten vom Niederrhein, 382.

97 Ibidem, 383.
98 Ibidem, 385–386, 413–414.
99 Ibidem, 413.
100 Ibidem, 396.
101 Ibidem, 405.
24 chapter one
observers agreed that in the eighteenth century, too, liberty remained

“the most sacred thing to this people”.102
3. Preliminary Remarks
Both in their own eyes and in the eyes of foreign observers, the eigh-
teenth-century Dutch were first and foremost free republicans. Recent
attempts to marginalize this all-important political dimension of eigh-
teenth-century Dutch public discourse and national identity have there-
fore remained less than convincing.103 Yet while it is relatively easy to
establish that the eighteenth-century Dutch prided themselves on being
republicans, it is much more difficult to define what exactly they meant
when they used that term. Indeed, as will become clear in the course
of this book, it is impossible to reduce the many varieties of eighteenth-
century Dutch republicanism to one single definition. This observa-
tion, of course, equally applies to eighteenth-century republicanism in
general. After a lifetime of reflection on the topic, John Adams in
1807 famously concluded that republicanism was the most “unintel-
ligible word in the English language”.104 A few years earlier, percep-
tive observers of the Dutch political scene had already complained
that republicanism lent itself to an infinity of interpretations, since it
consisted of little more than general principles “that are expressed
in abstract words, with very broad and undetermined meanings”.105
Although both these comments were written at a time when the con-
cept of republicanism was undergoing perhaps the most fundamental
changes in its entire history, the sense of bewilderment they expressed
is still with us today.106
Over the past decades, intensive scholarly debate about the nature
and meaning of early modern republicanism has failed to lead to even
a beginning of consensus. There is virtually no aspect of early mod-
102 Grabner, Über die Vereinigten Niederlande, 130.

103 Kloek and Mijnhardt, 1800. Blauwdrukken voor een samenleving. For a highly critical
discussion of this work see Van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland, 385–398.
104 Quoted in Wootton, Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1.
105 De Democraten, nr. 37, 274 (January 19, 1797).
106 On the late eighteenth-century transformation of the meaning of republicanism
see e.g. Wood, Creation of the American Republic; Ball and Pocock, Conceptual Change and the
Constitution; Ball, Transforming Political Discourse, 47–79; Fontana, The invention of the modern
republic.
ern republicanism on which historians agree. To some, its origins must

be sought in Greek or Roman antiquity; to others it was essentially
a new creation. Many historians have seen early modern republican-
ism primarily in institutional or constitutional terms and have accord-
ingly defined it as a preference for government without kings. Others,
however, have viewed it as a moral rather than an institutional phe-
nomenon and have therefore emphasized the importance of civic virtue
rather than the preference for a certain type of political constitution.107
In geographical terms, modern scholarship has primarily focused on
Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century England, and late eighteenth-
century Northern America and France, while for instance the Dutch
Republic and the Swiss Confederation have been relatively neglected.
Our view of early modern republicanism is therefore still quite incom-
plete and unbalanced.108 The fact, finally, that the study of early mod-
ern republicanism has often been inextricably linked with contempo-
rary political and ideological agendas has made matters even more
complex and has tended to amplify the differences between various his-
torical interpretations. Indeed, the scholarly rediscovery—or should we
say construction?—of early modern republicanism has coincided with
and contributed to the interest in republicanism in contemporary polit-
ical theory.109
While the present book limits itself to the study of eighteenth-century
Dutch republicanism, it is nonetheless informed by the international
scholarly debate on republicanism of the past decades. It is not too
much to say that the modest revival of interest in the study of Dutch
early modern republicanism in general has been heavily indebted to
this debate. Some twenty years ago Ernst Kossmann, the founding
107 The literature on early modern republicanism is by now immense. Among the
essential works are Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment; Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and His-
tory; Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought; Skinner, Liberty before Liberal-
ism; Skinner, Visions of Politics. Volume II. Renaissance Virtues; Wood, Creation of the American
Republic; Venturi, Utopia and Reform; Koenigsberger, Republiken und Republikanismus; Gam-
boni and Germann, Zeichen der Freiheit; Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern; Wootton,
Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society; Fontana, The invention of the modern republic;
Van Gelderen and Skinner, Republicanism. A Shared European Heritage; Scott, Commonwealth
Principles; Monnier, Républicanisme, Patriotisme et Révolution française.
108 That this situation is now rapidly changing may be seen in, for instance, Skinner
and Van Gelderen, Republicanism. A Shared European Heritage.

109 For modern republican theory see e.g. Pettit, Republicanism; Dagger, Civic Virtues;
Brugger, Republican Theory; Honohan, Civic Republicanism; Maynor, Republicanism in the

Modern World.
26 chapter one
father of the study of the history of Dutch political thought, published

his essay “Dutch Republicanism”.110 As his starting point, he took two
rival modern theories concerning the early modern republic. On the
one hand, there was the view of the Italian historian Franco Venturi,
who saw the early modern republics as commercial, averse to expan-
sion, obsessed with acquired rights and deeply conservative. Particularly
in the eighteenth century, so Venturi argued, these republics increas-
ingly became ossified relics of the past, unable to reform and adapt
themselves to the modern world and therefore doomed to disappear.
Yet despite their growing political insignificance, the surviving republics
still served as a source of inspiration for many enlightened political the-
orists, because they were capable of arousing “a resolute desire for inde-
pendence and virtue which … the monarchical states were not able to
satisfy”.111 It was out of this vague admiration for the virtues of the
republican way of life, so Venturi suggested, that the new republican-
ism of the late eighteenth-century revolutions would ultimately emerge.
Quite a different vision of the early modern republic was to be
found in the magnum opus of the New Zealand historian John Pocock.
In his stunningly learned The Machiavellian Moment, published in 1975,
Pocock studied republicanism not as an institutional phenomenon, as
Venturi had partly done, but as a political language. This language
of early modern republicanism, so Pocock claimed, had its roots in
classical antiquity, more particularly in the Aristotelian notion of man
as a zōon politikon or homo politicus, and was revived during the Italian
Renaissance by a succession of Florentine humanists, from Leonardo
Bruni to Niccolò Machiavelli. It was not primarily concerned with
rights, but with virtues or virtue, that is to say with those capacities
that enabled man to transcend his narrow self interest, allowed him
to realize himself to the fullest in the vita activa civilis and helped him
to withstand the ceaseless onslaughts of capricious fortuna. If virtue,
as best expressed in political participation, was the ultimate human
goal, it is evident that the participatory republic of classical inspiration
and dominated by independent citizens was the most desirable form of
government. It was Pocock’s greatest merit to demonstrate convincingly
that this language of classical republicanism or civic humanism, of
which many historians thought that it had been displaced after the
110 E.H. Kossmann, “Dutch Republicanism” in: Kossmann, Politieke Theorie en Geschie-
denis.
111 Venturi, Utopia and Reform, 70.
Renaissance by the rights language of natural jurisprudence or the

interest language of the reason of state, survived for a remarkably
long time—albeit with many adaptations and transformations—in at
least Anglophone political thought and surfaced in many discussions of
republics until the beginning of the nineteenth century.112
Having discussed both these visions of the early modern republic,
Kossmann posed his key question, namely: how did Dutch republi-
canism fit into all of this? His answer was of a refreshing simplic-
ity: it did not. Taking the writings of P.C. Hooft, the brothers De la
Court, Spinoza, Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol, and Elie
Luzac as his main examples, Kossmann argued that although ele-
ments of both republican strands described by Venturi and Pocock were
present in Dutch republican discourse, ultimately the differences were
more important than the similarities. Dutch political thought was too
dynamic and reformist to fit into the conservative republican world
of Venturi. It was also too preoccupied with human characteristics
other than political virtue to be labeled civic humanist or republican in
the classical sense. Dutch republican thought was, in Kossmann’s view,
deeply eclectic and contained elements from many seemingly mutually
exclusive traditions. Valuable as these insights were, they were based
on a very limited number of sources, highly impressionistic, and largely
negative in nature. To go beyond Kossmann’s general observations and
to establish precisely which elements played a role in Dutch republi-
can thought, in depth study of a larger number and a wider variety of
sources was absolutely necessary. This has since been undertaken in a
number of areas, yet much remains to be done.113 The present book is
intended as a further contribution to this collective endeavor.
Starting from the thesis that republicanism was central to Dutch
political consciousness during the entire eighteenth century and formed
a crucial element in eighteenth-century Dutch attempts to define a
national identity, this book attempts to explore the world of eighteenth-
century Dutch republicanism from a variety of methodological angles.
Several of the chapters, inspired by the methodology developed by the
Cambridge School, aim to identify the various republican political lan-
112 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment.

113 E.g. Van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt; Blom, Morality and
Causality in Politics; Prokhovnik, Spinoza and Republicanism; Velema, Enlightenment and Con-
servatism; Klein, Patriots Republikanisme; Haitsma Mulier and Velema, Vrijheid; Kloek and
Tilmans, Burger. On the historiography of early modern Dutch republicanism see also
Chapter Two.
28 chapter one
guages utilized in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. Others focus,

in the manner of German Begriffsgeschichte, on the changing meaning of
certain key concepts in republican discourse. Yet Dutch republicanism
is also studied by means of Rezeptionsgeschichte and through an analy-
sis of the ways in which Dutch theorists adapted familiar themes from
the rich store of European republican political thought to their own
specific needs. Throughout the volume, a broad range of source mate-
rials is used, including pamphlets, Spectatorial writings, political jour-
nals and, for the final years of the eighteenth century, parliamentary
debates.114
Rather than anachronistically imposing a definition of republicanism
on this eighteenth-century material, this book seeks to demonstrate that
such an exercise is futile. Republicanism meant many different things
to many different people in the eighteenth-century United Provinces.
To some, no doubt, its main ingredient was a preference for a govern-
ment without a king. From the middle of the seventeenth century until
the very end of the eighteenth century, there was a powerful strain of
anti-monarchism in Dutch political thought. As we have seen above,
even those who were in favor of the stadholderate never argued for
the introduction of a monarchy, but saw themselves as adherents of
a republican mixed government. To others, the moral component of
republicanism was much more important than the institutional one.
Indeed, contrary to what Kossmann has suggested, it is possible to
identify a significant current of classical republicanism in eighteenth-
century Dutch political thought, running from Lieven de Beaufort to
the Patriot and Batavian revolutionaries. To these civic humanists polit-
ical virtue, the willingness of the citizen to sacrifice his private interests
to the common good and to participate in the political process, was
the very essence of republican politics. Yet constitutional republicanism
and civic republicanism far from exhausted the available possibilities.115
In the course of the eighteenth century, many commentators began to
view republicanism primarily as a general way of life rather than as a
constitutional arrangement or as the exercise of strictly political virtue.
Reacting to the perceived threat of French politesse, Dutch Spectatorial
writers developed a view of republican culture that embraced far more
114 Further methodological commentary is provided in the appropriate chapters.

115 The terminology is derived from Blair Worden’s article “Republicanism, Regicide
and Republic: The English Experience” in Van Gelderen and Skinner, Republicanism: A
Shared European Heritage.
than anti-monarchism or political participation and that extended itself

to all areas of life.
All these various interpretations of what republicanism meant played
their part in the great political upheavals of the last two decades of
the Dutch eighteenth century. Indeed, these years amply demonstrate
the wisdom of Franco Venturi’s remark that it is more worthwhile to
follow the fortunes of the republican tradition in the last years of the
eighteenth century “than to examine the emergence of the idea of
democracy in those same years”.116 Nonetheless, fundamental changes
did take place. During the 1780s and 1790s the doctrine of the perma-
nent and active sovereignty of the people combined with older elements
from the republican tradition to form an explosive and revolution-
ary mixture. This same development forced conservative republicans
to give a more explicit theoretical grounding to their previously often
implicitly held views. The battle between conservative and revolution-
ary republicans—and everybody in between—raged for some fifteen
years and ended with the victory of the latter in 1795. The early years of
the Batavian Republic subsequently offered the fascinating spectacle of
old republicans trying to create a new republic. After endless theoretical
debates they succeeded in doing so, but their creation was to be short-
lived. The first decade of the nineteenth century witnessed the collapse
of Dutch republicanism under the combined pressures of internal polit-
ical exhaustion and French political power. What all eighteenth-century
Dutch republicans had so deeply dreaded thus became an inescapable
fact: the “first Republic of Europe” had been reduced to “a pathetic little
Monarchical Country”.117
116 Venturi, Utopia and Reform, 90.

117 Meerman, De Burgerlyke Vryheid, 20; Grondwettige Herstelling, van Nederlands Staatswezen,
I, 181.
chapter two
ANTI-MONARCHISM IN EARLY MODERN

DUTCH POLITICAL THOUGHT
1. The Study of Early Modern Dutch Political Thought
Historical scholarship has not been very generous in its treatment of

seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch republicanism. Whereas it
is hard to keep track of the continuous stream of studies devoted to
early modern Italian or English republicanism, publications on the
political thought of the Dutch Republic have remained few and far
between. Indeed, although the situation has somewhat improved in
recent years, it may still be stated without exaggeration that large areas
of early modern Dutch political thought remain entirely unexplored.
There are, so it would seem, at least three reasons for this rather
unsatisfactory state of affairs.
First of all, the study of the history of political thought has a very
weak institutional basis in Dutch academia and is consequently re-
garded by many Dutch scholars as a highly specialized and somewhat
obscure area of research. More important perhaps is the deep-seated
conviction that the Dutch have always been a thoroughly practical,
pragmatic, and commonsensical people, not much inclined to theory.
Thus, in a recent overview of early modern Dutch republicanism, Her-
bert Rowen once again ends with the timeworn cliché that Dutch polit-
ical theory did not match Dutch political practice. “Can it be”, his
concluding rhetorical question goes, “that those who possess liberty—
as the Dutch did in these two centuries more than any other people
in Europe—are not driven to philosophize about it?”1 Quite an aston-
ishing verdict, one cannot help thinking, on a culture that produced
not only Grotius and Spinoza, but also an astonishingly rich political
pamphlet literature.2
1 Herbert H. Rowen, “The Dutch Republic and the Idea of Freedom” in: Wootton,
Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 340.

2 See, for instance, Knuttel, Catalogus van de pamflettenverzameling.
32 chapter two
Thirdly and finally, the study of the history of early modern Dutch
political thought has, until quite recently, been hampered by the fact
that those scholars who did study it were obsessed with the need to
identify a particularly and exclusively Dutch form of political discourse.
This was the dominant perspective both in Kossmann’s classic 1960
monograph—the first, it should be mentioned in passing—on the polit-
ical thought of the Dutch seventeenth century and in the Dutch debate
following the publication of J.G.A. Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment in
1975.3 Kossmann’s conclusion in the exchange last mentioned that there
was no “Dutch paradigm” in early modern political thought may very
well be true, but the question it answers does not seem to be particu-
larly fruitful or enlightening, for there were very few if any early mod-
ern European nations with totally original and entirely exclusive tra-
ditions of political thought or language.4 The dominant early modern
political languages were, to a large extent, international. The interest-
ing question, therefore, is how and why they were applied, rejected,
adapted or extended in various national and international contexts and
under different circumstances. Fortunately, such an approach is now at
last slowly gaining ground in the study of Dutch political thought, the
pioneering effort in this respect being E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier’s 1980
monograph The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the Seven-
teenth Century.
The above general observations on the study of early modern Dutch
republicanism all strongly apply to the subject of the present chapter,
the anti-monarchical element in early modern Dutch political thought.
First of all, this evidently crucial aspect of Dutch republicanism has
so far not been subjected to systematic study. Secondly, it is eminently
suited to dispel the myth that the Dutch were disinclined to give polit-
ical matters much thought. There can be no doubt that the anti-
monarchical literature in the Dutch Republic, ranging from popular
and cheap pamphlets to learned treatises, was enormously rich, both
in quantity and in quality. It would, of course, only have been sur-
prising had this not been the case in a country that originated in a
revolt against a monarch and prided itself on its republican liberty ever
3 Kossmann, Politieke theorie in het zeventiende-eeuwse Nederland; Pocock, “The Problem
of Political Thought”.
4 E.H. Kossmann, “Dutch Republicanism” in: Kossmann, Politieke Theorie en Geschie-
denis.
anti-monarchism in early modern dutch political thought 33
since.5 Thirdly and finally, even the most superficial perusal of Dutch
anti-monarchical writings immediately makes it clear that Dutch the-
orists did not operate in national isolation. Just as they liberally used
French Huguenot theories of resistance during the sixteenth-century
struggle with Philip II, they borrowed from Machiavellian republican-
ism, Cartesian psychology, and Hobbesian philosophy in the course
of the seventeenth century.6 In the eighteenth century in turn they
adapted Addison and Steele’s spectatorial politeness, utilized Mon-
tesquieu’s new typology of the forms of government, and absorbed
Paine’s anti-monarchism.7 To look for a purely Dutch and entirely orig-
inal form of anti-monarchism would, it is clear, be both useless and
nonsensical.
The interesting question to be asked, then, is not whether Dutch
anti-monarchical theorists did or did not use predominantly non-Dutch
authors as their sources of inspiration, but how they adapted the var-
ious available international political languages to their own needs and
circumstances. Here it needs to be pointed out with some emphasis that
the circumstances the early modern Dutch found themselves in were
rather exceptional.8 In an age that saw the growth of various forms of
territorially extended and more or less centralized monarchy, the Dutch
inhabited a small, decentralized, commercial republic. The first func-
tion of their reflections upon the monarchical form of government was
therefore to increase their understanding of the organization of their
own state by comparing it to the political life of the countries surround-
ing the Dutch Republic. Had this been all, Dutch anti-monarchism
might never have become as intense as it did. What provided the stimu-
lus for the most principled and fervent rejections of monarchy from the
mid seventeenth century on, however, was not international compari-
son, but the role of anti-monarchism in domestic political dispute.
The state that had emerged from the Dutch Revolt was a repub-
lic in which the assemblies of the States, variously composed in each
5 Early modern Dutch concepts of liberty are discussed in Haitsma Mulier and
Velema, Vrijheid.
6 Van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt; Kossmann, Politieke theorie in
het zeventiende-eeuwse Nederland; Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice.

7 Many of these themes are treated in later chapters of the present volume. See also
Leeb, Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution and Klein, Patriots Republikanisme.
8 All previous general histories of the Dutch Republic, both in English and in
Dutch, have now been superseded by Jonathan Israel’s magisterial The Dutch Republic.
Illuminating reflections on the history of the Dutch Republic in comparative perspec-
tive are offered in Davids and Lucassen, A Miracle Mirrored.
34 chapter two
province, were held to be sovereign. At the same time, however, and

for a variety of reasons, the function of stadholder was retained in the
new political system. Throughout the history of the Dutch Republic the
position of the stadholder remained, as Herbert Rowen has remarked,
“an improvisation”.9 It was based on an ill-defined assembly of spe-
cial rights, privileges, usurpations and informal influence. Despite or
because of the opaque nature of their position, the stadholders, elected
by each province separately, succeeded in accumulating a consider-
able amount of symbolic and real power on both the national and the
provincial level.10 Particularly important in this respect was the fact that
their function combined substantial political power and the supreme
military command in one and the same person. It was precisely this
combination that made William II such a formidable opponent in his
1650 conflict with the province of Holland and that prompted the abo-
lition of the stadholderate in that most important of all the Dutch
provinces—and several others—between 1651 and 1672.11 During this
so-called First Stadholderless Era, the opponents of the stadholderate
argued their case by equating the stadholder with a monarch. Their
anti-monarchism, in other words, was the outcome of a domestic polit-
ical need. Since the adherents of the stadholder were careful not to
present him as a monarch, but as one of the indispensable elements in
a republican system of mixed government, their opponents were neces-
sitated either to reject mixed government altogether or to come up with
a modified version of it.12 The clear-cut opposition between Orangists
and Staatsgezinden that took shape in these years would dominate Dutch
political debate until the final decades of the eighteenth century.13
It will be my aim in the present chapter to attempt to further our
understanding of Dutch anti-monarchism by discussing two powerful,
yet quite different, examples of it. Although, as we have seen, it would
be quite incorrect to equate Orangism with monarchism, it nonetheless
remains true, for the reasons outlined above, that the most intense anti-
monarchism surfaced among the opponents of the stadholderate. The
authors I have chosen to discuss shared their dislike of that institution.
They also worked outside the mainstream of academic political theory
9
Rowen, The Princes of Orange, ix.
10 Mörke, ‘Stadtholder’ or ‘Staetholder’?, passim.
11 Ibidem, 77–112.
12 On Orangist political thought during the First Stadholderless Era see Van de
Klashorst, ‘Metten schijn van monarchie getempert’.

13 Leeb, Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution, passim.
and wrote in their native language. Their relatively sophisticated anti-

monarchism was crudely echoed in hundreds of less refined political
pamphlets and may therefore be taken to represent an important cur-
rent in early modern Dutch political thought. In the following section
I will discuss the anti-monarchical treatises the brothers De la Court
published in the 1660s. I shall then turn to the anti-monarchism of the
Second Stadholderless Era, the period between 1702 and 1747. Finally,
in a short concluding section, I shall briefly indicate why these forms
of strong and principled anti-monarchism lost much of their relevance
and appeal in the political discourse of the Dutch Patriots during the
last two decades of the eighteenth century.
2. True Liberty and Anti-Monarchism
In 1664 an Englishman summarized the prevailing political mood

among the Dutch with the following remark: “Tell them of monarchy
but in jest, and they will cut your throat in earnest”.14 The intense con-
temporary anti-monarchism this anonymous observer was referring to
can be found in a great variety of writings, ranging from the histori-
cal polemics of Johan Uytenhage de Mist to Rabod Herman Scheels’s
classically inspired Libertas Publica and from the learned and abstract
treatises of Spinoza to a host of popular pamphlets.15 Perhaps its best-
known expression came from the government of Holland itself in the
form of Johan de Witt’s famous Deduction of 1654, written in defense of
the adoption of the Act of Seclusion earlier that same year.16
Yet despite the considerable importance of all these anti-monarchical
writings, there can be no doubt that Dutch anti-monarchism in these
years of so-called “true liberty” found its most eloquent and com-
plete expression in a series of works, published in the early 1660s, by
the Leyden entrepreneurs Johan and Pieter de la Court. These works
14 The Dutch Drawn to Life (London, 1664) 39, cited in Rowen, John de Witt, 381.
15 Indispensable to the study of the political thought of this period is Van de
Klashorst, Blom and Haitsma Mulier, Bibliography of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Political
Thought. General discussions of the debate over the Stadholderate in the First Stadhold-
erless Era include Geyl, “Het stadhouderschap in de partijliteratuur” and G.O. van de
Klashorst, “De ‘ware vrijheid’, 1650–1672” in: Haitsma Mulier and Velema, Vrijheid.
16 [De Witt] Deductie, ofte declaratie van de Staten van Hollandt ende West-Vrieslandt. Parts
of the Deduction have been translated into English in Rowen, The Low Countries in Early
Modern Times, 192–200. Rowen discusses the Deduction and De Witt’s republicanism in
John de Witt, 380–400.
36 chapter two
included the Considerations of State, or Political Balance, the Political Dis-

courses, and the Interest of Holland, an expanded version of which was
translated into English in 1702 as The True Interest and Political Maxims of
the Republic of Holland. All of these works enjoyed a wide readership and
were reprinted numerous times—the Interest of Holland eight times in
1662 alone—and underwent constant revision between the various edi-
tions. It was Pieter de la Court who supervised their publication, since
Johan had died in 1660. Exactly who wrote what will probably never
be known and is not a matter of relevance to our present topic. For
the sake of convenience, I shall simply refer to De la Court from here
on.17 Although there is no full-length monograph on De la Court and
his work, a number of aspects have been analyzed. Thus Van Tijn has
studied his economic thought, Kossmann has presented him as the first
representative of Dutch “republican modernism”, Haitsma Mulier has
related his work to Italian political thought in general and the so-called
myth of Venice in particular, and most recently Blom has proclaimed
him to be one of the most eminent representatives of Dutch “natu-
ralism”.18 Valuable as all of these contributions are, none of them has
discussed De la Courts views on the monarchical form of government
at length and in detail. In what follows, this will be attempted, with
special reference to his most general discussion of monarchy, the entire
first part of the Political Balance and, to a lesser extent, Book V of the
Political Discourses.19
De la Court’s political thought was both extraordinary lively and
highly unsystematic. He freely mixed Cartesian philosophy with politi-
cal anecdotes and maxims, effortlessly combined grave historical exam-
ples with humorous political fables. Yet despite this seemingly chaotic
mode of proceeding, the main elements in his political thought were
fairly clear and simple. At the basis of his view of political life stood a
theory of human nature which was strongly influenced, as Kossmann
has shown, by Descartes Les Passions de l’Ame, first published in Amster-
17 An essential and exhaustive bibliographical guide to the work of De la Court is
provided by Wildenberg, Johan & Pieter de la Court.

18 Van Tijn, “Pieter de la Court”; Kossmann, Politieke theorie in het zeventiende-eeuwse
Nederland, 36–49; Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice, 120–169; Blom, Morality and Causal-
ity in Politics, 157–182. See also the essays brought together in Blom and Wildenberg,
Pieter de la Court in zijn tijd.
19 I have used the 1662 third edition of the Consideratien van Staat, Ofte Polityke Weeg-
schaal and the 1662 Amsterdam edition of the Politike Discoursen.

dam in 1649.20 For De la Court, man was a vulnerable, needy, and weak
creature, dominated by strong passions and powerful natural drives,
among which self-love and the desire to further his own interests—
defined as the limitless accumulation of property, honor, and power
regardless of the cost to others—were the most important ones. These
passions could and should be bridled and tamed by various means,
the development of reason and virtue through education being among
them. Yet in the end—flesh and blood being stronger than mind and
reason—it was unrealistic to expect even the most civilized and rea-
sonable person entirely to rise above his selfish passions unless he was
literally forced to do so.
It is necessity, and the fear of harm, which bridle man much more than
reason and virtue, for reason and virtue can do no more than to give
advice, whereas necessity forces. It breaks, as the saying goes, both laws
and iron.21
Departing from this rather bleak view of human nature and behavior,
De la Court immediately moved on to its implications for political life.
In the state of nature, he explained with several references to Thomas
Hobbes, man lived in a perpetual state of war and in constant fear
of all his fellow human beings. Given the fact that this was the most
dreadful situation imaginable, a perfect hell on earth to which even the
worst of all governments was to be preferred, everybody was desirous
to leave it.22 The way to do so was “to make a peace with several people
and a treaty not to damage each other, but to help each other against
the violence of all others”.23 For the treaty to succeed, it was essential
that it would stipulate who was to be given the power to maintain it.
This could be one person (monarchy), a small assembly (aristocracy), or
everybody (popular government or democracy), as long as this highest
sovereign power was not divided. For to establish a divided sovereignty,
De la Court maintained with great emphasis, was to choose a straight
road back to the disastrous state of nature.24
From De la Court’s brief treatment of the nature of man and the
origins of political society two core elements of his political thought
emerged with great clarity. On the basis of his bleak view of man, he
20 Kossmann, Politieke theorie in het zeventiende-eeuwse Nederland, 37–43.

21 [De la Court] Politike Discoursen, Book V, 145.
23 Ibidem, 23.
24 Ibidem, 23–26.
38 chapter two
emphatically rejected any form of government based on the political

virtue, that is to say the capacity to pursue the common good in a dis-
interested way, of either rulers or ruled. The only realistic way to arrive
at good government was to make the inevitable human self-interest pro-
mote the common good. “A good government”, he remarked in a key
passage,
is not one in which the welfare or the misery of the subjects depends on
the virtue or vice of the rulers, but—and this is most important—one
in which the welfare or the misery of the rulers necessarily follows the
welfare or the misery of the subjects.25
Secondly, it was perfectly clear that he would only be discussing the
three pure forms of government, since any mixed form was equivalent
to chaos and the disintegration of the body politic.
Before he started his discussion of each of the three separate forms
of government, however, he made a further point, which constituted
his first blow against monarchy. In a short section of the Political Bal-
ance on the origins of the three forms of government, he pointed out
that nobody in a political community was by nature born to rule or
to be ruled. The power to rule of any group smaller than the polit-
ical community as a whole—that is to say either an aristocracy or a
monarch—therefore, had, if it were to be called legitimate, at some
point to be entrusted to it by the entire community. Democracy or pop-
ular government, it followed, was the oldest and most legitimate form
of government. Now it was perfectly conceivable, he continued, that
a popular assembly would entrust the power to rule to a number of
elected and capable men. Aristocracy could therefore be considered a
legitimate form of government. But it was utterly inconceivable that
it would entrust this power to one single man and his descendants in
all eternity. Even before he started discussing this form of government,
in other words, De la Court had already decided that the origins of
monarchy could never be legitimate and had to be sought, as he would
later put it, in violence and fraud. The tone, one might say, was set.26
De la Court’s definition of monarchy was simple: it was the form of
government where one person rules and all others obey. Remarkably,
he did not sharply distinguish between different forms of monarchy
and did not set monarchy off from tyranny. The Greeks, he observed
at the beginning of the Political Balance, called the rule of one “monar-
25 Ibidem, 34.
26 Ibidem, 36–39.
chia”; later on in the same work, however, he emphatically remarks that

the Greeks and the Romans called it “tyranny”.27 The Turkish Empire,
generally regarded in Europe as the epitome of tyranny, De la Court
discussed at length as the most perfect example of monarchical govern-
ment.28
In general, De la Court pointed out, monarchy was regarded as the
best form of government.29 The first reason for this was sought in the
advantages of a monarchical upbringing. If a person was known to be
the successor to the throne at the moment of his birth, he could be
given a fitting education and be provided with the best teachers avail-
able and thus be fully prepared for his task at the moment of acces-
sion to the throne.30 The second reason for the general preference for
monarchy had to do with the intrinsic merits of this form of govern-
ment. In a monarchy, so the theory went, the ruler identifies with the
welfare of his subjects. He is able to surround himself with the best
advisers. Decisions are swiftly taken, seldom changed, and executed
with vigor. Because the prince has great powers to reward and to pun-
ish, moreover, he will be eminently successful in rooting out violence
and corruption.31 Unfortunately, however, De la Court observed at the
end of this summary of monarchical political thought, those who hold
these lofty views have forgotten one crucial fact: princes are human
beings and will therefore generally follow their passions, lusts, and
immediate self-interest rather than reason.32 That this was so and had
disastrous consequences, he proceeded to demonstrate in great detail.
The first perspective from which De la Court treated the horrors of
monarchy was that of court life.33 The trouble began with the upbring-
ing of princes. Far from receiving the most perfect education imagin-
able, as the monarchical theorists maintained, successors to the throne
in fact were brought up in the worst possible way. The reason was sim-
ple. Since the incumbent prince always feared that his successor would
want to rule as soon as he was fit to do so, he would do his utmost to
27 Ibidem, 35.
28 Ibidem, 175–229.
29 That monarchism indeed had “extraordinary tough roots” is rightly emphasized
in Koenigsberger, “Republicanism, monarchism and liberty”.

31 Ibidem, 44–47.
32 Ibidem, 47.
33 Many of De la Court’s strictures on court life are strikingly similar to those found
in contemporary English political discourse. Cf. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 89–93
and the literature mentioned there.
40 chapter two
keep the child stupid and ignorant. The courtiers helped the prince in
this design to gain his favor, but also to later have the advantage of a
weak ruler they could dominate. Young princes were therefore brought
up with useless entertainments. The only thing they learned was to
follow their lowest lusts, whereas their reason remained underdevel-
oped. Small wonder that, when they eventually came to the throne,
they already were “more evil than other people”.34
Once on the throne, most princes simply wanted to continue fol-
lowing their basest passions. In order to be able to do so they needed
unlimited wealth and therefore sucked the country dry.35 It was also
essential that no threat to their position should be allowed to develop:
provincial governors were distrusted and frequently replaced, big and
populous cities were kept in check with castles and armies. Yet the
prince himself was only to a very limited extent directly involved in
this ruthless exploitation of his subjects. Since he rather followed his
lusts than engaged in the hard task of governing, he gladly left most
decisions to his courtiers.36 Monarchies, it was clear to De la Court,
were never administered by virtuous counselors, magistrates, and pub-
lic servants, but invariably by the “vicious courtiers” who were in the
direct environment of the prince and who constantly had his ear. Since
these courtiers could only ingratiate themselves with the prince by con-
stant flattery and by following him in the relentless pursuit of base plea-
sures, none of them escaped moral corruption. This is why, De la Court
remarked, a monarchical court is justly described as “a great whore” or
“an immense brothel”.37 Indeed, untruthfulness was the very essence
of court life. To illustrate his point, De la Court told one of his many
fables. A Frenchman and a Dutchman visit the Kingdom of the Apes.
During the first two days of their visit they are lavishly entertained.
On the third day they are brought before the king and asked what they
think of his magnificent government. The Frenchman replies with great
eloquence that he has never seen such beauty and style and is promptly
offered a position on the king’s secret council. The blunt Dutchman,
however, remarks
34 [De la Court] Consideratien van Staat, Ofte Polityke Weeg-schaal, 56–69; [De la Court]
Politike Discoursen, Book V, 145–150. The quotation is on 145.

36 Ibidem, 86–92; [De la Court] Politike Discoursen, Book V, 150–156.
37 [De la Court] Consideratien van Staat, Ofte Polityke Weeg-schaal, 110, 132; [De la Court]
Politike Discoursen, Book V, 150.

that he has seen nothing that even remotely resembles good government,
but only luxury, gluttony, excessive drinking, fornication, hunting, danc-
ing, and gaming; which confirms the saying: an ape is an ape, even if it
wears golden clothing.
The Dutchman, of course, is immediately executed, with the French-

man commenting on the justness of this punishment and all the apes
saying Amen.38 Apart from the inevitable corruption of young princes
and the general and inherent perversity of the system of court life, a
third and final drawback of monarchical rule, viewed form the perspec-
tive of the functioning of the court, was constituted by the fact that the
problem of succession could never be fully solved, with periodic bitter
struggles and even open armed conflict as a result.39
The exposure of the revolting nature of court life, however, was insuf-
ficient to bring out the full horrors of monarchical rule. There was no
better way to reveal these, De la Court insisted, than by studying the
degradations and deprivations the subjects of all monarchies necessarily
underwent. The basic explanation of the gruesome fate of the monar-
chical subject was that it was in the interest of the court to be slavishly
served by the rest of the population and not to be resisted or threatened
in its power in any way.40 This meant, first of all, that all laws were for-
mulated in the interest of the court, not of the subject. This in itself was
bad, yet here one could still say dura lex attamen scripta. Far worse was
the fact that the interpretation or explanation of these laws was also in
the hands of the king and his court and therefore totally unpredictable
and arbitrary. Should the king want someone’s life or money, he could
simply accuse him of treason, crimen majestatis, or of being a heretic and
take whatever he wanted. For the subjects of a monarchy, there could
be no legal certainties.41
The one certainty monarchical subjects did have was that the king
and his court would do everything in their capacity to make them
powerless and to make the whole life of the nation depend on the
wishes and whims of the court. There were various means by which the
king and his court attempted to achieve this aim. First of all, the entire
administration of the country was directed from the court itself, so as to
prevent the emergence of independent centers of power. Secondly, cities

39 Ibidem, 113–117.
40 E.g. [De la Court] Politike Discoursen, Book V, 132.
42 chapter two
were deliberately kept weak and defenseless. They were neither allowed
to put up fortifications of their own nor to train their citizens in the use
of arms. Having thus been made entirely powerless, the subjects were,
in the third place, subjected to ever increasing taxes, to the point where
nobody in the end had anything left. Indeed, in a monarchy anyone
who showed any sign of wealth, wisdom, learning or moral courage was
feared by the court and consequently in danger of losing his life. Under
a successful monarchy, therefore, these things rapidly disappeared.42 To
increase their power over their subjects, finally, monarchs frequently
engaged in offensive wars. For apart from giving them the opportunity
to add to their own riches, such wars allowed them to raise taxes
to levels previously unheard of and to use the army against the last
remains of urban power and independence.43
Having outlined the main characteristics of monarchical rule, De
la Court was left with three important questions. Why was it, in the
first place, that, given the unmitigated dreadfulness and barbarism of
monarchical government, it almost invariably received higher praise
than republican government? The answer was simple. In republics,
where there was a greater freedom of speech, everyone wanted to
rule and the sitting government was therefore constantly criticized. In
monarchies, on the other hand, the only voices to be heard were those
of paid court flatterers and—much the same thing—royal historiogra-
phers.44 The second question was somewhat more complicated. Why
was it, De la Court asked, that the monarchies of the countries sur-
rounding the Dutch Republic were less harsh than his own general
typology of monarchical rule would lead one to expect? The answer
was historical. That monarchical rule in Western Europe was relatively
mild, that the subjects of these kingdoms still possessed some riches,
commerce, learning, and virtue, was solely due to the fact that these
hereditary and centralized monarchies were relatively recent creations,
erected on the remnants of republican forms of government which they
had so far not been able to eradicate completely. But that, De la Court
warned, was only a matter of time.45
The third, final and most burning question, of course, was: what
did this analysis of monarchical government tell the inhabitants of the
42 Ibidem, 134–137.
43 Ibidem, 138–142.
44 [De la Court] Politike Discoursen, Book V, 108–110.
45 [De la Court] Consideratien van Staat, Ofte Polityke Weeg-schaal, 168–170, 230–257.
Dutch Republic? The answer was: everything. For De la Court made it

abundantly clear that all he had said about the nature of monarchical
rule also applied to so-called republics with an hereditary head who
was the supreme military commander. Reinstall the stadholder, such
was his message to his compatriots, and you will in time be exposed
to all the horrors of monarchy.46 Should his fellow Hollanders, after all
he had said, nonetheless decide to take this step, De la Court had one
final piece of advice to offer. The appropriate symbolic accompaniment
and expression of such a decision, he suggested, would be to replace
the proud lion in the weapon of the province with a mule.47
3. Early Eighteenth-Century Anti-Monarchism
Dramatic political developments separated the anti-monarchism of De

la Court from that of the early eighteenth century. The First Stadhold-
erless Era had ended in 1672 with the murder of that embodiment of
republican statesmanship, Johan de Witt. Between that year and 1702
William III, the stadholder-king, accumulated more power than any of
his predecessors in the stadholderate had possessed. Indeed, a contem-
porary joke had it that his position was best described as stadholder
in England and king in Holland.48 At William’s death, partly because
there was no direct male heir, most provinces decided not to elect a new
stadholder. Thus started the Second Stadholderless Era, which would
last until 1747. The end of William III’s reign brought with it an imme-
diate revival of the principled anti-monarchism of the third quarter of
the seventeenth century. De la Court’s dire warnings about the thin
line separating a republic with a stadholder from a full-blown monar-
chy had found a perfect illustration in the previous three decades.
In two voluminous, highly interesting, but hitherto largely neglected
works published in the middle of the first decade of the eighteenth
century, the Catholic merchant and writer Emanuel van der Hoeven
explained the republican lessons to be learned from the recent past.
The first of these works was The Life and Death of the Illustrious Brothers
46 Ibidem, 275–398, especially 307–308.

47 Ibidem, 298.
48 On the reign of William III see Israel, The Dutch Republic, 807–863; Israel, The
Anglo-Dutch Moment; Rowen, The Princes of Orange, 131–148; Hoak and Feingold, The World
of William and Mary; Troost, Stadhouder-koning Willem III.
44 chapter two
De Witt. A book devoted to the heroic deeds of these two brilliant

republican statesmen was long overdue, the author explained, but the
political climate had simply not allowed it. Now, however, the time was
ripe, “since we have regained the pleasure and the advantage of a Free
States Government”.49 But saving the reputation of the brothers De
Witt from Orangist calumny was insufficient. It was also, once again,
necessary to demonstrate that the semi-monarchical stadholderate was
extremely harmful to the Dutch Republic. This task Van der Hoeven
took upon himself in his second major work, Holland’s Ancient Liberty,
without the Stadholderate, published in 1706. As Johan Uytenhage de Mist
and many others had done during the First Stadholderless Era, Van der
Hoeven attempted to demonstrate with lengthy historical arguments
that Dutch liberty had always been protected by the nobles and above
all by the towns. It had always been threatened by the emergence
or presence of a single head in government. The name attached to
such a head, Van der Hoeven insisted, was irrelevant: stadholders were
to be regarded as no lesser danger to liberty than “Counts, Princes,
Dukes, Kings, Emperors, etc”.50 In fully equating the stadholderate with
monarchy, Van der Hoeven followed a strategy that had proved useful
to his seventeenth-century predecessors. He had the added advantage,
however, of the example of William III, who had effortlessly combined
the functions of stadholder and king. Van der Hoeven saw his chance
and devoted a long chapter to the “extreme danger” to which ancient
Dutch liberty had been exposed when the last stadholder succeeded in
“combining the British Crown with the Stadholderate”.51 Yet he was
able to end his book on an optimistic note: the stadholderate had once
again been abolished in the most important provinces, hopefully for
good.
Van der Hoeven’s hopes proved to be vain. From the early 1730s on
it became increasingly clear, among other things from his marriage to
Anna of Hanover, that the Frisian stadholder William Charles Henry
Friso, later to become William IV, had serious political ambitions. It
was in this changed political context that Lieven Ferdinand De Beau-
fort, about whose life unfortunately very little is known, wrote his bulky
Treatise on Liberty in Civil Society, perhaps the most fundamental defense of
a pure and stadholderless republic written during the Second Stadhold-
49 Van der Hoeven, Leeven en Dood, Book I, 1.

50 Van der Hoeven, Hollands Aeloude Vryheid, “Bericht aan den Leezer”.
51 Ibidem, Part 3, 358–408.
erless Era. De Beaufort, a regent in the province of Zeeland, described

the increasingly oligarchic Dutch Republic of his days as a perfect
example of republican liberty and has for that reason repeatedly been
called a smug and self-satisfied hypocrite in later historiography.52 This
evaluation misses the mark completely, for a close reading of the Treatise
on Liberty in Civil Society reveals it to be a deeply pessimistic book about
the fragility of republican liberty and the ever increasing threat to it the
European monarchies were posing.53 Although both rejected the stad-
holderate, De Beaufort’s intellectual world was sharply different from
that of De la Court, to whose work he never even referred. Of the two,
De Beaufort was clearly the more old-fashioned theorist. No Descartes
or Hobbes for him. His work was totally dominated by the authors of
classical antiquity, with Aristotle, Tacitus, Sallust, Plutarch, and Cicero
in the most prominent roles. His view of political life was classical in
the fullest sense of the word.54
De Beaufort’s entire treatise revolved around the opposition between
liberty and slavery.55 Liberty, he explained, consisted of two elements.
First of all it meant the rule of law and the protection of the life, liberty
and property of each individual inhabitant of a country.56 Secondly, and
more importantly, liberty meant the right to participate in government.
Where what De Beaufort calls “full liberty” reigns,
there Civil Society, the Body of the People, … participates in Govern-
ment; indeed the Government, and the Sovereignty of the Land, consists
of the body of the People, or those who represent it.57
This full republican liberty was and had always been quite rare, but
was clearly present in the early eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. For
it was evident that in the Dutch Republic
52 Blok, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk, III, 390–391; Geyl, Geschiedenis van de
Nederlandsche Stam, II, 315; De Jongste, “Een bewind op zijn smalst”, 49.
53 For a fuller and more general treatment of De Beaufort’s political thought see
Chapter Three.
54 This may help explain why he singled out the equally classically oriented Rabod
Herman Scheels, author of Libertas Publica (1666), as his only worthy predecessor in the
Dutch Republic: [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaat, 3. On Scheels
see Kossmann, Politieke theorie in het zeventiende-eeuwse Nederland, 32–34.
55 This opposition has recently been identified as the core of early modern “neo-
roman” theory in Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism.

56 [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaat, 30.
57 Ibidem, 52.
46 chapter two
the Sovereignty of the State consists of the body of the People, and that
the Citizenry has no reason to complain that it is being excluded from
the Government or that its voice is not heard in affairs of State.58
The survival of this precious Dutch republican liberty, De Beaufort
insisted, entirely depended on the willingness of both citizens and re-
gents to completely devote themselves to the common good. His con-
ception of virtue, in other words, was classically republican in a way De
la Court’s had not been.59
De Beaufort was quite explicit about the fact that the political virtue
he deemed necessary for the attainment and survival of republican
liberty was a demanding and difficult ideal. Indeed, he was convinced
that most peoples and many individuals were altogether unfit for it. A
truly free republic had to be inhabited by citizens and regents whose
elevated mind would allow them to disregard material gain and direct
self-interest, whose reason would enable them to discern the value
of liberty, and whose virtue would always make them act “for the
good of the Fatherland and the welfare of the people”.60 Although
De Beaufort’s Treatise at times reads like an instruction manual for
the proper behavior of regents, its central message was certainly not
directed at regents only. On the contrary. All members of a republican
political community, both regents and citizens, had to display political
virtue. More importantly, in good Aristotelian or classical republican
fashion De Beaufort emphasized the constant reversal of roles between
regents and citizens, the alternation of ruling and being ruled. In order
for such a system to work the maintenance of a high degree of what
he called “civic equality” (“burgerlyke evengelykheid”) was an absolute
necessity.61
The decline of republican liberty, De Beaufort was convinced, invari-
ably commenced with the joint disappearance of civic equality and
political virtue. Following classical authors, he identified ambition and
luxury as the two main causes of this process. Ambition, the burning
desire to elevate oneself in the political world, he observed,
58 Ibidem, 129–130.
59 Despite a quarter century of discussion, criticism and revisionism, the most con-
vincing and powerful account of early modern classical republicanism remains Pocock,
The Machiavellian Moment.
60 [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaat, 207–210.
61 Ibidem, 200, 338–339, 348–349.
ruins equality, tramples the Laws, raises people above their Fellow Citi-
zens, above the Laws, and above the Fatherland, from which arise enor-
mous irregularities, strife, discord and in the end public violence and the
rape and loss of liberty.62
Almost equally harmful was luxury. It made people proud and haughty
and therefore unwilling to live in a world of civic equality. At the same
time it replaced virtue with a voluptuous cowardice and thus paved the
way for the introduction of political slavery.63
The worst form of political slavery, the very opposite of republican
liberty, was absolute monarchy. Contrary to De la Court, De Beaufort
distinguished between various types of monarchy, absolute and limited
monarchy being the most important ones. It was to absolute monar-
chy that he devoted most of his attention, on the one hand because he
thought that this was the form to which most monarchies in the end
tended, on the other hand because it had become such a powerful phe-
nomenon in recent European history. Indeed, he was convinced that
“the love of liberty that has always been so characteristic of the peo-
ples of Europe has become so weak that it has almost disappeared”.64
To counter this trend, it was of the utmost importance to demonstrate
that, whatever paid royal propagandists might endlessly repeat, abso-
lute monarchy was the worst possible form of government.65 It was,
briefly put, contrary to the natural state of man, to reason, to the goal
of good government, and to sound politics.
In the state of nature, De Beaufort remarked—appealing to Roman
law—all men were equal and equally free. Now this obviously changed
with the transition to civil society, yet even there it remained true that
slavery, the total subjection to the will of another person, was incom-
patible with human nature and the rights of man. Absolute monar-
chy, the form of government which in effect reduced men to slaves,
could therefore only be founded on violence and was illegitimate. It
was also plainly contrary to reason and to the goal of good govern-
ment. That goal, the age-old salus populi suprema lex, was incompatible
with all power being vested in the unlimited will of one person. Here
62 Ibidem, 348–382. The quotation is on 349.

63 Ibidem, 304–348.
64 Ibidem, 76.
65 On the dangerous and misleading arguments of “courtly politicians”: ibidem, 243–
255.
48 chapter two
De Beaufort sounded somewhat like De la Court. “The will of one

person”, he remarked,
always follows his own interests, prejudices, and pleasure and is usually
the most unreasonable, the nastiest, and the most variable thing in the
world, subject to all sorts of wicked passions and desires.66
It was therefore highly unlikely that any reasonable people had ever
entrusted its welfare to such an unlimited individual will or would
do so in the future. But perhaps the most telling argument against
absolute monarchy was the fact that it brought, as De la Court had
also pointed out, nothing but misery and suffering to the subjects of
the monarch. It was simply an evil political system. Not only was
it completely incompatible with the rule of law, that first and most
fundamental element of liberty, but it was also inherently aggressive.
Taking Louis XIV as his most important example, De Beaufort at this
point launched into a long litany about the perfidious and ultimately
self-destructive behavior of Europe’s modern absolute monarchs, who
laid waste a whole continent to satisfy their own ambitions with wars
of conquest. Under their reign of terror, he was convinced, Europe had
already lost a considerable part of its population. Should their capacity
for destruction increase even further, which the rise and continuous
expansion of standing armies made highly likely, the future of Europe
looked bleak indeed.67
That same conclusion was to be drawn from an analysis of limited
monarchy. At first sight, De Beaufort remarked, this was quite an
acceptable form of government. The king was bound to fundamental
and other laws and the subjects, although they evidently did not enjoy
the full liberty of participating in government, were generally secure in
their life and property. Yet the system had one fatal flaw: the balance
between the sovereignty of the crown and the rights and liberties of the
people was very hard to keep. In the end, it had to go one way or the
other. In modern Europe, where monarchs had considerable standing
armies at their disposal, it was evident where matters would end.68
De Beaufort had now assembled all the elements necessary to de-
scribe and understand the process whereby a free republic degenerated
into an absolute monarchy. It started with the loss of equality and virtue
through ambition and luxury. This weakening of political vigilance
66 Ibidem, 79–80.
67 Ibidem, 96–103.
68 Ibidem, 103–115.
permitted the rise of one person to a position of great power. Should

that power include military command, there was very little that could
be done to prevent the eventual transition to absolute monarchy and
political slavery. The implied lesson for his contemporaries, of course,
was quite simple and straightforward. Although it was reached from a
different perspective, it was the same as De la Court’s had been. To
remain the “bulwark of European liberty”, the Dutch Republic had to
prevent the reinstallment of the semi-monarchical stadholderate at all
cost.69
4. Anti-Monarchism and Patriot Republicanism
Different as their anti-monarchical theories were, De la Court and De

Beaufort were both convinced that the republican political structure
of the Seven United Provinces was fundamentally different from, and
indeed superior to that of the surrounding monarchies. De Beaufort
held it to be near perfect as it was, whereas De la Court warned
against the closing of the regent elite and pleaded for expanded political
participation of well to do citizens. For both, however, the greatest
threat to the liberty of the country was posed by the stadholderate,
which was viewed as the first step in the direction of monarchy. It was
this perspective which gave their anti-monarchism such urgency.
It was only in the final decades of the eighteenth century that both
these forms of anti-monarchism came to lose much of their relevance.
During the 1780s, the Dutch Republic saw the rise of the so-called
Patriot political movement. This, obviously, is not the place to dis-
cuss Patriot political thought, which was derived from many different
sources, in general.70
For our present purposes, it is only relevant to point out that, par-
ticularly during the first years of the Patriot movement, many echoes
could be heard of what for more than a century, with the work of De
la Court and De Beaufort in a central position, had been the stan-
dard repertoire of Dutch anti-monarchism. In his highly influential To
the People of the Netherlands, published anonymously in 1781, Joan Derk
van der Capellen tot den Pol set the tone. He described William V
as a stadholder “who behaved as a Sovereign”. From his corrupt and
69 Ibidem, 139–141, 348–382, 439–440. The quotation is on 140.

70 See Chapters Six and Seven and Klein, Patriots Republikanisme.
50 chapter two
decadent court, William made every effort to extinguish urban liber-

ties and the rule of law and to impose a “military government” on
the Republic.71 During the following years, the Patriots further devel-
oped these sharp criticisms of the stadholderate. They railed against
William V’s extensive powers of appointment, arguing that the exis-
tence of such rights caused the country to be ruled by incompetent
court flatterers. Indeed, there were few persons more despicable than
a “stadholderly regent”.72 The existence of such people inevitably led
to a widening of the gap between the rulers and the ruled and an
increasing inequality “which is completely contrary to and destructive
of the nature and essence of a Republic”.73 Equally harmful was the
fact that William held the highest military command and was thus in
a position to intimidate the country with a standing army that blindly
followed his every wish. As the author of a notorious 1782 pamphlet
put it: “Standing armies are the instruments of Despotism, have been
instituted as such, and since then all original Constitutions in Europe
have been subjected to the arbitrary decisions of Kings”.74 Their great-
est fury, however, the Patriots reserved for the stadholderly court itself.
In Patriot political discourse, the “despotic court” symbolized every-
thing a true republican should detest. Peopled by the aristocracy with
its “natural passion … for monarchy” and the despicable “stadholderly
regents”, it was the locus of every imaginable sin, from boozing to sex-
ual license and from open corruption to the blatant abuse of power.75
The decadence, luxury and depravity of the court and the courtiers
spread over the entire country and gradually undermined the “most
necessary Republican character in all distinguished Dutch Families”.76
In the end, the Patriots predicted, courtly luxury and license would
completely ruin “National character” and thereby the foundations of
republican freedom.77 William V, they were convinced, already was a
king in all but name.78 Unless drastic and immediate action was taken,
71 [Van der Capellen] Aan het Volk van Nederland, 60–88. The quotations are on 60
and 69.
73 De Post van den Neder-Rhyn, III, nr. 141, 1250.
74 Brief over de waere Oorzaek van ’s Lands Ongeval, 58.
75 [Van der Capellen] Aan het Volk van Nederland, passim; Grondwettige Herstelling, van
Nederlands Staatswezen, I, 330–331; [De Wakker van Zon] De Adel, 100, 123.
77 Ibidem, 1250.
republican citizens would soon be transformed into “white negroes and

chained slaves”.79
Yet as the Patriots developed and radicalized, they became increas-
ingly aware that their demands for political reform were resisted by
the regents as much as by the stadholder. This in turn led them to
re-think the history and theory of Dutch republicanism. The conclu-
sions were startling. Having redefined liberty as the active and per-
manent sovereignty of the people, the Patriots became convinced that
the whole history of the Dutch Republic had been one of oppression.
Whether that oppression had been suffered at the hands of a stadholder
or of a small group of regents, they concluded, was only of marginal
importance and interest. Indeed, in 1783 Pieter Vreede, later to become
one of the leading radicals in the Batavian Republic, pointed out that
since the sixteenth-century Revolt Dutchmen had not been freer than
the inhabitants of monarchies such as France or Spain. They had, he
insisted to the consternation of more traditional republicans, been no
more than slaves ever since the formation of their independent state.80
With that conclusion, which would be widely adopted by Patriot and
later Batavian Dutchmen in the two decades to come, the old anti-
monarchical theories, largely intended for domestic political use, had
largely lost their function. To the adherents of the new “philosophical
republicanism” of the late eighteenth century, all forms of government
other than a representative democracy were equally despicable.
79 De Prince Vlag, Oranje Boven, 56.

80 [Vreede] Waermond en Vryhart. The Patriot redefinition of the concept of liberty is
discussed in Chapter Seven.
chapter three
EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
POLITICAL LANGUAGES
1. The Neglect of the Early Eighteenth Century
In the historiography of early modern Dutch political thought, the

so-called Second Stadholderless Era (1702–1747) is perhaps the most
neglected period. It is easy to see why this should be so. These decades
lack the obvious appeal of the Dutch Revolt, the philosophical excite-
ment of the first years of “true liberty” (1651–1672) and the drive for
political renewal of the late eighteenth-century revolutions. Yet this era
was by no means as intellectually barren as has frequently been sup-
posed. It will be the aim of this chapter to demonstrate that early
eighteenth-century Dutch political discourse was both lively and sophis-
ticated and is therefore well worth studying. Given the lack of previous
research on the political thought of the period, a single and significant
episode has been chosen as a case study.
During the years between 1736 and 1739 an intense polemic devel-
oped between what contemporaries referred to as republicans and
Orangists (Prinsgezinden). The most important work to come out of this
polemic was the republican Treatise on Liberty in Civil Society, written by
the Zeeland regent Lieven Ferdinand de Beaufort and posthumously
published in 1737. The cause of the stadholder was taken up by two
distinguished Frisians, Wybrandus van Itsma and Epo Sjuk van Bur-
mania, in a number of so-called “barge- and yacht-talks”. De Beaufort
was defended in the Candid Reflections on Liberty and the Supplement to
the Candid Reflections on Liberty, both attributed on dubious grounds to
the eminent legal scholar Cornelis van Bynkershoek. The immediate
cause for this heated exchange of printed opinions was the position of
William Charles Henry Friso, later to become stadholder William IV.
Over the years, William had gradually been building up his political
position. Since he had come of age in 1729, he had held the stadholder-
ate in a number of provinces. During the 1730s, disputes occurred over
his potential role as a military commander and as a member of the
54 chapter three
Council of State. Two other matters caused an even greater stir. First
of all, there was the highly complicated issue—which came to a head
in 1732—of whether or not William was entitled to the marquisate of
Veere and Flushing. Secondly, there was William’s controversial and
politically sensitive marriage to George II’s daughter Anna in 1734.1
All these practical political issues were treated at considerable length
in the polemic here under discussion. In the end, however, the dispute
did not primarily revolve around practical politics, but around differ-
ent conceptualizations of the political world. Contemporaries and later
eighteenth-century generations were fully aware of the importance of
this debate, yet it has not received full or adequate treatment in mod-
ern historiography.
Both this modern neglect and the few things that have been said
about this polemic in later historiography throw a revealing light on the
way the political thought of the first half of the eighteenth-century has
hitherto been approached by historians. It is, first of all, not unusual to
find moral condemnation of an author whose personal behavior seems
to be in conflict with the message of his writings substituted for a sus-
tained analysis of his thought. Lieven the Beaufort, who participated
in ruling practices we would nowadays not hesitate to describe as oli-
garchic, has been a frequent victim of such overly simplistic moralism.2
Pieter Geyl blamed him for “shameless hypocrisy” and more recently
the Treatise on Liberty in Civil Society has, on the same grounds, been called
“less than edifying”.3 If dismissing an author’s work were this easy, the
canon of Western political thought would be very short indeed.
More serious and therefore more important is the tendency in re-
cent, often prosopographically inspired research dealing with the “high
politics” of this period simply to deny the relevance of political dis-
course. Thus the author of a study about the elite of Gouda during the
eighteenth century announces that he has paid no attention to the ideo-
logical and religious views of the group he has studied. He continues by
confidently asserting that the study of such views is irrelevant when it
comes to answering the question as to how the elite succeeded in main-
1 Geyl, Willem IV en Engeland tot 1748, 1–71; Schutte, “Willem IV en Willem V”,
187–193; Rowen, The Princes of Orange, 148–162.

2 On De Beaufort’s political role see Broersma en Fruin, “Correspondentiën in
steden van Zeeland”.

3 Geyl, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Stam, II, 315; De Jongste, “Een bewind op zijn
smalst”, 49.
early eighteenth-century political languages 55
taining its position.4 It is, in other words, presupposed here that the
political and religious discourse of the elite played no significant role
in its capacity to maintain its hegemony. In the light of our increased
sensitivity to linguistic forms of dominance, such a presupposition not
only seems highly implausible, but also an unnecessary impoverishment
of our view of the past.5
The few historians who have shown a serious interest in the political
thought of the first half of the eighteenth century, have unfortunately
also failed to do justice to the richness of its content. They have tended
to underestimate the depth of the ideological disputes during the period
and moreover frequently and anachronistically dismissed them as futile
or unrealistic. Thus C.R. Emery, the author of the only full length study
of the political thought of these decades, characterized the debate of
the late 1730s as follows: “The similarities between De Beaufort and
Burmania are far greater than the points of difference—a fact which
lends an air of abstraction and irrelevance to the whole dispute”.6 No
doubt the participants in this intense and prolonged polemic would
have shown great surprise upon hearing that their intellectual exertions
were futile and superfluous.
Perhaps the prevailing malaise in the study of Dutch early eigh-
teenth-century political thought is best remedied by attempting a new
beginning. Instead of hastily indulging in moral condemnation, in apri-
oristic dismissal or in retrospective judgments of irrelevance, histori-
ans might more profitably start with a systematic analysis of the polit-
ical discourse of the period. It is through such intensive study of the
contemporary political vocabulary that our understanding of this era,
which certainly was not the cultural desert it is often held to be, may
gain in depth and exactitude. The aim of the present chapter is to
contribute to such a renewed study of early eighteenth-century politi-
cal discourse by demonstrating that the late 1730s witnessed an exciting
political debate, in which differences of a fundamental nature emerged
between republicans and Orangists.
4 De Jong, Met goed fatsoen, 12.

5 The name of Michel Foucault should suffice in this context. See Ankersmit, Denken
over geschiedenis, 251–256.
6 Emery, “The Study of Politica in the Netherlands”, 78. See also Leeb, Ideological
Origins of the Batavian Revolution, 57 and passim.

56 chapter three
2. Classical Republicanism
Smugness and complacency are the terms one most frequently encoun-
ters in discussions of Lieven Ferdinand de Beaufort’s Treatise on Liberty in
Civil Society.7 A careful study of this extraordinary text, however, imme-
diately reveals that such qualifications are entirely inappropriate. It is,
in fact, a sustained meditation on the internal and external fragility
of republican liberty. Surveying the recent course of European history,
De Beaufort found very little cause for optimism. Whereas formerly
monarchies used to be tempered by the law and the presence of repre-
sentative assemblies, they were now, at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, almost invariably of the absolutist variety. This development,
De Beaufort claimed, had fundamentally changed the nature of Euro-
pean politics and society. The behavior of these new absolutist rulers
was characterized by an unquenchable thirst for glory, by unmitigated
aggressiveness and by total untrustworthiness. To fund their enormous
standing armies and to keep up their luxurious courts, modern kings
had raised taxes to such an extent that both economic activity and the
population were now in serious decline. Indeed, De Beaufort was con-
vinced that in recent times the population of Europe had declined to a
third of what it had previously been. Evidently, such dramatic changes
could not leave the Dutch Republic unaffected.8
It was against this international background that De Beaufort un-
folded his views on the internal or domestic aspects of republican lib-
erty. Although he constantly and implicitly referred to the situation in
the Dutch Republic, he formally presented his Treatise on Liberty as a
general discussion of republican liberty, in which the history of the
Roman Republic held pride of place.9 The present section intends to
demonstrate that the views De Beaufort expounded in this text squarely
place him within the tradition of classical republicanism. To do so effec-
tively, the meaning in which this controversial term is used here first
needs to be established. In the scholarly debate about early modern
classical republicanism, which seriously took off after the publication
of J.G.A. Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment in 1975, this strand of political
7 Blok, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk, III, 390–391; De Jongste, “Een bewind
op zijn smalst”, 49. A more nuanced discussion is offered by Emery, “The Study of
Politica in the Netherlands”, 64–78.
8 [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaet, 29–30, 96–99, 142–144,
176–178, 313–315, 509–512.

9 Ibidem, “Voorbericht aen den Leser”.
thought was initially exclusively identified with a positive interpreta-

tion of liberty, whereas the negative interpretation of liberty was asso-
ciated with political thought of a juristic orientation.10 This view was
further reinforced when Pocock himself presented a model for histori-
ans of political thought, in which the substantial differences between,
and the ultimate incompatibility of, the languages of “virtues” and of
“rights” were emphasized.11 Attempts to apply this model to early mod-
ern Dutch republicanism, however, led to the conclusion that it was
quite usual to find these two languages combined in one and the same
text.12 Does this mean that early modern Dutch republicanism was con-
ceptually confused and of an inconsistent eclecticism? Perhaps not. For
in a number of publications Quentin Skinner has meanwhile revised
our understanding of what is to be understood by classical republican-
ism or civic humanism. Skinner has convincingly demonstrated that in
the political thought of Machiavelli, the central figure in this tradition,
positive and negative liberty were intimately connected. The crucial
difference between the civic humanist conception of liberty defended
by Machiavelli and his early modern followers and the juristic con-
ception of liberty that increasingly gained ground during the seven-
teenth century, was not that Machiavelli had been uninterested in or
had neglected negative liberty. It was, rather, that he and his followers
believed that negative liberty, which they highly valued, could only be
assured in a situation where all citizens led a life of virtue and pub-
lic service in a self-governing political community. In civic humanist
political thought, in other words, positive liberty was conceived of as a
necessary and essential instrument or precondition for the maintenance
of negative liberty. It was precisely this linkage of the two conceptions
of liberty that was missing from or dismissed in the juristic tradition.13
10 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, passim. For an important and illuminating early
review of this work see Hexter, On Historians, 255–305. The distinction between positive
and negative liberty in modern scholarship, of course, goes back to Isaiah Berlin’s justly
celebrated Two Concepts of Liberty.
11 J.G.A. Pocock, “Virtues, rights, and manners: A model for historians of political
thought” in: Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, 37–50.

12 See, for instance, E.H. Kossmann, “Dutch Republicanism” in: Kossmann, Politieke
Theorie en Geschiedenis, 211–233.

13 Skinner, “Machiavelli on the Maintenance of Liberty” and “The Idea of Negative
Liberty”. Skinner has since gone on to introduce a third or “neo-roman” concept of

liberty, interpreted as nondomination and noninterference, into the discussion. See
Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism; “Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil
War” in: Van Gelderen and Skinner, Republicanism. A Shared European Heritage, II, 9–
58 chapter three
And it is precisely this linkage that may prominently be found in Lieven

de Beaufort’s Treatise on Liberty in Civil Society.14
Having first told his readers that, with the one exception of Rabod
Herman Scheels’s Libertas Publica, nothing worthwhile had been written
on liberty in the Dutch Republic, De Beaufort defined the concept very
broadly as the power to do as one wishes within the limits set by law
and reason.15 He immediately added that this general definition was not
specific enough and in need of further refinement. Liberty, he therefore
continued, was to be looked upon as consisting of two interconnected
parts, of which the one referred to the individual, and the other to the
political community as a whole. For individual citizens, liberty meant
that they live secure lives under the protection of the laws, that they fully
possess their lives, liberty and property independently of other people,
and that these may not be taken from them but by their own crimes and
through the sentence of their regular and lawful judge.16
In order to safeguard the maintenance of this individual liberty and
to prevent it from being eroded by the sovereign, a second and public
component of liberty was needed:
… in a Free Government, that is to say a government where there is
full Liberty … Civil Society, the Body of the People, is equally Free as
the individual Inhabitants are and not only that, but it participates in
Government; indeed the Government, and the Sovereignty of the Land,
consists of the body of the People, or those who represent it.17
To clarify what he was talking about, De Beaufort at this point inserted
a paean to the Roman Republic, where every citizen had not only
enjoyed security under the law, but had also been entitled to cast
his vote freely in matters of government. Both aspects of liberty, he
pointed out, had almost simultaneously disappeared under the Roman
Empire.18
28; “A Third Concept of Liberty”. Important commentaries on Skinner’s recent work

include Pettit, “Keeping Republican Freedom Simple” and Pocock, “Quentin Skinner”.
14 This is why Elie Luzac, a convinced adherent of a purely negative definition of
liberty, vehemently attacked the work of De Beaufort: [Luzac] De Zugt van den Heere
Johan de Witt, 90 and Luzac, Hollands Rykdom, III, 212.
15 [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaet, 3, 25. On Scheels see
Kossmann, Politieke theorie in het zeventiende-eeuwse Nederland, 32–34.

16 [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaet, 30.
17 Ibidem, 52.
18 Ibidem, 52–60.
Such full liberty could obviously not be found in absolute monar-

chies, but neither in limited monarchies, in undiluted aristocracies or in
pure democracies, in which last form of government—a many headed
monster—the license of the rabble invariably ended in chaos and vio-
lence.19 Even the mixed form of government, so highly praised by com-
mentators from Polybius on, did not find an unqualified supporter in
De Beaufort. Although he was obviously sympathetic to the notion,
he wished to modify it in two respects. First of all, he deemed the
monarchical element to be unnecessary and insisted that it had been
largely absent even in the Roman Republic. Perhaps even more impor-
tantly, he suggested that good government would not result from a bal-
ance between the two remaining elements, aristocracy and democracy,
because such a balance would always remain unstable and lead to con-
flict. What was needed, he argued, was a synthesis of aristocracy and
democracy into something altogether new. The best form of govern-
ment was “not a mixture of various separate forms of government, but
a careful moderation, a mitigation and mean between the Aristocracy
and Democracy”. Fortunately, such was exactly the nature of the har-
monious States government of the Dutch Republic, built as it was on
friendship, reason, compromise and persuasion.20
In illustration of this last point, De Beaufort took the assembly of
the States of Holland and West-Frisia as an example. In this assembly,
he pointed out, not a trace of pure aristocracy was to be found, since
the noble members did not hold their seat by birthright and did not
vote in their own name. But neither was it a democracy, because the
people had no say in it. The people could nonetheless be said to be
the sovereign, since the assembly of the States represented the people,
“whereby Sovereignty ultimately rests in the bosom of the People and
may be said to belong to it as much as it formerly belonged to the
Roman People”. The crucial link between representatives and citizens
was to be located in the non-hereditary nature of the city councils,
which provided the bulk of the members of the assembly of the States,
for this meant that, contrary to the situation in for instance Genoa or
Venice, every virtuous and capable citizen could in principle become a
member of government.21 This potential accessibility of political office
had been an absolutely central topos in Dutch republican discourse since
19 Ibidem, 61–121.
20 Ibidem, 130–132, 139. The quotation is on 131.
60 chapter three
at least John de Witt’s famous Deduction of 1654.22 It served a great many

functions. During the first half of the eighteenth century, it was used
to present the regime of the regents as the perfect embodiment of
positive liberty, which in turn allowed theorists such as De Beaufort
to adopt the entire vocabulary of classical republicanism in defense of
the established order. More generally, it served as a rich source of anti-
aristocratic and anti-stadholderly sentiment.
Full republican liberty, De Beaufort pointed out, brought with it a
great number of advantages. Such liberty made people brave and intel-
lectually active, stimulated the economy, and contributed to the general
welfare by bringing about a substantial growth in population. Far from
being a bleak Spartan army camp, De Beaufort’s ideal republic was a
commercially and culturally flourishing state.23 Having briefly defined
liberty, indicated in which forms of government it could be found, and
explained its great blessings, De Beaufort was now ready to launch into
the central themes of the Treatise on Liberty in Civil Society. His real inter-
est did not lie in the exact and detailed definition of liberty, but in what
may perhaps anachronistically be termed the sociological and psycho-
logical conditions necessary for the maintenance of republican liberty.
It was to this theme, which seamlessly fitted into the mental world of
the classical republican tradition, that he devoted more than two thirds
of his lengthy text and it was here that he demonstrated his intimate
knowledge of the classical writers. The tone was one of pessimistic,
Catonic awareness of the perpetual threats to liberty, with an occasional
whiff of Ciceronian prudentia.24 The dominant model in these pages was
the decline and fall of the Roman Republic.
De Beaufort needed hundreds of pages to explain how vulnerable
liberty was. Only the most noble of peoples and only men of elevated
mind and virtue, men like Demosthenes, Cicero, Marcus Brutus and
above all Cato Uticensis were fully willing to sacrifice everything for
22 Rowen, John de Witt, 385.

23 [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaet, 144–185.
24 For the use of Catonic and Ciceronian vocabularies in English political thought
of the first half of the eighteenth century see Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas
of the Court Whigs. The use of classical models in Dutch eighteenth-century political
thought deserves systematic study. For some introductory observations see Grijzenhout
and Tuyll van Serooskerken, Edele eenvoud. Excellent treatments of this theme for other
countries may be found in Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought; Roberts,
Athens on Trial; Millar, The Roman Republic in Political Thought; Richard, The Founders and
the Classics; Sellers, American Republicanism.
it.25 Mankind in general, however, unfortunately tended to ignore its

long term self-interest by neglecting liberty, just as it tended to neglect
its health and with the same disastrous and irreversible consequences.26
To make matters even worse, liberty was exposed to the constant
assault of the forces of anti-republican propaganda and had all sorts of
dark perversities perpetrated upon it, including the abuse of the word
itself. Thus courtly politicians never ceased to claim that a monarchy
limited by law was preferable to the inevitable chaos spawned by a
many headed government, although history left it in no doubt that
the law offered no better protection against an armed monarch than
a paper harness did.27 The sly and insincere use of the name of lib-
erty was best exemplified by the rise of Augustus Caesar. De Beaufort
explained at length how Augustus, without being the formal sovereign
and without changing old names and institutions openly, gradually
amassed all power and in this refined way led the Roman people down
the road to slavery.28 The obvious parallel with the way the stadholders
in the Dutch Republic operated will not have escaped contemporary
readers.29
The loss of liberty was primarily caused by two evils already famil-
iar since the writings of Polybius: luxus and ambitio. Luxury, of course,
was one of the most frequently used categories of social and political
analysis during the eighteenth century. It was a capacious concept that
referred to much more than just a lavish material style of life. As many
commentators before him had done, De Beaufort regarded luxury as a
crippling disease, which seriously undermined the health of the social
and political body.30 Splendor and extravagance, the almost inevitable
result of riches, were “the sources from which flow all the irregularities
that ultimately lead to the destruction of liberty”.31 Luxury, first of all,
produced such avarice and rapacity that people became willing to sell,
25 [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaet, 185–225. The life of Cato
is discussed on 211–225.
26 Ibidem, 225–228.
27 Ibidem, 245–247.
28 Ibidem, 276–291. On eighteenth-century English discussions of Augustus see Wein-
brot, Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England.

29 To make matters perfectly clear, De Beaufort even referred to Augustus as “Cap-
tain General”: Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaet, 279.

30 General studies of the concept of luxury may be found in Sekora, Luxury and
Berry, The Idea of Luxury. Also see Nijenhuis, Een joodse philosophe, 104–112.
31 [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaet, 304. On the relation
between riches and luxury: ibidem, 505–506.

62 chapter three
as the citizens of Rome had done, even their liberty and therefore their
republic. Luxury corrupted political officeholders, ruined the old and
distinguished families of a country, and undermined marriage, the very
basis of society. Commerce, too, fell prey to it, because luxury made
people lazy and indolent and desirous to spend their money on worth-
less foreign trinkets. Indeed, luxury transformed the entire human per-
sonality. It made pride and haughtiness replace the sentiments of civic
equality necessary in a free government. It extinguished all feelings of
honor and virtue, promoted a voluptuous cowardice, and thus paved
the way for slavery.32
Perhaps even more destructive of the body politic than luxury was
ambitio, a concept that had also played a central role in the political
writings of Machiavelli.33 Ambition, according to De Beaufort,
ruins equality, tramples the Laws, raises people above their Fellow Citi-
zens, above the Laws, and above the Fatherland, from which arise enor-
mous irregularities, strife, discord and in the end public violence and the
rape and loss of liberty.34
Ambition, the burning desire for political self-advancement, was like a
cancer in the bosom of a free state. It completely blinded people to the
common good and made them willing to do anything that furthered
their own rise to power and greatness. There were two main types of
ambitious men. On the one hand, there were those who, like Julius
Caesar, openly flouted the law and did not shrink from the use of force;
on the other hand, there were those who, like Pompey, preferred cun-
ning schemes, deception and secret machinations. The situation to be
avoided at all cost was that someone, for instance through a combina-
tion of high birth, important offices and permanent military command,
should come to occupy a position so far above his fellow citizens, that
his ambition could no longer be bridled. That, De Beaufort pointed
out, had been one of Machiavelli’s most wise and valuable political
lessons.35
32 Ibidem, 304–348.
33 Skinner, “Machiavelli on the Maintenance of Liberty”, passim and Skinner, “The
Idea of Negative Liberty”, 208–209.
35 Ibidem, 348–382, 439–440. De Beaufort’s attitude towards Machiavelli was ambiva-
lent. Most frequently, he presented the Florentine as the author of the “wicked politics”
of Il Principe (172–173, 203–204, 234, 313–314). On the other hand, he used the Istorie
fiorentine (in French translation, 303, 528) and praised Machiavelli’s “observations on the
De Beaufort’s analysis, which awarded such a prominent place to

luxury as the almost inevitable consequence of riches and ambition as
a permanent threat, was far from smug or optimistic. Indeed, the his-
tory of the decline and fall of republics through these twin evils gave
every reason for despair.36 What was to be done to safeguard the liberty
of the Dutch Republic? Unlike the brothers De la Court, De Beau-
fort had little confidence in institutional mechanisms.37 Unlike Machi-
avelli, he expected little from the law.38 Against luxury and ambition,
laws were no more than cobwebs, easily swept away by a raised hand.39
In the end, liberty could only be maintained by the political virtue of
the regents. But were they up to it? De Beaufort observed that regents
came in three varieties. Between the two extreme poles of the truly
virtuous and the viciously ambitious regents, there was a broad mid-
dle group of honest men, possessed of good intentions, but lacking the
courage to sacrifice everything for the fatherland. In theory, this mid-
dle group should see that its duty and interest required it to cooperate
with the truly virtuous regents. In practice, however, indolence, stu-
pidity and plain fear usually prevented these men from taking sides in
conflicts between virtuous and ambitious regents. Had not Cato been
abandoned by his fellow regents in his struggle against Caesar and
Pompey? The virtuous regent was, in short, constantly engaged in a
strenuous fight to win over the middle group to the good cause.40 His
remuneration was the ingratitude of the people, for the sober message
that respect for the law and sacrifices for the common good were nec-
essary in republics, was highly unpopular.41 Indeed,
if one sees that such excellent men are abandoned by the very people
whose rights they defend, are sent into exile, are condemned to a violent
Republic” (439–441). On the Dutch reception of Machiavelli see Haitsma Mulier, Het
Nederlandse gezicht van Machiavelli.
37 The best discussion of the work of the brothers De la Court remains Haitsma
Mulier, The Myth of Venice, 120–169. De Beaufort was opposed to the introduction
of such institutions as the Greek ostracism, the Roman censorship, or the Venetian
inquisition in the Dutch Republic. He did however suggest that the high courts be
given more supervisory powers over the behavior of political officeholders: Verhandeling
van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaet, 485–500.
38 Skinner, “Machiavelli on the Maintenance of Liberty”, 8–13.
39 [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaet, 501, 526.
40 Ibidem, 232–237; 472–476.
41 Ibidem, 390–397.
64 chapter three
death, yes are even torn apart by the rabble, is that not enough to deter
everybody from the service of the Fatherland and of Liberty?42
Should not the honest regent follow the advice of Sallust and conclude
that it was best to turn his back on politics?43 The final answer was
negative. For even though the virtuous regent, surrounded as he was
by an inconstant people and a majority of cowardly or ambitious
colleagues, had an almost impossible task to perform, it was still his
duty to persevere. History would reward him, for it was not Antony,
but Cicero who lived on in the eternal memory of mankind.44
Thus De Beaufort used the whole arsenal of classical history and
political thought to demonstrate the extreme fragility of republican lib-
erty. So pessimistic was his analysis that nothing short of the miraculous
seemed capable of sustaining Dutch republican liberty. Fortunately, it
turned out that such was in fact the case, for in the very last chap-
ter of the Treatise on Liberty in Civil Society De Beaufort, in a remarkable
change of vocabulary, suddenly presented the Dutch Republic as a bul-
wark of liberty created and maintained by God’s Providence.45 It was
only through this abrupt switch from the vocabulary of civic humanism
to the idiom of Dutch Israel that De Beaufort could finally escape from
his classicist labyrinth of almost inevitable republican decline.46
3. Godly Republicanism
With the Candid Reflections on Liberty, published in 1738 and attributed

on dubious grounds to Cornelis van Bynkershoek, we definitively move
from the world of classical republicanism into that of republican the-
ology and contract.47 In an abstract argument, in which the Dutch
Republic only appears at the end, the author immediately made it plain
that liberty interpreted as a total lack of restrictions and a complete
independence had nothing to do with man’s liberty, as a reasonable
42 Ibidem, 399. The reference here, of course, is to the lynching of the brothers De
Witt in 1672, at the end of the First Stadholderless Era.

43 Ibidem, 397–399.
44 Ibidem, 415–419.
45 Ibidem, 532–578.
46 Huisman, Neerlands Israel, passim.
47 Star Numan, Cornelis van Bynkershoek, does not mention the Candid Reflections. De
Beaufort, “Een vergeten boekje”, fails to come up with sufficient proof for attribution.
creature of God, to try and fulfill the goals given in God’s creation.48
Liberty and religion, he suggested, could not exist without each other,
for irreligion turned liberty into license, whereas slavery turned religion
into superstition.49 The argument of the Candid Reflections on Liberty con-
sisted of three parts. The author first of all investigated what human
liberty originally meant. He proceeded to demonstrate that mankind
no longer enjoyed this general natural liberty and to indicate the way
to get it back. Finally, he applied this abstract theory to the situation of
the Dutch Republic.
Liberty, the author of the Candid Reflections observed, was hard to
define because it was often taken to mean the absence of something
instead of a more positive quality. In general, however, it could best be
described as the capacity of the individual to follow, without any con-
straint, the goals God had created for His world. It was only within
the context of God’s orderly creation that the notion made any sense.50
Once people recognized this with the reason they were endowed with,
they would interpret their liberty in relation to God as the attempt
to fulfill the goal of creation, to wit a life in conjunction with God,
and in relation to their fellow human beings as the attempt at harmo-
nious and disinterested cooperation.51 The greatest threat to liberty thus
interpreted was posed by what the author frequently referred to as “the
violent attacks of evil desires and prejudices” that made men into slaves
of themselves and others.52
These same evil desires were to be blamed for the fact that mankind
no longer lived in its original state of natural liberty. Like ferocious
tigers, men had ripped apart all bonds of love and were henceforth
living as chained slaves of sin. Driven by narrow and evil passions,
mankind had, with dire consequences, placed itself instead of God in
the center of things.53 Since reason had evidently been insufficient to
make people understand the goals of creation and thereby keep their
natural liberty, God had been necessitated to lead mankind back to
liberty in a different way. That way was Jesus Christ. Mankind could
only return to its original liberty if “we become a property of Christ,
who gives us the principle of our Liberty, which is the Love of God; so
48 Vrymoedige Bedenkingen over de Vryheid, 24–25.

49 Ibidem, “Opdragt aan de Liefhebbers der Vryheid”.
50 Ibidem, 7–8.
51 Ibidem, 15–51.
52 Ibidem, 32, 50.
53 Ibidem, 52–61.
66 chapter three
that we become free, as our Faith grows stronger”.54 It was only after
death, in a total union of man and God in love, that man’s original
liberty would be completely restored and even surpassed. Until that
time, everything on earth bringing man closer to this ultimate union
increased liberty. And nothing brought this union closer than the law of
love for God and for our fellow creatures.55
From all this resulted the necessity to find a form of political orga-
nization in which the love for God and for our fellow creatures would
be best realized and in which man’s perennial evil desires and passions
would be reigned in as much as possible. Such a free form of polit-
ical organization, the author of the Candid Reflections claimed, should
have three essential characteristics. The government should, first of
all, strive for nothing but the general welfare and do so by means of
love, holiness and justice. To make sure it behaved by these rules, an
earthly supervising power was necessary, because the sanctions of eter-
nity were insufficient to deter undesirable behavior.56 Such a supervis-
ing power, finally, could only lie with the people or its representatives.
Because by nature no human being had the right to rule over another
human being, the relation between government and subjects needed to
be based on a contract. The elected government promised to work for
the common good, while the electors or subjects (the author, remark-
ably enough, used these terms interchangeably) promised obedience
and respect. Should the government fail to do its work properly, the
electors could simply replace it.57 It was at this point that the author
apparently fully realized that he was dealing with explosive material,
for he assured his readers that he was aware of the dangerous nature
of his suggestions, but could see no other way to prevent the rise of
absolute power.58
The next question to be asked and answered was in which partic-
ular form of government these three essential characteristics of lib-
erty were best realized. The author of the Candid Reflections did not
even deign to discuss monarchy in this context. He equally dismissed
a hereditary aristocracy, because it was entirely lacking in mechanisms
54 Ibidem, 65.
55 Ibidem, 66–67.
56 Ibidem, 67–75.
57 Ibidem, 75–77. Man’s status as a creature of God also placed inherent limits on the
nature of the contract. Man was not allowed to entirely deliver himself into the power
of another, because such behavior would be contrary to the goal of creation.
58 Ibidem, 77–78.
to restrain the arbitrary exercise of power. He furthermore rejected a

pure democracy, on the grounds that the passions of the rabble invari-
ably turned liberty into license. Like De Beaufort, the author regarded
a pure democracy as a many headed monster. The best solution seemed
to be
such a Democratia … where not the few, but a great assembly of the best,
the wealthiest and the most virtuous Subjects represents the whole Body
of the Subjects; who have a right not only to elect the Government, but
also to make it rule by the laws and for the common welfare.59
The author still needed to explain exactly how the great assembly
could be said to represent the subjects. Where in De Beaufort’s clas-
sical republic the political career open to talent had functioned as the
guarantee of participation and adequate representation, the author of
the Candid Reflections emphasized, entirely in line with his previous argu-
ment, a formal transfer of rights. It was only on the basis of an original
free election by all subjects that the great assembly could legitimately
claim to represent the whole body politic.60
The way in which political life in the Dutch Republic was organized
was eminently suited to illustrate this general theory of republican polit-
ical legitimacy. The basis of the entire political structure was formed by
the towns, which were democratically governed by the city councils.
The author adduced Amsterdam as an example and anticipated possi-
ble criticisms of his argument by posing the question if the city council
of that town, composed as it was by cooptation, should not be called
an oligarchy. The answer was negative, for the citizens of Amsterdam,
sick and tired of the discord generated by repeated elections, had trans-
ferred their right to vote to the city council, “which is why the Council
must be regarded as elected by the Citizenry, because new members are
selected on the basis of this transfer from the Citizenry to the Council”.
Liberty and democracy would only be endangered should membership
in the city council be made hereditary. This would mean the disappear-
ance of considerations of virtue and capacity in the selection of future
members of the council and, even worse, the destruction of the right
to vote which the subjects had transferred to the council.61 The author
went on to show how the introduction of the hereditary principle in city
councils would ultimately destroy the free Dutch constitution on all lev-
59 Ibidem, 88.
60 Ibidem.
68 chapter three
els, since the entire structure was ultimately based on the maintenance
of urban democracy.62
The author of the Candid Reflections, who had taken his readers from
God’s intentions with mankind to the town hall of Amsterdam with
truly amazing speed, continued his treatise with the observation that
the stadholderate could not possibly be a part of the free constitution of
the Dutch Republic, because it was simply incompatible with liberty.63
Nobody could guarantee that capable persons would occupy hereditary
posts. Even a stadholder with extraordinary capacities, moreover, would
always be surrounded by “flatterers, impoverished noblemen, and the
bastards of the Great”, who would succeed in making him abuse his
power. That political and military power, finally, was so substantial that
it was almost impossible to resist.64 It was certainly true that abuses
could also occur in stadholderless governments, the author admitted,
but their consequences were more limited and easier to reverse. In
such a form of government, nobody had enough power to maintain his
position with force and violence. Most important issues, moreover, were
decided with unanimity of votes, so that the chance of corruption was
slim. Finally, the mutual equality of the members of government, an
equality that would rudely be disturbed by the presence of an eminent
head, meant that regents were not easily influenced, but took their own
individual decisions.65
It was clear that the inhabitants of the present free and stadholderless
Dutch Republic should count their blessings, the author of the Candid
Reflections concluded. Strangely enough, they did not seem to do so.
Indeed, the behavior of his compatriots gave the author every reason
to believe that hardly anybody was taking his republican lessons to
heart. The lavish and extravagant style of life with which they had
replaced the sobriety of their ancestors, had brought many Dutchmen
to the brink of material and spiritual bankruptcy. Such people, who
had learned to hold virtue in contempt, began to regard liberty with
62 Ibidem, 100–104.
63 Ibidem, 109. There were also no historical or legal reasons for the presence of the
stadholderate, the author claimed. In 1581, the States had taken over the powers of the
Counts and since the Counts had not been obliged to appoint stadholders before 1581,
the States were not obliged to do so after that date: ibidem, 104–106.
64 Ibidem, 106–112. The author did not deny that the temporary appointment of a
stadholder with restricted powers could be useful in emergencies, just as Rome had
derived benefits from its temporary dictators: ibidem, 110, 185.
65 Ibidem, 112–113.
disgust. To satisfy their desire for a lazy and lustful life, they clamored
for a stadholder and even for a sovereign king with a splendorous court
and a great many courtiers.66 Luxury, evidently, not only posed a mortal
threat to De Beaufort’s classical republic, but also fatally undermined
the theological and juridical republicanism expounded in the Candid
Reflections.
4. Ancient Constitutionalism
According to Pieter Geyl, the Orangist reaction to these various forms

of republican political discourse consisted of little more than superficial
“juridical, constitutional, and historical observations”.67 It is indeed true
that such matters played a prominent role in the Barge- and Yacht-
Talks published between1736 and 1738 and written by Van Itsma and
Van Burmania. In these pamphlets, composed in the familiar form
of fictitious conversations during travel on Dutch canal barges or the
larger yachts crossing the Zuyder Zee, one finds detailed legal expositions
about the marquisate of Veere and Flushing and about William Charles
Henry Friso’s right to a military appointment and a membership of
the Council of State.68 One is also repeatedly reminded of the unifying
role of the stadholderate, firmly established by the Union of Utrecht
and absolutely indispensable for the achievement of harmony among
the provinces.69 These pamphlets, finally, certainly contained lengthy
discussions of the careers of former stadholders, filled with scathing
references to the recent critical biographies of William I and Frederick
Henry by Lieven de Beaufort and Pieter le Clerq. Such historical
digressions, of course, were meant to demonstrate that the stadholders
had not been the actual or potential tyrants they were made out to
be by the shamelessly ungrateful republicans, and had never actively
sought sovereignty.70
66 Ibidem, 125–128.
67 Geyl, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Stam, III, 330.
68 E.g. [Van Burmania] Schuite-Praatje ofte Samenspraak Tusschen Drie Heeren, 1–8, 22–46.
On the various genres of early modern Dutch pamphlets see Harline, Pamphlets, Printing,
and Political Culture and De Kruif a.o., Het lange leven van het pamflet.
69 [Van Itsma] Jagt-Praatje ofte Discours tusschen een Groeninger, een Dockumer, en twee
Zeeuwze Heeren, 8–12; [Van Itsma] Jagt-Praatje, ofte Samenspraak tusschen een Leyenaar, een
Groeninger, en een Franeker, 11–13; [Van Itsma] Jagt-Praatje, ofte Discours Gehouden tusschen een
Groeninger, Amsterdammer, en Harlinger, 112–123.
70 E.g. [Van Burmania] Schuite-Praatje ofte Samenspraak Tusschen Drie Heeren, 8–12; [Van
70 chapter three
Yet beneath this superficial bickering, something more fundamental

was going on. The Orangists were, it seems, engaged in the attempt
to deny the relevance of the republican approach to politics and to
develop a viable alternative. They first of all tried to discredit the
republican use of history. De Beaufort’s humanist and classicist mode
of arguing, in which the similitudo temporum played a prominent role, was
sharply rejected by Van Itsma:
I really fail to comprehend what possesses people these days to abuse
the old and new histories … , written by the greatest men, for their own
parochial purposes, as if this would give more authority and status to
their States Government.71
The endless, often classical, historical analogies and the usually irrele-
vant foreign historical examples beloved by the republicans contributed
nothing whatsoever to a better understanding of Dutch liberty, the
Orangists maintained.72 Neither, they argued in a second line of attack,
did the republican penchant for lengthy disquisitions on the nature
of liberty. Such abstraction was both pedantic and useless. “It seems
that a Republican Author needs no knowledge of the actual History
of the Republic and that a capacity to produce some drivel about the
word Liberty suffices”, Van Itsma bitterly remarked.73 Rejecting both the
generalized use of history and theoretical abstraction, the Orangists
advocated the rehabilitation of Dutch historical and juridical prece-
dent. Indeed, so convinced were they of its importance, that they
accused their opponents of deliberately and systematically obscuring
the national past. The bought pens of republican writers, the Orangists
claimed, were doing their utmost to distort the historical truth, while
their paymasters, the republican regents, were keeping the relevant
documents under lock and key or letting them fall prey to the hungry
Burmania] Schuite-Praatje ofte Samenspraak Tusschen Vier Heeren, 3–9, 16–25; [Van Itsma]
Jagt-Praatje ofte Discours tusschen een Groeninger, een Dockumer, en twee Zeeuwze Heeren, 84–97.
The biographies referred to were [De Beaufort] Het Leven van Willem de I and [Le Clerq]
Het Leven van Frederik Hendrik.
71 [Van Itsma] Jagt-Praatje, ofte Discours Gehouden tusschen een Groeninger, Amsterdammer, en
Harlinger, 153–154.
72 E.g. [Van Itsma] Jagt-Praatje ofte Discours tusschen een Groeninger, een Dockumer, en twee
Zeeuwze Heeren, 33; [Van Itsma] Jagt-Praatje, ofte Samenspraak tusschen een Leyenaar, een
Groeninger, en een Franeker, 108–109, 121. On De Beaufort’s view of history see Schutte,
“Grondvester of belager der vrijheid?”
73 [Van Itsma] Jagt-Praatje, ofte Discours Gehouden tusschen een Groeninger, Amsterdammer, en
Harlinger, 150.
moth.74 The dramatic decline in the knowledge of Dutch history and

public law was a constant theme in the Barge- and Yacht-Talks and Ulrik
Huber, who in the late seventeenth century had called for the study of
national public law, was the favorite authority of their authors.75
This preoccupation with the importance of national historical and
legal precedent was indicative of the central tenet of Orangist politi-
cal thought in the polemics of the 1730s. That tenet is perhaps best
described as a version of what is generally known as “ancient constitu-
tionalism”.76 This early modern mode of political and historical thought
was characterized by an emphasis on the desirability of continuity and
by the conviction that every deviation from the original constitution
of a country paved the way for the ruin of the body politic. For the
Orangists, it goes without saying, the stadholderate was an integral part
of the ancient constitution.77 They conceived of liberty as the rule of
law, with the law meaning the original and ancient constitution. The
regents had no right whatsoever to make any changes in this constitu-
tion.78 Should they nonetheless decide to do so, the consequences would
be dreadful, since it was well known
that Kingdoms or States start their decline as soon as they deviate from
the solid basis on which they have been built, and put their trust in
shaky and uncertain foundations, which, as experience has taught us,
may bring down the entire edifice and turn it into a heap of rubble.79
74 [Van Itsma] Jagt-Praatje, ofte Samenspraak tusschen een Leyenaar, een Groeninger, en een
Franeker, 1–4, 87. On the accessibility of archives in the eighteenth-century Republic see
Roelvink, “‘Bewezen met authenticque stukken’”.
75 [Van Burmania] Schuite-Praatje ofte Samenspraak Tusschen Vier Heeren, “Voorreden”,
[Van Itsma] Jagt-Praatje, ofte Samenspraak tusschen een Leyenaar, een Groeninger, en een Franeker,
137–138; [Van Itsma] Jagt-Praatje, ofte Discours Gehouden tusschen een Groeninger, Amsterdammer,
en Harlinger, 76–83. On Ulrik Huber see Kossmann, Politieke theorie in het zeventiende-eeuwse
Nederland, 82–103 and Veen, Recht en nut.
76 The classic work here is Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Also see
Finley, The Ancestral Constitution.

77 On the dangers of deviation from the original constitution e.g. [Van Burmannia]
Schuite-Praatje ofte Samenspraak Tusschen Drie Heeren, 16–17. Van Itsma argued that the
often quoted saying “boni civis est, praesentem reipublicae statum tueri, eumque
mutatum nolle” actually meant that a good citizen should keep supporting the original
constitution of his country, even after changes had been made in it: Jagt-Praatje, ofte
Discours Gehiuden tusschen een Groeninger, Amsterdammer, en Harlinger, 145–149.
Franeker, 131–134.
79 [Van Itsma] Jagt-Praatje ofte Discours tusschen een Groeninger, een Dockumer, en twee
Zeeuwze Heeren, 103–104.

72 chapter three
Despite their avowed preference for national history, the Orangists

thought their point was best illustrated with a particularly gruesome
example from recent English history. During the English Civil War,
they pointed out, an assembly composed of republican fanatics had
abolished both the monarchy and the House of Lords, had thereby
destroyed the ancient constitution and had thus paved the way for
Cromwell’s unspeakable military terror.80 The scenario of doom was
always the same. Cleverly appealing to widespread and inarticulate
sentiments of liberty, ambitious politicians, above all eager to better
their own position, invariably began with suggesting that “the privileges
of a certain house or a member of Government are too big for a
free people and have to be diminished or abolished”. Having thus
mobilized the people, they subsequently, with the help of the armed
population and of the army, grabbed all power for themselves. Once
comfortably in power, they refused to make further changes, despite
all their previous libertarian promises. The Orangists were adamant in
their insistence that such harmful excesses could only be avoided by
preventing any changes in the ancient constitution and in the original
rights and privileges of every person, group, and estate in society.81
The substantial differences between republicans and Orangists in
the polemics of the 1730s may perhaps be further clarified by a brief
look at the way both sides made use of the English example. Since
the Orangists, who as we have seen generally preferred to conduct the
discussion in terms of Dutch history and public law, were willing to
Franeker, 120–124. The Orangists were convinced that the ideological origins of the
principled republicanism that had been formulated in the Dutch Republic during the
First Stadholderless Era were to be sought in England. Van Itsma observed: “It was
after the death of William II that people in our United Netherlands first started to
talk like that and began to look for new arguments to discredit Stadholderly rule as
foreign to our Government: It was in those years that a new Philosophy of Government
arrived from across the Channel, in which it was maintained that Kings were no more
than simple Ministers, of whom the people could rid itself at will, which is exactly what
the House of Commons did when it declared the Office of King to be superfluous,
inconvenient and dangerous to liberty and the House of Lords of no use; this original
power of the people was used by those who desired changes, until both Nobles and
Commoners came under the might of the sword. Applied to our country, this doctrine
simply meant that suspicion was cast on all Princes and members of eminent families
…”: Jagt-Praatje, ofte Discours Gehouden tusschen een Groeninger, Amsterdammer, en Harlinger, 111–
112.
Franeker, 132–133.
make an exception for the English case, it was here that a genuine
exchange of opinions occurred. In reaction to De Beaufort’s claim
that the monarchical element was superfluous and even harmful in
free governments, the Orangists extolled the advantages of the English
mixed monarchy. The English, the Yacht-Talks insisted, had every reason
to regard their constitution as the most natural and the most perfect.
The King as the head has all the luster and splendor of Sovereignty,
reinforced with all the Power, which enables him to protect his people in
general and to bestow his Royal favors on particular persons; his great
Council, with which he deliberates over the imposition of tributes and
other important matters concerning his Realm, is composed of all the
parts of the entire body of the State; the most Eminent of the people, the
high Nobility and the Clergy, assemble there with the proper splendor;
the lower Nobility, the Notables of the countryside, the Citizens, Schol-
ars, in a word all the communities making up a well-ordered state, are
members of Parliament, who freely expound their interests for the com-
mon good.82
In this wonderful regnum mixtum, the king was unable to violate the
rights of his subjects. Since his ministers could be brought to justice,
evil advisors would moreover never surround the king. The result of
this most happy situation was an enormous increase in England’s power
and commerce and a flourishing cultural life.83
The English example did not just demonstrate the advantages of a
mixed form of government with a strong monarchical element to the
Orangists. It also served to illustrate their central political conviction
that it was highly undesirable and extremely dangerous to change a
country’s ancient constitution. England’s greatness, they argued, was
based on the maintenance of its original constitution. This constitu-
tional continuity meant that the rights and liberties of all groups in
society found a better and more knowledgeable defense in England
than anywhere else in Europe. With an obvious, albeit implicit refer-
ence to the situation in the now stadholderless Dutch Republic, Van
Itsma pointed out that in many countries the fundamental laws were
constantly being changed by the party that happened to be in power
and that the qualification for political office was the favor of the heads
of cabals rather than relevant constitutional knowledge. In England,
however, “a Member of Parliament who does not know the History,
82 [Van Itsma], Jagt-Praatje ofte Discours tusschen een Groeninger, een Dockumer, en twee
Zeeuwze Heeren, 11–12.

83 Ibidem, 12–13.
74 chapter three
laws, old usages and customs of his Country, is a dumb, powerless and
despicable member of that assembly”.84
The republicans responded to this Orangist idolization of the English
political model with the general observation that the equation of old
with good was nonsense. Confronted with yet another Orangist appeal
to legal precedent, the author of the Candid Reflections remarked: “What
happened before is irrelevant: many things have happened in the past
that one would wish had been different”.85 De Beaufort briefly referred
to England in his discussion of what he called limited monarchical gov-
ernment. Such a form of government, he admitted, was not entirely
bad and frequently offered considerable legal security to its subjects.
The problem, however, was that in practice the balance between the
sovereignty of the crown and the rights and liberties of the people
was almost impossible to maintain and that the scale tended to tip
towards the crown. This could particularly be observed in recent times,
in which the growth of standing armies had greatly increased the power
of kings and had led to the rise of absolutism.86 The author of the Can-
did Reflections was more specific. He emphasized the differences between
England and the Dutch Republic and concluded that imitation of the
English example was to be avoided. The English king, he admitted,
was theoretically not as powerful as the kings of, for instance, France
or Denmark. He was no more than a part of the legislative power
and financially dependent upon parliament. His presence nevertheless
constituted a great danger to liberty. First of all, he could make war,
peace and alliances without prior parliamentary approval and could
thereby cause considerable damage to the country.87 Perhaps even more
important was the fact that the king, the author of the Candid Reflections
observed echoing the contemporary English opposition, had a strong
hold over parliament. Indeed, through the manipulation of elections
and the distribution of pensions and places, he could entirely corrupt
parliament and make it eat out of his hand “since there will always
be cowardly souls willing to betray Liberty for the charms of gold”.88
The House of Lords, moreover, was composed of bishops and hered-
84 [Van Itsma] Jagt-Praatje ofte Samenspraak tusschen een Leyenaar, een Groeninger, en een
Franeker, 135–137. The quotation is on 136–137.

85 Vrymoedige Bedenkingen over de Vryheid, 143.
86 [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaet, 103–115.
88 Ibidem, 184. On the views of the contemporary English opposition see Dickenson,
Liberty and Property, 163–192.

itary nobles and could therefore not be said to represent the people.
That such an institution was incompatible with true republican liberty
was of course perfectly clear.89 There were, in short, plenty of reasons
to conclude “that Liberty is much more compatible with the Constitu-
tion of our Government, than with England”.90 Thus the debate over
the English political model once again revealed the fundamental differ-
ences between republicans and Orangists during the 1730s.
5. The Debate Continues
With these treatises of the late 1730s, the energy the principled repub-
licans devoted to the defense of a stadholderless republic was far from
exhausted. In 1741, one year after Frederick the Great’s Anti-Machiavel
had been published in The Hague, a most curious work entitled Machi-
avelli Republican appeared in Utrecht.91 Largely based on J.F. Christius’s
1731 De Nicolao Machiavello Libri Tres, this treatise mainly consisted of a
critical discussion of previous commentaries on the works of Machi-
avelli from Gentillet to Frederick the Great and Voltaire.92 The anony-
mous author held up the true, republican Machiavelli as a shining
example for his readers. He sharply criticized the way in which polit-
ica was taught in Dutch universities and the lack of good books in
this field, “most of those books being filled with juridical questions
from Civil, Roman and Natural Law”.93 In 1742, an attempt was made
to revive the principled republicanism of the First Stadholderless Era
with a new translation of Rabod Scheels’s Libertas Publica.94 Thus the
battle for the stadholderless republic continued, even though the pes-
simism of the republicans increased even further in the early 1740s. The
author of the 1743 pamphlet The Virtuous Citizen, for instance, gloomily
remarked:
Disinterested Virtue is no longer in fashion. It takes a more than human
courage to deliberately sacrifice oneself for the Welfare and the Advan-
tage of the Fatherland. We leave that honor to the Old Romans … The

90 Ibidem, 176.
91 On Frederic the Great’s Anti-Machiavel see Schieder, Friedrich der Grosse, 102–126.
92 On Machiavel Republicain see Haitsma Mulier, Het Nederlandse gezicht van Machiavelli,
20–21.
93 Machiavel Republicain, 27–28.
94 Scheels, Vertoog van de gemeene Vryheid.
76 chapter three
Spirit that drove those Heroes died with them: or, if it survived anywhere
in the world … it is certainly not with Peoples addicted to Idleness and
Lust.95
Despite all doubts they entertained about the viability of their elevated
ideals, it is clear that the republicans harnessed a rich classicist and
theological-juridical vocabulary to their political cause. They thereby
succeeded in monopolizing two of the most powerful early modern
political languages. The Orangist reaction, a combination of the blunt
dismissal of the abstract discourse of their opponents with an empha-
sis on the ancient constitution, was perhaps not entirely adequate. The
ancient constitution that played such a crucial role in Orangist polit-
ical argument was, after all, quite young in the Dutch Republic. The
Orangists clearly needed to find new ways to defend their cause and
that is precisely what they did. Already in 1741, Willem van Haren
added a new dimension to their discourse by introducing the notion
of a patriot king in his Friso.96 In the 1750s, Elie Luzac’s philosophical
defense of the stadholderate would elevate Orangism to new and pre-
viously unknown levels of theoretical abstraction and sophistication.97
With that last development, however, we move into an entirely new
phase in the highly complex political debates of the Dutch eighteenth
century.
95 De Deugdelyke Burger, 8–9.

96 Van Vloten, Leven en werken van W. en O.Z. van Haren, 3–132.
97 On Luzac see Velema, Enlightenment and Conservatism in the Dutch Republic.
chapter four
POLITE REPUBLICANISM AND

THE PROBLEM OF DECLINE
1. Republican Decline
In 1779, shortly before his death, the Frisian nobleman, discredited

politician and well known poet Onno Zwier van Haren decided that
the occasion of the bicentennial of the 1579 Union of Utrecht presented
him with a unique opportunity to put his mature thoughts on the state
of the nation to paper.1 He did this in the form of a lengthy address
to those who would have to take the country into its third century: the
youth of The Netherlands.2 Van Haren’s message to the young men
and women of the late eighteenth-century Dutch Republic was rather
a bleak one. The manners and morals of the inhabitants of the Repub-
lic, he told his audience, were nothing less than disgusting. The country
had sunk into luxury, sloth and ignorance and the integrity, good faith
and love of the fatherland that had once made the nation great were
almost completely extinguished. Such complaints by old men are, of
course, familiar to all of us and can be heard through the ages. Yet
Van Haren’s admonitions were much more than a vague and unspec-
ified lament about general decline. For he continued to explain with
great exactitude both when Dutch manners and morals had reached
their apogee and when and how things had subsequently gone wrong.
It was in the second and third quarter of the seventeenth century that
the golden age (het gulden tijdperk) of Dutch national manners, morals
and religion could be located.3 These were the decades in which, after
1 The best work on Van Haren is Van der Vliet, Onno Zwier van Haren.
2 The full title of the address was Proeve van eene nationale Zedelyke Leerreeden van een oud
man aan de jeugd van Nederland over de woorden van Ezra cap. III, v. 12, ter geleegenheid van ’t begin
van de derden Eeuw van de Unie van Utrecht. It can be found in Van Vloten, Leven en werken
van W. en O.Z. van Haren, 503–521 and is briefly discussed in Van der Vliet, Onno Zwier
van Haren, 420–422.
3 Van Vloten, Leven en werken van W. en O.Z. van Haren, 513–515. The term “gulden
tijdperk” is used on 513.

78 chapter four
the miseries and violence of the Revolt, diligence and industriousness

created an unprecedented prosperity, without however corrupting pure
manners and morals. For as Jacob Cats, whom Van Haren obviously
considered to be a reliable witness to the nature of seventeenth-century
Dutch life, had shown, the potentially dangerous effects of rising wealth
were kept in check by a life-style of sobriety and simplicity, by a con-
siderable measure of social equality, and by a shared culture of the love
of freedom and of the fatherland.4 These were the days in which the
great Admiral De Ruyter, after a bloody sea battle lasting three days
and ending in a glorious victory, could be seen feeding his own chicken
and cleaning his own ship. These were also the days in which Johan de
Witt, equal in political power to the mightiest kings of Europe, could
make do, both at home and in his public appearances, with no more
than one servant.5 It was during the last quarter of the seventeenth cen-
tury that things started to take a turn for the worse. The Dutch, appar-
ently unaware of their own true greatness, suddenly and unthinkingly
began to adopt foreign manners and morals. Simplicity and sincerity
were first undermined by the introduction of French politesse, brought
into the country by the numerous Huguenot refugees from Louis XIV’s
religious persecutions. This shift in values was then further reinforced
by the presence of the luxurious and aristocratic international court of
the stadholder-king William III. Taken together, so Van Haren assured
his readers, these developments spelled the end of the golden age of
pure Dutch manners and morals, fatally undermined “the love for the
virtues of our ancestors” and thereby paved the way for the general
decline of the Dutch Republic during the eighteenth century.6
Two years after Van Haren’s pessimistic assessment of Dutch eigh-
teenth-century manners and morals as compared to those of the glo-
rious seventeenth-century golden age, the enlightened historian, civil
servant and Patriot politician Cornelis Zillesen started publishing the
six volumes of his monumental Inquiry into the Causes of the Rise, Decline
and Regeneration of the Most Important Ancient and Modern Peoples.7 Despite
its ambitious title, the work was actually largely devoted to a discus-
4 Ibidem, 513–514. Eighteenth-century interpretations of the work of Cats are dis-
cussed in Joost Kloek, “Burgerdeugd of burgermansdeugd? Het beeld van Jacob Cats
als nationaal zedenmeester” in: Aerts and Te Velde, De stijl van de burger, 106–114.
5 Van Vloten, Leven en werken van W. en O.Z. van Haren, 513.
6 Ibidem, 515–516.
7 Very little has been written about Zillesen, but see Elias, Historiographie der Bataaf-
sche Republiek, 58–69 and Eco O.G. Haitsma Mulier, “Between Humanism and Enlight-
polite republicanism and the problem of decline 79
sion of the history of the Dutch Republic. That state, Zillesen main-
tained, had without doubt reached its greatest freedom, prosperity and
glory around the middle of the seventeenth century. It was then that a
boundless energy held everyone in its grip. The spirit of industry was
general, as was perseverance in dangerous situations. No nation on the
face of the entire earth could better the mid seventeenth-century Dutch
Republic in spreading the blessings of commerce. Indeed, this free
and commercial republic had been a shining example for all monar-
chs of Europe, for it taught them where the true sources of pros-
perity and happiness were to be found: in liberty and trade instead
of in war.8 Yet a century later, this exemplary state had sunk into a
deep crisis. The seemingly inexhaustible energy of the Dutch had been
sapped by the demon of luxury. It was luxury that had caused indus-
triousness to be replaced by idleness, frugality by conspicuous con-
sumption, simplicity by French and English fashions, chastity by sexual
license, and good faith and honesty by fraud and insincerity. To under-
line his point, Zillesen sharply contrasted the morals and manners of
the eighteenth-century Dutch economic elites with those of the mer-
chants from the seventeenth-century golden age. His contemporaries,
he observed, detested work, thought of an occasional bankruptcy as no
big deal, were lavish spenders, avid followers of fashion and devotees of
French galanterie.9 How different had their direct forefathers been:
Industriousness, combined with frugality and good faith, made their
treasure-chests overflow. They earned a lot, spent little, and left a fortune
to their descendants. Their dress was distinguished but simple, their
houses were clean but without magnificence, their food was healthy, and
the one or two servants they kept were simply there for purposes of
convenience, never for show. They therefore did not have to waste money
on daily changing foreign fashions, on the construction of expensive
country houses, or on the upkeep of a throng of lackeys …10
Given the fact that Zillesen considered the commercial classes to be the
backbone of the country, this stark and dramatic decline of their morals
and manners since the middle of the seventeenth century boded ill for
the future of the entire Dutch Republic.
enment: The Dutch Writing of History” in: Jacob and Mijnhardt, The Dutch Republic in
the Eighteenth Century, 184–186.
8 E.g. Zillesen, Onderzoek der Oorzaaken, III, 254–261, 315–316.
9 Ibidem, VI, 84–90.
10 Ibidem, 85–86.
80 chapter four
Seven years after Zillesen completed his account of the history of

the Dutch Republic, the Utrecht theologian, preacher and reformer
Ysbrand van Hamelsveld added his distinctive voice to the chorus of
complaint about the decline of the Dutch Republic.11 In 1791, he pub-
lished his well-known work The Morals and Manners of the Dutch Nation
at the End of the Eighteenth Century. It took him close to six hundred
pages to dissect, diagnose and damn the moral state of the Dutch.
Van Hamelsveld’s work is quite remarkable for its comprehensiveness
and unrelenting pessimism. The author finds himself unable to dis-
cover even a single ray of light in the late eighteenth-century Republic.
The combined effects of luxury and the imitation of foreign, particu-
larly French, examples had fatally undermined the old Dutch repub-
lican virtues. Almost nothing was left of those ancestral morals and
manners that had made the country reach such enormous heights dur-
ing the seventeenth century. “Alas!”, the author desperately exclaimed
halfway through his work, “the old glory of the Netherlands is no more.
The Netherlands can no longer be found in the Netherlands”.12 Van
Hamelsveld exhaustively discussed every aspect of eighteenth-century
Dutch life, from the domestic to the political. His list of the ancestral
virtues that had been lost was almost endless and included industri-
ousness, moderation, frugality, diligence, simplicity, modesty, religiosity,
sincerity, generosity, tolerance, the love of republican liberty and equal-
ity and patriotism. The ruthless pursuit of self-interest seemed to have
entirely superseded the republican esprit publique of former days. Indeed,
it was hard to see how such an utterly degenerated nation could survive
at all. “I can only conclude”, Van Hamelsveld summed up his argu-
ment,
that the manners and morals in our fatherland are corrupt and that this
corruption, whatever one may do to try to reverse it, will inevitably ruin
the country, unless the people, in whose power it is to save the fatherland
from its fall, suddenly and on the brink of total ruin, becomes wise and
ends this sheer madness.13
All these three late eighteenth-century authors, it is obvious, shared a
common discourse. Despite their considerable differences, the conser-
vative and aristocratic poet Van Haren, the enlightened historian Zille-
sen and the reformist preacher Van Hamelsveld were all deeply worried
11 On Van Hamelsveld see Van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland, 255–263.

12 Van Hamelsveld, Zedelyke Toestand, 309.
13 Ibidem, 309–310.
about the decline in morals and manners they seemed to be witnessing

in the late eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. As a point of compari-
son for their own times, all three no longer primarily chose the distant
Batavian past, as many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutchmen
had done, but the middle decades of the Dutch seventeenth-century.14
This era, they were convinced, was the true golden age of Dutch morals
and manners. It was a glorious period of commercial prosperity, per-
sonal integrity and republican public virtue that should serve present
and future generations as a shining example to be imitated and, if pos-
sible, returned to.
From a present day point of view, one could say that these authors
replaced the Batavian myth with the myth of the seventeenth century.
For to us, of course, the stark and absolute contrast these writers drew
between the utter bliss of the seventeenth century and the deep corrup-
tion of the eighteenth century is no longer credible. We have, on the
one hand, learned to see the polite and prosperous Dutch eighteenth
century in a much more positive light than many contemporaries or
even nineteenth-century historians did. Perhaps not, as the great Johan
Huizinga once suggested, as the true golden age in Dutch history, but
certainly as a period of enlightenment, cultural sociability and, in its
last decades, beneficial and much needed political reform.15 We are, on
the other hand, no longer able to see the Dutch seventeenth century
as a time of unambiguous greatness. To view the period between, let
us say, the beheading of Oldenbarnevelt and the public lynching of the
brothers De Witt, with all its raw capitalism, ruthless imperialism, inter-
national warfare and religious strife in an entirely rosy light strikes us as
absurdly one sided and therefore unacceptable.16 Perhaps modern his-
torical scholarship, always highly critical and deeply distrustful of facile
retrospective constructs, is simply no longer able to apply terms such
as greatness, let alone moral greatness, to entire historical eras. How-
ever that may be, the fact remains that this is exactly what the authors
14 On the use of the Batavian past during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
see Schöffer, “The Batavian Myth”; Van der Woud, De Bataafse hut; Haitsma Mulier,
“De Bataafse mythe opnieuw bekeken”; Teitler, De opstand der “Batavieren”.
15 Huizinga, “Nederland’s beschaving in de zeventiende eeuw”, 507. The rehabili-
tation of the Dutch eighteenth century began during the 1970s and has now found a
monumental synthesis in Kloek and Mijnhardt, 1800. Blauwdrukken voor een samenleving.
16 Recent interpretations of the Dutch seventeenth-century “golden age” include
Schama, The Embarrasment of Riches; Frijhoff and Spies, 1650. Bevochten eendracht; Prak,
Gouden Eeuw; Van Deursen, De last van veel geluk.
82 chapter four
whose works we have so far discussed did. The questions we therefore

now have to pose are: where, when and how did this powerful notion
of a seventeenth-century golden age, so dominant in late eighteenth-
century Dutch public discourse, originate? And what purpose did it
serve for its creators?
2. Justus van Effen’s Polite Republicanism
The answers to these questions, it will be argued in the remaining

part of this chapter, are to be found in a genre of periodical writing
that played a dominant role in Dutch public discourse during most
of the eighteenth century: the so-called Spectatorial literature. This
genre, modeled on the famous early eighteenth-century English exam-
ples of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, was exceptionally popular
in eighteenth-century Protestant Europe and is notoriously difficult to
characterize. Usually appearing weekly and generally written by anony-
mous authors, the eighteenth-century Spectators provided a running
normative commentary on virtually every aspect of contemporary life.
The great initiator of this form of periodical literature in the Dutch
Republic was Justus van Effen, whose Hollandsche Spectator appeared in
three hundred and sixty issues between 1731 and 1735. Van Effen’s pio-
neering work was followed by dozens of other Dutch Spectators over
the next decades, bearing attractive and intriguing titles such as The
Dutch Philosopher, The Thinker, The Cosmopolitan or Citizen of the World, Con-
tributions to Human Happiness and The Cheerful Moralist.17 It was in these
Dutch Spectators that the notion of the seventeenth-century as a golden
age of Dutch manners and morals was first created and elaborated.
To understand the purpose and function of that notion, it is essential
that we first determine what main issue the Spectators were trying to
address.
In Dutch historiography, it is a widely accepted view that the Spec-
tatorial writings of the eighteenth century should be read as a nonpo-
litical genre aimed at the moral education of a specific social group:
17 On Dutch spectatorial writing see Hartog, De spectatoriale geschriften; Buynsters,
Spectatoriale geschriften and Sturkenboom, Spectators van Hartstocht. A selection of texts has
been published in Sturkenboom, Verdeelde Verlichting. There remains an urgent need for a
comprehensive study of Dutch spectatorial writing, comparable to Martens’s standard
work about the genre in the German speaking world, Die Botschaft der Tugend.
the rising middle class or bourgeoisie.18 Yet such an interpretation of these

texts is hard to sustain. It is, in the first place, extremely difficult to iden-
tify anything resembling a rising middle class during the Dutch eigh-
teenth century.19 Perhaps even more important, however, is the fact that
much of the content of the Spectatorial literature seems to point in an
altogether different direction. It is Simon Schama, frequently maligned
by Dutch historians, who deserves credit for drawing our attention to a
fundamental feature of Dutch public discourse during the seventeenth
and the eighteenth centuries that is highly relevant for a proper under-
standing of the Spectatorial message. In the introduction to The Embar-
rassment of Riches, his wide-ranging study of Dutch seventeenth-century
culture published in 1987, he quite rightly points out that, contrary to
what is generally supposed, “at the center of the Dutch world was a
burgher, not a bourgeois. There is a difference, and it is more than a
nuance of translation. For the burgher was a citizen first and homo oeco-
nomicus second”.20 Later on in the book he emphatically states that “the
sensibility that joined Dutch men and women in a common feeling for
family, nation, freedom and material comfort was civic in the classi-
cally republican sense”.21 Although Schama does not do as much with
this observation as one might have wished, his point is nonetheless cru-
cially important. For it refers to the centrality in early modern Dutch
discourse of the long tradition, starting with Aristotle, of defining the
citizen as a member of a koinonia politike or societas civilis, terms that were
translated into Dutch as burgerstaat.22 It was the definition of the burger
not as a bourgeois but primarily as a member of a political community or
a res publica that dominated Dutch public discourse in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries and that forms the key to understanding the
central message and the main political intention of Dutch Spectatorial
writing.
Indeed, it may be claimed without exaggeration that the Dutch
Spectatorial writers of the eighteenth-century were first and foremost
republican theorists. Far from being apolitical moralists writing for
a burgerij in the social sense of the word, their main concern was a
18 Buijnsters, Spectatoriale geschriften, passim.

19 E.g. Kloek, “De lezer als burger”.
20 Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, 7.
21 Ibidem, 568.
22 Important general studies of the historical development of concept of citizenship
include Riesenberg, Citizenship in the Western Tradition; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment;
Koselleck and Schreiner, Bürgerschaft; Smith, Civic Ideals; Kloek and Tilmans, Burger.
84 chapter four
deeply political one: the education of the republican citizen.23 Justus

van Effen’s Hollandsche Spectator abounded with references to the burger
as a “good member of Civil Society” or a “dignified member of the
Commonwealth”.24 The Nederlandsche Spectator, appearing around the
middle of the century, wrote about and for “free citizens”, whose only
recognized master was the law.25 And the author of the late eighteenth-
century De Borger clarified his main theme with the following revealing
words:
When I speak about making good borgers out of our countrymen, it
should be evident that I am not using the word BORGER in contradis-
tinction to the nobleman, the farmer, the soldier or the clergyman, but
that the word means a member of civil society in general; and in that
sense it contains the nobleman, the regent, the farmer, the soldier, the
clergyman, the merchant and everybody else, because everybody is a
member of civil society… Were I writing in French, I would simply call
my publication Le Citoïen, and all ambiguity would vanish.26
But what exactly was it that these Spectatorial authors had to add to
the long tradition of theorizing about citizenship already to be found
in the classical republican tradition? In a word: the cultural dimension.
Classical republicanism, as it had resurfaced in Europe since the Italian
Renaissance and as it was still manifesting itself in the early eighteenth-
century Dutch Republic in for instance the work of Lieven de Beaufort,
was obsessed with the trinity of liberty, public virtue and corruption,
but showed relatively little interest in sustained reflection on the role of
culture in the maintenance of republican liberty.27 The Dutch Specta-
tors, on the other hand, evinced an overwhelming interest in what may
be described as the cultural dimension of citizenship. The central Spec-
tatorial message was that the basis of a free political community was to
be found in sociability, in open and civilized communication between,
relatively equal, educated, and virtuous citizens. The Spectatorial aim,
in other words, was the creation of polite republicans. “Culture”, in
Nicholas Philipson’s formulation, “was to be the mother of citizenship
in a genteel Spectatorial polity”.28 That such a project cannot possibly
23 The political reading of Dutch Spectatorial writings here suggested has recently
found support in Hietbrink, “De deugden van een vrije republiek” and Okel, Der Bürger,
die Tugend und die Republik.
24 Van Effen, Hollandsche Spectator, II, part 2, 578, 660.
25 De Nederlandsche Spectator, V, 35.
26 De Borger, I, 5.
27 On De Beaufort see Chapter Three.
28 Phillipson, Hume, 27.
be characterized as apolitical is quite clear. More interesting, therefore,

is the question of the intellectual provenance of this Spectatorial cul-
tural politics.
It was during the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century
that a potential threat to virtuous republican citizenship emerged in
the form of a powerful new cultural ideal. This, of course, was French
politesse. Politesse was a notion of great complexity. It referred to a refined
and elegant form of behavior that was pleasing to others, a capacity
for smooth and cultured conversation, a stylish presentation of the self.
Politesse was a social virtue: it was acquired and developed in the com-
pany of others. Its centers were the royal court, the academy and the
salon. The concept of politesse could, moreover, also be applied to soci-
eties as a whole and signify something close to civilization. In this last
sense politesse became the final stage of a historical development that
started with barbarism and thus a central category in the eighteenth-
century discourse on the progress of society.29 Outside France, reactions
to this new ideal of politesse widely diverged. It was, of course, possi-
ble to reject it completely and to depict it as a notion spawned by and
appropriate to monarchical absolutism. To make a people polite, one
Dutch Spectatorial author observed as late as 1753, was synonymous
with making it fit for slavery.30 Such outright and total rejection, how-
ever, was hard to maintain in the light of the broad European diffusion
of the concept and its association with the notion of the progress of soci-
ety. A much more fruitful approach, therefore, was to attempt to detach
the concept from its courtly and absolutist connotations. This process
has been studied in some depth for England, where authors such as
Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison
and Richard Steele transformed courtly politesse into politeness, an ide-
alized form of human intercourse, in the words of Lawrence Klein, that
was thought to contribute to the maintenance of liberty and virtue.31
A similar development occurred in the Dutch Republic in the first half
of the eighteenth-century There, the Spectators set out to make the
powerful French ideal of politesse fit for use in a free republic. They
attempted to develop what Peter France in a felicitous phrase has called
29 France, Politeness and Its Discontents; Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty.

30 De Nederlandsche Spectator, V, 33–40.
31 Klein, “The Political Significance of ‘Politeness’”, 76. See also Klein, Shaftes-
bury and the Culture of Politeness; Phillipson, “Politeness and Politics”; Burtt, Virtue Trans-
formed.
86 chapter four
“politeness for the polis”.32 How they did this may be seen in the work
of Justus van Effen, whom we have already met as the paradigmatic
Dutch Spectatorial author.33
In Van Effen’s Hollandsche Spectator, the concept of politeness (beschaaft-
heid in Dutch) played a key role. Van Effen used it in a number of differ-
ent ways. In the first place, he described the Dutch Republic as clearly
belonging to a select company of “polite nations” or “polite peoples”
and as being as far removed from barbarism as possible: politeness, in
short, as the highest stage in the progress of society.34 At the same time,
however, Van Effen mounted a full-scale and frontal attack on French
politesse. This, he claimed, was an ideal characterized by an objection-
able emphasis on social distinctions, a total hypocrisy in human com-
munication, a disgusting dependence on the whims of fashion, an exag-
gerated attention for outward appearances, and a general effeminacy.
Van Effen made it abundantly clear that such a false notion of polite-
ness, although it might be fit for an absolutist monarchy, could have no
place in a free commonwealth.35 Indeed, he considered a man mod-
eling himself on French politesse to be the exact opposite of a virtuous
republican citizen. Again and again he ridiculed the notion that Dutch-
men should change their behavior along these lines, and again and
again he warned that this would sap the foundations of republican lib-
erty. Nothing good for society could be expected from effeminate fops
who spent hours at their dressing table in order to perfect the latest
fashionable hairdo.
Can a head that spends so much time and effort on external embellish-
ment be expected to contain anything on the inside? Can one expect
elevated thoughts and feelings, manly ambition, a taste for true wisdom,
an inclination for heroic deeds from a mind that has become effeminate
and used to childish cowardice and trivial pursuits? Will such fops, who
play with themselves as if they were dolls, become enlightened and indus-
trious servants of the state or tough, hard, and courageous soldiers? Of
course not. I am convinced that, had coiffure been as popular with our
Forefathers as it is with us, our Religion and liberty would have been
long gone.36
32 France, Politeness and Its Discontents, 53–73.

33 The definitive biography of Van Effen is Buijnsters, Justus van Effen.
34 Van Effen, Hollandsche Spectator, I, part 1, 115, 148.
35 On the distiction between false and true politeness: ibidem, I, part 1, 291–302, 338–
348; part 2, 362–372.

36 Ibidem, I, part 2, 459. On gender stereotypes in Dutch Spectatorial writing see
Sturkenboom, Spectators van de Hartstocht.

To combat the French ideal of politesse effectively, Van Effen devel-

oped his own notion of true politeness, cleverly incorporating some ele-
ments from politesse and giving them a republican turn. What kind of
being was Van Effen’s virtuous and polite citizen? In essence, he—for it
was always a he—could be defined as someone who tried to be useful
to civil society in every aspect of his behavior. To achieve this lofty goal,
he had to be hard working, sincere, sociable, reasonable and virtuous.
Van Effen’s citizen was religious, but his religion was “manly, genteel
and Philosophical”, free from both the superstition and the enthusi-
asm that had wreaked such havoc in the past.37 Philosophical religion
and social virtue were almost synonymous: true religion proved itself
“in the company of people” and an “upright Christian” could sim-
ply be defined as “an honest man”.38 Not only religion, but philoso-
phy also had to serve a clear and practical purpose. Van Effen’s citi-
zen was advised to shun the metaphysics and meaningless abstractions
“of so-called Philosophers, who argue like the Inhabitants of a Platonic
Commonwealth and who raise their thoughts, so to speak, above the
limits of humanity”.39 It was much better to strive for knowledge that
was directly related to social reality. In order to acquire such practical
knowledge and to make himself useful for society, the citizen had to
be sociable and had to involve himself in constant conversation with
his fellow-citizens. “Without sociability”, Van Effen observed, “thought
becomes dull”.40 Indeed, few activities—here we have a theme clearly
derived from French politesse—were more despicable than the isolated
and antiquarian accumulation of useless knowledge.41
Above all, however, Van Effen’s citizen had to distrust both arbitrary
authority and the whims of fashion.42 He could do so by constantly
sharpening his reason through sociability. This, of course, could only be
achieved in a “Commonwealth, composed of free people”, where the
citizens were neither the “born slaves of a single man, under whose
rule they … lead a wretched and uncertain life” nor subjected to
an all powerful clergy, and where everybody could think, speak and
write freely.43 Citizens who used their reason under such circumstances
37 Van Effen, Hollandsche Spectator, I, part 2, 481.

38 Ibidem, I, part 2, 483 and II, part 1, 216.
39 Ibidem, I, part 1, 91.
40 Ibidem, III, part 2, 473.
41 Ibidem, I, part 2, 463–466.
42 Ibidem, I, part 1, 236 and II, part 1, 131–132.
43 Ibidem, I, part 2, 699 and III, part 2, 424.
88 chapter four
would effortlessly get acquainted with “the sweetest and most pleasant
friend of reason”: virtue.44 They would learn to discern the value of
humanity, simplicity and honesty. They would come to realize that
actions contributing to the good of society could be called virtuous and
they would therefore always attempt to act for the common good.45 In
doing so, they would demonstrate “true politeness”, which really was
synonymous with civic duty and republican virtue.46
Van Effen of course realized that his efforts to combat courtly and
absolutist French politesse and to offer polite republican citizenship as
an alternative would greatly gain in persuasive power if he could show
that the polite republican society he so highly recommended was viable
in real life and not just a philosophical utopia. He therefore needed
an authoritative historical example, familiar to his Dutch readership.
Both classical antiquity and the Batavian past, the traditional sources
of inspiration for the Dutch republican historical imagination, were
unsuitable for this purpose, for polite republicanism had to be pre-
sented as the highest stage in the progress of society. Neither the hon-
est yet rude manners and morals of the distant Batavian forefathers,
nor the austere pre-commercial virtue of classical antiquity could quite
serve this purpose. Fortunately, there was an easy and obvious solu-
tion at hand. For Van Effen could effortlessly project his ideal of the
polite republic back onto the Dutch seventeenth century. It was, indeed,
Van Effen who may largely be held responsible for inventing the Dutch
seventeenth-century as a golden age of the morals and manners appro-
priate to the modern commercial republic. It was then, so he argued,
that honesty, simplicity, industriousness, frugality, practical religiosity,
relatively egalitarian sociability, and a ubiquitous readiness to further
the common good, or republican virtue, had created a paradise of
political freedom and economic prosperity. It was the fatal combina-
tion of the old evil of luxury and, above all, the modern evil of false
French politesse that had brought this blissful situation to an end, that
had undermined the “national manners, liberty, and free and equal
way of life” of the Dutch and that had thus landed the Republic in its
eighteenth-century predicament.47

47 Ibidem, III, part 2, 480.
3. A New Orthodoxy
Van Effen finished publishing his Hollandsche Spectator in 1735 and died
the same year. But his innovative and original analysis of the dan-
gers of French politesse, of the blessings of virtuous citizenship, and of
Dutch seventeenth-century society as the embodiment of true republi-
can politeness would have a very long life. These were the materials out
of which, in the course of the eighteenth-century, subsequent Spectato-
rial writers were to fashion a full-blown myth of absolute contemporary
decline and of seventeenth-century greatness and perfection in morals
and manners. Perhaps that myth reached its most perfect expression
in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, when Dutch Specta-
torial writing reached its apogee and when the appearance of Mon-
tesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, immensely popular in the United Provinces,
had given Dutch commentators interested in the fundamental differ-
ences between the morals and manners of monarchies and those of
republics new food for thought.48 In the mid-century Nederlandsche Spec-
tator, published in Leyden in three hundred and twelve issues between
1749 and 1760, it had at any rate evidently reached full maturity.49 Let
us therefore, in conclusion, briefly look at the way this Spectator dis-
cussed the topic. Although the anonymous writer of the Nederlandsche
Spectator did not deny all merit to the eighteenth century and showed
a vivid awareness of the fact that nostalgia for an idealized past and
dissatisfaction with the behavior of the younger generation were phe-
nomena of all ages, he was nonetheless of the opinion that there was
reason for grave concern about contemporary Dutch morals and man-
ners. Prosperity was dwindling, honesty, good faith and sincerity had
been replaced by hypocrisy and fraud, and status consciousness and
hierarchical thinking had been substituted for republican virtue and
equality. All this had come about, in the first place, because of that
age old threat to healthy republics: luxury. Its devastating effects were
particularly evident in the behavior of the backbone of the nation, the
commercial classes. Abandoning frugality, prudence and honest trade,
they had given themselves over to frivolity and ridiculous extravagance.
They nowadays shamelessly and conspicuously showed off their great-
ness with splendid mansions, costly furniture, noble silver tableware
48 On the Dutch reception of Montesquieu see Chapter Five.

49 On the Nederlandsche Spectator see Van de Klashorst, “De Nederlandsche Specta-
tor”.
90 chapter four
and excessive dinners served by veritable armies of servants, all to the

ruin of their formerly solid and impeccable businesses.50 But what was it
that made these and other Dutchmen so susceptible to luxury? It was,
of course, the pernicious influence of French politesse. The author of the
Nederlandsche Spectator never tired of pointing out that it was the inappro-
priate imitation of the French example that was causing the decline of
Dutch morals and manners. Instrumental in this development had been
the influx of French refugees from Louis XIV’s persecutions, for they,
despite their sad fate at the hands of an absolute king, had in the end
never been able to shed their slavish and hierarchical monarchical men-
tality.51 Following the dictates of French politesse might have started with
seemingly innocent matters such as fashion, but it had gradually spread
to all areas of life. By undermining egalitarian manners, sincere and
honest sociability and the virtuous willingness to sacrifice self-interest
to the common good, so the Nederlandsche Spectator assured its readers,
French politesse was slowly corrupting the republican core of the Dutch
nation. It was absolutely imperative that this process be brought to an
immediate halt, for otherwise the nation was doomed. Indeed, without
a drastic reversal in morals and manners, it would only be a matter of
time before the Dutch Republic would turn into an absolute and arbi-
trary monarchy, with neither laws nor justice, and formerly free repub-
lican citizens would be forced to spend their wretched lives in miserable
and humiliating slavery.52 What was quite unprecedented in all this, the
author of the Nederlandsche Spectator emphasized, was the fact that Dutch
liberty was not threatened by internal force or external violence, as had
been the case in the past, but by a cultural process. “Sheer madness!”,
he desperately wrote,
what Emperor Charles V and his son Philip cunningly undertook in order
to ruin and dominate our country … , we now do ourselves, without
being forced by anyone, and that only to imitate a people that has,
without even noticing it, been tricked into slavery.53
Yet although the situation was bleak, it was far from hopeless. The only
thing the Dutch had to do was to come to their senses and realize that
French politesse was in all respects inferior to the exemplary republican
morals and manners of their ancestors. In suggesting this course of
50 De Nederlandsche Spectator, VI, 33–40 and VIII, 193–200.

51 E.g. ibidem, II, 150–152 and IV, 207.
52 Ibidem, V, 33–40.
53 Ibidem, V, 38.
action to his readers, the author of the Nederlandsche Spectator made it

perfectly clear that he was not referring to some unspecified distant
past, but to the seventeenth century. It was the situation of less than
a century ago that should serve as the example to be imitated. “If
our Fathers could rise from the grave”, he wrote in 1754, “and could
observe the changes that have occurred since their time in style of life,
sociability and manners, … they would think they were in a different
part of the world”.54 And by fathers, he added, he meant those living
seventy or eighty years ago.55 To save themselves, therefore, all the
Dutch had to do was to return to the morals and manners of their
recent past and turn themselves, once again, into virtuous republican
citizens.
The analysis of Dutch decline in morals and manners offered by the
mid eighteenth-century Nederlandsche Spectator and other similar Spec-
tatorial publications was of a powerful simplicity. Van Effen’s subtle
and sophisticated efforts of the 1730s to develop a distinction between
the false and empty politesse of French monarchical society and the
true politeness of rational and virtuous republican sociability had soon
hardened into an orthodoxy: the country was on the brink of ruin,
the misguided imitation of French courtly politesse was to blame, and a
return to the truly polite republican morals and manners of the recent
seventeenth-century golden age was the only way out. Exactly this same
analysis, we are now in a position to recognize, could still be found at
the very end of the eighteenth-century in the work of Onno Zwier van
Haren, Cornelis Zillesen and Ysbrand van Hamelsveld. The demise of
the myth of the Dutch seventeenth-century in this particular political
form was only brought about by the fall of the Dutch republican ancien
régime. The golden light in which the eighteenth century had viewed
its recent past, however, continued to shine and would soon make the
myth of the seventeenth century return in different ways.56
54 Ibidem, VI, 33.

55 Ibidem, VI, 34.
56 Blaas, Geschiedenis en nostalgie, 42–60; Grijzenhout en Veen, De gouden eeuw in perspec-
tief ; Wiskerke, De waardering voor de zeventiende-eeuwse literatuur.

chapter five
REPUBLICAN READINGS OF MONTESQUIEU:

THE ESPRIT DES LOIS IN THE DUTCH REPUBLIC
In the Dutch Republic, even the dead discussed Montesquieu. Thus, in

the anonymous pamphlet Dialogues in the Realm of the Dead, published in
1783, stadholder William IV tries to defend the behavior of his famous
predecessor William III against a negative assessment by Johan Hop,
chief treasurer of the Union from 1753 to 1769. When Hop claims that
William III ruthlessly suppressed Dutch liberty, William IV counters
by quoting Montesquieu on the occasional necessity, in extraordinary
circumstances, of giving great power to a single republican magistrate.
This, he adds, is what the Roman dictatorship was all about. Hop,
who conveniently carries the Esprit des Lois around in his pocket in the
realm of the dead, immediately replies that the comparison with Rome
is utterly misplaced, since Montesquieu had stressed that great power
had to be accompanied by brevity of tenure. William III, however, had
been appointed for life. Much more to the point in judging the position
of the stadholder-king, Hop continues, is yet another observation from
the great Montesquieu:
In a republic the sudden rise of a citizen to extraordinary power pro-
duces monarchy, or more than monarchy. Under monarchical govern-
ment, the laws have provided for, or been accommodated to the con-
stitution; the very principle of government checks the ruler. But when
a citizen of a republic gains extraordinary power, the damage done is
greater, because being unanticipated by the law, there exists no way of
checking it.1
The above exchange of opinions, although admittedly conducted in
somewhat unusual circumstances, may serve to illustrate the wide-
spread use made of Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, first published in 1748,
1 Zamenspraken in het Ryk der Dooden, 45–46. The Montesquieu quotation is from the
Esprit des Lois, book II, chapter 3. All direct quotations from the Esprit des Lois in this
chapter are based on the Pléiade edition of Montesquieu’s Oeuvres complètes, edited by
Roger Caillois. For the English translation I have, in some cases, made use of Richter,
The Political Theory of Montesquieu.
94 chapter five
by representatives of all political persuasions in the Dutch Republic. It

is, indeed, no exaggeration to claim that Montesquieu was among the
most popular foreign political theorists of the second half of the century
in that country. Yet despite the fact that this popularity has repeatedly
been remarked upon by later historians, there still is a remarkable
lack of research on Montesquieu’s Dutch impact.2 It is the purpose
of the present chapter to explore this topic and thereby to further
our understanding of the development of Dutch political thought in
the later eighteenth century. In the first section, I shall discuss the
formal reception of the Esprit des Lois and some of the interpretative
problems that inevitably arise in any attempt to study the impact of a
complex political treatise. The second section will deal with the ways
in which the Dutch interpreted Montesquieu’s masterpiece in the light
of their own republican experience. The third and final section will
provide a sketch of the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary uses of
Montesquieu in the years of political upheaval after 1780.
1. The Dutch Reception of the Esprit des Lois
Throughout the eighteenth century the Dutch republic remained one

of Europe’s most important centers of printing and publishing. Most
of the books and periodicals published in the French language were
primarily destined for the export trade. The fact that in the third
quarter of the century at least six French editions of the Esprit des
Lois were published in Amsterdam alone therefore tells us very little
about the Dutch reception of the book.3 What it does suggest, however,
is that it was readily available to the contemporary bilingual Dutch
elite-readership, well versed in both French and Dutch. The Boekzaal
der Geleerde Waerelt, a prominent review journal, immediately drew the
attention of a wide Dutch readership to Montesquieu’s work by devot-
ing no less than thirty-eight pages to it.4 That the Esprit des Lois was
2 E.g. Colenbrander, Patriottentijd, I, 70; Gobbers, Rousseau in Holland, 71–72 and
236; Leeb, Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution, 179. There are two brief and
unsatisfactory articles about Montesquieu in the Dutch Republic: Fockema Andreae,
“Montesquieu en Nederland” and Bosch, “Quelques remarques sur l’influence de
l’Esprit des Loix”.
3 Bosch, “Quelques remarques sur l’influence de l’Esprit des Loix”, 381.
4 Maandelyke Uittreksels, of Boekzaal der Geleerde Waerelt, 69 (1749) 568–588 and 70 (1750)
57–75.
republican readings of montesquieu 95
widely bought and read in French during the first decades after its
original appearance is not only evident from the holdings of Dutch
private libraries, but also from the observations of one of the review-
ers of the first Dutch translation of the book, published in Amster-
dam between 1771 and 1773.5 What was the use, he wondered, of a
translation of this already highly familiar and justly famous treatise? It
had been in the hands of erudite and civilized Dutchmen for decades
and for a very simple reason. “Among these distinguished people, there
are very few unable to read French, since learning French and a good
education are nowadays thought of as synonymous”. There was, he
however admitted, a remote possibility that there were some Dutch-
men left who were intelligent enough to understand Montesquieu, yet
unable to read French. For such people, the translation might be of
use.6 The Dutch booksellers were apparently untouched by such scep-
ticism about the commercial viability of a Dutch version of the Esprit
des Lois and signed up for it in considerable numbers.7 The Dutch peri-
odical press, too, welcomed the initiative and regarded this new Dutch
edition as a proper opportunity once again to expound the contents
of the book, even though it was generally agreed that the quality of
the translation was rather poor.8 Continued demand and dissatisfaction
with the quality of the first translation led Dirk Hoola van Nooten—a
Schoonhoven magistrate, the Dutch translator of Condillac and Adam
Smith, and himself the author of a number of moral, juridical, and
political treatises—to produce a second translation. It was published in
Amsterdam between 1783 and 1787.9 Not only did Hoola van Nooten
retranslate the Esprit des Lois, he also added a substantial commen-
tary of his own. He thereby became the second Dutch author to do
so, for already in 1759 the prolific Leyden publisher and publicist Elie
5 Montesquieu, De Aart der Wetten. The translator is unknown. On Montesquieu in
Dutch libraries see Gobbers, Rousseau in Holland, 71.

6 De Regtsgeleerde, 5 (1771) 185.
7 See the list of subscribers contained in volumes one and two of the Aart der Wetten.
8 De Regtsgeleerde, 5 (1771) 185–195; Nieuwe Vaderlandsche Letter-Oefeningen, 5 (1771, part
one) 333–338; Hedendaagsche Vaderlandsche Letter-Oefeningen, 1 (1772, part one) 220–226 and
3 (1774, part one) 223–227.
9 Montesquieu, De Geest der Wetten. Van Nooten’s translation was reviewed in Alge-
meene Vaderlandsche Letter-Oefeningen, 6 (1784, part one) 331–334 and Nieuwe Algemeene Vader-
landsche Letter-Oefeningen, 1 (1786, part one) 162–166, 365–371, 544–550 and 2 (1787, part
one) 152–154.
96 chapter five
Luzac had done the same, albeit in French.10 Both Dutch translations
contained Luzac’s “philosophical and political observations” on Mon-
tesquieu.
The above would seem to be enough to establish that the Dutch
reader had easy access to the Esprit des Lois, be it in French or in
Dutch. The elaborate and favorable reviews and the appearance of
two major commentaries moreover testify to the fact that, as in other
countries, the book was thought to be highly important. Interpreta-
tive problems arise, however, as soon as an attempt is made to be
more specific and more exact about its influence on Dutch public dis-
course. Although it is quite easy to find literally hundreds of contem-
porary statements bearing a strong resemblance to passages from the
Esprit des Lois, it frequently remains unclear what their actual source
is. Many of them may equally well have come from the work of such
popular authors as Bielfeld, Justi, or Robertson. This problem can, of
course, simply be circumvented by focusing on those passages where
it is more or less evident that Montesquieu is directly quoted or dis-
cussed. But what does a direct reference actually mean? What do
we make of an author who claims that the people always remain
sovereign, as demonstrated by “Pufendorf, Sidney, Locke, Hutcheson,
Price, Priestley, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Mably, Raynal”?11 Although
it was a declining habit, eighteenth-century writers still attached great
importance to indiscriminately citing as many widely recognized au-
thorities as possible for any given opinion. In the Dutch Republic, as
elsewhere, Montesquieu clearly belonged to the very top of the hier-
archy of Great Minds to be invoked. This sort of ritual and rhetori-
cal invocation, however, tells us very little, except that the President of
Bordeaux was venerated. Dutch writers of the time seldom mentioned
him without calling him “the famous” or “the jewel of his age”, or his
work “immortal”.12 Indeed, the admiration for Montesquieu was such
that Dutch authors frequently apologized to their readers before utter-
ing even the mildest criticism. Thus Laurens van Limburg, upon con-
cluding that Montesquieu’s distinction between monarchy and despo-
tism was not altogether satisfactory, added a lenghty footnote to explain
10 There is, unfortunately, no secondary literature on Hoola van Nooten. On Luzac
see my Enlightenment and Conservatism in the Dutch Republic.

12 Decker, Proeve eener Verhandeling, v; Pestel, Fondemens de la Jurisprudence Naturelle, 244;
Engelberts, Aloude Staat en Geschiedenissen der Vereenigde Nederlanden, II, 356.

how extraordinarily difficult he had found it to contradict the findings

of the great man.13
All of this makes the study of Montesquieu’s Dutch impact far from
easy, but certainly not impossible. There is, however, yet another prob-
lem, constituted by the very nature of the Esprit des Lois. Because of its
sheer size, its eclecticism, and the almost limitless diversity of topics it
addressed, the book was seldom read or assessed as a whole. It was,
as Frank Herdmann has observed for Germany, frequently used as no
more than an encyclopedia.14 More important, however, is the fact that
the Esprit des Lois lent itself to innumerable interpretations. The modern
historian is, of course, highly aware of the fact that the reader creates
the meaning of any given text as much as the original author does.
The creativity of the reader does, however, tend to grow or diminish in
response to the nature of the text before him. The Esprit des Lois offered
its readers so much ambivalence and interpretative openness, that at
times it seemed as if everyman could create his own Montesquieu. To
illustrate this point, it may be useful briefly to look at one example
of completely opposed readings of Montesquieu. In the Dutch Repub-
lic, Roman law had always been regarded as the most important sub-
sidiary law and had always dominated the legal curriculum at the uni-
versities. During the eighteenth century, as Corjo Jansen has demon-
strated, the status of Roman law gradually came to be questioned. In
the legal faculties, the study of Roman law was supplemented with that
of natural and Dutch law. In legal practice, the relevance of Roman
law came to be doubted.15 The remarkable thing is, that both the jurists
who defended and those who attacked the position of Roman law used
the Esprit des Lois for their completely contrary purposes. Thus in 1777
Willem Schorer, in the most famous pamphlet to come out of this con-
troversy, argued that Montesquieu had convincingly demonstrated that
the laws should be adapted to the special circumstances of a country.
The adoption of an ancient and foreign legal system such as Roman
law was therefore both inappropriate and harmful.16 In that same year,
his young opponent L.J. Vitringa hastened to assure his readers that
the careful perusal of the Esprit des Lois was one of his favorite pastimes.
The correct lesson to be drawn from that great book was none other
13 Van Limburg, Bedenkingen over de eigentlijke Oorzaak, 95–96.

14 Herdmann, Montesquieurezeption in Deutschland, 238.
15 Jansen, Natuurrecht of Romeins Recht.
16 Schorer, Vertoog over de Ongerymdheid, 35–36.
98 chapter five
than that Roman law, constantly cited by Montesquieu himself, con-

tained many legal rules of universal validity.17 It would be quite wrong,
however, to conclude from this apparent anarchy of individual inter-
pretation that Rezeptionsgeschichte is a doomed genre, unable to reach any
general conclusions. Fortunately for the historian, the reception of even
the most complex text is not solely determined by the idiosyncracies of
individual readers, but also by the broader preoccupations of the polit-
ical culture within which it takes place. This is what, in the end, makes
it possible to discern general themes and patterns. Just as, for instance,
French readers of Montesquieu primarily responded to his treatment of
monarchy, so Dutch readers focused on his interpretation of republi-
canism.18
At the time of the appearance of the Esprit des Lois, the surviving
European republics seemed to have little left to boast about. The Ital-
ian republics, so glorious during the Renaissance, were clearly beyond
their prime; the Swiss Confederation was not exactly one of Europe’s
most dynamic states; and the Dutch Republic, unquestionably one of
the great powers of the seventeenth century, was rapidly losing ground
in the competitive struggle with the surrounding monarchies. Republi-
canism, the conclusion might have been, was largely a thing of the past
and was probably fated to disappear altogether.19 Strangely enough,
however, this political crisis of republicanism coincided with a revival
of republicanism as an ideology or, as Franco Venturi has put it, as a
“morale”.20 Although the origins of this revival were manifold, it is evi-
dent that the appearance of the Esprit des Lois was of crucial importance.
It would, of course, be incorrect to label Montesquieu a republican
political theorist. But it can not be doubted that his magnum opus once
again gave republicanism a central place on the agenda of political
thought. As is well known, Montesquieu replaced the traditional divi-
sion of governments into monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy with
17 [Vitringa], De Eer der Hollandsche Natie, 28–29.

18 On the reception of Montesquieu in various European countries and America
see Carcassonne, Montesquieu et le Problème de la Constitution française; Hampson, Will and
Circumstance; Vierhaus, “Montesquieu in Deutschland”; Herdmann, Montesquierezeption
in Deutschland; Fletcher, Montesquieu and English Politics; Spurlin, Montesquieu in America;
Stourzh, “Die tugendhafte Republik”; Cohler, Montesquieu’s Comparative Politics.
19 On the history of Europe’s early modern republics see Durand, Les Républiques
au Temps des Monarchies; Venturi, Utopia and Reform; Koenigsberger, Republiken und Repub-
likanismus; Everdell, The End of Kings.
20 Venturi, Utopia and Reform, 71. For the general literature on eighteenth-century
republicanism see Chapter One.

the alternative triad despotism, monarchy, and republic. Much more

important, however, was the fact that he analyzed these three forms
of government from the broadest possible perspective. He gave each
of them its own guiding principle: fear in despotic states, honor in
monarchies, and virtue in republics. He attempted moreover to estab-
lish links between the various forms of government and a wide range
of factors, including the size of the territory, the climate, the economy,
the social structure, and the moeurs and manières of the inhabitants of
a country. What emerged from the Esprit des Lois, in other words, was
a highly complex ideal type of three forms of government, with the
republic in as central a position as the two other forms.21 To Dutch
political thinkers, who since the Dutch Revolt had always been highly
eclectic and open to foreign suggestions in their attempts to define the
nature of their own unusual republican state, Montesquieu’s analysis of
republicanism came as a great challenge.22 They endlessly read and dis-
cussed the Esprit des Lois. They tried to apply Montesquieu’s republican
ideal type to their own republican experience. Finally, they attempted
to restructure their declining state on the basis of Montesquieu’s repub-
lican precepts.
2. Montesquieu’s Republican Themes Interpreted
Several modern commentators have justly observed that while Mon-

tesquieu’s general argument in the Esprit des Lois was full of ambiguity,
his treatment of republics was especially so. The most obvious prob-
lem posed by the book was caused by the fact that Montesquieu did
not consistently maintain his own new classification of forms of govern-
ment. The distinction between despotism, monarchy, and republic was
parallelled and at times overshadowed by the more basic and simple
distinction between despotism on the one hand and moderate govern-
ment on the other. In writing about the first set of distinctions, Mon-
tesquieu stressed the crucial importance of the principles of fear, honor,
and virtue; upon turning to the second, he shifted emphasis to such
21 Shackleton, Montesquieu remains indispensable for all students of Montesquieu.
More recent general commentaries include Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism;

Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime; Richter, The Political Theory of Montesquieu;
Shklar, Montesquieu.
22 On the open and eclectic nature of Dutch republicanism see Kossmann, Politieke
Theorie en Geschiedenis, 211–233.

100 chapter five
themes as fundamental laws, the separation of powers, and the bal-

ance between political institutions. His discussion of republics showed
even less consistency. At first sight, Montesquieu’s view of the repub-
lic might seem relatively simple and straightforward. A republic was a
state in which the people, or a part of the people, held sovereign power.
Its principle was virtue, variously defined as patriotism and the love of
equality, but always meaning the willingness of the citizen to put the
general interest before his own. In order for a republican state to sur-
vive, it had to be small and preferably agrarian. No sooner had Mon-
tesquieu given this basic analysis, however, than he began to amend
it. There were in fact, he remarked at the very beginning of his work,
two major kinds of republics: democracies and aristocracies. Whereas
virtue was all important in democratic republics, moderation was the
principle of the aristocratic republic. Even of democratic republics, the
President proceeded to reveal, there were several varieties. The pure
civic virtue of ancient agrarian republics was not to be confused with
the surrogate virtue, generated by commerce, on which most modern
republics had to survive. Indeed, it was not altogether clear whether
Montesquieu still regarded the virtuous republic as a viable political
system or as an admirable ancient form of political organization, no
longer suited for the modern world. The Esprit des Lois, it is evident,
offered Dutch republicans no shortage of issues to reflect upon.23
Although Montesquieu’s threefold classification of the forms of gov-
ernment rapidly developed into a new orthodoxy for a considerable
number of Dutchmen, there were also several who questioned it and
some who rejected it altogether.24 Prominent among the latter was Elie
Luzac, Montesquieu’s first Dutch commentator. Luzac did not for a
moment dispute that the Esprit des Lois was the work of a “sublime
genius” and that it should be widely studied for its unique contribu-
tions “to Public Law, to Universal Jurisprudence, and to Politics”.25 The
23 Montesquieu’s approach to republicanism is discussed by, among others, Lowen-
thal, “Montesquieu and the Classics”; Keohane, “Virtuous Republics and Glorious
Monarchies”; Shklar, “Montesquieu and the New Republicanism”; Carrithers, “Not
So Virtuous Republics”.
24 Among authors who adopted Montesquieu’s classification without further com-
ment were Cornelis van Engelen (Brieven over de Weelde, I, ix) and Ysbrand van Hamels-
veld (De zedelyke Toestand, 61–66).
25 Wolff, Institutions du Droit de la Nature et des Gens, I, 23; Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des
Loix, I, 12. Luzac’s commentary on the Esprit des Lois was printed in several editions of
Montesquieu after it originally appeared in 1759. When it is cited in this chapter, it is
always from the 1763 Arkstee and Merkus edition.
Montesquieu he admired, however, was the Montesquieu of moder-

ate and balanced government and the rule of law, not the theorist of
the virtuous republic. Montesquieu’s threefold division of governmental
types, Luzac maintained, was not only flawed, but also made super-
fluous by the much sounder distinction, introduced later in the book,
between arbitrary and limited government. In limited or moderate gov-
ernments the power of the state was restrained by fundamental laws,
the separation of powers, and various balancing mechanisms; in arbi-
trary governments it was not. Despotism occurred as soon as an arbi-
trary will was exercised within the state, be it a republic or a monarchy.
It was a most dangerous error, he warned, to suppose that only monar-
chies could degenerate into despotism.26
Luzac’s purpose in seizing upon Montesquieu’s distinction between
moderate and despotic government and in implicitly playing down the
differences between republics and monarchies had everything to do
with his position in contemporary Dutch political debate. During the
1750s, the period when he wrote his commentary on Montesquieu, the
Orangist Luzac was embroiled in a vehement political controversy, ulti-
mately occasioned by the restoration of the stadholderate in 1747, with
the historian Jan Wagenaar and other adherents of the Staatsgezinde
party.27 The Staatsgezinden emphasized that in the Dutch Republic the
provincial assemblies of States were sovereign and that the stadholder
was no more than their mere servant, who had to do exactly as they
told him. To Luzac, this strongly smacked of the arbitrary exercise of
unchecked power by an oligarchy and therefore of aristocratic despo-
tism. Montesquieu’s theory of moderate government, including the
ideas of the separation of powers and the salutary balance between var-
ious governmental institutions, helped him to legitimate the presence
of a strong stadholderate in the Dutch Republic against the contrary
claims of his political opponents. Luzac, in fact, increasingly came to
defend the position that modern republicanism and moderate govern-
ment were one and the same thing. Contrary to classical notions and
to a number of passages in the Esprit des Lois, he argued that a repub-
lic was not primarily characterized by the absence of a single ruler or
26 Esprit des Loix, I, 16–17, 52–55, 308–311; [Luzac] De Zugt van den Heere Johan de Witt,
36–37; Luzac, Hollands Rykdom, III, 327–332.

27 On the ideological conflicts of the 1750s in the Dutch Republic see Geyl, “De
Witten-oorlog, een pennestrijd in 1757” and Leeb, Ideological Origins of the Batavian Repub-
lic, 68–97.
102 chapter five
by the practice of political virtue by its citizens, but by the presence of

a limited and balanced government guaranteeing the freedom of the
individual inhabitants.
Luzac, however, was one of the very few so drastically to reject
Montesquieu’s analysis of the three main types of government. Insofar
as others questioned it, their criticism was considerably milder. Thus in
his The Foundations of Natural Jurisprudence, the most widely used natural
law textbook of the time in the Dutch Republic, F.W. Pestel pointed
out that even in republics the principles of fear and honor had a role
to play.28 Dirk Hoola van Nooten turned this observation around and
insisted that a certain amount of virtue was necessary for the survival
of any state, not just for that of republics.29 Several commentators,
Samuel Wiselius among them, regretted the fact that Montesquieu, by
treating despotism as one of the three major forms of government, had
appeared to give it a semblance of legitimacy. The brute exercise of
power based on violence did not really deserve the name of government
at all.30 Despite such observations, however, the vast majority of Dutch
commentators affirmed Montesquieu’s contention that a republic was
more in need of virtue and equality than any other type of state.
They therefore made it their task to explore what exactly was to be
understood by those concepts and how they applied to their own
republic.
Most Dutch readers were astonished to find that Montesquieu at
times appeared to regard the republics of antiquity as superior to those
of the modern world. He had summed up his views on the differ-
ence between ancient and modern republican politics in one of those
aphorisms he so excelled in: “Those Greek statesmen who lived under
democratic government knew of no support for it other than virtue.
Today, statesmen can tell us only of manufacturing, finances, wealth,
and even luxury”.31 The crucial issue here, of course, was the rise of
28 Pestel’s Fundamenta Iurisprudentiae Naturalis, originally published in 1772, went
through five Latin editions between 1772 and 1806. The book was translated into
French and Dutch. Here, I have used the Dutch edition: De Gronden der Natuurlyke
Rechtsgeleerdheid, II, 211–212. On the popularity of this textbook see Jansen, “Over de
18e-eeuwse docenten natuurrecht”; on Pestel’s political thought see Worst, “Staat, con-
stitutie en politieke wil”.
29 Montesquieu, De Geest der Wetten, I, 99–106.
30 Wiselius, Proeve over de verschillende Regeringsvormen, 43. The text was originally writ-
ten in 1793. On Wiselius see DeWit, De Strijd tussen Aristocratie en Democratie in Nederland
1780–1848.
31 Book III, chapter 3.
commercial society and its impact on civic virtue. When he visited the
Dutch Republic in 1729, Montesquieu reached the conclusion that “the
heart of people living in commercial states is entirely corrupted”, an
opinion he later repeated in the Esprit des Lois: “Commerce corrupts
pure moeurs”.32 Yet he also realized that the spirit of commerce had irre-
versibly come to dominate the modern world and that it was no longer
sufficient or realistic simply to keep dwelling on the vanished world
of ancient heroic virtue. Commerce, he admitted and even came to
stress, also had distinctly positive effects. It civilized and polished man-
ners, it created peace between nations, and it sometimes even provided
an alternative to pure political virtue in preventing the corruption and
decline of republics.33 Although Dutch readers were greatly impressed
by this unprecedented abstract analysis of commerce, it was entirely
clear to them that Montesquieu insufficiently appreciated the bless-
ings of commercial society.34 They responded, first of all, by demon-
strating that Montesquieu’s admiration for the ancient republics was
unfounded. Most commentators proceeded to claim that commerce
and virtue were entirely compatible. Some, however, maintained that
while it was correct to say that political virtue was not the basis of mod-
ern political life, this should be interpreted as a gain instead of as a
loss.
Dutch republicans entirely agreed with Montesquieu that the ab-
sence of a highly developed system of commerce in antiquity consti-
tuted the main difference between ancient and modern republicanism.
Although commerce had not been unknown in antiquity, it had never
developed into the basis of the entire social and political system. “Those
ancient republics”, Hoola van Nooten observed in his commentary on
Montesquieu, “did not have the extensive commercial interests that
preserve the present-day republics”.35 Instead of simply leaving it at
that conclusion, Dutch commentators dwelled at length on the regret-
table consequences of the lack of commercial activity in antiquity. The
ancient agrarian republics, they pointed out, had largely been based on
32 Montesquieu, Oeuvres complètes, I, 864 and book XX, chapter 1.

33 Book V, chapter 6 and book XX, chapter 2. Montesquieu’s views on commerce
are discussed by Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism, 200–248; Pocock, Machiavel-
lian Moment, 490–493; Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, 70–81; Hutchison, Before
Adam Smith, 220–224.
34 The Maandelyke Uittreksels, of Boekzaal der Geleerde Waerelt, 70 (1750) 69–74 stressed
the innovative character of Montesquieu’s abstract discussion of commerce.

35 Montesquieu, De Geest der Wetten, I, 612.
104 chapter five
slavery and conquest and both these phenomena had been grounded
in violence. Hoola van Nooten devoted many pages to a discussion of
Roman slavery and concluded that it was both inhuman and totally
incompatible with modern European notions of liberty.36 Conquest,
the second violent aspect of ancient republicanism, was judged to be
equally reprehensible. Why, indeed, should it have been any more legit-
imate than the ceaseless drive for territorial expansion demonstrated in
the recent past by several ambitious French monarchs at the expense of
the Dutch Republic?37 The fact that the ancient republicans were living
in societies largely based on violence, Dutch readers of Montesquieu
further observed, had also caused them to entertain excessively mar-
tial notions about civic virtue. It was abundantly clear, Gerrit Paape
commented, that “ancient heroic virtue, once philosophically observed,
loses most of its hitherto so extravagantly praised charms”.38 Ancient
republics, to sum up, were characterized by agriculture, slavery, and
militarism; modern republics such as the Dutch Republic, on the con-
trary, were largely based on commerce, equality before the law, and
lack of expansionist ambition. Elie Luzac drew the appropriate conclu-
sion: “In constantly referring to the example of the ancient republics,
people too often forget that these states have nothing in common with
us except the name of republic”.39 It was, he might have added, not espe-
cially difficult to determine which variety of republic was to be consid-
ered superior.
While Dutch readers unanimously rejected Montesquieu’s glorifica-
tion of ancient republicanism, they were divided in their opinion on the
fate of virtue in the world of modern commercial republicanism. Elie
Luzac, once again, represented the point of view of a distinct minor-
ity by arguing not only that modern commercial republicanism was
incompatible with the stern participatory political virtue idealized by
Montesquieu, but also that this was in fact a considerable improvement.
To Montesquieu’s remarks about the civilizing effects of commerce,
Luzac added the observation that commerce made people more socia-
ble, more active, and more industrious, but also less courageous, more
aware of their perfect rights, and less sensitive to sentiments of gen-
36 Ibidem, II, 105–107, 116–117, 122.

37 This was one of the dominant themes in the work of Elie Luzac. See, for instance,
[Luzac] Lettre d’un Anonime à Monsieur J.J. Rousseau, 234–246.
38 Paape, Grondwettige Herstelling van het Geluk der Nederlandsche Maatschappy, 95.
erosity.40 The world had become less heroic, but more predictable and
this was to be judged important progress. Most other Dutchmen, how-
ever, sharply disagreed with Montesquieu’s viewpoint that the political
virtue to be found in modern republics was at best a feeble imitation
of ancient virtue. Montesquieu, Hoola van Nooten pointed out, had
simply been carried away by “the old prejudices of his nation against
commerce”.41 It was both ludicrous and insulting to suggest, as Mon-
tesquieu had done, that true republican love of country was best com-
pared to the devotion of monks to their order, that is to say to suggest
that it was primarily occasioned by a lack of other objects to focus
attention on.42 There were no grounds whatsoever to suppose that pure
virtue could only flourish in an environment of stark agrarian simplic-
ity. Whether a republic was agrarian or commercial in fact had very
little to do with the issue of virtue. A citizen loves his country and is
willing to sacrifice everything for it
because he approves of its form of government, because he is utterly
convinced of the existence of an indissoluble connection between the
conservation of the republican form of government and the sweet happi-
ness, the wonderful liberty, and the complete security he is enjoying. He
loves his fellow-citizens, because they are all equally committed to the
preservation of this blissful state of affairs.43
Indeed, insofar as commerce could be said to have any effect at all on
the republican ethos, Hoola van Nooten continued his polemic with
Montesquieu, it was positive rather than negative. Instead of under-
mining the material equality necessary for the survival of republics,
commerce—if left entirely free—actually distributed wealth evenly. In-
stead of corrupting people, it in fact enhanced the moral virtues.44
Although most Dutch commentators agreed with Montesquieu that
equality was an essential characteristic of republics, few shared Hoola
van Nooten’s confident view that commerce was ideally suited to in-
crease it. There was, in fact, very little agreement among Dutch read-
ers about the exact nature of republican equality. Some, like Elie Luzac,
followed Montesquieu’s suggestion that even the accumulation of great
private riches would not seriously endanger the survival of a commer-
40 Ibidem, II, 228.

41 Montesquieu, De Geest der Wetten, I, 125.
42 Ibidem, 136.
43 Ibidem, 137.
44 Ibidem, II, 332, 338, 340. For another rejection of Montesquieu’s views on the
effects of commerce see e.g. Van Hamelsveld, Zedelyke Toestand, 159–161.

106 chapter five
cial republic as long as the spirit of commerce, ingraining the habits

of frugality, moderation, and industry continued to reign. The impor-
tant task, in other words, was to prevent the emergence of a post-
commercial elite.45 Others did not directly relate republican equality to
the system of commerce. Thus F.W. Pestel, who added a long discussion
of republican equality to the third edition of his natural law textbook,
took the position that whether a republic was poor or rich, agrarian
or commercial, the maintenance of equality was always largely a mat-
ter of mentalité. Although Pestel was not very forthcoming in explana-
tions on how this necessary mentality was created or preserved, he did
point out that the example set by those in responsible positions was
of great importance.46 Very few Dutchmen, either before or after the
revolutionary 1780s, took republican equality to imply either the totally
equal distribution of material wealth or the absence of clear distinctions
between rulers and ruled. Nobody desired to turn the Dutch Republic
into a second Sparta. “The means used by Lycurgus to make all citizens
equally wealthy and to prevent anyone from gaining too much power
in that scarcely populated republic”, Pestel observed in his discussion
of equality, “were violent. Their use is irreconcilable with a pleasant
life and a polite mind”.47 As to the equality of rulers and ruled, it was
realized, even by those who thought that an attempt should be made
to approach this state of affairs, that the size, the social hierarchy, and
the economic life of the Dutch Republic made it unfit for the direct
democracy of the Greek polis or the Swiss cantons.48
There was, however, yet another and final republican issue that did
make the Swiss experience relevant to Dutch readers of Montesquieu:
the size and structure of the state. In the Esprit des Lois, Montesquieu
had remarked that the federative constitution of both the Swiss and the
Dutch state potentially made these countries into “republics that will
last for ever”.49 Without exception, his Dutch readers agreed with this
positive evaluation of the structure of their republic. Montesquieu, they
observed, had been ill-informed about the exact nature of the Dutch
confederation. He had, for instance, been totally mistaken in follow-
ing Janiçon’s description of the Dutch state as “consisting of about fifty

46 Pestel, Gronden der Natuurlyke Rechtsgeleerdheid, II, 209–212.
47 Ibidem, 209.
48 E.g. Grondwettige Herstelling, van Nederlands Staatswezen, I, 291–293.
49 Book IX, chapter 1.
republics”.50 Such factual errors, however, in no way diminished the

value of his analysis of the federative republic as “a type of constitu-
tion that combines all the internal advantages of republican govern-
ment with the power of monarchy in foreign affairs”.51 Although some
pointed out that to expect a federative republic to execute its foreign
policy as swiftly and efficiently as a unitary monarchy was an illusion,
all Dutch republicans agreed that the advantages of this type of state
far outweighed the disadvantages.52
3. Republicanism Redefined
During the third quarter of the eighteenth century, many Dutchmen

worried about the diminishing importance of their state on the interna-
tional scene. They attributed this loss of power to a number of causes,
ranging from increased international competition to a failure of nerve
brought about by luxury. Very few observers, however, pointed to the
political system as a major factor in the decline of the Dutch Republic.
It was during the late 1770s and the early 1780s that all of this suddenly
changed. For the first time, considerable numbers of Dutchmen began
to attribute the sad state of their country to flaws in its republican polit-
ical structure. This remarkable transformation of public discourse was
largely brought about by two developments. In the first place, the emer-
gence of new and vital forms of republicanism on the other side of the
Atlantic stimulated many Dutch republicans to revise their ideas about
republican politics in a radical direction.53 Secondly, the course of the
Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1783) suddenly confronted Dutchmen
in a very direct and humiliating way with the many shortcomings of
their own political system. The result of these ideological and political
developments was the birth of the Patriot movement.54
50 Montesquieu, De Geest der Wetten, I, 382–383. Montesquieu’s sources of information
on the Dutch Republic are discussed by Masterson, “Montesquieu’s Stadholder”.

51 Book IX, chapter 1.
52 Montesquieu, Esprit des Loix, I, 218. For high praise of Montesquieu’s analysis of
the federative republic see e.g. Grondwettige Herstelling, van Nederlands Staatswezen, I, 29–56.
53 Schulte Nordholt, The Dutch Republic and American Independence.
54 For short general surveys of the period see Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 64–135;
Israel, The Dutch Republic, 1098–1113 and Rosendaal, De Nederlandse Revolutie, 17–55. The
commemorations of the Patriot era in 1987 have resulted in several important collec-
108 chapter five
The ideology of Dutch Patriotism was complex and eclectic and

drew its strength from the creative combination of a number of dis-
parate political languages. It freely mixed elements from the civic hu-
manist tradition with an ultra-Lockean radicalism, and both with ap-
peals to the glorious Dutch past.55 Most important for our purposes,
however, is the fact that the Patriots avidly used the Esprit des Lois.
Indeed, it has hitherto largely been ignored that their ideological inno-
vations partly took the form of a re-examination of Montesquieu’s
meaning for the Dutch Republic. Perhaps the most surprising and cer-
tainly the most fundamental result of this enterprise was the growing
conviction among Patriots that by their reading of the standards set by
Montesquieu the Dutch Republic was not a proper republic at all. With
that conceptual move, the Patriots succeeded in permanently changing
the boundaries of Dutch political debate. How far things had come by
the late 1780s and the early 1790s may be seen from a political exchange
between H.J. van Loe and an anonymous Patriot opponent. Taking
both his motto and most of his argument from Montesquieu, Van Loe
maintained that the main cause of the political troubles the Dutch had
witnessed in recent years was the decline of the republican principle of
virtue. The country, however, was still far from being totally corrupted
and there was every reason to believe that an attempted return to this
essential principle would be successful.56 Van Loe’s opponent no longer
had any confidence in such simple solutions. Nothing could be more
true, he admitted, than Montesquieu’s contention that virtue was the
principle of republics. Unfortunately, however, this valuable lesson of
the Esprit des Lois was largely irrelevant for the Seven United Provinces,
since that state was not and had never been republican in the true sense
of the word. Its political and judicial institutions had always retained
the mark of their origin under a monarchical government. The stad-
holderate, in particular, was incompatible with a republican constitu-
tion. There had, finally, always been far too much social inequality for
tions of essays: Grijzenhout a.o., Voor Vaderland en Vrijheid; Rosendaal a.o., 1787. De Neder-
landse Revolutie?; Bots and Mijnhardt, De Droom van de Revolutie; Jacob and Mijnhardt, The
Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century. The most recent full length treatment of Patriotism
is Klein’s excellent Patriots Republikanisme.
55 For a discussion of the main characteristics of Patriot political thought see Chapter
Six.
56 Van Loe, Recherches sur la vraie Cause de nos Troubles. The pamphlet was translated
into Dutch in the year of its appearance. See also Van Loe, Antwoord op een Brief.
the country to qualify as a proper republic. Given this situation, the

anonymous pamphleteer concluded, Van Loe’s pleas for a return to
republican virtue were noble but entirely misguided. Dutchmen simply
would never become virtuous unless they first created a truly republican
state.57
It was only by a gradual process that the Patriots learned to draw
such radical conclusions from their reading of Montesquieu. They
began by using the Esprit des Lois in their attacks on the position of
the stadholder. They proceeded to invoke Montesquieu in their argu-
ments for greater popular participation in politics. They then moved,
still under the guidance of the Esprit des Lois, to the theme of republi-
can equality. Not until the very end of the Patriot era did they combine
these themes into an outright condemnation of the entire political sys-
tem and into a denial of the republican character of the Seven United
Provinces. During the 1750s, as has been seen above, Montesquieu’s
notion of the separation of powers had successfully been appropriated
by the Orangists in their attempts to argue for a measure of indepen-
dence for the stadholder vis-à-vis the assemblies of the States. It was
during the late 1770s and the early 1780s that the Patriots discovered the
uses of this very same concept for their own political purposes. One of
the main reasons why the Dutch Republic was on the brink of becom-
ing a despotic state, they contended, was the fact that the stadhold-
ers had come to control most of the political system. By means of the
extensive rights of appointment they had accumulated since William III
on both the local and the provincial level, the stadholders had almost
succeeded in turning themselves into arbitrary monarchs. They ruled
the country by a system of patronage, influence, and corruption.58 The
fact that the stadholders, directly or indirectly, appointed a substantial
number of the members of the assemblies of the States, the Patriots
emphasized, made the Orangist claim that the existing system perfectly
embodied Montesquieu’s ideal of a separation and balance of powers
into an absurdity. Quite the reverse was true. Indeed, the authors of the
influential Constitutional Restoration observed with an obvious reference to
the Esprit des Lois, it was generally known “that the principles of a free
57 Nadere Redenen en Oorzaaken van de jongste Onlusten en nog heerschende Verdeeld-heden in het
Vaderland.
58 The most notorious attack on the stadholderate was Joan Derk van der Capellen
tot den Pol’s 1781 pamphlet To the People of the Netherlands. For a modern reprint see the
edition by H.L. Zwitzer.
110 chapter five
Constitution are irrevocably lost when the members of the legislative

power are appointed by the executive power”.59
Had the Patriots gone no further than to attack the position of the
stadholder, they would, despite a modernized political vocabulary, have
done no more than what the Staatsgezinden had been doing ever since
the middle of the seventeenth century. The attack on the stadholder,
however, was only the prelude to a more comprehensive assault on the
entire established order. Even with the power of the stadholder reduced
to its proper bounds or abolished altogether, the Patriots began to insist
as their movement grew in strength, republican liberty was still far from
complete or secure. The Staatsgezinden had always refused to acknowl-
edge that the Dutch Republic without a stadholder strongly resembled
a closed oligarchical state. It was, as the authors of the famous 1785 Ley-
den Draft put it, an “Aristocracy of Regents”.60 The medicine that was
needed to make the body politic healthy again was increased popular
participation in politics. To prove that this was a justified demand, the
Patriots appealed to a variety of arguments, including the permanent
and irrevocable nature of popular sovereignty. More important here,
however, is the fact that they also, once again, enlisted the services of
the Esprit des Lois. Popular participation in politics, they stressed, was
much more than just a goal in itself. It was the only way to bring
about the reign of virtue, so rightly praised by the great Montesquieu.
“The larger the number of those participating in Government …”,
as the authors of Constitutional Restoration formulated this conviction,
“the more each citizen will identify with the general interest and the
greater therefore will Patriotism, the soul of all Republican Govern-
ments, become”.61 It was almost inevitable that this emphasis on the
incomparable advantages of widespread popular participation in poli-
tics would lead on to a renewed investigation of the theme of republi-
can equality. When it came, it nonetheless shocked many readers by its
radical nature.
It was in 1786 that the Anonymus Belga, nowadays widely believed
to have been Petrus de Wakker van Zon, published his explosive trea-
tise The Aristocracy.62 Most Dutchmen, De Wakker van Zon claimed,
59 Grondwettige Herstelling, van Nederlands Staatswezen, I, 190. Constitutional Restoration is
discussed by, among others, Van Himsbergen, “Grondwettige Herstelling”.

60 Ontwerp, 17.
62 Very little is known about Petrus de Wakker van Zon (1758–1818), but see Nieuw
Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek, V, 1176–1177.

had hitherto failed to grasp the full implications of Montesquieu’s bril-

liant analysis of republicanism for their own state. The equality praised
by that eminent philosopher was not to be interpreted as a somewhat
vague and politically harmless mentality. It consisted, on the contrary,
of the absence of artificial social distinctions. A true republic could
know no more than one social order, that of republican citizens. In the
Dutch case, this meant that both the titled aristocracy and the hered-
itary urban patriciates should be abolished forthwith. Indeed, it could
be said that the Dutch Republic had been structurally unsound ever
since it was first erected in the sixteenth century. The original founders
of the state had insufficiently appreciated that distinctions other than
those based on merit could not be tolerated in a proper republic. Given
the existing inequality in the Dutch Republic, De Wakker van Zon con-
tinued, it was illusory to expect virtue, the principle of all republics, to
flourish there. Anticipating the reactions of his political opponents to
this point of view, he emphatically denied any wish to return to the
complete equality of the state of nature or even to the real or imagined
egalitarianism of the ancient republics. He freely acknowledged that the
location, the size, and the commercial nature of the Dutch state made
such desires completely unrealistic. There was, he however stressed, no
need to indulge in any regressive fantasies to defend his point of view.
The viability, even in modern times, of the kind of republic he envis-
aged was being demonstrated by the new confederation of republics
across the Atlantic, where equality and the absence of artificial social
distinctions were the very basis of the political order and were being
written into the constitution.63
To those who remained convinced of the merits of the existing polit-
ical arrangements, the vehemence of the Patriot political onslaught
came as a great shock. The Patriots, it seemed to these conservatives,
were suddenly using generally accepted political concepts in entirely
new and incomprehensible ways. In doing so, they irresponsibly de-
stroyed the previously existing consensus about the fundamental sound-
ness of the Dutch republican system. Patriotism, the Utrecht professor
Rijklof Michael van Goens observed in his political journal, was largely
based on the perversion of the language of politics.64 Even the great
63 [De Wakker van Zon] De Adel, 51, 54–72, 94, 134–135.

64 [Van Goens], De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot, nr. 34–36. For another discussion
of this same theme see Kluit, Academische Redevoering, over het Misbruik van ’t Algemeen
Staatsrecht. The conservative rejection of Patriotism is treated in Chapter Eight.
112 chapter five
Montesquieu, the anti-Patriots sadly concluded, was being misread and

distorted by the radical reformers. Instead of being grateful for living
in a state that perfectly embodied Montesquieu’s notion of the separa-
tion of powers, the Patriots abused this concept in their futile attempts
to demonstrate that the stadholders had turned the Dutch Republic
into a despotic state. They moreover did not seem to realize that the
idea of permanent popular sovereignty they cherished was theoretically
incompatible with the moderation and balance so highly praised in the
Esprit des Lois.65 The Patriots were also misguided, their opponents con-
tinued, in their reading of Montesquieu’s idea of republican equality as
implying the need for a considerable levelling of existing social distinc-
tions.66 As to the use of the American example in this context, it was
perfectly clear that the sort of equality the Americans aspired to was
no longer possible in the modern world and was doomed to disappear
under the impact of the “mercantile system”.67 The Patriot contention,
finally, that virtue would never exist in the Dutch Republic without a
thorough overhaul of its political institutions was, many conservatives
maintained, both unnecessarily defeatist and plainly wrong. Republican
virtue was not to be thought of as the mechanical result of the intro-
duction of a certain set of superficial political arrangements, but as the
moral essence of a certain way of life. By blaming the political system
for all contemporary ills, the Patriots fatally obscured the fact that it
was the moral fibre of the nation that needed regeneration. Indeed,
what better proof of this than the very emergence of their destructive
and regressive movement itself ?68
From the above, it is clear that the conservative response to the inno-
vative reading of Montesquieu presented by the Patriots was largely
reactive and did not have much to offer in the way of new interpre-
tation. Montesquieu, it would seem, had successfully been enlisted in
the cause of the radical reformers. Although this was indeed largely
the case, it should still be pointed out that their embattled position
brought the anti-Patriots to emphasize at least one element from the
65 [De Vogel] Katechismus van het Stadhouderschap, 83–85 and 502–507; [Luzac] De
Vaderlandsche Staatsbeschouwers, I, 329–337; II, 10–100; IV, 445–447.

66 E.g. Decker, Proeve eener Verhandeling, 18.
67 Van Hogendorp, Brieven en Gedenkschriften, I, 410–411. The observation is from Van
Hogendorp’s “Considérations sur la Révolution de l’Amérique”, written in 1784. On

Van Hogendorp and Montesquieu see Van der Hoeven, Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp,
11–27.
68 E.g. Van Loe, Antwoord op een Brief, 2.
Esprit des Lois that had previously not been prominently used in politi-
cal debate. In the course of the 1780s, Dutch conservatives discovered
that Montesquieu’s strong interest in the complexity and the interre-
latedness of existing political arrangements in any given society, fre-
quently the product of centuries of historical development, could be
turned into a powerful weapon in their attempt to defend the estab-
lished order. It was once again Elie Luzac, the most consistently cre-
ative interpreter of Montesquieu in the Dutch Republic, who pioneered
this new approach. His Letters on the Dangers of changing the Original Con-
stitution of a Government, published in 1792, were a lengthy meditation on
Montesquieu’s theme of complexity and on the dangers of rash political
reform. The most fundamental flaw in the political thought of the Patri-
ots, Luzac maintained, was the absence of an awareness that abstract
political blueprints would in practice probably turn out to be incom-
patible with the historically formed and highly complex character and
genius of the Dutch people.69
Despite such occasional new insights and despite the anti-Patriot
political victory in 1787, however, it remains true that a real and sig-
nificant resurgence in the conservative political uses of Montesquieu
did not take place until after 1795. In that year, the Dutch Republic
definitively collapsed. The radical Patriots, many of whom had been
exiled after the counterrevolution of 1787, triumphantly returned to
their country in the wake of the French army. Obviously, the agenda
of political thought was dramatically changed by these revolutionary
developments. Before 1795 the opposed parties had disagreed on almost
every issue, but not, on the whole, on the desirability of a federative
republic. Now, partly under the influence of the French example, con-
siderable numbers of Dutchmen reached the conclusion that only the
creation of a republic one and indivisible could save their country from
everlasting political insignificance. The old division between Patriots
and Orangists, in short, gave way to a new division between Unitarists
and Federalists.70 No book served the purposes of the conservative fed-
eralists better than the Esprit des Lois. It was probably Gerard Dumbar
who most emphatically appealed to Montesquieu in his attempts to
demonstrate that unitary republics were inherently unstable and there-
69 [Luzac] Lettres sur les Dangers, 107–108.

70 For general surveys of the period between 1795 and 1798 see Schama, Patriots and
Liberators, 211–353 and Rosendaal, De Nederlandse Revolutie, 97–114.
114 chapter five
fore shortlived, whereas well-ordered federative republics could indeed

live forever.71 Although the Dutch ancien régime was dead, the heritage
of Montesquieu was still very much alive. It would remain so for many
decades to come.
71 Dumbar, De oude en nieuwe Constitutie der Vereenigde Staaten van Amerika, II, 146–150
and [Dumbar], Betoog, dat eene onverdeelde Regeeringsvorm. On Dumbar see Mecking, “Mr.
Gerard Dumbar” and Schulte Nordholt, The Dutch Republic and American Independence,
279–281.
chapter six
REVOLUTION, COUNTERREVOLUTION
AND THE STADHOLDERATE, 1780–1795
1. A Deep Ideological Divide
On the night of January 18, 1795, stadholder William V fled the Dutch
Republic by ship. At the time he was embarking in the coastal vil-
lage of Scheveningen, the troops of revolutionary France, the country
that had declared war on this “tyrant” two years before, were already
marching through the heart of the country. The contrast with the
two previous Williams, who had gratefully used conflicts with France
to restore and strengthen the stadholderate, could hardly have been
greater. William V’s inglorious departure signaled the end of the stad-
holderate in the Seven United Provinces. Indeed, the French military
intervention meant the end of the entire old Dutch Republic and its
replacement by the Batavian Republic. The revolutionary events of
1795, which were the prelude to important and permanent changes
in the structure of the Dutch state, had been preceded by a cycle
of revolution, counterrevolution and restoration during the last fif-
teen years of the existence of the old Dutch Republic. In the present
chapter an attempt will be made to reconstruct the nature of the
debate over the stadholderate—a debate ultimately resolved by the
brute facts of 1795—during the eventful decade and a half before
1795.
In the historiography dealing with the last decades of the Dutch
eighteenth century, it is not unusual to find the oppositional Patriot
movement that emerged during these years described as moderate and
entirely devoid of radicalism. Both Patriots and Orangists, many a his-
torian has contended, remained obsessed with the Dutch past and with
historically oriented forms of political argumentation. They therefore
did not deeply disagree on essential matters. Thus I. Leonard Leeb,
one of the better known proponents of this view, argues that Joan Derk
van der Capellen tot den Pol and Elie Luzac, two of the more promi-
nent representatives of the opposing political camps during the 1780s,
116 chapter six
did not hold sharply antagonistic political views: “Only a minor quar-
rel about the practical form of the executive power separated them;
much more bound them together”.1 Such a retrospective interpreta-
tion of Dutch political thought during the years after 1780 raises the
obvious problem that it becomes almost impossible to understand the
undeniable vehemence with which political opponents confronted each
other during the period in question. Even the most superficial perusal
of the available sources seems to point in a very different direction:
these were years in which fundamental political and ideological con-
flicts developed. The two main parties that emerged—the Patriots and
the Orangists—were separated by much more than a negligible differ-
ence over matters of practical political organization. It would be no
exaggeration to say that their differences were so fundamental as to
cause a total breakdown in communication. As was the case in other
European countries during these crucial years of what Reinhart Kosel-
leck has called the Sattelzeit, Dutch political debate largely revolved
around the suddenly openly contested meaning of words and concepts.2
Contemporaries observed that there no longer existed a common lan-
guage in which political debate could be conducted. In retrospect, we
can see that they were right. The meaning of key concepts such as
liberty, sovereignty and representation was no longer self-evident and
became the subject of radically opposed interpretations. But it was not
only on a theoretical level that the contestation during these years was
intense. In practical politics, the Patriots did everything they could to
diminish the power not only of the stadholderate, but also of the regent
oligarchy. That Patriotism in the end crumbled like a house of cards in
the face of overwhelming Prussian military power does not, of course,
prove that the situation until the end of 1787 was not a genuinely revo-
lutionary one.
It has justly been remarked by E.H. Kossmann that it would be
wrong and misleading to study the Patriot era in Dutch history as no
more than a prelude to the French and Batavian revolutions that were
1 Leeb, Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution, 176. More recently, Leeb’s ap-
proach has been adopted by L.H.M. Wessels. See his “Tradition et lumières in politicis”
and “Over heden en verleden in het tweede tijdvak. Historie, verlichting en revolutie:
enkele impressies bij een beoordeling van de ideologische positie van de Nederlandse
patriotten” in: Rosendaal a.o., 1787. De Nederlandse revolutie?.
2 On the notion of a Sattelzeit see, of course, Reinhart Koselleck, “Einleitung”
in: Brunner a.o., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, I, xiii–xxviii. For the crucial importance
contemporaries ascribed to language and concepts in politics see also Chapter Eight.
revolution, counterrevolution and the stadholderate 117
to follow it.3 One could add to this that it would be equally wrong and
misleading to study the conflicts of the Patriot period as no more than
a continuation of already existing Dutch political debates and antago-
nisms. Patriotism was a phenomenon sui generis and should be studied
as such. Regrettably, this has seldomly been done. What made Patriot
ideology into such an explosive force was its combination, during a
moment of crisis in the history of the Dutch Republic, of three strains of
thought, which by themselves and under different circumstances would
perhaps not have had such wide-ranging consequences. The Patriots,
first of all, interpreted liberty in a classically republican way as incom-
plete and endangered if it did not include the active participation of
the citizen in politics. Such a positive definition of liberty was in itself
far from radical. As we have seen in a previous chapter, it had ear-
lier in the eighteenth century been put to conservative republican uses
by for instance Lieven de Beaufort.4 What gave this notion a radical
potential was the fact that the late eighteenth-century Patriots com-
bined it with a highly individualistic and ultra-Lockean interpretation
of the natural, permanent and inalienable rights of the sovereign peo-
ple. These two strains in Patriot political thought were, thirdly, under-
pinned by a great confidence in the beneficial effects of the ongoing
process of popular enlightenment. It was the combination of these
three elements that gave the Patriot program of national regeneration
its specific character and that enabled the Patriots to view society as
potentially changeable and improvable. The Patriots, in other words,
may be said to have been representatives of a Revolutionary Enlighten-
ment.
The anti-Patriots, who regarded the emergence of these radical opin-
ions with astonishment and distaste, had a wide range of counterargu-
ments at their disposal. The most important representatives of anti-
Patriotism, however, mainly derived their arguments from the intellec-
tual arsenal of what has been termed the Moderate Enlightenment.
This included not only the early eighteenth-century Newtonian-Leib-
nizian synthesis, but also modern natural law from Grotius to Wolff.
Cosmic and natural laws, order, regularity, harmony and balance were
the key terms in this intellectual universe. Socially conservative from
its inception, the Moderate Enlightenment turned explicitly to political
3 E.H. Kossmann, “Nabeschouwing” in: Bots en Mijnhardt, De Droom van de Revolu-
tie, 142.
4 See Chapter Three.
118 chapter six
conservatism under the onslaught of the Revolutionary Enlightenment

of the final quarter of the eighteenth century.5
This brief sketch of the broad contours of intellectual and political
argumentation in the years after 1780 is, as will become clear in the
course of the present chapter, indispensable for a full and proper under-
standing of the debate over the stadholderate during these same years.
For that debate, far from being limited to a narrow range of legal and
historical issues, ranged over a wide intellectual field. It may be said to
have reflected the fundamental nature of the political and theoretical
conflicts of the era.6
Perhaps the anti-Patriots, the defenders of the stadholderate who
have so far much less than the Patriots received their due in historiogra-
phy, were faced with the most difficult task, both practical and theoreti-
cal, in the conflicts that raged during the 1780s. They had, first of all, to
deal with the rather awkward problem that William V was hardly the
most ideal embodiment of the blessings of the stadholderate. Whatever
other qualities he may have had, in politics he was an inflexible conser-
vative who rigidly stuck to the letter of the law and who was unable to
respond adequately to situations of political crisis.7 Even in politicians
closely linked to the court, such as Laurens Pieter van de Spiegel, these
characteristics caused considerable irritation.8 Things were made worse
by the catastrophic course of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, for which
it was easy to blame William, who after all was Captain-general and
Admiral-general of the Republic.
A second problem the Orangists had to contend with was the ex-
traordinary popularity of Patriotism. A clever and innovative use of the
political press, the introduction of new and appealing forms of political
organization and the systematic use of clear and accessible political
symbols had allowed the Patriots to gain a hold over a considerable part
5 This typology of Enlightenments is inspired by May, The Enlightenment in America.
For a fuller treatment see Velema, “Verlichtingen in Nederland”. Further discussion

of the relationship between various types of Enlightenment and political thought is
provided in Jacob, Radical Enlightenment; Velema, Enlightenment and Conservatism and, more
recently, Israel, Radical Enlightenment.
6 The same, it may be observed here, was also true for previous confrontations
between adherents and opponents of the stadholderate. See Van de Klashorst, “‘Metten
schijn van monarchie getempert’” and Chapter Three.
7 For estimates of the personality and the political capacities of WilliamV see
Schutte, “Willem IV en Willem V” and Rowen, The Princes of Orange, 186–232.

8 Boogman, Raadpensionaris L.P. van de Spiegel.
of public opinion.9 The Orangists observed these developments with a

consternation bordering on despair. The country, it seemed to many
of them, was descending into total chaos. “If one reads the papers”,
Rijklof Michael van Goens observed in 1782,
or peruses the issues of the Post van den Neder-Rhyn, or listens to conversa-
tions held in public, and if one combines this with what is known about
recent public events and the content of various libels, then one simply
does not know any longer where one is: the whole country seems to be
one big Madhouse.10
It was absolutely necessary, all Orangists were agreed, to attempt every-

thing possible to convince the public that Patriot rhetoric was empty
and specious. Yet this was easier said than done. How hard it was
to reconquer public opinion was, for instance, experienced by those
who tried to put together the Orangist Old-fashioned Dutch Patriot (1781–
1783).11 In order to counter the Patriot threat effectively, an enormous
range of topics would have to be discussed. In a memo concerning
this topic to Count Van Heiden Reinestein, chamberlain to the prince,
Nicolaas ten Hove, the Master of the Mint who played a key role in the
publication of the Old-fashioned Dutch Patriot, summed up what would be
necessary:
… we shall need a jurist, with profound knowledge of the public law
of the Fatherland; a recognized and highly motivated theologian; a man
well versed in history, always ready to cull examples from it when nec-
essary; a politician who has access to the latest news and information; a
skillful debater, who is able to combat sophisms and follow them in all
their ramifications; someone with the patience to read all the daily hor-
rors and the capacity to expose their enormity with long or short articles,
according to their importance; a man gifted with the talent for eloquence
suited to reawaken the people and to drag the nation from its lethargy;
another one with the capacity to react to sarcasm, a clever man, a sharp
mind, who knows how to wield the weapon of ridicule …12
Every separate group of the population, moreover, needed to be ap-

proached in its own way. Thus Kornelis de Vogel aimed his Catechism of
the Stadholderate at “the honest and useful middle rank”.13 For the young
9 Grijzenhout a.o., Voor Vaderland en Vrijheid; Grijzenhout, Feesten voor het Vaderland;
Van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland, 173–274.

10 [Van Goens], De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot, nr. 33, 171–172.
11 On this journal see Peterse, “Publicist voor Oranje”.
12 Beaufort, Brieven aan R.M. van Goens, III, 127.
13 De Vogel, Katechismus van het Stadhouderschap. Tweede Deel, viii.
120 chapter six
and the poor he composed a shorter and more accessible publication,

the Small Catechism of the Stadholderate.14
On a more theoretical level, the anti-Patriots were forced to con-
front the fact that the position of the stadholder within the political
system of the Dutch Republic was nowhere clearly defined. It was,
in fact, a rather haphazard mixture of all sorts of different functions
and responsibilities.15 Even as late as the Fall of 1786 Wilhelmina, the
energetic wife of stadholder William V and one of the protagonists of
the counterrevolution of 1787, found herself highly uncertain about the
essential components of the stadholder’s function. To have matters clar-
ified, she urged Van de Spiegel to write a memo about the topic.16 Not
only were many details concerning the exact nature of the position of
the stadholder surrounded with uncertainty, there was also no system-
atic political theory of Orangism. “Nobody”, as E.H. Kossmann has
observed, “had ever developed a rational theory of Orangist policy”.17
Around the middle of the eighteenth century, it is true, Elie Luzac had
attempted to modernize the defense of the stadholderate by introduc-
ing elements from Lockean natural law and Montesquieu’s notion of
the separation of powers into Orangist discourse, but the Patriots in
the course of the 1780s rapidly appropriated these notions.18 Orangism
therefore remained in considerable need of new intellectual impulses.
The late eighteenth-century anti-Patriots did not, it should be
pointed out, form a unified group. The term Orangism covered a
broad spectrum that ran from orthodox reformed preachers to enlight-
ened conservative political theorists.19 The defense of the stadholderate
was moreover, as has been indicated above, conducted in all sorts of
highly dissimilar publications, from popular pamphlets to learned aca-
demic treatises. Yet remarkably enough the representatives of all these
14 [De Vogel] Kleine Katechismus van het Stadhouderschap.

15 Fruin, Geschiedenis der Staatsinstellingen in Nederland, 321–362; Gabriëls, De heren als
dienaren.
16 Vreede, Mr. Laurens Pieter van de Spiegel, II, 599–620.
17 Kossmann, The Low Countries, 40.
18 Wyger R.E. Velema, “Elie Luzac and Two Dutch Revolutions: The Evolution of
Orangist Political Thought” in: Jacob and Mijnhardt, The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth
Century.
19 The ‘Dutch-Israel’ variety of Orangism will not be treated separately in this
chapter, even though Kornelis de Vogel may be said to have belonged to it. See
Huisman, Neerlands Israel and Van Eijnatten, God, Nederland en Oranje. Variations within
enlightened Orangism have been pointed out by Worst, “Staat, constitutie en politieke
wil” and Boogman, Raadpensionaris L.P. van de Spiegel, 38–40.
varieties of Orangism constantly quoted each other and often, despite

their sometimes profound differences, used highly similar arguments.
On one thing all were in perfect agreement, both before and after 1787:
Patriotism posed a vital threat to the existence of the Dutch Republic.
The next section of this chapter will discuss the Patriot attack on the sta-
tus quo in general and on the stadholderate in particular. The third and
final section will analyze the ways in which the Orangists responded to
this new threat.
2. The Patriot Revolution and the Stadholderate
During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the vast majority of
Dutch political commentators were convinced that the Republic was in
dangerous decline. The observable facts, such as the weakened position
of the United Provinces in international affairs, seemed to support this
almost universal view. Both Patriots and Orangists were of the opinion
that decisive action was urgently needed to bring the ailing state back
to its former health. Yet at that point all agreement ended, for the two
parties were in complete disagreement as to the means by which this
end was to be achieved. Insofar as the Orangists, who were forced to
spend most of their energies on countering the revolutionary threat,
may be said to have had specific plans of reform, these largely consisted
of proposals to strengthen the position of the central organs of the state,
including the stadholderate. The inspiration for this view they mainly
found in the work of the early eighteenth-century Grand Pensionary
Simon van Slingelandt, who had formulated a number of proposals
for increased political efficiency and centralization.20 That Van Slinge-
landt, whose works were first printed in the early 1780s but had been
circulated in manuscript before, had written during the Second Stad-
holderless Era and thus belonged to the tradition of the Staatsgezinden,
did in no way diminish the enthusiasm of the late eighteenth-century
Orangists.21 “It is well known”, Adriaan Kluit argued,
20 Van Slingelandt deserves a thorough modern study. The observations of the
nineteenth-century Dutch statesman Thorbecke on his work are still well worth read-
ing: “Simon van Slingelandt’s toeleg om den Staat te hervormen”, reprinted in De Wit,
Thorbecke en de wording van de Nederlandse natie. See also Van Arkel, Simon van Slingelandt and
Leeb, Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution, 40–58.
21 Van Slingelandt, Staatkundige Geschriften.
122 chapter six
that S. v. Slingeland wrote at a time when Holland was without a Stad-

holder and that he was thus obliged to defend the Form of Government
then in existence both by oath and by position. He therefore attempted
to remedy existing flaws, insofar as this was possible, without Stadhold-
erly influence. Yet in some of his Writings he clearly indicates that he
considered a Government with a Stadholder to have been the primitive and
original Government since the founding of the Republic.22
To emphasize this same point, A.G. Waelwyk wrote a separate treatise
on Van Slingelandt’s Political Writings.23 In his attack on the proposals
put forward in Constitutional Restoration, Johan Canter de Munck pre-
sented the views of the early eighteenth-century Grand Pensionary as a
viable alternative.24 Elie Luzac, who never tired of quoting Van Slinge-
landt with the greatest respect, characterized him as
a man who, had Providence given him a few more years, would no doubt
finally have arrived at the conclusion that nothing except the sufficient
authority of an Eminent Head could solve the problems he discusses and
bring the Liberty which he mentions to the State.25
That loyal servant of the court Herman Tollius, finally, in 1792 inten-
sively studied Van Slingelandt’s works with the stadholder’s oldest son
and would keep using them until well after the collapse of the Dutch
ancien régime in 1795.26 This appropriation of Van Slingelandt was, of
course, perfectly understandable in the light of the Orangist desire to
increase the efficiency of the state without making any concessions
whatsoever to Patriot radicalism.27 The Patriots in turn explicitly dis-
tanced themselves from such a model of reform. Van Slingelandt’s pro-
posals for the reform of the state, the influential Leyden Draft observed,
were not only insufficient, but also undesirable.28
Over and against these cautious proposals for reform from above,
the Patriots offered a far more fundamental program of reform and
renewal. Contrary to what has often been maintained in later histo-
riography, this program clearly went beyond the call for a return to
an idealized ancient constitution. As has already briefly been suggested
22 Kluit, De Souvereiniteit der Staten van Holland, 12.

23 Waelwyk, Vaderlandsche remarques.
24 Canter de Munck, Tegenswoordige Regeeringsvorm, 207–212.
25 [Luzac] Reinier Vryaarts Openhartige Brieven, X, 99.
26 Naber, Correspondentie van de stadhouderlijke familie, I, 169; [Tollius] Nederland’s Staats-
gebreken.
27 On the Orangist proposals for reform see Schutte, “Van grondslag tot breidel der
vrijheid”.
28 Ontwerp, 11–12.
above, the radicalism of the Patriot movement may perhaps best be

understood as arising from the combination of three elements: the tra-
dition of classical republicanism, the notion of permanent and inalien-
able popular sovereignty and a boundless confidence in a progressive
and continuous process of popular enlightenment. The purpose of the
present section will be to demonstrate the validity of such an analysis
of the nature of Patriot political thought by means of a discussion of
some of the more important Patriot political texts, with special refer-
ence to Constitutional Restoration.29 It is worth pointing out in passing that
the Dutch Patriots shared their preoccupation with the tradition of clas-
sical republicanism with their late eighteenth-century fellow radicals in
England and America. The frequently voiced objection that—given the
agrarian basis of republican notions of independent and virtuous citi-
zenship in the Anglophone world—comparisons between Dutch and
Anglo-American eighteenth-century republicanism are of little use has
recently lost much of its persuasive power.30 For as John Brewer has
convincingly demonstrated, certainly late eighteenth-century English
radicals had little trouble with giving up the notion of landed prop-
erty as the basis for citizenship while at the same time continuing to
use the vocabulary of classical republicanism.31 In that light, compar-
isons between Dutch and the Anglo-American late eighteenth-century
republicanism become much more plausible.
As good representatives of late eighteenth-century classical republi-
canism, Dutch Patriots regarded the struggle between power and lib-
erty as the fundamental and recurring pattern in human societies.32 All
history showed, in the words of Constitutional Restoration, “a permanent
Battle between Sovereigns with a desire for arbitrary power and Peoples
doing their utmost to defend their Liberty against these onslaughts”.33
In the Dutch Republic such attempts at usurpation could not, of course,
be attributed to a monarch, but the stadholder was effortlessly placed in
29 Grondwettige Herstelling has always been regarded as a central, perhaps the central
text in the Patriot program: Leeb, Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution, 185–195;
Van Himsbergen, “Grondwettige Herstelling”.
30 For the problem of comparing eighteenth-century Dutch and Anglophone repub-
lican discourse see, for instance, Pocock, “The Problem of Political Thought”; E.H.
Kossmann, “Dutch Republicanism” in: Kossmann, Politieke Theorie en Geschiedenis and
Klein, Patriots Republikanisme.
31 Brewer, “English Radicalism”.
32 Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, in particular the third chapter:
“Power and Liberty: A Theory of Politics”; Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 3–45.
124 chapter six
the same role. Just like George III, detested by English and American
radicals, William V according to the Patriots ceaselessly attempted to
bring liberty to an end through his corrupting influence and his com-
mand of a standing army.34 In the same slightly paranoid style of their
Anglo-American colleagues, Dutch Patriots described the time in which
they lived as one in which liberty was put to the ultimate test.35 There
were, the authors of Constitutional Restoration were convinced, only two
alternatives left: liberty and slavery.36
In their reflections on the nature of this momentous conflict, the
authors of Constitutional Restoration showed themselves to be much less
obsessed with arguments from Dutch history than has generally been
supposed by later commentators. Much more important to them were
what they considered to be the true basic principles of republics in gen-
eral. Even when they spoke about restoration, they were not primarily
referring to a Dutch constitution which was deemed to have existed at
some point in historical time, but to these general republican princi-
ples. Only such a reading can explain why the crucial first chapters of
the work were devoted to an exposition of general political principles,
or why the authors were perfectly willing to concede that the Dutch
Republic had really never had a well-ordered constitution.37 While it is
certainly true that the authors of Constitutional Restoration made ample
use of arguments from Dutch history in putting forward their proposals
for a new political order, they simultaneously and repeatedly empha-
sized that the importance of the heritage of the past was secondary
to the general principles of republicanism in their argumentation.38
Among those principles, they placed a conception of liberty derived
from classical republicanism in a central role. The participation of the
citizen in government was, Constitutional Restoration emphasized, abso-
lutely necessary for the survival of liberty:
34 [Van der Capellen] Aan het Volk van Nederland. The editor of the most recent
edition of this work, H.L. Zwitzer, is entirely right in stressing its roots in the classical
republican tradition.
35 Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style”.
37 Ibidem, 32–33, 131.
38 In regard to the well-known 1581 resolution by the States of Holland concerning
the consultation of the guilds and civic militias in the political process, for instance, the
authors of Constitutional Restoration remarked that only those decisions from the past not
conflicting with “true Republican principles” retained their validity (Ibidem, 99). On this
resolution of the States see Woltjer, “Dutch Privileges”.
In a Republican state it is possible to distinguish between civil and

political liberty. The first consists therein that one is allowed to do what
one wants, provided that one does not harm others. Political liberty is
about the right to influence the Government of the state, be it directly
or through elected Representatives. … It would be easy to show that the
maintenance or suppression of political liberty goes hand in hand with
the maintenance or suppression of civil liberty.39
At first sight, this close and intimate linking of positive and negative
liberty was strikingly similar to the classical republican vision Lieven de
Beaufort had unfolded during the first half of the eighteenth century.40
Unsurprisingly, the authors of Constitutional Restoration on several occa-
sions approvingly cited his work.41 Yet in the meaning they attached to
the concept of political liberty, they went far beyond anything that had
been envisaged by De Beaufort. For where De Beaufort had defined
political liberty largely in terms of the potential access to political office
for all citizens, Constitutional Restoration wrote about citizens actively exer-
cising their sovereignty and arming themselves in order to protect their
independence and virtue. It was, in other words, in the changing def-
inition of what constituted the active citizenship regarded as essential
to the maintenance of political liberty that the radicalism of the Patriot
message could be found. In the Dutch Republic, as elsewhere in early
modern Europe, it was of course not unusual to find the notion of orig-
inal popular sovereignty at the basis of highly traditional and hierar-
chical forms of political argumentation. The Patriots, however, explic-
itly rejected such uses of popular sovereignty by emphasizing that the
sovereign people, composed of independent, virtuous and armed citi-
zens, could never permanently transfer its sovereign rights. Although
its exercise could temporarily be entrusted to elected representatives,
popular sovereignty was inalienable. Should the people decide that
its temporary representatives no longer served the common good, it
could simply revoke their mandate. The people were always entitled
“not only to replace those who exercise political power, but also to
change the entire Form of Government”.42 Petrus de Wakker van Zon,
the most likely author of The Aristocracy, a radical pamphlet of obvi-
ous civic humanist inspiration, in this context emphatically mentioned
the right of the nation “to purify, to improve, yes to change” the con-

40 See Chapter Three.
41 E.g. Grondwettige Herstelling, van Nederlands Staatswezen, I, 283–284.
42 Ibidem, 63–64.
126 chapter six
stitution.43 Better known perhaps is Van der Capellen’s description of

the people as “the participants, the owners, the lords and masters”
of the political order.44 Despite this heavy emphasis on the permanent
sovereignty of the citizen body, the Patriots acknowledged that constant
and direct participation of all virtuous citizens in the government of the
country was a practical impossibility. The exercise of sovereignty was
to be entrusted to elected representatives, responsible to their electors
and holding no more than a temporary and revocable mandate. Mixed
government was to be replaced by “Representative Democracy” or a
“well-ordered representative Popular Government”.45 It is evident that
the implementation of this ideal would have far-reaching implications
for the position of the stadholder, the aristocracy and the oligarchic
regents.
The Patriots were confident that active republican citizenship on the
basis of permanent popular sovereignty would be a great blessing for
the country. As the authors of Constitutional Restoration observed:
The larger the number of those participating in government, either as
representatives or as represented, the more each citizen will identify with
the general interest and the greater therefore will Patriotism, the soul of
all Republican Governments, become.46
This confidence was underpinned and strengthened by the Patriot

conviction that the population was more enlightened than it had been
in any previous historical era. The Patriots were perfectly willing to
admit that in the ancient world popular participation in politics had
frequently led to utter chaos, but they invariably pointed out that such
scenes of horror were no longer to be feared in enlightened modern
times. Indeed, the process of enlightenment had made a dominant
role of the people in politics all but inevitable.47 De Wakker van Zon
even suggested that because of this increase in enlightenment, it was
really only in modern times that the republican form of government
had become a viable possibility.48 Perhaps it is worth stressing once
again, at the end of this sketch of the general characteristics of Patriot
political thought, that the respect of these reformers for the heritage of
43 [De Wakker van Zon] De Adel, 105.

44 [Van der Capellen] Aan het Volk van Nederland, 38.
45 Ontwerp, 46; [De Wakker van Zon] De Adel, 133.
47 Ibidem, 426–427, 434.
48 [De Wakker van Zon] De Adel, 75–76.
the past was not as great as has often been suggested. They certainly
appreciated Dutch history as a rich store of experience to draw upon,
but their radicalism was forward looking and in their political program
they clearly desired something new. In that respect, the words of the
author of The Aristocracy were entirely representative of the aspirations
of Dutch Patriotism:
We overthrow old buildings to build new and better ones on the same
ground. We see old shortcomings and we are afraid to replace them with
new and good arrangements? On the contrary, the older they are, the
sooner they need to be eradicated; on the one hand, because the long
period of suffering they have caused humanity gives it a right to rid itself
of them as soon as possible; on the other hand, because by vigorously
remedying the mistakes made by our Forefathers, we will be entitled to a
greater gratitude from Posterity than they can lay claim to from us.49
It was this general view of the essential principles of republicanism that

formed the background to the Patriot attack on the stadholderate. The
stadholders, the Patriots were convinced, had in the course of time
amassed immense power. William V, whose power exceeded that of
“the old Kings of the Land”, could in fact be regarded as the sovereign
“with only the official title lacking”.50 It was of course obvious that the
stadholders, who had ceaselessly sought to increase their power through
the darkest of channels, would never admit to their true intentions:
“It is thus that those who desire sovereignty fool the people!”51 To
strengthen their position the stadholders had, the Patriots observed,
made use of all available means, but above all of the vast rights of
political appointment they had gradually and informally accumulated.
They had thereby succeeded in subjecting the country to a system
of influence, dependence and corruption that undermined the very
foundations of republicanism.52 To the Patriots, it was evident “that the
stadholder … is no more suited to fill vacant places in the government
with dignity, than Caligula’s horse was able to act as Burgomaster”.53
Not only was the stadholder incapable of making such appointments,
it was also completely illegitimate. For did not all the best political
writers agree that the end of liberty was near “when those who are
49 Ibidem, 107–108.
52 For a modern analysis of the stadholderly system of government in the second half
of the eighteenth century see Gabriëls, De heren als dienaren.

128 chapter six
in possession of the legislative power are appointed by the person who

holds the executive power”?54
The Patriots described the dismal consequences of this illegal growth
of executive power in language strongly reminiscent of contemporary
English and American radicalism. The whole system of government,
they insisted, had come to depend on the favors distributed by the stad-
holder and his court, that is to say on special interests. Merit or capacity
counted for nothing when it came to political appointments. Thus, the
state had come to be dominated by “the least suitable, the basest, de
most shameless Flatterers and Favorites of the Court, and oppressors of
the People.”55 The entire government of the country had fallen into the
hands of a pyramid of corrupt dependents, with the “Despotic Court”
at the top.56 Since such stadholderly regents—the term is from Con-
stitutional Restoration—had no ties whatsoever to the people, they com-
pletely disregarded the common good.57 In these circumstances, repub-
lican liberty was obviously doomed. Indeed, the stadholderly system of
government, in which virtuous liberty had been replaced with despotic
favoritism, was corrupting the entire “national character”.58 The val-
ues of the hierarchical and luxurious court culture penetrated society
as a whole and generated a “remarkable inequality of persons, which
is the pest of Republics”.59 This changing pattern of values in turn
adversely affected all other areas of activity, including commerce. Thus,
the unbridled growth of the power of the stadholder and his court
posed a threat to the very survival of the Dutch Republic.60
The consequences to be drawn from this analysis were clear. The
position the stadholder had come to occupy was entirely incompatible
with republican principles and values. Were the light of liberty to
continue shining, drastic political action was imperative. In taking such
action, the Patriots insisted, it was unnecessary to take into account
the stadholder’s historical rights. The only thing that counted was the
common good.
54 Ibidem, 190.
55 Ontwerp, 14.
56 [De Wakker van Zon] De Adel, 100.
57 Grondwettige Herstelling, van Nederlands Staatswezen, I, 190–191, 330–331.
58 Ibidem, 191; [Van der Capellen] Aan het Volk van Nederland, 52–54.
59 Grondwettige Herstelling, van Nederlands Staatswezen, I, 192. For a heavy emphasis on
the essential importance of equality for republics see also [De Wakker van Zon] De
Adel.
It is undisputable that the principal basis of the stadholderate ought

to be the common good of the nation. Should therefore some existing
arrangement, in whatever way it may have come about, be found to
conflict with this aim, it may always be revoked.61
Even if one wished to argue from the past and from historical prece-
dent, however, it was clear that the stadholderate could not be con-
sidered an essential part of the government of the Dutch Republic.
Expressions such as “Eminent Head” or “Stadholderly Constitution”
should be regarded as no more than hollow Orangist propaganda.62
Not that the stadholderate was to be dispensed with altogether: the
Patriots acknowledged that the highly decentralized and particularistic
structure of the Dutch state needed the presence of such a figure, albeit
one whose “functions are clearly and meticulously limited through
explicit and unambivalent instructions”.63 It was with a view to draw-
ing up just such instructions that, early in 1787, the States of Holland
installed a commission to investigate and determine the proper “bound-
aries of the executive power”.64 Before its recommendations could be
implemented, however, the Orangist counterrevolution had triumphed.
3. In Defense of the Stadholderate
The political arguments of the defenders of the stadholderate orig-

inated from an intellectual background that fundamentally differed
from the one in which Patriotism was rooted. The liberty all Orangists
praised as one of the great blessings of the Dutch Republic was not the
classical republican liberty the Patriots had adopted and adapted, but
the negative liberty of the rule of law. The Orangists did not deny the
existence of a close relationship between civil and political liberty, but
they conceived of that relationship in a way that was utterly different
from Patriot political thought. Whereas the Patriots warned that civil
liberty would inevitably disappear if the citizens did not actively partic-
ipate in government, the Orangists argued the opposite, and claimed
61 Ibidem, 195. See also 149, 174–175, 241.

62 Ibidem, 149–169. This passage offers an extended discussion of all the wrong names
that according to the authors had been given to the stadholderate.
63 Ibidem, 445 (quotation), 242–258; Ontwerp, 14–15.
64 Colenbrander, De Patriottentijd, III, 119–121, 149. The Concept Instructie voor den Heere
Erfstadhouder may, together with a long and hostile commentary, be found in [Luzac]
Vaderlandsche Staatsbeschouwers, IV, 439–536.
130 chapter six
that the rule of law and civil liberty were incompatible with active pop-
ular participation in politics. Far from being positively linked, civil and
political liberty were in fact enemies, both Adriaan Kluit and Johan
Meerman maintained.65 The Orangists stressed that if anyone’s exist-
ing rights, for instance those of the stadholder, could simply be revoked
in the name of the common good, the end of everyone’s security and
liberty was near.66 They therefore viewed the Patriot assault on the posi-
tion of the stadholder in the name of political liberty as the beginning
of the end of civil liberty.
The Orangists equally rejected the Patriot conception of a perma-
nent popular sovereignty founded on natural and inalienable rights.
They voiced their resistance to this notion in various ways. Some,
Adriaan Kluit among them, simply argued that the Patriots, in fol-
lowing this idea derived from “modern writers on Public Law” such
as Rousseau, Price and Priestley, were perverting the most evident and
generally accepted principles of sound politics.67 For “the best and most
Political teachers” all agreed that the original sovereignty of the peo-
ple had been transferred by means of a contract which had created a
mutual legal obligation between both parties involved and which could
not, except in the most extraordinary circumstances, be one-sidedly dis-
solved.68 To deny this, as the followers of the new “imaginary and disas-
trous System” were doing, was in fact to deny the possibility of any form
of stable government.69 Other Orangists, such as Kornelis de Vogel and
Elie Luzac, went considerably further than Adriaan Kluit. Shocked by
the egalitarian, democratic and revolutionary interpretation the Patri-
ots were giving to the concepts of original popular sovereignty, contract
and natural rights, they attempted to remove all potentially radical ele-
ments from the vocabulary of natural law. They tried, in other words, to
make the modern tradition of natural law from Grotius through Wolff
fit for counterrevolutionary use by means of hierarchical and conserva-
tive adaptations. They denied the relevance of natural rights and nat-
65 Meerman, De Burgerlyke Vryheid, passim; Kluit, Academische Redevoering, over het Mis-
bruik van ’t Algemeen Staatsrecht, 88.

66 Aan het Volk van Nederland, 5.
67 Kluit, De Souvereiniteit der Staten van Holland, 88; Kluit, Academische Redevoering, over het
Misbruik van ’t Algemeen Staatsrecht, 27–28.

68 Kluit, Academische Redevoering, over het Misbruik van ’t Algemeen Staatsrecht, 33–51, 97.
69 [Kluit] De rechten van den mensch in Vrankrijk, 349. On Kluit see Leeb, Ideological
Origins of the Batavian Revolution, 198–211, 251–258; Veen, “De legitimatie van de souvere-
initeit der Staten”; Schöffer, “Adriaan Kluit”.
ural liberty for existing civil societies, argued that natural equality had
never existed, emphasized that forms of dominance and social hierar-
chy were an integral part of every existing social and political order
and disagreed with the view that governments necessarily derived their
legitimacy from an explicit contract. Not only did they consider the
notion of permanent popular sovereignty to be an absurdity, but they
also denied that the people had originally been sovereign. It is indica-
tive of the enlightened nature of this late eighteenth-century debate
that even the orthodox-reformed De Vogel did not base his arguments
on the Bible, but on reason and “the excellent capacities of Grotius,
Pufendorf, Barbeyrac, Burlamaqui, Wolff, Luzac and other legal schol-
ars”. That this same De Vogel devoted a separate section of what was a
Catechism of the Stadholderate to such issues, moreover, once again testifies
to the fact that the debate over the stadholderate was intimately linked
with more general theoretical issues.70
After the foregoing, it will come as no great surprise that the Or-
angists also rejected the third and last central tenet in Patriot politi-
cal thought, the idea that the growth of popular enlightenment cre-
ated an increasingly solid foundation for permanent popular partici-
pation in politics. They certainly did not deny the enlightened nature
of the century they lived in. On the contrary: they saw themselves as
the representatives and guardians of a rational and tolerant enlighten-
ment against the new fanaticism preached by the Patriots. That rational
enlightenment had anything to do with popular participation in poli-
tics, however, the Orangists refused to acknowledge. Indeed, they were
convinced that the two were diametrically opposed.71
Such, then, was the general intellectual background against which
the Orangist arguments in favor of the stadholderate may be under-
stood. They did not consider the stadholderate as a merely useful insti-
tution, but as an absolutely necessary part of the government of the
Dutch Republic. They claimed that Patriots such as Pieter Paulus, who
70 De Vogel, Katechismus van het Stadhouderschap. Tweede Deel, passim (the quotation is
on 263). The subtitle of this second volume of the Catechism is “Containing, in the
treatment of man and the state of nature, the rights and duties of humanity and
of nature; as fundamental concepts for the knowledge and the defence of the entire
duty of the citizen”. Elie Luzac’s mature thought on natural law may be found in the
posthumously published Du Droit Naturel, Civil et Politique.
71 E.g. [Luzac] De Voor- en Nadeelen van den Invloed des Volks, II, 18–25. For a more
extended treatment of the general characteristics of conservative political thought

during this period see Chapter Eight.
132 chapter six
only grudgingly admitted that the stadholderate could be of some use,

implicitly undermined the institution.72 For, as J.W. Kumpel pointed
out, “he who reduces necessity to utility thereby makes the topic under
discussion problematic—and declares the necessity unproven.”73 Given
the vehemence of their accusations against the stadholderate and its
incumbents, moreover, the Orangist simply did not believe the Patri-
ots in their assurances that, despite all this, they were convinced of the
use of the institution. Both Adriaan Kluit and Elie Luzac were certain
that it was only for tactical reasons that the Patriots for the moment
were willing to tolerate a stadholderate strongly reduced in power.74
Should the Patriots have their way, the stadholder would be no more
than “a Shadow, subjected to the orders of the Voice of the People, who
as Servant of the State, without any power or influence, would be able
to do no more than blindly follow those orders”.75 One might as well
abolish the stadholderly dignity altogether.76 In order to counter the
Patriot attacks on the stadholderate effectively, the Orangists needed,
first of all, to refute the assertion that the country was being ruined by
the political machinations of a despotic court. Secondly, they had to
demonstrate, by means of a convincing description of the essential role
of the stadholderate in the political order, that it was the reduction of
the power of the stadholderate desired by the Patriots that would truly
bring disaster to the country.
Following the analysis presented early in the eighteenth century by
Grand Pensionary Simon van Slingelandt, the Orangists emphasized
that the Republic was lacking in effective central political power. Given
this indisputable fact, how could the Patriots possibly be taken seri-
ously in claiming that the stadholder was running the country like an
oriental despot? Any such suggestion was obviously preposterous, since
the power of the stadholder could not even be compared to that of a
legitimate sovereign king. The Patriot contention that the stadholder,
but for the official title, possessed more power than the old kings of
the country, was dismissed by the Orangists as a gross misrepresenta-
72 In 1772, Pieter Paulus had written a well-known treatise entitled The Use of the
Stadholderly Government.
73 [Kumpel] De Philarche, 31.
74 Kluit, De Souvereiniteit der Staten van Holland, 61; [Luzac] Vaderlandsche Brieven, nr. 6,
50–58.
75 Canter de Munck, Tegenswoordige Regeeringsvorm, 17.
76 Samenspraak tusschen de geest van een oudtydschen vaderlander, 12–13; Onpartydige beschou-
wing, van de voorledene en tegenwoordige staatsgesteldheid, 30–32.

tion of reality. Even the most superficial knowledge of the structure of

Dutch government was sufficient to establish that the stadholders held
neither the whole of sovereignty, nor even the legislative power.77 Elie
Luzac, who constantly derided the classical republicanism of his oppo-
nents, pointed out that it was the unfortunate legacy of classical antiq-
uity from which the Patriots derived such confused ideas. Their mis-
placed classicism had led them to make two major analytical mistakes.
In the first place, they suffered from the deluded view that every form
of monarchical power inevitably led to political slavery. “This notion, or
fallacy, has been implanted in the mind of the rabble by the Romans,
after they had chased out Tarquin, and has subsequently been spread
by them to other Peoples”. Because they adhered to this classical prej-
udice the Patriots, secondly, were unable to distinguish between “the
authority of one Head in the Government” and “arbitrary one-headed
sovereignty”. They therefore mistakenly ascribed all the disadvantages
of the latter political arrangement to the former, of which the stadhold-
erate was an example.78
The stadholder’s rights of appointment, regarded by the Patriots as
the most dismal feature of a corrupt system of government, did not,
the Orangists maintained, testify to an uncontrolled and dangerous
growth of the executive power. The influence the stadholder had was,
on the contrary, one of the few available means by which the break-
down of the government of the Republic into a plethora of uncon-
nected interest groups and parties could be prevented. Johan Meer-
man observed that the stadholder would be entirely powerless without
such influence, “an arrangement which, like all human institutions, is
susceptible to abuse, but more often serves to detach Regents from ill-
understood Provincial or urban interests and to remind them of higher
duties”.79 It was undeniable, the Orangists admitted, that the stadhold-
ers preferably appointed supporters of their own house. That, however,
was all for the good since supporters of the stadholderate were by def-
inition supporters of the common good, Kornelis de Vogel argued in
a blandly optimistic vein.80 The Orangists equally rejected the Patriot
contention that the presence of a court corrupted Dutch national char-
acter. Regents who spent much of their time at the court could indeed
77 [De Vogel] Katechismus van het Stadhouderschap, 505.

78 [Luzac] Vaderlandsche Staatsbeschouwers, I, 125, 113.
134 chapter six
polish their manners and shed some of their habitual bluntness, but
that was clearly to be considered an improvement. For the rest, every
suggestion that “more lasciviousness, debauchery, sumptuousness, lux-
ury and arrogance, or so-called vainglory” could be found at the court
than in other parts of society was without any basis in fact. A moderate
luxury, with the court as an example, was moreover highly advanta-
geous to economic life and commerce.81 Finally, the Orangists pointed
out that the Patriots were wrong in ascribing an unlimited desire for
the expansion of his power to the stadholder simply because it con-
flicted with his interests. Should the stadholder succeed in acquiring
sovereignty, he would thereby instantly degrade his own status. From
“the richest citizen and Stadholder of the first Republic”, he would become
“the poorest Regent and Sovereign of one of the smallest Kingdoms”.82
The huge factual power the Patriots ascribed to the stadholder was,
in short, non-existent. Their plans, formulated on the basis of this
misrepresentation of political reality, to drastically reduce his role were
not only unlawful, but would be disastrous for the country as a whole.
In a clever argumentative move, the Orangists accused their opponents
of doing exactly the sort of things they reproached the stadholder
for. It was not William V who was acting in a despotic way, but the
States of Holland with their initiative, legitimated by appeals to the
common good and the voice of the people, to one-sidedly change the
existing constitution. They were obviously under the misapprehension
that they possessed an arbitrary sovereign power and could change the
stadholderly dignity as they pleased.
They decided, to put it briefly and bluntly, that they needed a servant
who would do whatever they wished. That is what this drivel, which,
were it not so malicious, we would dismiss as deranged, amounts to,
Elie Luzac wrote in his furious commentary on the plans of the com-
mission appointed in 1787 by the States of Holland to determine the
proper boundaries of the executive power.83 In order to prove that such
changes in the position of the stadholder were unlawful, the Orangists
had to demonstrate that the stadholder was much more than a mere
servant of the States, who could be manipulated at their will and whose
function was at most that of head of the executive power. They tried
to do so by claiming, often on the basis of extremely complex historical
81 Canter de Munck, Tegenswoordige Regeeringsvorm, 120–125. The quotation is on 121.

82 [Kluit] De rechten van den mensch in Vrankrijk, 366–367.
83 [Luzac] Vaderlandsche Staatsbeschouwers, IV, 448. See also note 64.
arguments, that the stadholderate was an integral part of the constitu-

tion of the Dutch Republic. This was, they added, also evident from
the fact that it had been declared hereditary. The only legitimate way
to change anything in this arrangement was through the consent of
all parties involved.84 To describe the stadholder, as the head of the
executive power did not in itself strike the Orangists as wrong, but
they sharply rejected what they considered to be the Patriot abuse of
this terminology derived from Montesquieu. The executive power, they
insisted, should not be regarded as something entirely separate from
and fully subordinate to the legislative power, but should be under-
stood as one of the parts of sovereignty.85 What the Patriots intended
to achieve through the abuse of such terminology was nothing less than
to undermine “the radical and essential character of the Stadholderly
dignity, the trunk out of which all branches of Stadholderly government
should grow: namely the status of being Eminent Head of the State”.86
Should they succeed in doing so, the stadholder would no longer be
able to fulfill his essential role in the government of the Dutch Repub-
lic.
It was to the necessity of the role of the stadholder in Dutch politics
that the Orangists devoted their perhaps most penetrating and certainly
most unanimous observations. They described the stadholder as the
protector of the people, the guardian of the common good, the helm
and the soul of the state. To the Orangists, who found the notion
of increased popular participation in politics abhorrent, the liberty
and welfare of the people were best protected by the existence of a
moderate and mixed government. Since the people were incapable
of self-protection, it was the form of government that had to exclude
all possibility of oppression. Such protection of civil liberty against
oppression had always existed in the Low Countries, they claimed.
Before the Revolt, they never tired of pointing out, the States had been
the guardians of the interests of the people. When the sixteenth-century
Revolt made them into the sovereign power, it became impossible for
them to fulfill their traditional role any longer, and it was the stadholder
who took this task upon himself.
84 E.g. Waelwyk, Vaderlandsche remarques, passim; Decker, Proeve eener Verhandeling, 23–
24.
85 E.g. [De Vogel] Katechismus van het Stadhouderschap, 83–85.
86 [Luzac] Vaderlandsche Staatsbeschouwers, IV, 484.
136 chapter six
When the Sovereignty of these Lands, which had belonged to the King,
went over to the States, they could no longer, as they used to, intercede
with the Sovereign on behalf of the People and thus the Stadholderate
came into our Constitution, to plead for the interests and the Liberties of
the Citizens with the present Sovereign …87
When it came to specifying precisely how the stadholder was to carry
out his role as champion of the interests of the people, the language
employed by the Orangists became rather general and vague. Some
described the position of the stadholder as holding a “balance between
the Aristocracy and the People”, others referred to him as “the per-
manent Representative of the people”.88 All however agreed that it was
only the stadholder who was capable of protecting the people against
potential oppression by the aristocracy. The Orangists were moreover
convinced that the silent majority they were so desperately trying to
mobilize against the Patriot threat fully subscribed to the truth of this
analysis and therefore desired no curtailment of the powers of the stad-
holder.89
Apart from seeing him as the sole protector of the people, the Or-
angists also regarded the stadholder as the only person in the Republic
in a position to further the common good. Where the Patriots main-
tained that the interests of a powerful monarchical element in govern-
ment were by definition opposed to those of all citizens, their oppo-
nents took the exact opposite view. In their observations on the role
of the stadholder as the promoter of the common good, the Orangists
of course pointed out that the government of the Republic was highly
particularistic and that, with its manifold institutionalized urban and
provincial interests, it strongly resembled a patchwork quilt. The unify-
ing authority of a stadholder was therefore clearly indispensable. More
important, however, was their argument that no purely aristocratic gov-
ernment, regardless of the form of the state in which it ruled, was capa-
ble of furthering the common good. Aristocratic governments, lacking
a “common driving force”, were by their very nature incapable of cre-
ating the necessary political unity and therefore always spawned par-
87 [De Vogel] Katechismus van het Stadhouderschap, 518–519. See also Meerman, De
Burgerlyke Vryheid, 26, 51–52.

88 Onpartydige beschouwing, van de voorledene en tegenwoordige staatsgesteldheid, 40; Verhandeling
over den alouden en tegenswoordigen staat, 24.

89 E.g. Missive betreffende de zo beruchte aanspraak, 5.
ties. And parties in turn, it was all too well known, were the bane of
politics.90 In the Republic, where the aristocratic element was already
quite a dominant force in government, such a disastrous development
could only be prevented by the presence of a stadholder, whose func-
tion it was to give a steady and uniform movement to the whole
body politic. Their unique and elevated political, social and finan-
cial position, their education and the august history of their house
made it impossible that the Orange stadholders, in carrying out this
lofty task, would ever have something other than the common good
in mind. That, in the view of the Orangists, it was equally unlikely
that they harbored secret desires for sovereignty, we have already seen
above. The stadholders, in short, were the essential “Golden Mean”
and added the necessary “legitimate authority of Monarchical rule” to
the complex and predominantly aristocratic government of the Dutch
Republic.91
Yet even this barrage of arguments from history, law and the theory
of politics was deemed insufficient by the defenders of the stadholder-
ate fully to convey the urgency of their case. As their choice of lan-
guage made abundantly clear, they aimed to demonstrate the necessity
of the stadholderate on the basis of arguments of the greatest possible
scope. Not only the Dutch Republic, but every viable state needed a
monarchical element in its government. Indeed it was the very struc-
ture of the universe, the orderly and hierarchical principles of which
were deeply admired by the adherents of the Moderate Enlightenment,
which proclaimed the naturalness of the presence of a single head in
government. The metaphors and analogies the Orangists employed in
this context are richly deserving of a separate study. Here, however,
we must limit ourselves to the final words, entirely characteristic of this
universal ambition of late eighteenth-century Orangism, of Elie Luzac’s
The Necessity of the Stadholderly Government:
Contemplate the coherence of the Universe; a common and fixed pri-
mary cause keeps everything in its proper movement: contemplate the
parts, they are all subject to their driving force; the Planets are being
moved around a Head-Planet and the lesser planets all around one of
their own. The world turns around its axis; and its parts move, by one
and the same law, to its center. The life of our body is caused by a move-
90 [Luzac] Vaderlandsche Staatsbeschouwers, I, 170–185.

138 chapter six
ment, just as our desire for happiness is the first cause of all our other
desires. Can you name one single instrument which does not receive its
movement from a general driving force? Nothing lives, nothing exists,
nothing moves without proclaiming to us that Civil Society needs a
Head, just as there is a primary cause for everything.92
92 [Luzac], Vaderlandsche Staatsbeschouwers, I, 184–185.

chapter seven
THE CONCEPT OF LIBERTY IN

THE DUTCH REPUBLIC, 1780–1787
The historiography concerning the Dutch Patriottentijd, the period of

political upheaval between 1780 and 1787, is marked by a curious para-
dox. On the one hand, the Patriot political movement is seen as an
important early continental manifestation of “the age of the democratic
revolution” by historians such as R.R. Palmer and Simon Schama.1 On
the other hand, students of Patriot political thought—I. Leonard Leeb
prominently among them—tend to emphasize the traditional ancien
régime nature of the Patriot program. The Dutch Patriots, so their argu-
ment goes, were obsessed with the glorious Dutch past. They desired
a return to a (largely imagined) ancient constitution, discussed politics
almost entirely in terms of Dutch history, showed themselves incapable
of innovative political thought and were ideologically separated from
the Orangists by no more than “a minor quarrel about the practical
form of the executive power”. It was only after 1787 and under the
influence of the French revolution, so this line of argument continues,
that the exiled Dutch Patriots radicalized and started to plead for the
introduction of a unitary state based on popular sovereignty.2
In the previous chapter it was argued—against the dominant histo-
riographical view—that Patriotism, although one may certainly har-
bor legitimate doubt about its role as the harbinger of a modern
“democratic revolution”, undeniably represented something new and
unprecedented in the history of Dutch political thought. From an anal-
ysis of Patriot political language in general and Patriot arguments
against the stadholderate in particular, it emerged that the movement
manifested an innovative radicalism that was recognized as such by
1 Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution; Schama, Patriots and Liberators.
2 Leeb, Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution, passim. The quotation is on 176.
See also: Wessels, “Tradition et lumières in politicis”; Grijzenhout, Feesten voor het
Vaderland, 40. Recent historiography concerning the Dutch Patriot era is discussed in
Reitsma, “‘Altoos Gedenkwaardig’”; Huussen jr., “1787. De Nederlandse revolutie?”
and Te Brake, “Staking a new claim”. The most recent attempt at synthesis is Klein,
Patriots Republikanisme.
140 chapter seven
contemporary Orangists, who employed a fundamentally different po-

litical language in their attempts to defend the established order. The
present chapter takes up the same theme, albeit from a different meth-
odological angle. This time, Patriotism is not approached through an
analysis of its general political language or its arguments about specific
political institutions such as the stadholderate, but through its use of
one central political concept: liberty. The purpose of this exercise in
Begriffsgeschichte or the history of concepts is, once again, to demon-
strate that the dominant view of Patriot political thought as essentially
moderate, backward looking and lacking in innovative content is fun-
damentally flawed. In the first section of this chapter, some general
remarks will be made about the study of the concept of liberty in the
late eighteenth century, about the available sources, and about the rel-
evant historical context. The second section will trace the development
of the concept of liberty in the crucial years between 1780 and 1787 and
will show how the Patriots brought about a fundamental change in its
meaning. The third and final section briefly addresses the Orangist or
conservative use of the concept of liberty during these same years.
1. “Different Meanings Given to the Word of Liberty”
“No word has been given more different meanings or has made such
varied impressions upon the minds of men as that of liberty”, Mon-
tesquieu observed in his chapter on “Different Meanings Given to
the Word Liberty” in the Esprit des Lois.3 Dutch readers of the 1780s,
who could peruse the Esprit des Lois in Dirk Hoola van Nooten’s new
translation, would most certainly have agreed, for they found them-
selves engaged in a veritable battle over the true meaning of liberty.4
They endlessly discussed liberty in their new periodic political press
and analyzed it in political pamphlets and learned treatises; they sang
the praises of liberty in poetry and plays; they named their new politi-
cal societies after liberty and they depicted liberty in countless prints;
they designed public rituals in which temples of liberty functioned
as the crucial symbols. With this new political press, this unprece-
dented political sociability, and these intense political rituals, all revolv-
ing around the concept of liberty, the Dutchmen of the 1780s created, it
3 Esprit des Lois, book 11, chapter 2.

4 On the Dutch reception of Montesquieu see Chapter Five.
the concept of liberty in the dutch republic, 1780–1787 141
has recently been suggested, a new political culture.5 The question that
has so far remained unanswered, however, is whether or not they also
gave a new meaning to the concept of liberty. Did, in other words, this
rapid and spectacular genesis of a new political culture coincide with a
transformation of the meaning of key terms in the political vocabulary?
That the answer to this question is likely to be affirmative is sug-
gested by two preliminary observations. In the first place, it is well
known that rapid conceptual change was the rule rather than the
exception at the time of the European and American revolutions of the
late eighteenth century. During the American Revolution, the meaning
of crucial concepts such as “republic” was dramatically transformed in
the course of just a few years.6 The French Revolution, too, was char-
acterized by fundamental conceptual change during its initial phases.7
Given this international pattern of conceptual development, it would
be remarkable indeed if the Dutch Republic should turn out to have
gone through revolutionary changes in political practice without the
accompanying conceptual changes. To this supposition derived from
the international context one may add, in the second place, the fact
that the 1780s saw the sudden appearance in the Dutch Republic of a
large number of treatises on the theme of the abuse of words. It has
justly been pointed out by the editors of the Handbuch politisch-sozialer
Begriffe in Frankreich 1680–1820 that a marked increase in the number of
treatises on the “abus des mots” is the most important contemporary
indication of decisive conceptual change.8 In the Dutch Republic, sev-
eral political publicists were deeply alarmed by the new ways in which
familiar political terms were being used during the 1780s.
On February 9, 1784, Professor Adriaan Kluit relinquished his duties
as rector magnificus of Leyden University with a farewell address reveal-
ingly entitled On the Abuse of Public Law. Just as Jean-François La Harpe
5 Van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland, 173–274.

6 Wood, Creation of the American Republic; Ball and Pocock, Conceptual Change and the
Constitution; Ball, Transforming Political Discourse, 47–79.
7 Reichardt and Schmitt, Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe; Reichardt, “Revolu-
tionäre Mentalitäten”. On the development of the concept of liberty in varous coun-

tries during this period see Reid, The Concept of Liberty; Dickinson, Liberty and Property,
195–318; Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property, 229–259; Brunner, a.o., Geschichtliche Grundbe-
griffe, II, 425–542; Schlumbohm, Freiheitsbegriff und Emanzipationsprozess and Freiheit; Spitz,
La liberté politique; Ozouf, “Liberté”; Van den Heuvel, Der Freiheitsbegriff der Französischen
Revolution; Van Kley, The French Idea of Freedom.
8 Reichardt and Schmitt, Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe, I/II, 40–50. See also
Ricken, “Abus des mots”.

142 chapter seven
and Edmund Burke would do a few years later in France and Eng-
land, Kluit ascribed the revolutionary turbulence of his days to the
irresponsible and highly dangerous way in which reformers were dis-
torting the hitherto generally accepted meaning of political concepts.9
The Patriots, Kluit contended, were completely perverting the existing
legal and political vocabulary by attaching new and arbitrary meanings
to the concepts of sovereignty, representation, people, obedience, and
liberty. Should they (and their international companions) succeed in
their efforts, Kluit gloomily predicted, then “alas! all civil societies will
be overturned, all kingdoms will be destroyed and millions of people
will perish in violent civil wars”.10
Kluit was certainly not the only one to worry about the destructive
effects of the abuse of words. Two years before he addressed his audi-
ence on this matter, Rijklof Michael van Goens, the editor of the impor-
tant Orangist periodical The Old-fashioned Dutch Patriot, had devoted sev-
eral issues of his journal to the rapid “decay of theoretical concepts
and skills”. He was particularly worried about the apparently unstop-
pable growth of “monstrous misconceptions about liberty”. To prove
his point, he deliberately did not contrast the Patriot conception of lib-
erty with the Orangist view on the same topic, but with the thought
of a committed classical republican from the first half of the century,
“the well known adherent of the Staatsgezinden” Lieven de Beaufort. The
Patriot conception of liberty, Van Goens thus made it clear, was not
only extremely dangerous, but also totally without precedent in Dutch
political thought.11 Elie Luzac, the most prominent Dutch conservative
political publicist of the late eighteenth century, shared this opinion.
Not only did the Patriots in his view attach new meanings to exist-
ing concepts in order to reach their ludicrous political conclusions, he
also thought that these “modern Rhetoricians” and “Political Quacks”
excelled in the invention of meaningless neologisms: “If there is any-
thing to be admired in the behavior of these State-Deformers, it cer-
tainly is their capacity to invent words and sayings that seem to imply
much, but in fact mean nothing”. Yet despite such obvious flaws, the
9 On La Harpe see Reichardt and Schmitt, Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe,
I/II, 40–50 and Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 19, 25; on Burke see Blakemore, Burke
and the Fall of Language.
10 Kluit, Academische Redevoering, over het Misbruik van ’t Algemeen Staatsrecht, 89.
11 [Van Goens] De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot, nr. 34–36, 175–230. Adriaan Kluit,
too, would at a later date unfavorably compare the Patriots to De Beaufort: [Kluit] De
rechten van den mensch in Vrankrijk, 236–237.
Patriots had succeeded in introducing “ecstatic feelings of liberty …

which inevitably lead to public turmoil” into Dutch political life and
thought.12
To determine whether or not this conservative alarm about the
growing abuse of words in general and about the changing meaning
of liberty in particular corresponded to a real conceptual revolution,
an exhaustive treatment of all genres of political writing in existence
during the 1780s would be desirable. This chapter, however, mainly
focuses on the contemporary pamphlet literature. Even by concentrat-
ing on one particular genre of political writing, however, the problem
of quantity is not entirely solved. The pamphlet collection of the Royal
Library in The Hague, diligently brought together and catalogued by
W.P.C. Knuttel early in the twentieth century, reveals an enormous
increase in the number of published pamphlets during the revolution-
ary years between 1780 and 1787. For the eight years before the Patriot-
tentijd (1772–1779) the Knuttel catalog lists 375 pamphlets, for the eight
years thereafter (1788–1795) 957 pamphlets. During the eight revolu-
tionary years in between no fewer than 2376 pamphlets appeared.13
Apart from the problem of the sheer quantity of pamphlets published,
there is the further question of the definition of the genre. Should a
consecutive series of publications such as Elie Luzac’s Reinier Vryaarts
Candid Letters be seen as part of the pamphlet literature or as part of
the new periodical press?14 Is the Companion for the Netherlands, or defi-
nition of the most frequently used political words a lexicon or a pamphlet?15
And to which genre does Adriaan Kluit’s learned but cheaply printed
farewell address On the Abuse of Public Law belong?16 It is clear that both
on formal (unicity versus periodicity) and on substantive (popular ver-
sus learned) grounds the borders of the pamphlet genre remain fluid
and that therefore the focus of this chapter on the pamphlet literature
of the 1780s can be no more than a rough indication of the type of
source material used.17
12 [Luzac] Reinier Vryaarts Openhartige Brieven, VI, 21 and VIII, 36; [Luzac] Vaderlandsche
Staatsbeschouwers, I, 417 and IV, 48–49.

13 Knuttel, Catalogus van de pamflettenverzameling.
14 [Luzac] Reinier Vryaarts Openhartige Brieven.
15 Handboekje voor Nederland, of bepaalingen van de meest gebruikt wordende staatkundige woor-
den.
16 Kluit, Academische Redevoering, over het Misbruik van ’t Algemeen Staatsrecht.
17 On the many genres of political publishing in the late eighteenth century see
Reichardt and Schmitt, Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe, I/II, 86–148 and Darn-
144 chapter seven
For a proper understanding of the conceptual content of the political

pamphlets published between 1780 and 1787, finally, it is necessary to
make some preliminary remarks about the concept of liberty in Dutch
political discourse before the Patriot era. The concept of liberty, of
course, was prominently present in Dutch political discourse during the
entire eighteenth century and long before. Some meanings of the con-
cept were largely uncontested. Everyone agreed that national indepen-
dence was one of the essential meanings of liberty. It was only a state
that showed itself capable of successful defense against external threats
that could justly be called free. The Seven United Provinces were not
only an independent state, however, but also a republic. Eighteenth-
century Dutchmen were highly conscious of this fact. They regarded
republics as incomparably more free than monarchies and took great
pride in belonging to a nation of “freeborn republicans”.18 It was only
when they started to discuss the most appropriate political institutions
for their free and independent republic that serious political differences
of opinion arose.
Dutch political debate during most of the eighteenth century was
dominated by the ideological opposition between the adherents of the
States-party (Staatsgezinden, Loevesteiners) and the Orangists (Prinsgezinden).
It has often and correctly been pointed out that these two political
camps were separated by different interpretations of Dutch history.
Equally important for an understanding of their positions, it should
be added, is the way in which they adopted or rejected the vocabu-
laries of natural law and classical republicanism. The adherents of the
States-party, who presented themselves as the upholders of “true lib-
erty”, argued that liberty was only secure in a republic without a head,
or with a head with severely restricted powers. The Orange stadhold-
ers, they maintained, were always waiting for an opportunity to estab-
lish themselves in a monarchical position and were therefore a peren-
nial threat to Dutch liberty. The Orangists emphatically denied this
ton and Roche, Revolution in Print. The Dutch situation is discussed in Jeremy D. Popkin,
“Print Culture in the Netherlands on the Eve of the Revolution” in: Jacob and Mijn-
hardt, The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century; Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of
Revolution; Van Sas, “The Netherlands, 1750–1813”. For Dutch pamphlet literature see
Ter Horst, “Over het begrip ‘pamflet’”; Harline, Pamphlets, Printing, and Political Culture
in the Early Dutch Republic; Wessels, “Het pamflet”; De Kruif a.o., Het lange leven van het
pamflet.
18 Engelberts, Verdediging van de Eer der Hollandsche Natie, 104.
and argued that the stadholders were an indispensable element in

the mixed and balanced form of government of the Dutch Republic.
They described the stadholders not only as the protectors of national
liberty against foreign threats, but also as the protectors of the liberty
of the people against aristocratic-oligarchic oppression.19 Despite these
different interpretations of the meaning of liberty, both parties shared
some assumptions. First of all, they accepted the 1579 Union of Utrecht
as the legitimate basis of the existing free and republican political
order. Secondly, although it did frequently function as the ultimate
theoretical source of political power, both parties did not ascribe an
active political role to the people in their definitions of liberty. The
people were free, or enjoyed liberties, but this popular liberty did
generally not imply an active and permanent role in politics. Both
Staatsgezinden and Orangists, in other words, were primarily interested
in the distribution of power within the existing political order and paid
much less attention to the relationship between liberty and the political
power of the people. Even in the work of a classical republican such as
Lieven de Beaufort, republican popular participation was interpreted
as little more than an equal opportunity for all citizens to compete for
political appointments.
All this, so it will be argued in the following section of this chap-
ter, would fundamentally change in the years after 1780. The decades
between the restoration of the stadholderate in 1747–1748 and the Patri-
ottentijd were marked by an intensive public debate about the perceived
decline of the Dutch Republic and by the formation of an enlightened
public opinion.20 In the 1770s the American Revolution helped to cre-
ate a new awareness of the possibility of radical political change.21 Such
change would come to the Dutch Republic in the years beginning with
the outbreak of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784). During the
1780s, the Patriot movement not only succeeded in creating a new polit-
ical culture, it also transformed Dutch political vocabulary. The Patri-
ots started as more or less extreme adherents of the States-party, but
19 Despite serious shortcomings, the best overview of Dutch eighteenth-century
political thought remains Leeb, Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution. See also
Herbert H. Rowen, “The Dutch Republic and the Idea of Freedom” in: Wootton,
Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society.
20 Contemporary perceptions of Dutch decline are discussed in Chapter Four. A
synthesis of three decades of research on the Dutch Enlightenment may now be found
in Kloek and Mijnhardt, 1800. Blauwdrukken voor een samenleving.
21 Schulte Nordholt, The Dutch Republic and American Independence.
146 chapter seven
their position soon evolved to a total rejection of the existing republi-

can order. At the basis of that rejection, it will be seen below, was a new
definition of the concept of liberty.
2. The Patriot Transformation of Liberty
The Patriots at first assumed that the lack of liberty they saw in the
Dutch Republic was mainly caused by the despotic power of Stad-
holder William V. Soon, however, they realized that an attack on Wil-
liam’s position in itself was insufficient to restore liberty. They therefore
began to reflect upon the various means available within the estab-
lished political order to guard the liberty of the citizen. Essential to the
maintenance of liberty, they now argued, were the freedom of expres-
sion and of the press, the right to submit petitions to the authorities,
and the right to bear arms. To support these claims, they appealed to
historic rights and liberties, but also to natural rights theories and to
the civic humanist tradition. The dynamics of the revolutionary process
and the growing resistance of many regents against increased popu-
lar participation within the existing order soon forced many Patriots
to go even further. They arrived at the conclusion that the so-called
ancient rights, privileges, and liberties of the people were largely a fig-
ment of the imagination, that the Seven United Provinces had—even
without stadholders—never been a free state, and that it was an illusion
to think that liberty could ever be realized within the existing political
order. The Dutch Patriots, in other words, within a few years came to
reject the ancien régime in the name of a new concept of liberty. In this
section, an attempt will be made to follow them in their conceptual
quest. Before this is done, it is perhaps appropriate to point out that
any attempt to reconstruct the development of the Patriot concept of
liberty will have the character of an ideal type or a simplification of
reality. Not all Patriots followed the route briefly indicated in the above
to the end. Some stopped along the way, others took detours or went
back to where they came from. It is on those who completed the entire
conceptual journey that the present section focuses.
From the very beginning of their movement the Patriots stressed the
fact that the eternal struggle between power and liberty was an unequal
one. Liberty was more of an exception than a rule in human his-
tory. Liberty was a fragile creature, constantly preyed upon by power-
hungry enemies. “Liberty”, the author of the civic humanist pamphlet
The Excellence of a free state wrote, “is like a flower, whose color is so
bright, that every touch makes it fade, and yet everybody tries to get
at it. It is therefore of the utmost necessity to defend liberty with the
most extreme vigilance”.22 In the Dutch Republic of 1780, the Patriots
were convinced, the flower of liberty had almost completely withered
away. It had systematically been abused by generations of stadholders.
“It is not since today or yesterday”, an anonymous Patriot remarked,
“that the House of Orange has engaged in despicable schemes to bring
Free Dutchmen under the yoke of a Count’s rule”.23 Joan Derk van der
Capellen’s famous pamphlet To the People of the Netherlands was only one
of many publications in which it was explained to the population that
the stadholders “have always desired to make us sigh under a heredi-
tary yoke”.24 It was not until William V, however, that the stadholders
had almost completely succeeded in carrying out their evil designs and
had amassed quasi-monarchical power. William V, the Patriots main-
tained, had put himself above the law with the help of a formidable
system of patronage and the command over a substantial standing
army. By propagating a luxurious and dissolute lifestyle from his cor-
rupt court, he was furthermore attempting to exterminate the last rem-
nants of republican virtue and love of liberty.25 Indeed, it was only the
outbreak of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War that had rudely awakened
the country from its stupor and revived the “almost completely extinct”
spirit of liberty.26 Had this not been the case, one Patriot pamphlet
remarked, William V would doubtlessly have succeeded in his designs
to turn the Dutch into “white negroes and chained slaves”.27
Many Patriots at this early stage were convinced that once the power
of the stadholder was curbed, the most important step toward the
restoration of liberty would have been taken. Liberty was usually still
defined as the rule of law and the protection of acquired rights, as
had been the case in Chomel and Chalmot’s well known dictionary
in 1778: “the rights of a people to be governed by its own laws and
to be maintained in its privileges”.28 A political pocket dictionary of
22 De Voortreflykheid van een vryen staat, 24.

25 E.g. ibidem, 60–88; Brief over de waere Oorzaak van ‘s Lands Ongeval, passim.
28 Chomel and Chalmot, Algemeen Huishoudelyk, Natuur—, Zedenkundig en Konstwoorden-
boek, VII, 4014.

148 chapter seven
1782 claimed: “In a free country, the people are governed by free and
reasonable laws”.29 Also in 1782, to give one more example, the journal
The Statesman defined liberty as “a situation where the law and not the
unbridled will of a king or a government rules”. For the citizens this
implied that
they live safe lives under the protection of the laws; that they fully possess
their life, liberty and property in independence of all other people, yes
that they may not and cannot be robbed thereof except by their own
crime and by the sentence of their lawful Judge.30
More than a few Patriots, however, also increasingly realized that in
order not to give the stadholder a renewed opportunity to “destroy our
liberty and bring the Dutch people under the harsh yoke of slavery”,
a vigilant citizenry was an absolute necessity.31 For only a citizenry that
was permanently on its guard could effectively block future stadholderly
attempts to seize power. To reach this goal, they recommended various
strategies. First of all, the events after 1780 had taught the Patriots
how important a force in politics public opinion had become and how
strongly that opinion was shaped by the printing press. They therefore
now proceeded to designate the freedom of the press as one of the most
essential parts of civil liberty.
Guard the freedom of the printing press, for it is the only support of
your national liberty. If we are not allowed to speak freely to our fellow-
citizens, and to warn them in time, then the oppressors of the people will
have their way,
Van der Capellen wrote in 1781.32 His views were taken up in numerous
Patriot pamphlets over the next few years. The freedom of the press
was not only deemed an excellent means to keep the citizens alert,
but also highly suited to expose major flaws in government. Indeed it
was evident, De Post van den Neder-Rhyn wrote, that without a complete
liberty of the press “there would not remain a trace or shadow of
liberty and a Dutchman would henceforth only in name be different
from the obsequious Venetian”.33 A logical consequence of the liberty
29 Vervolg op het eeuwigdurend politiek Zak-memorie boekje, 1.

30 De Staatsman, V (1782, part two) 153.
31 The quotation is from Zakboek van Neerlands volk, 21.
33 De Post van den Neder-Rhyn, VIII, nr. 400, 774. On this important journal see
Theeuwen, Pieter ’t Hoen. On the late eighteenth-century debate on the freedom of

the press in general see Huussen jr., “Freedom of the Press” and Velema, “Politiek, pers
en publieke opinie”.
to point out deficiencies in government in print was the right to draw

the attention of the authorities to these flaws in an even more emphatic
way, namely by petition. It was the duty of each and every citizen,
the Patriots held, actively to think about the general good and it was
his fullest right to make these thoughts known to those who governed.
The political authorities, in turn, should not close their ears and eyes
to such well-intentioned petitions, but should take them into account
in their decisions.34 According to the Leyden Draft, it might even be
said that within the established political order petitions were “the only
Constitutional means available to the people to make its wishes known
and to influence or enlighten the government in its work”.35
But a public opinion speaking through the press and through peti-
tions, large numbers of Patriots soon began to see, remained highly
vulnerable. It was incapable of structurally safeguarding liberty. Some-
thing more was clearly needed. Like many of his fellow Patriots, the
author of a “Disquisition on the Necessity of Citizen Armament and its
relation to the true nature of Civil Liberty” was convinced that
it is only when we shall be capable and allowed to support our laws,
our measures, and our freedom-loving wishes with arms; it is only when
for the defense of our selves and of all that is dear to us we shall no
longer depend on mighty fellow-citizens … , on standing armies, or on
foreign mercenaries, but on ourselves—it is only then that we shall be
truly free.36
The Patriots used three main arguments to legitimate the citizen arma-
ment they now deemed necessary for the protection of their liberty.
In the first place, they pointed out that the right to bear arms had
been laid down in article VIII of the Union of Utrecht and there-
fore belonged to the ancient rights of all Dutchmen.37 Secondly, they
claimed that carrying arms was a natural right, “the inalienable prop-
erty of every free man”.38 Finally, appealing to an early modern repub-
lican tradition originating in the work of Machiavelli, they stressed that
a virtuous and armed citizenry was indispensable to a free republic, as
the Americans at that very moment were demonstrating on the other
34 [Allart] De Vryheid, 221–227, 241–246.

35 Ontwerp, 23.
36 De Post van den Neder-Rhyn, VIII, nr. 400, 777 (“Vertoog over de Noodzakelijkheid
der Burgerbewapening, en haar verband met den waren aart der Burgerlijke Vrijheid”).
37 [Van der Capellen] Aan het Volk van Nederland, 36; [Allart] De Vryheid, 249–250. On
Article VIII of the Union of Utrecht see Spits, “Unie en militie”.

38 De Post van den Neder-Rhyn, VIII, nr. 401, 779.
150 chapter seven
side of the Atlantic.39 Indeed, the right to bear arms was what most
clearly distinguished the “Citizen of a Commonwealth” from “the subject of
a Monarch”.40 Having expounded their case, the Patriots began to orga-
nize citizen militias throughout the Dutch Republic.41 Thus in 1784 the
authors of Constitutional Restoration could write with evident satisfaction:
“everywhere our citizens are training themselves in the use of arms
in order to defend their liberty—a liberty which would remain highly
uncertain should they be incapable of defending it themselves”.42
It was in the year 1783 that the Amsterdam publisher and publicist
Johannes Allart ably synthesized the Patriot political position as it had
so far developed. His pamphlet entitled Liberty was reprinted three
times in the year of its appearance and reads like a summary of early
Patriot thought. Allart dwelled upon the threats posed to liberty by past
and present stadholders.43 He highly praised the liberty of the press
and called upon his compatriots to bombard the political authorities
with petitions.44 He considered it evident that “an armed citizenry
is the best guarantee of liberty”.45 Although there were some rather
ambiguous passages in the pamphlet where he referred to the consent
of the population, Allart still largely defined liberty as the rule of law.
His attempt at definition deserves to be quoted at length:
A People may be called free when every person, independent of all
others, is absolutely lord and master of his life and property,—when it
is subjected to certain Laws, designed by itself and to which all Members
have unanimously and voluntarily consented in order to safeguard the
undisturbed security of their life and property;—when the maintenance
of these Laws has been entrusted to a number of the most eminent,
virtuous, wise and respectable men from its midst, who have solemnly
sworn to uphold these laws;—when it is to such men that the general
interests of the people have been entrusted, as well as the judgment over
mutual conflicts and the public punishment and curbing of criminals and
disturbers of the peace.—A people may furthermore be called free when
it is able, without the assistance of Friends or Neighbors, to maintain and
defend itself against public violence of other Peoples or Powers; when it
39 [Van der Capellen] Aan het Volk van Nederland, 34–36; Ontwerp, 50–56. For this
republican tradition see, of course, Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment.

40 De Post van den Neder-Rhyn, VIII, nr. 401, 779.
41 H.L. Zwitser, “De militaire dimensie van de patriottenbeweging” in: Grijzenhout,
a.o., Voor Vaderland en Vrijheid.

43 [Allart] De Vryheid, 109–204.
44 Ibidem, 12–48, 221–227, 241–246.
45 Ibidem, 249.
trains itself in arms so as to be able, should the necessity arise, to use this
means against domestic and foreign violence, to resist the enemy, and to
make itself formidable.46
Liberty thus defined, Allart maintained, was entirely compatible with,
indeed was the very essence of the old constitution and form of gov-
ernment of the Seven United Provinces, now fortunately restored to its
former glory by the active intervention of the Patriots.47
Allart’s pamphlet elicited many reactions. For most of the old adher-
ents of the States-party it predictably went much too far, as was evi-
dent from a (probably fictitious) letter from Jacobus Studiosus to the
journal The Trumpet of Peace. Jacobus had always thought and did still
think that liberty entirely consisted of “the enjoyment of a Government
unobstructed by a Stadholderly Presence” and was therefore unpleas-
antly surprised by such in his view most undesirable novelties as Allart’s
call for citizen armament.48 For mainstream Patriots Allart had struck
the exact right note. Thus one of the most influential review journals
heartily recommended Liberty to all those “who have until now failed
to appreciate the enormous importance of liberty”.49 More important
for our purposes, however, is the fact that from 1783 on there also
started to appear pamphlets in which Allart’s definition of liberty was
rejected because it was judged to be far from radical enough. In 1784
the authors of Constitutional Restoration emphatically pointed out that the
sovereign people permanently retained the right “not only to replace
those who exercise political power, but also to change the entire Form
of Government”.50 In 1785 the Leyden Draft argued that liberty would
always remain “a treacherous shadow and a vain sound” if the armed
citizens were not governed by elected and dependent governors.51 In
that same year, The Patriot in Solitude remarked that liberty could only
exist where
the entire Citizenry … possesses the unchanging right to elect its own
Regents, to demand that they publicly justify their actions in govern-
ment, to cashier them in case of incompetence or bad faith, to repel all
attacks on the constitution and the liberty of the Fatherland and thus to
keep a quite substantial influence on the conduct of the Government,
46 Ibidem, 11–12.
47 Ibidem, 283–284.
48 De Vredebazuin, nr. 48 (1784) 123–130.
49 Algemeene Vaderlandsche Letter-Oefeningen, V (1783, part one), 535.
51 Ontwerp, 62–68.
152 chapter seven
whose members are strictly speaking no more than the Representatives

or Mandatories of the People—the only true and legitimate Sovereign of
a free Republic.52
In 1786, finally, the author of The Aristocracy—in all probability Petrus de

Wakker van Zon—was bold enough to declare that only by dismantling
large parts of the existing political structure the Seven United Provinces
could become a truly free republic.53 In all these publications, a direct
and exclusive link was established between liberty and the active and
permanent sovereignty of the people. This new definition of liberty had
been formulated as early as 1783 in two radical pamphlets written by
Pieter Vreede, later to become a leading political figure in the Batavian
Republic.54 It is therefore with a discussion of these two remarkable,
but hitherto neglected pamphlets that this attempt to reconstruct the
development of the Patriot concept of liberty concludes.
In his first 1783 pamphlet, written in the form of a dialogue, Vreede
had the main character Waermond (“Speaker of the truth”) explain
to Vryhart (“Freeheart”) that the much-vaunted Dutch liberty was in
fact nothing but slavery in disguise. Waermond hastened to assure
Vryhart that he need not be embarrassed for mistakenly thinking that
he was living in a free country, since it was only in classical antiquity,
in a few regions of Switzerland and in present-day America that a
true understanding of liberty as popular self-government had so far
surfaced.55 And yet this was undeniably what liberty meant:
You cannot be said to be free if you do not govern yourself, your
property, and your happiness. If the control of these things is in the hands
of others, and you do not yourself have a constitutional right to elect
these men, to provide them with binding instructions and to demand
that they account for their actions.56
Applying this simple and clear definition to Dutch history, Waermond

continued, immediately made it clear that, since the sixteenth-century
Revolt, Dutchmen had been no freer than the inhabitants of monar-
52 De Patriot in de Eenzaamheid, 204–205. The second edition of 1787 has been used
here.
53 [De Wakker van Zon] De Adel, 107–108 and passim.
54 There is no satisfactory study of the life and work of Vreede, but see M.W. van
Boven a.o., “Pieter Vreede (1750–1837)” in: Vreede, Mijn Levensloop and H.M. Beliën,
“Pieter Vreede. Strijder voor de gelijkberechtiging van Brabant” in: Beliën a.o., Neder-
landers van het eerste uur.
55 [Vreede] Waermond en Vryhart, 16.
56 Ibidem, 4.
chies such as France or Spain. Indeed, they might even be said to have
been slaves ever since the formation of their independent state. After
an initial reaction of shock and confusion, Vryhart has to admit that
Waermond’s daring analysis was completely accurate:
This notion of having no liberty—of having been born and raised in
slavery! O Waermond! it cuts me to the heart—and yet I have to admit
that possessing an abstract right I am unable to exercise is nonsense.—
And that, when this is the basis of our liberty, our liberty itself is more
abstract than real.—Indeed, I have to admit that one might then as well
call the inhabitants of Siberia free.57
But, Vryhart now asked, how was it possible that so many Dutchmen
had suffered from permanent delusions and had always been convinced
that they lived in a free state? Waermond knew the answer. At the time
of the Dutch Revolt, he explained, Dutchmen had for centuries lived
under a single-headed political authority and had thus become used to
it. Like the other European peoples, moreover, they had only just awak-
ened from the medieval “deep sleep of ignorance and superstition” and
they were everywhere surrounded by monarchies. These factors, com-
bined with the fact that during the struggle against Philip II they had
mistakenly learned to identify the assemblies of the States with the pro-
tection of liberty, explained why the Dutch had failed to found a truly
free state and had been content with a semblance of freedom.58 It was
equally easy to understand why this situation had hardly changed dur-
ing the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, the
Dutch had been so preoccupied with expanding their wealth and com-
merce that hardly anybody bothered about real liberty. On the other
hand, the established order had been exceptionally mild and had been
characterized by such blessings as the rule of law, the separation of
powers, and the ius de non evocando:
Institutions that, while not making a people truly free, are nonetheless
most useful and valuable—and that tend to make a people, particularly
when it is surrounded by neighbors living without all or most of these
civil blessings, feel that it is free, even though in reality it is not, just as a
wax image may show the shape of a man without being one in reality.59
It was the outbreak of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, Vreede continued
in a second 1783 pamphlet written in reaction to Johannes Allart’s
57 Ibidem, 15.
58 Ibidem, 17.
59 Ibidem, 18.
154 chapter seven
Liberty, which had suddenly raised Dutch political consciousness. Now,

at the very end of the eighteenth century, Dutchmen for the first time
seriously and publicly began to reflect upon the all-important theme
of liberty.60 That Allart had greatly contributed to this process with his
popular pamphlet, Vreede was willing to admit. Yet at the same time
he insisted that the author of Liberty had not really understood what he
was talking about and had failed to identify the core meaning of liberty.
In fact, it was only the first part of his interminable attempt to define
liberty that was of any use (“A People may be called free when every
person … is absolutely lord and master of his life and property …”).
This part of Allart’s definition, Vreede explained to his readers, could
be and should have been further elaborated to read:
… a people is free when it has the real right and might to change
the things it thinks need to be changed. By a real right I mean a
right based on and laid down in the constitution—and by a real might
I mean the highest and most extensive power in this whole society,
publicly acknowledged and, if necessary, backed by armed force, in other
words the situation in which the people is in the real possession of its
sovereignty.61
Direct democracy was, in other words, the only free and legitimate
form of government. Vreede conceded that it was incompatible with
a sizeable population and that therefore the introduction of some form
of representation was inevitable. He stressed, however, that the elected
representatives should have a binding mandate and should be con-
stantly controlled by the sovereign people. They were to be no more
than its instruments. The sovereign people, moreover, should be trained
and armed so as always to remain in a position to remind its repre-
sentatives of the real location of political power. It was only thus that
Allart’s definition of liberty as a situation in which every person was
“absolutely lord and master of his life and property” could be said to
acquire real substance.62
60 [Vreede] Beoordelend en ophelderend Verslag, 5–7.

61 Ibidem, 25–26.
62 Ibidem, 26–29.
3. Old Liberty Maintained
In the first section of this chapter it has been observed that both
the international late eighteenth-century pattern of rapid conceptual
change in revolutionary political circumstances and the relatively sud-
den appearance in the Dutch Republic of a lively discourse on the
theme “abuse of words” would seem to suggest that the Patriotten-
tijd potentially was a time of fundamental conceptual change. In sec-
tion two of this chapter it has been demonstrated on the basis of the
contemporary pamphlet literature how, within a short time span, the
Patriot definition of liberty evolved from protection against arbitrary,
especially single-headed, government to active and permanent popular
sovereignty. This brief final section will investigate whether or not the
above analysis of the development of the Patriot concept of liberty finds
confirmation in the contemporary conservative pamphlet literature.
Some Orangists simply refused to view the Patriots as more than vul-
gar disturbers of the peace and limited themselves to accusing them of
licentiousness in all areas of life. An anonymous critic in 1787 sum-
marized this line of approach as follows: “A true patriot must be a
swearer and curser; a boozer, gambler, idler and whoremonger; a viola-
tor of virgins and insulter of honorable women; a friend of concubines,
a filthy swine and a rebel”. After several more pages in this vein, he
finally offered a concise view of the Patriot desire for increased liberty:
“Whether with Bacchus’s full cup or in Venus’s lustful lap, A Son of
Liberty will always yell: if I’m not free, I would rather be dead”.63 Most
conservative or Orangist political publicists, however, attentively fol-
lowed the development of Patriot political thought and tried to counter
it with arguments at every single stage.64 Unsurprisingly, the Orangists
firmly rejected the Patriot suggestion that the Stadholders formed a
threat to liberty. They pointed out that the stadholder’s constitutional
and political position did not allow him to rule the country despoti-
cally and that, on the contrary, it was only with the greatest effort that
the stadholder managed to bridle and balance the enormous power of
the aristocratic regents.65 The liberty of the press and the right to peti-
tion the Orangists too regarded as pillars of general liberty. What they
63 Rommelzootje, 52–53 and 68.

64 For a fuller discussion of the development of conservative political thought during
this period see Chapter Eight.
65 See Chapter Six.
156 chapter seven
objected to were the in their eyes licentious and extreme uses to which
these precious institutions were put by the Patriots.66 Spontaneous cit-
izen armament, finally, most Orangists vehemently condemned as an
unconstitutional and violent attempt to undermine the existing political
order, although they were willing to admit that a revitalization of the
old civic militias would be useful and salutary.67 In following the argu-
ments of the Patriots up to this point, the Orangists could still place
their political demands within a more or less familiar context. Early
Patriot thought, it seemed to them, was not all that different from the
traditional discourse of “true liberty” of the adherents of the States-
party. It was not until the Patriots started to define liberty as active
popular sovereignty that the defenders of the established orders real-
ized that something truly new was going on and that their opponents
were fundamentally altering the nature of Dutch political debate.
The Orangists were shocked and dismayed by the radical Patriot
redefinition of liberty. “What do you hold of it, true lovers of noble
liberty?”, Adriaan Kluit exclaimed,
What do you think? Writers who deny all obligations between Rulers
and Subjects; who under the splendid name of Civil Liberty know of no
other Sovereignty than that of the People; who consider no government
but a Popular Government legitimate; who acknowledge no other ties
than those among Citizens … ; who think that they can change the
Form of Government when they judge it proper; that they can arbitrarily
appoint or cashier their Magistrates: to see such writers praised by true
Dutchmen; … to see so many publications on liberty while it is actually
being raped: to see all this in our days! Who would have believed it!68
To combat their opponents effectively, the conservatives now systemat-

ically began to develop the contrast between civil (the rule of law) and
political (popular sovereignty) liberty, a contrast they often referred to as
that between “the right of the people” and “the might of the people”.69
They thus made it perfectly clear that they had identified the Patriot
redefinition of the concept of liberty. They could not, however, see this
Patriot move as more than a gross error. “Their basic mistake”, Kluit
wrote about the Patriots, “is that they constantly confuse the civil lib-
66 E.g. [Van Goens] De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot, nr. 21–22, 449–463 and 473–
486; Vreede, Mr. Laurens Pieter van de Spiegel, II, 428–431.

67 E.g. Spiegel der Vryheid; [Luzac] De Voor- en Nadeelen van den Invloed des Volks, III,
150–155.
68 Kluit, De Soevereiniteit der Staten van Holland, 91.
69 Ibidem, 83; Vreede, Mr. Laurens Pieter van de Spiegel, II, 415–431.
erty that belongs to each individual citizen with political liberty or the
right of the citizens to govern themselves”.70 Indeed, where the Patri-
ots were now defining popular self-government as the very essence of
liberty, the Orangists started doing the exact opposite. Nobody perhaps
did this with more ability and clarity than Johan Meerman, who in
1793 wrote: “Political liberty is, I cannot find words strong enough to
express my conviction, the destructor, the exterminator, the murderer
of civil liberty”.71 It is the very shrillness of Meerman’s tone that makes
it abundantly clear to us that the Patriots, although they had in the
meantime suffered temporary political defeat, had succeeded in funda-
mentally changing the nature of the Dutch debate about the meaning
of liberty.
chapter eight
CONTEMPORARY REACTIONS
TO PATRIOT POLITICAL DISCOURSE
1. On the Need for the Study of Political Discourse
In recent years, scholarship dealing with the Dutch Patriot era has
undergone a transformation. During the 1960s and the 1970s, research
and writing in the field was dominated by a socio-political interpreta-
tion first expounded in the many works of C.H.E. de Wit and culmi-
nating in Simon Schama’s Patriots and Liberators. Revolution in the Nether-
lands 1780–1813.1 Over the past decades, this interpretative framework
has been abandoned in favor of an approach that focuses on politi-
cal culture. Inspired by developments in the historiography concerning
the French Revolution, Dutch historians have turned to the study of
changing structures of political communication, of new forms of politi-
cal sociability and organization, and of revolutionary symbols, festivals,
costumes.2 For all those who have remained unconvinced by decades
of dreary determinism, this is a most satisfying development, which
will doubtlessly lead to a richer and more balanced view of a much
maligned period in Dutch history. Yet it is to be regretted that the
exponents of this new cultural approach to the Dutch Patriot era are
largely neglecting what is perhaps the most fundamental characteris-
tic of human culture: thought as expressed in language. No doubt this
omission can be explained by the fact that the modern French histo-
rians of the revolutionary era, who are so warmly recommended to
1 De Wit, De Strijd tussen Aristocratie en Democratie; De Wit, De Nederlandse Revolutie van
de Achttiende Eeuw; De Wit, Het Ontstaan van het Moderne Nederland; Schama, Patriots and
Liberators; Van Sas, “Simon Schama”.
2 For a representative sample of new approaches to the French Revolution see the
series The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture: Baker, The Politi-
cal Culture of the Old Regime; Lucas, The Political Culture of the French Revolution; Furet and
Ozouf, The Transformation of Political Culture. For a discussion of recent developments in
the historiography of the French Revolution see Velema, “Post-revisionistische perspec-
tieven”. The volume that heralded the triumph of a new approach to late eighteenth-
century Dutch history was Grijzenhout a.o., Voor Vaderland en Vrijheid.
160 chapter eight
us as examples to be followed, have so far, despite the lip service they

pay to the importance of political language, treated it with the utmost
nonchalance. Indeed, in his highly praised Penser la Révolution française
(1978) François Furet, the leader of French revisionism, shows himself
to be basically uninterested in what late eighteenth-century Frenchmen
said, wrote or thought. According to Furet, it is only the deliberately
anachronistic conceptualization of the revolution that will finally deliver
French historiography from its endless political wrangles. Whereas his
book is therefore full of abstract observations on language and has at its
analytical center a highly artificial and dubious distinction between the
linguistic-ideological sphere on the one hand and the social sphere on
the other, it unfortunately contains hardly any analysis of revolutionary
discourse itself.3
If we wish to start doing justice to the Patriot era, Furet’s approach
does not seem to be the most promising avenue to follow. Perhaps it
would be more fruitful to begin the attempt at a genuinely historical
reconstruction of the political culture of that period with the recon-
struction of contemporary perceptions as primarily expressed in lan-
guage. We simply need to find out how late eighteenth-century Dutch-
men viewed the events of the 1780s and what they thought was hap-
pening to the Dutch Republic. We can do so by systematically studying
their political discourse. To attempt this is not, as was generally—albeit
often implicitly—assumed in the older historiography, a futile exercise
in textual exegesis. It is, on the contrary, of crucial importance. For as
both the methodological and the substantive writings of the practition-
ers of the new history of political thought have made abundantly clear
over the past decades, language is not a peripheral phenomenon, eas-
ily explained by reference to other aspects of reality.4 Far from being a
mere mirror of reality, language may in many ways be said to consti-
tute it. There is therefore, to say the least, no valid reason to regard the
verbal or linguistic as of lesser importance than or determined by other
aspects of reality.5 It is precisely such an understanding of the impor-
tance of language that provides us with a starting point for analyzing
the political discourse of the Patriot era.
3 Also see Lynn Hunt’s review of Penser la Révolution française in History and Theory, 20
(1981) 313–323.
4 The literature on the new history of political thought is by now vast. Some
essential statements are: Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, passim; Dunn, “The identity of
the history of ideas”; Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, 1–34.
5 Pocock, “Texts as Events”.
contemporary reactions to patriot political discourse 161
While it needs to be remarked that approaching the Patriot era

through the study of its political discourse does evidently not invalidate
other approaches, it may nonetheless be said to be of fundamental
importance. The study of contemporary political discourse allows us,
in the first place, to determine the boundaries within which political
actors in a given period operated. In the words of J.G.A. Pocock:
… in tracing history in terms of contemporary self-understanding—
which is what the history of ideology really amounts to—one is not
playing a barren game of pitting one cause against another cause, or
one factor against another factor; one is exploring the contemporary
perception of possibilities and impossibilities, and the limitations of that
perception.6
Reconstructing contemporary political discourse, secondly, places us in
a better position to explore to what extent the situation in the late
eighteenth-century Dutch Republic was similar to, or different from,
the situation in surrounding countries. From the perspective of the
historian of political languages, for instance, it is instantly clear that
Lynn Hunt’s remarks about the role of political rhetoric in the French
Revolution do not apply to the Republic. The French revolutionaries,
Hunt argues, used words to replace the charisma of the kings. Their
rhetoric was characterized by a desire for, and a consciousness of,
a total rupture with the past.7 In the late eighteenth-century Dutch
Republic, such a development was inconceivable. Not only did the
country not have an absolute monarchy, but both the opponents and
the proponents of the established order used the very same vocabulary:
citizenship, the rule of law, civil liberty, representation, toleration, and
so on. This did not mean that the political differences in the Republic
were superficial. It did mean, however, that they were often expressed
in the form of a struggle over the proper meaning of words equally
used by both political sides. Studying the political discourse of the
late eighteenth century Republic, therefore, is above all discovering
discontinuities of meaning within the continuity of political vocabulary.
A third advantage of the approach here advocated is that it forces us
to reflect upon the use of the term “modern”. Given its frequent invo-
cation, the temptation to use it is apparently almost irresistible when-
ever historians descry something in the past bearing even a remote
resemblance to their own preoccupations. In this way, the Patriots
6 Pocock, “1776: The Revolution against Parliament”, 267–268.

7 Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class, 19–51.
162 chapter eight
have often been presented as the direct forerunners of modern Dutch

democracy.8 A study of late eighteenth-century political discourse, how-
ever, immediately makes it clear that the situation was much more
complex. For whereas the defenders of the established order cease-
lessly explained how modern it was, the Patriot attack on it was at least
partly based on the vocabulary of classical republicanism. Equally, the
more recent characterizations of the Patriot era as the cradle of mod-
ern Dutch political culture seem to be largely of retrospective value.9 To
apply this term to a period in which classical political virtue was revived
with a vengeance, political parties were feared and disapproved of and
political representation was viewed by many with deep suspicion, is to
risk committing the mortal sin of anachronism.
The fourth and certainly not the least important benefit that a sys-
tematic and careful study of late eighteenth-century Dutch political dis-
course will bring us, is that it will allow us to develop a more balanced
view of the period. For a long time, the attention paid to the political
thought of the period has consisted of little more than a paraphrase
of some reformist political pamphlets, divorced from their contempo-
rary context. More recently, the study of Patriot political thought on the
basis of a broader range of texts has made considerable progress.10 Yet a
balanced view of the whole period will remain impossible until the writ-
ings of all parties involved in the political struggle are studied in their
interaction. It was the intensive exchange of arguments and opinions
that gave shape to the political thought of the Dutch Patriot era. In and
through these verbal battles the “essentially contested concepts” out of
which normative political languages are formed acquired new mean-
ings or new shades of meaning.11 The political thought of the period
is therefore best studied as a process of linguistic interaction—and at
times of the total breakdown of the possibility of such interaction—
between various parties. If we look at the period from this perspective,
it becomes clear that the first priority should now be the study of the
political discourse of the hitherto neglected defenders of the established
order. We know something, although far from enough, about the work
of Rijklof Michael van Goens, Elie Luzac, Adriaan Kluit and Laurens
8 This tendency was omnipresent in the work of C.H.E. de Wit.

9 See the various contributions by N.C.F. van Sas, recently republished in Van Sas,
De metamorfose van Nederland, 173–274.
10 A thorough overview of Patriot political discourse is now available in Klein,
Patriots Republikanisme.
11 Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse.
Pieter van de Spiegel. We know almost nothing about such conserva-

tive publicists as Kornelis de Vogel, Johannes Canter de Munck, Cor-
nelis Willem Decker and Johan Meerman, or about the hundreds of
often anonymous anti-Patriot pamphlets and periodicals. It has, more-
over, so far gone unobserved that literally every major Patriot politi-
cal statement, from Van der Capellen’s To the People of the Netherlands to
the Post van den Neder-Rhyn and from Constitutional Restoration to the Ley-
den Draft, was immediately rebutted in conservative publications. These
writings in defense of the established order were not only of obvious
ideological significance, but also—although one has to be careful in the
absence of systematic research—seem to have enjoyed a considerable
popularity. A voluminous and intelligent defense of the stadholderate,
which appeared in 1786, had the impressive number of 1240 subscribers
and many anti-Patriot pamphlets were published in several printings
and editions.12 In style, these conservative publications ranged from the
banal to the refined. In content, they ranged from vulgar Orangist pro-
paganda to the most subtle intellectual defense of the status quo. The
study of all of these writings, however, is indispensable if we wish to
arrive at a balanced view of political discourse in the Patriot era. In
what follows, an attempt will be made to outline some of the major
themes they discussed.13
2. The Blessings of the Established Order
There were plenty of differences of opinion among those who made

it their task to defend the existing order during the Patriot era. Con-
servatives held diverging views on the precise definition of the form
of government, the exact constitutional position of the stadholder and
the necessity of gradual institutional reform. Yet they all agreed that
the Dutch Republic in its post-1747 incarnation was one of the most
free, egalitarian, tolerant and humane states in Europe. They found it
inconceivable that anyone could have a valid reason for a fundamen-
tal attack on the existing state of affairs. Given the situation in many
12 [De Vogel] Katechismus van het Stadhouderschap.

13 These introductory remarks may partly be read as a response to N.C.F. van
Sas’s exhortations to adopt the work of François Furet and Lynn Hunt as a model
for the study of the Dutch Patriot era: N.C.F. van Sas, “The Patriot Revolution: New
Perspectives” in: Jacob and Mijnhardt, The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century.
164 chapter eight
countries surrounding the Republic, we should beware of retrospec-

tively condemning this view of matters as incomprehensible or exces-
sively blinkered.
The vast majority of defenders of the established order defined the
form of government of the Republic as mixed and therefore moderate.
A delicate balance between monarchical, aristocratic and democratic
elements was seen as the essential mechanism for the prevention of the
exercise of arbitrary power. So crucial did many conservatives deem
an understanding of this essential feature of the Dutch form of govern-
ment, that they devoted entire treatises to a detailed discussion of the
proper role of each of these three elements.14 The aristocratic element
was invariably viewed as the greatest threat to the existing balance
of power. Most conservative authors were convinced that ever since
the beginning of the seventeenth century there had been a constant
effort to establish a hereditary oligarchic government or an aristocratic
tyranny in the Republic. Indeed, they thought it quite evident that this
aristocratic cabal was also to be held responsible for the recent Patriot
disturbances.15 The best remedy against such aristocratic pretensions
was, of course, a strong stadholderate. Among the impressive array
of functions the conservatives attributed to the stadholder, his role as
counterbalance against the aristocracy was always prominent. In some
cases, the stadholder was not only seen as the protector of the people
against aristocratic domination, but even as the “great Representative
of the People”.16 The mildness and moderation of the existing form
of government was not only safeguarded by its mixed and balanced
nature, but also by the presence of a multitude of representative insti-
tutions and the existence of a stable constitution, defined by Cornelis
Willem Decker as “the Ordinances and Regulations on the Provincial,
the Stadholderly and the Urban level of Government … upon which
the People, the Regents and all Governing Bodies, as well as the Stad-
holder, are all dependent”.17
14 This was the case in, for instance, Canter de Munck’s lengthy rebuttal of Constitu-
tional Restoration: Canter de Munck, De Tegenswoordige Regeeringsvorm.

15 [Van Goens] De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot, nr. 20, 434 and “Etat actuel de
la République d’Hollande” in: De Beaufort, Brieven aan R.M. van Goens, III, 205–210;
Missive van een oud Regent; Onpartydige Beschouwing, 16–17.
16 Verhandeling over de Alouden en Tegenswoordigen Staat, 23. For a more detailed discussion
of arguments used in defense of the stadholderate, see Chapter Six.

17 Decker, Proeve eener Verhandeling, 9.
It was largely due to this blessed form of government, the conserva-

tives claimed, that the inhabitants of the Republic enjoyed a degree of
civil liberty almost without precedent in human history. They devoted
their most rapturous writings to the manifold manifestations of this glo-
rious republican liberty. All defenders of the established order empha-
sized that liberty should not be taken to mean the right or capacity to
follow one’s own will in all matters at all times. Such an interpreta-
tion would in the end destroy all liberty. When people abused liberty
on the basis of “superior assets or greater physical strength”, it would
inevitably degenerate into “absolute dominance and tyranny”.18 This
was the case in all situations imaginable, Laurens Pieter van de Spiegel
pointed out: “man has no right to unlimited liberty, neither in the State
of Nature, nor in Civil Society: he is a dependent creature, dependent
on those laws proper to the situation in which he finds himself, that
is to say on Natural Law in the State of Nature and on Civil Law in
Civil Society”.19 Unlimited liberty, however, was particularly irreconcil-
able with the nature of civil society. In a well-ordered civil society true
liberty on the one hand consisted in dependency on the law, not on the
arbitrary will of another person, on the other hand in as much personal
independence and freedom of action as was compatible with these nec-
essary limits.20 The existing order in the Republic, the conservatives
were convinced, was the perfect embodiment of this ideal.
All inhabitants of the Republic were subject to the same laws and
could in that sense be said to be equal. Limitations on their freedom to
act as they pleased were only possible by law and therefore equally
applied to all. The unique, independent and incorruptible adminis-
tration of justice, “that incomparable anchor of liberty and security”,
not only protected the life and property of all individual citizens, but
also bridled the exercise of power by the government.21 The inhab-
itants of the Republic, finally, enjoyed a large measure of personal
independence. “How little do the laws of this commonwealth hinder
people in following all their desires in civil society!”, Johan Meerman
triumphantly exclaimed. “Is not everyone free to choose his clothing,
18 Onpartydige Beschouwing, 28.

19 Laurens Pieter van de Spiegel, “Diverse loopende Collecteana over Burgerlyke
Vryheid en Regeering. Anno 1785” in: Vreede, Mr. Laurens Pieter van de Spiegel, II, 421.
20 Decker, De volgens Eed en Plicht verschuldigde Achting en Eerbied, 1–3; Welmeenende en
Trouwhartige Waarschuwing, 4; Meerman, De Burgerlyke Vryheid, 3–6.

21 Missive van een oud Regent, 35 (quotation); Decker, Proeve eener Verhandeling, 25–29;
Meerman, De Burgerlyke Vryheid, 9–16.

166 chapter eight
his food and drink, his profession, his friends and entertainments, his
entire way of life?”22 Yet there was even more to Dutch liberty than the
rule of law and the perfect administration of justice, the conservatives
continued, for the Republic was also characterized by an extraordinary
tolerance and openness.
According to the defenders of the established order, the Republic’s
felicitous combination of an established religion with a large measure
of religious toleration represented the maximum of religious liberty
that could exist in a well-ordered society. They rejected unrestricted
tolerance or the full equality of all religions, since they thought these
incompatible with the necessary unity in society. In the words of Elie
Luzac: “tolerance in religious matters is always of lesser importance
than the necessity to prevent the things that lead to disunity, discord
and civil strife in Civil Society”.23 Yet the great majority of conservatives
stressed, often to the chagrin of the most orthodox preachers, the
crucial importance of the maintenance a broad religious toleration in
the Republic.24
Perhaps, however, it was the open character of their society in gen-
eral that made it most clear how much freedom the Dutch enjoyed.
The defenders of the established order never tired of praising the free
exchange of opinions and knowledge, a phenomenon that in their view
corresponded to the free exchange of goods and services characteristic
of commercial society. Indeed, they had a great penchant for compar-
isons between the economy and the polity. Just as commerce in the end
depended on elusive notions such as good faith and credit, the basis of
the entire republican order was, according to some conservative theo-
rists, not to be sought in legal agreements, but in the opinion of the
inhabitants of the country. Already in 1749, Elie Luzac had pleaded for
the freedom of opinion and of the press.25 At the end of the century,
most conservatives extensively wrote on the topic. Limitations on the
freedom of the press, they all agreed, were only allowed in cases of sedi-
tion or slander. Yet such cases really had little to do with true freedom

23 [Luzac] Reinier Vryaarts Openhartige Brieven, XII, 178.
24 [Kluit], De rechten van den mensch in Vrankrijk, 246–257; Meerman, De Burgerlyke
Vryheid, 9. On the orthodox preachers see Huisman, Neerlands Israel, passim. The eigh-
teenth-century Dutch debate on religious toleration has recently been exhaustively
discussed in Van Eijnatten, Liberty and Concord in the United Provinces.
25 [Luzac] Essai sur la Liberté. For an English translation of this important essay see
Laursen and Van der Zande, Early French and German Defenses of Freedom of the Press, 35–87.
of the press: they were about the fight against license. Preventive cen-
sorship, Van Goens among others maintained, was unacceptable in any
circumstances.26 It was Johan Meerman who succinctly summarized the
mainstream conservative view on the topic: “The tongue, the pen and
the press know no other limits in this country than those implicitly
suggested by respect for politeness and manners and the peace of soci-
ety”.27 Republican openness, however, consisted of more than just a free
press. It was Adriaan Kluit who identified two further essential compo-
nents. In the first place, political life in the Republic was characterized
by the permanent presence of dissident voices. This phenomenon was
not to be confused with an institutionalized opposition, which Kluit
held to be unacceptable, yet was strong enough to persuade the regents
to govern with prudence and mildness. Secondly, the government of the
Dutch Republic was—partly as a result of the presence of dissidence—
not shrouded in secrecy, but conducted in public.28
It was Rijklof Michael van Goens who, in one of his most original
contributions to the political thought of the period, developed such
loose observations on the openness of the Dutch republican system into
a general theory about the importance of public opinion in free states in
general and in the Dutch Republic in particular.29 Public opinion, “the
opinions and desires of the people”, should be regarded, he insisted,
as the real basis of the whole republican system. The power of the
stadholder, for instance, was only to a very small degree based on
strictly defined rights. It largely depended on the opinion people had
of it or, Van Goens explained with an explicitly commercial metaphor,
on credit.30 The fact that the existing order to a large extent rested on
opinion made it crucially important to inform the public about what
was right and what was wrong. The perversion of public opinion posed
the greatest imaginable threat to true republican liberty. Yet this was
exactly what the Patriots were threatening to bring about.31
26 [Van Goens] Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot, nr. 22, 473–486.

28 Kluit, De rechten van den mensch in Vrankrijk, 153–175.
29 On van Goens see Wille, De literator R.M. van Goens and Peterse, “Publicist voor
Oranje”.
30 [Van Goens] Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot, nr. 15, 310–311; De Beaufort, Brieven
aan R.M. van Goens, III, 169, 245–249, 280–289. Reflecting on the same matter, the
young Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp in 1784 observed: “L’homme est tellement gou-
verné par l’opinion, que pour régner un souverain droit se rendre esclave de son peu-
ple”. Van Hogendorp, Brieven en Gedenkschriften, I, 407.
31 The changing meaning and role of the concept of public opinion in the late
168 chapter eight
3. Patriot Primitivism and Utopianism
It took those who would later become the articulate defenders of the
established order some time to realize that the threat posed by the
Patriots represented something new in Dutch politics and political dis-
course. In the early 1780s, many thought that Patriotism consisted of
little more than a revival of the discourse of the Staatsgezinden, famil-
iar since the second half of the seventeenth century. Yet Patriot polit-
ical action and, above all, Patriot political arguments rapidly dispelled
this misunderstanding. The most acute conservative thinkers soon con-
cluded that the Patriot program not only posed a threat to the stadhold-
erate, but also endangered the entire existing political order. They then
put up a vigorous fight, accusing the Patriots of the seemingly opposed,
but in fact intimately related sins of primitivism and utopianism.
The primitive or regressive nature of the political thought of their
opponents, the anti-Patriots argued, was clear from the way it inter-
preted natural law and natural rights, from its incapacity to provide
political continuity and from its constant normative invocation of the
distant past. The Patriots, they claimed, ceaselessly invoked a number
of natural rights, including natural liberty and natural equality, without
demonstrating that these rights had ever existed or were relevant to life
in civil society. According to among others Kornelis de Vogel, Consti-
tutional Restoration was a prime example of this pathetically inadequate
mode of proceeding. The entire argumentation of the authors of this
enormously successful work could in fact be reduced to the following:
Nature created an essential equality among people, a situation in which
nobody was subjected to another person; the established fundamental laws
of our Constitution do not agree with our passions and desires; we
therefore invoke that state which we consider to be original and the basis
of our rights; and thereon we will here and now build a new Political
System: it is this, and not the amelioration of real or imagined wrongs, to
which we give the name of Constitutional Restoration.32
The opponents of Patriotism used the same arguments over and over
again. First of all, the state of nature the Patriots invoked was no more
than a hypothesis and did not correspond to what was known about the
earliest human history. Even if one, for the sake of argument, decided
eighteenth century are discussed in Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property, 260–315 and Baker,
Inventing the French Revolution, 167–199.
32 De Vogel, Katechismus van het Stadhouderschap. Tweede Deel, 135.
to accept this hypothetical state of nature, it was—secondly—far from

clear why the Patriots insisted that it was characterized by liberty and
equality. Finally and most importantly: the natural rights the Patriots
postulated should never be used as the criteria by which the legitimacy
of established states and societies were to be judged.33 As Elie Luzac
succinctly put it:
To dig up natural rights, to peddle them as truths, and to demand their
enforcement regardless of the civil laws and despite their incompatibility
with a country’s political system and the patterns of its social life is, in
our view, a sign of enormous foolishness.34
Not only did the Patriots apparently exactly know what natural rights
were, but to the consternation of their opponents they also proclaimed
such rights to be inalienable. This, the anti-Patriots claimed, prevented
them from having any conception of a continuous process of social and
political development. A system based on inalienable rights was the
least stable system imaginable, if it deserved the name at all. Not only
could the living never be bound by the wise decisions of previous gen-
erations, but even within one and the same generation people could
constantly claim their inalienable rights, with utter chaos as a result.35
The final reason why the defenders of the existing order deemed Patriot
political thought to be regressive was because of its inability to under-
stand the complex and irreversible development of states and societies.
This was quite evident, they pointed out, from the way in which the
Patriots constantly invoked the distant past, be it the Roman Republic
or the Batavian commonwealth. The normative appeal to the distant
past necessarily ignored such factors as the transition from a prim-
itive agrarian to a highly developed commercial economy, the enor-
mous increase in institutional complexity and the emergence of profes-
sional and technically sophisticated forms of warfare. The Patriots, their
opponents claimed, were simply denying the irreversibility of moder-
nity.36
33 E.g. ibidem, 116–142; Missive aan Mr. Pieter Paulus, passim; Laurens Pieter van de
Spiegel, “Loopende gedagten over de Gelykheid der Menschen” in: Vreede, Mr. Laurens
Pieter van de Spiegel, IV, 571–581; Luzac, Du Droit Naturel, Civil et Politique, passim.
34 [Luzac] Vaderlandsche Staatsbeschouwers, II, 205.
35 On inalienable rights see e.g. Kluit, De Souvereiniteit der Staten van Holland, 71–74; on
the ties between various generations: [Kluit] De rechten van den mensch in Vrankrijk, 377 and
following; Meerman, De Burgerlyke Vryheid, 44.
36 Canter de Munck, De Tegenswoordige Regeeringsvorm, 50–53. Fifteen years later, Can-
ter de Munck would return to this theme at length in his Vrije Gevoelens over de beste
170 chapter eight
Whereas the conservatives thought of some aspects of Patriot

thought as regressive and primitivist, they judged other aspects to be
blatantly utopian. The Patriot view of human nature was a case in
point. In drawing up their far-reaching plans for reform, the Patriots
evidently presumed the nature of man to be good and virtuous. To
the conservatives, who in their most optimistic moments saw man as a
mixture of good and evil, this was a highly dangerous presupposition.
“Please be aware, O! Drawing Room Politicians, that you are dream-
ing of a perfect commonwealth for an imperfect mankind!”, Cornelis
Willem Decker warned the in his eyes overly ambitious reformers.37 At
the bottom of this complacent view of man, the conservatives were con-
vinced, was a complete lack modesty and humility brought about by a
misunderstood Enlightenment. It would certainly be wonderful, Adri-
aan Kluit observed, “if people were always as perfect, as pure in morals
and manners, as informed and enlightened and as meritorious as they
are, in these philosophical days of enlightenment, depicted to us on
paper and in conversations”.38 Yet they were not and would never be.
The Patriots, however, supposed that mankind had suddenly come very
close to perfection and that this created the conditions for an entirely
new and infinitely better political order.39 Such arrogant political utopi-
anism, Van Goens was sure, could only be regarded as “one of the
apples of Sodom, grown from the fatal tree of modern Philosophy”.40
Not only was their view of human nature dangerously unrealistic
according to their opponents, the Patriots also evinced a completely
unfounded and therefore utopian faith in the capacity of states and
societies for wholesale change. Nothing could be more absurd than
to suppose that established structures could simply be changed on the
basis of an abstract “plan of political construction” or of values alien
to the practical and specific circumstances and problems of a given
people.41 The Patriots were apparently unaware, Adriaan Kluit pointed
out,
Staatsgronden, I, 13 and following. On Canter de Munck see now Van Sas, De metamorfose
van Nederland, 355–357.
37 Decker, De volgens Eed en Plicht verschuldigde Achting en Eerbied, 10.
38 [Kluit] De rechten van den mensch in Vrankrijk. 398.
39 Ibidem, 175–177.
40 Van Goens, “De la Liberté et de l’Utopisme politique”, 18.
41 [Luzac] Lettres sur les Dangers, 102 and passim; [Luzac] De Voor- en Nadeelen van den
Invloed des Volks, II, 32–33.

that an old building, constructed from a great variety of materials and

lived in by ancient inhabitants, can not be torn down without such
tremendous creaking and devastation and such random flying of pieces
and splinters, that infinite preference should be given to keeping it stand-
ing and letting craftsmen make the absolutely necessary improvements,
rather than risking such creaking and devastation.42
The Patriots failed to realize that an established political order was

a fine-tuned mechanism, a mechanism that could easily be destroyed
by ill-considered tampering, without there being any guarantee that
something better would replace it.43
In the end, the conservatives emphasized, primitivism and utopi-
anism were but two different manifestations of the one and the same
fundamental error. Both forms of argumentation wrongly presupposed
that the human intellect was capable of operating outside all given
social, institutional and historical contexts. The resulting abstract spec-
ulations could only be compared to religious enthusiasm and had the
same destabilizing and subversive effect on society. Already in 1780,
Laurens van Limburg had ascribed the decline and fall of flourishing
states to “abstract metaphysical speculations” and during the following
years most anti-Patriots would remain preoccupied with the in their
eyes feverish and extravagant nature of Patriot political speculation.44
They viewed Patriotism as a contagious disease, as a form of polit-
ical fanaticism.45 Perhaps this characteristic was most strikingly illus-
trated by the incapacity of the Patriots to express themselves in an
understandable political language, based on the commonly accepted
meaning of political concepts. Through a perversion of language, the
Patriot “hundred-headed Hydra of Seditious Writers” had succeeded in
destroying the political consensus that had reigned in the Dutch Repub-
lic before the 1780s.46 They had left no concept unassailed. Thus Van
Goens attempted to demonstrate that, compared to the nonsense the
Patriots spouted on this topic, the opinions on liberty formulated earlier
in the century by Lieven de Beaufort could be considered quite mod-
erate and sane.47 Adriaan Kluit, too, maintained that Patriotism was
42 [Kluit] De rechten van den mensch in Vrankrijk, 355.

43 Van Goens, “De la Liberté et de l’Utopisme politique”, 7 and following.
44 Van Limburg, Bedenkingen over de eigentlijke Oorzaak.
45 E.g. Naauwkeurige en zedelyke Beschouwer; [Van Goens] Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot,
nr. 15, 320–323; [Luzac] Reinier Vryaarts Openhartige Brieven, IX, 26.
46 Kluit, De Souvereiniteit der Staten van Holland, 40.
47 [Van Goens] Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot, nr. 34–36, 180–230.
172 chapter eight
largely based on “the ambiguous meanings of words and on lines of

reasoning and conclusions lacking all logic”.48 All these flaws in Patriot
political thought, the defenders of the established order maintained,
could be discerned with particular clarity in what they regarded as the
central political goal of Patriotism: the introduction of a popular gov-
ernment or democracy. They therefore devoted a considerable part of
their energy to opposing this Patriot ideal.
4. The Horrors of Democracy
The anti-Patriots used an impressive range of arguments to prove that

the introduction of a democracy in the Dutch Republic would be noth-
ing short of a disaster. They regarded democracy as a regressive ideal,
incompatible with a modern and highly developed commercial soci-
ety. They maintained that such an ideal had no basis whatsoever in
Dutch history. They argued, moreover, that the necessity or desirability
of introducing a democracy could only be argued on the basis of a fla-
grant distortion of the generally accepted meaning of political concepts.
They described the Patriot democratic ideal as utopian, because its
adherents refused to face the real consequences of its implementation.
Finally, they insisted that a democratic government would doubtlessly
ruin all former republican achievements. A popular government was
the very opposite of true republican liberty. In the words of Johan
Meerman: “Political liberty is, I cannot find words strong enough to
express my conviction, the destructor, the exterminator, the murderer
of civil liberty”.49
It was testimony to their total lack of understanding of the pro-
gressive historical development of states and societies, Cornelis Willem
Decker observed, that the Patriots refused to admit “that it does not
belong to the essence of every citizen, however free, personally to par-
ticipate in appointing the government”.50 A democracy might be viable
in a very small state with a limited population and a primitive agrar-
ian economy, but it was unthinkable in the Dutch Republic, for it
49 [Kluit] De rechten van den mensch in Vrankrijk, 66; Meerman, De Burgerlyke Vryheid, 42.
was totally incompatible with an economy based on commerce.51 Civil

liberty was the only liberty appropriate to the “mercantile system”.
The anti-Patriot consensus on this issue was perfectly summed up in
a remark made by Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp in 1785:
I wish the present fanatical parties [i.e. the Patriots] had a better under-
standing of the commerce that makes the state what it is, and of the
rational liberty that is the foundation of commerce and that reinforces
it; … as much liberty, that is, as is compatible with the advanced state
of our society. Whoever wants more will only bring about confusion and
will, because of a misconceived love of liberty, plunge us into anarchy
and despotism.52
Popular participation in politics was simply impossible in a highly
developed commercial society, whose main characteristic was an ad-
vanced division of labor. Nothing could be more absurd than the notion
that everybody was competent to arrive at sound political judgments.
As an anonymous pamphlet put it in 1783: “The political merchant
or laborer is a miserable being, and such a political fool is a great
fool indeed”.53 Nothing was more patently ridiculous than the sug-
gestion that industrious citizens should prove their virtue by bearing
arms and by engaging in military exercises.54 The catastrophic conse-
quence of this Patriot delusion would be, Decker assured his readers,
the inevitable replacement of the salutary “Spirit of Commerce” by an
archaic and detrimental “Military Spirit”.55 Politics should largely be
left to politicians, just as fighting should largely be left to soldiers. The
citizen should strive for personal fulfillment in his occupation and in his
family life.56 For the rest, it was his simple duty to uphold, in the words
of Van Goens, “a sincere and intense, but calm Love of the Fatherland,
of which the most important part is subjection to legitimate authority
and devotion to the established laws and constitution”.57
51 Canter de Munck, Tegenswoordige Regeeringsvorm, 50–53; Meerman, De Burgerlyke
Vryheid, 27.
52 Van Hogendorp, Brieven en Gedenkschriften, II, 280. On Van Hogendorp’s political
economy see Overmeer, De economische denkbeelden van Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp.
53 Verhandeling over de Alouden en Tegenswoordigen Staat, 36; Welmeenende en Trouwhartige
Waarschouwing, 5–6, 14–15.

54 E.g. Spiegel der Vryheid, passim; Samenspraak tusschen de geest van een oudtydschen vaderlan-
der, 6; [Luzac] De Voor- en Nadeelen van den Invloed des Volks, III, 150–153.
56 E.g. Samenspraak tusschen de geest van een oudtydschen vaderlander, 7.
57 [Van Goens] Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot, nr. 5, 100.
174 chapter eight
Not only was the introduction of a democracy made impossible by

the nature of Dutch society according to the anti-Patriots, they also
claimed that this ideal had no basis in Dutch history. Patriot attempts,
for instance in Constitutional Restoration, to prove the opposite were inge-
niously refuted by among others Johan Canter de Munck and Adriaan
Kluit. It was impossible, they argued, to find any sign of permanent
popular sovereignty in Dutch history. Such popular influence as existed
within the established order was entirely unrelated to the Patriot con-
ception of democracy.58 It was only the flagrant abuse of the concepts of
sovereignty and representation that could explain such Patriot miscon-
ceptions about the history of Dutch institutions. In general, the con-
servatives contended, the abuse of these concepts was at the basis of
most Patriot theories about popular government. The Patriots, whether
they desired a Rousseauist democracy or a democracy by representa-
tion along the lines suggested by Richard Price, Joseph Priestley and
Thomas Paine, completely ignored the generally accepted meaning of
the word sovereignty. Their contention that the people always remained
sovereign was a gross distortion of the writings of authorities such as
Grotius and Locke. For Grotius, as Kluit explained at length in his reply
to the authors of Constitutional Restoration, had argued the precise oppo-
site.59 And Locke too, Jan Willem Kumpel claimed, had stressed the
transfer of sovereignty.60 The Patriot refusal to admit that sovereignty
could be transferred led, their opponents argued, to a total misun-
derstanding of the concept of representation. For if the people always
remained sovereign, representatives could be no more than servants
and instruments of the people, always answerable to their principals
and removable at will. To claim that, however, was to destroy the basis
of government by making it impossible to distinguish between gover-
nors and governed. The essence of representation, the defenders of the
established order insisted, was the very real replacement of the repre-
sented.61 Anything else would result in chaos.62
58 Canter de Munck, Tegenswoordige Regeeringsvorm, passim; Kluit, De Souvereiniteit der
Staten van Holland, passim.

59 Kluit, De Souvereiniteit der Staten van Holland, 76 and following.
60 [Kumpel] De Philarche of Vorsten-Vriend, nr. 3–4, 26–29.
61 Canter de Munck, Tegenswoordige Regeeringsvorm, 173.
62 On representation see Kluit, Academische Redevoering, over het Misbruik van ’t Algemeen
Staatsrecht, 51–64; Decker, Proeve eener Verhandeling, 34–36; Onpartydige beschouwing, van de
voorledene en tegenwoordige staatsgesteldheid, 26–29.
Far from being satisfied with simply proving that the concepts used
by the Patriots were deficient, the conservatives also wanted to demon-
strate that a popular government could not possibly function in prac-
tice. Those who desired it were therefore either unrealistic utopians
or completely insincere. Would the introduction of a representative
democracy, the defenders of the status quo asked, mean a real improve-
ment for the inhabitants of the Dutch Republic?63 Johan Meerman’s
answer was very clear indeed. Anybody who seriously reflected upon
that system, he observed, would soon be forced to conclude that it
brought no more than imaginary advantages to the individual. Let us
suppose, he wrote, that Holland has 250.000 voters, who choose 500
representatives.
A wonderful and invaluable blessing no doubt, and worthy to be bought
with streams of blood, to have a one-two hundred and fifty thousand’s
part in the sovereignty of my Fatherland, a part which I can, however,
not exercise, and a one-five hundredth part in choosing a representative,
who will exercise sovereignty with four hundred and ninety nine others
in my name!64
But even if one thought all this worthwhile, there still remained the
problem of competence. Did the Patriots seriously wish to give every-
body a vote? That would obviously be ridiculous, because most Dutch-
men knew nothing about politics and were therefore incapable of judg-
ing and choosing. The inevitable result of general participation in poli-
tics would be the rise and rule of unscrupulous demagogues.65 Even the
Patriots admitted as much, their opponents pointed out, and wanted to
limit the right to vote to notables. Yet this meant giving up their own
democratic ideal, Elie Luzac observed in his attack on that “Catechism
of the Patriots”, Van der Capellen’s To the People of the Netherlands.66 If
63 To some, including Johan Canter de Munck, the notion of a representative
democracy would remain a contradiction in terms: “A Representative Democracy is

an illusion; either the Representatives are forced to consult the voters over every
little detail, or the Representatives have been given power ex plenitudo potestatis to
decide certain things, there is no third possibility: in the first case what we have is a
Complete Democracy, in the second case not a Democracy at all, but a mixed Form
of Government, with aristocratic or exclusive power”. Canter de Munck, Tegenswoordige
Regeeringsvorm, 177.
65 Ibidem, 27–28, 32–34; [Luzac] De Voor- en Nadeelen van den Invloed des Volks, I, 20;
[Luzac] Lettres sur les Dangers, 126, 220.

66 This description of Van der Capellen’s pamphlet is used in Onpartydige beschouwing,
van de voorledene en tegenwoordige staatsgesteldheid, 20.

176 chapter eight
a people was not permanently sovereign, it lived in slavery, the Patri-

ots had claimed. Would then not, if the right to vote were limited to
notables, half, three-quarters or an even greater part of the population
become the slaves of their fellow-citizens? Could such a system possibly
claim to be a popular government? Of course not. It was, on the con-
trary, an excellent example of the aristocratic despotism so detested—or
so they claimed—by the Patriots.67
There was no end, the conservatives contended, to the practical
problems a representative democracy would bring. It would be quite
difficult, for instance, for the representatives to know what their vot-
ers actually wanted. They would therefore no doubt succumb to the
temptation, as the Patriots themselves were now doing, to regard the
opinions of a small and vociferous minority as the voice of the people.68
Given the public character of a hypothetical future national assembly,
moreover, it would be exposed to the irresistible pressure of the hordes
of demagogues and political careerists to be found in any major city,
while the silent majority would be condemned to political passivity
in the provinces.69 Added to the inherent constitutional instability of
popular governments, this was enough to make Meerman desperately
exclaim:
… if I were offered the choice between becoming a subject of the Dey
of Algeria or Tripoli and becoming a citizen in a Democracy, where the
constitution may be changed by the people at any time: I would cross the
Mediterranean on the wings of an eagle.70
The anti-Patriots, whose political discourse richly deserves further
study, had now to their own satisfaction demonstrated that the Dutch
Republic had been a free and happy country before the start of the
revolutionary disturbances, that the Patriot attack on the established
order was based on dangerously primitivist and utopian arguments and
that the introduction of a democracy—the main aim of the Patriots—
was undesirable in theory and impossible in practice. Taking all of
this into account, Elie Luzac could confidently tell his Patriot oppo-
nents:
67 [Luzac] Vaderlandsche Brieven, nr. 6, 47–49.

68 Ibidem, 60.
69 Meerman, De Burgerlyke Vryheid, 39–40.
70 Ibidem, 45.
From whichever side one … looks at your System, it always turns out
to be a thoroughly confusing maze, in which it is impossible to take even
one step without running the danger of getting so utterly lost that no way
out is possible.71
71 [Luzac] Vaderlandsche Brieven, nr. 6, 49–50.

chapter nine
DUTCH CONSTITUTIONALISM AT THE

END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Among the records of the Executive Directory of the Batavian Repub-

lic, the revolutionary state that was proclaimed in 1795, the speech its
president gave on the occasion of the official celebration of the com-
pletion of the first Dutch constitution has been preserved. The docu-
ment is dated May 19, 1798. The president’s short address, held in the
open air in The Hague for an audience of Dutch and foreign politicians
and dignitaries, was obviously not intended as a profound intellectual
statement. It is nonetheless of great interest, for it succinctly captures
the political mood of the moment: the immense relief at the comple-
tion of the constitution, the deep loathing the Batavian revolutionaries
had developed for most aspects of their own ancien régime, and the great
potential for national regeneration they ascribed to the constitution of
1798. “Batavians”, the president began, “at long last the day has come
that our commonwealth can openly claim a place among the truly
free peoples of the world”. He continued to contrast this blissful new
state of the Dutch with the horrors of their recent past: “The chains of
despotism, forged by superstition and riveted together by a pernicious
Stadholderly or a monstrous federal government, have been completely
broken. The sweet sounds of liberty replace the fearful voices of slav-
ery”. Now that the Dutch were finally free, possessed a written con-
stitution and could respect laws of their own making, there was noth-
ing that could prevent them from recovering their former glory and
greatness. The new constitution, the president confidently predicted,
would inaugurate an era in which once again, as had been the case in
the previous century, the enemies of the Netherlands would tremble at
the mere contemplation of its gigantic power. It was merely a matter
of time, he added, before heroes of the caliber of Oldenbarnevelt, De
Witt, Tromp and De Ruyter would emerge from the ranks of the free
Batavians.1
1 De Gou, De Staatsregeling van 1798, II, 464–465.

180 chapter nine
All this, of course, would not happen. By the end of the eighteenth
century the days of Dutch greatness as a world power were long gone,
never to return. The factual inaccuracy of the president’s predictions,
however, does not detract from the importance of his address from an
ideological point of view. It reveals a whole range of revolutionary polit-
ical concepts and convictions that had found widespread acceptance
among the Dutch by 1798. Among the most important of these was a
new view of the role and meaning of a constitution. For the Batavian
revolutionaries of 1798 it had become almost self-evident that a consti-
tution was a written document, containing both an enumeration of the
rights of man and citizen and a description of the structure of republi-
can government. This document, moreover, was fundamentally differ-
ent in nature from ordinary legislation. It was believed to constitute the
basis not only of the realm of high politics, but also of society as a whole
and was therefore frequently referred to as the social contract. Such a
contract, the Batavian revolutionaries maintained, was only legitimate
if approved by the people and could only be changed by the people. It
was, in other words, the most important expression of the doctrine of
inalienable popular sovereignty. Given all this, it is understandable that
the constitution was regarded as of central importance to the entire
functioning of society. The people shaped it, but once established, it in
turn shaped the behavior of the people. A good constitution was not
only believed to establish liberty, but also to be the foundation of the
virtue and happiness of the entire society.
It will be the purpose of this chapter to explore the way in which this
novel, revolutionary and extremely ambitious interpretation of the con-
cept of a constitution gradually emerged during the last two decades of
the Dutch eighteenth century. The first section will discuss the chang-
ing meaning of constitutionalism during the second half of the eigh-
teenth century. Section two treats the way in which the Dutch, against
the background of this international conceptual development and in
the context of a deep domestic political crisis, relatively suddenly came
to the conclusion that the Dutch Republic had no proper constitution.
Section three will look at the practical and theoretical difficulties the
Dutch experienced when, after 1795, they finally had the opportunity
to write an entirely new constitution. The fourth and last section will
briefly discuss the final result of late eighteenth-century Dutch constitu-
tionalism, the Staatsregeling of 1798.
dutch constitutionalism 181
1. Eighteenth-Century Constitutionalism
Among historians, and certainly among conceptual historians, it has

become a generally accepted notion that many of the concepts that
make up our present-day political vocabulary acquired their modern
meaning in the decades around 1800.2 It was the German historian
Reinhart Koselleck who first described the century between roughly
1750 and 1850 as the Sattelzeit in which “die Auflösung der alten und die
Enstehung der modernen Welt” took place.3 The rapid development
of constitutionalism during the second half of the eighteenth century
forms a perfect illustration of his general thesis. During the greatest
part of the early modern period, the concept of a constitution usually
referred to the ordered totality of existing institutions, rules and cus-
toms making up a certain state or society. Comparisons to the consti-
tution of the human body were not uncommon. Just as the structure
of the human body, the established order or constitution was seen as
something natural, which could not deliberately be changed and should
not be tampered with. In the course of the eighteenth century, this tra-
ditional meaning of the concept gradually began to change.4 In the first
place, it was narrowed down to come to mean the organization of polit-
ical life or simply government. This development had obviously already
taken place by the time Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois was published
in 1748, for its famous discussion of English political life in book XI,
chapter 6 was entitled “De la constitution d’Angleterre”.5 Within the
flourishing eighteenth-century discourse of natural law, this political
definition was then further developed until constitution came to mean
2 This is the central thesis of two great collaborative works on conceptual history:
Brunner a.o., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and Reichardt and Schmitt, Handbuch politisch-
sozialer Grundbegriffe.
3 Reinhart Koselleck, “Einleitung” in: Brunner a.o., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, I, xiv.
4 For discussions of the eighteenth-century development of the concept of a con-
stitution see, among others, Heinz Mohnhaupt and Dieter Grimm, “Verfassung” in:
Brunner a.o., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, VI, 831–899; Dippel, Die Anfänge des Konstitu-
tionalismus in Deutschland, 7–44; Wolfgang Schmale, “Constitution, Constitutionnel” in:
Reichardt and Schmitt, Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe, XII, 31–63; Duclos, La
notion de constitution; Marina Valensise, “La constitution française” in: Baker, The Political
Culture of the Old Regime, 441–467; Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 252–305; Graham
Maddox, “Constitution” in: Ball a.o., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, 50–67. See
also the literature on the American Revolution cited in note nine below.
5 Montesquieu, Oeuvres complètes, II, 396–407. Carcassonne, Montesquieu et le prob-
lème de la constitution française remains of fundamental importance for Montesquieu’s

constitutionalism.
182 chapter nine
the fundamental rules or laws of political life. This is evident in, for
instance, Emmerich de Vattel’s authoritative 1758 definition of a con-
stitution: “Le règlement fondamental qui détermine la manière dont
l’autorité publique doit être exercée, est ce qui forme la constitution de
l’état”.6 These fundamental rules, it was argued within the eighteenth
century language of natural law, constituted a sort of contract that at
some point had been approved, either implicitly or explicitly, by the
people, who were thought to be the original sovereign. All these notions
were further developed in the remaining decades of the eighteenth cen-
tury. It was, of course, Rousseau who most radically appropriated and
transformed the existing vocabulary of natural law to develop his rev-
olutionary theory of the social contract and the inalienable character
of popular sovereignty.7 It was left to the American revolutionaries,
however, to develop ways in which the theoretical abstractions about
contracts, constitutions and popular sovereignty could be implemented.
Indeed, the American process of constitution writing, first on the level
of the separate states and subsequently on the national level, was the
first significant opportunity for the more radical political ideas of the
Enlightenment to be put into practice. Europe watched breathlessly.8
The Americans insisted, first of all, that if a state could be said to have
a constitution, this had to be a written document—a thought not unre-
lated to the fact that most American colonies already had written char-
ters functioning as fundamental laws before the American revolution.
The Americans also found a way to implement the idea that a constitu-
tion was fundamentally different from normal legislation and therefore
ought to be approved directly by the sovereign people: they developed
the instrument of the constitutional convention. Finally, the American
Revolution firmly established the notion that no constitution was com-
plete without an accompanying bill of rights.9 This requirement would,
of course, return in article 16 of the French Declaration of the Rights of
6 Cited in Stourzh, “Vom Aristotelischen zum liberalen Verfassungsbegriff”, 97.

7 For a still unsurpassed analysis of Rousseau’s political thought within the context
of the discourse of natural law see Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique.
8 On the influence of the American Revolution on Europe in general see Palmer,
The Age of the Democratic Revolution and Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1776–
1789, I, 3–143. On its influence in the Dutch Republic see Schulte Nordholt, The Dutch
Republic and American Independence.
9 The literature on the constitutionalism of the American Revolution is vast. Indis-
pensable are Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution; Wood, Creation of the Amer-
ican Republic and Radicalism of the American Revolution; Adams, The First American Constitu-
tions; Ball and Pocock, Conceptual Change and the Constitution; Rakove, Original Meanings.
Man and Citizen of 1789, which states that “toute societé dans laquelle la
garantie des droits n’est pas assurée … n’a point de constitution”.10
From the above it is clear that the development of the meaning of the
concept of a constitution had been rapid and spectacular in the second
half of the eighteenth century. Whereas Montesquieu, whose own use
of the term constitution was relatively new, in 1748 praised the English
constitution as the embodiment of liberty, less than half a century later
that great international revolutionary Thomas Paine could simply deny
that England had a constitution.11 He had come to see government
and constitution as radically different entities, as is clear from the first
sentence of the chapter “Of Constitutions” in his Rights of Man:
That men mean distinct and separate things when they speak of consti-
tutions and of governments is evident; or, why are those terms distinctly
and separately used? A constitution is not the act of a government, but
of a people constituting a government; and government without a con-
stitution, is power without a right.12
For Paine, a constitution was a written document, which not only
had to specify the structure and the powers of government, but also
had to contain a declaration of the rights of man and citizen. Such
a constitution, moreover, exclusively derived its legitimacy from the
fact that it had been framed by a constitutional convention and had
been approved by the sovereign people. States that did not meet these
requirements simply had no constitution.13 The difference between
Montesquieu and Paine, it is important to point out, went much deeper
than disagreement over the meaning of a concept. That disagreement
reflected two fundamentally different mental worlds. Montesquieu be-
longed to the moderate world of the early Enlightenment, with its deep
respect for history and the existing social and political structures. He
was still a stranger to the later notion that man was the complete mas-
ter of his own political fate and could simply draw up constitutions at
will. Paine, on the other hand, was in all respects a representative of
the late eighteenth-century Revolutionary Enlightenment, with its lim-
itless confidence in the political perfectibility of man and society and its
10 Rials, La déclaration des droits de l’homme, 26. On the French Declaration see also
Gauchet, La révolution des droits de l’homme; Van Kley, The French Idea of Freedom; Hunt,
The French Revolution and Human Rights.
11 Montesquieu’s view of the English constitution is discussed in Granpre Molière,
La théorie de la constitution anglaise chez Montesquieu.

12 Paine, Collected Writings, 572.
13 On Paine see Claeys, Thomas Paine and Philp, Paine.
184 chapter nine
forward-looking trust in the blessings of philosophical republicanism. It

was this latter mental world that was at basis of the new constitutional-
ism of the revolutionary era and that allows us to understand why many
of Paine’s contemporaries had such high expectations of the introduc-
tion of written republican constitutions.14
The Dutch, too, developed their new constitutionalism of the late
eighteenth-century against this international intellectual background of
radical natural rights theories and enlightened philosophical republi-
canism. Indeed, there can be no doubt whatsoever that the politi-
cal concepts and languages emerging at the revolutionary end of the
eighteenth century were to a large extent international in nature. Yet
although political discourse ignored national borders, it nonetheless
remains true that national circumstances deeply influenced the appli-
cation of abstract constitutional principles and demonstrably affected
the shape constitutional debates took in the various European coun-
tries and in America. The Dutch late eighteenth-century constitutional
debates took place in a context that was in many ways unique to
the country. Contrary to most other Western countries—it cannot be
emphasized enough—the Dutch had been republicans for over two
hundred years by the time they came to realize that they needed a
new political order. Liberty, virtuous participatory citizenship and deep
distrust of monarchical political power were therefore already com-
monplaces of Dutch political discourse before the start of the late
eighteenth-century revolutionary ferment—a factor which at times
makes it hard to distinguish between the old and the new republicans.
Then there was the fact that the Dutch had remained convinced feder-
alists until deep into the eighteenth century. This peculiarity of Dutch
history would take on a central importance in the process of constitu-
tion writing: before the Dutch could decide on their form of govern-
ment, they needed to decide on the form of their state. By the late eigh-
teenth century, moreover, this unique confederate Republic was, at least
according to many contemporaries, in deep decline. This contempo-
rary perception of decline greatly increased the expectations the Dutch
revolutionaries had of a new constitution: not only was it supposed for
the first time to establish true republican liberty, it was also—as we have
14 For the distinction between these two types of Enlightenment see May, The Enlight-
enment in America. For the relationship between various Enlightenments and polical
thought also see Jacob, Radical Enlightenment; Velema, Enlightenment and Conservatism;
Israel, Radical Enlightenment.
seen above—expected to lead to national regeneration and to a new

period of Dutch greatness, comparable to that of the seventeenth cen-
tury. Finally, there was the simple matter of chronology that gave the
Dutch debates their own particular flavor. Dutch constitutional exper-
iments began well before the first signs of an approaching revolution
in France were noticeable. Indeed, the Dutch Patriots of the 1780s may
be counted among the first continental European revolutionaries in the
age of the democratic revolutions.15 It was this Dutch precociousness
that led the conservative author Rijklof Michael van Goens, looking
back on recent revolutionary events, to observe:
It is not in France, it is in Holland, and originally in America, that the
French revolution is to be studied, and the true key and means of it …
to be look’d and traced back to … Whatever horrors were committed
in France, on a large scale, had been plotted in miniature and tried in
dumb shew in Holland … It is in Holland, and ultimately in America,
that the Demon of Revolution has served his prenticeship.16
2. The Patriots Discover that the Republic does not have a Constitution
Should anyone have told the Dutch in the 1770s that they did not have
a constitution and were no freer than the inhabitants of the surround-
ing monarchies, he would no doubt have met with astonishment and
incomprehension. For at that time the Dutch were still convinced that
their Republic belonged to the freest countries in the world and that
the 1579 Union of Utrecht was their constitution. Indeed, in 1775 Pieter
Paulus, who would subsequently go a long way and become the first
president of the first National Assembly some twenty years later, pub-
lished the first volume of his lengthy work on that Union. At the very
beginning of it, he insisted that the Union was the only fundamental
law of the Dutch. To this he added that he could not read this great
document without being overwhelmed by emotion and without being
impressed by the enormous wisdom of its authors.17 Paulus’s sentiments
were echoed four years later, when the bicentenary of the Union was
15 The phrase, of course, is R.R. Palmer’s. See Palmer, The Age of the Democratic
Revolution.
16 De Beaufort, Brieven aan R.M. van Goens, I, 91.
17 Paulus, Verklaring der Unie van Utrecht, I, Opdragt. On Paulus see De Gou, Biografische
bijdragen over achttiende-eeuwers, 141–169 and Vles, Pieter Paulus (1753–1796).

186 chapter nine
celebrated with elaborate festivities.18 Little did the participants in these

festivities suspect that the Union of Utrecht would lose much of its
prestige within the next few years. But that is exactly what happened,
for the Patriot movement that emerged in the early 1780s definitively
undermined its status.
As is well known, the Dutch Patriot movement started at the time of
the fourth Anglo-Dutch war as a movement of protest against what was
seen as the semi-monarchical power the Stadholders had accumulated.
Soon, however, the Patriots came to realize that simply diminishing
the power of the Stadholder would not solve the problems of their
country. What was needed, they now began to claim, was a process
of constitutional restoration. This concept of constitutional restoration,
however, was fraught with ambivalences and would, as we shall see,
ultimately lead the Patriots to the radical conclusion that there was no
constitution to restore and that they would have to create an entirely
new one.19
In one of the most important Patriot political statements from the
mid 1780s, the so-called Leyden Draft, the concept of constitution was
still used in Montesquieu’s sense of form of government. “It cannot be
denied”, the Draft stated in its first chapter, “that our Republican Con-
stitution … has a certain soundness and perfection”.20 It went on to
argue that these characteristics had unfortunately become obscured by
the growth of aristocratic and even of monarchical tendencies. These
needed to be rooted out. Restoration of the original truly republi-
can constitution, with the Union of Utrecht still in a central position,
would lead the country back to liberty, happiness and greatness. For the
authors of the Leyden Draft, it is clear, constitutional restoration was the
relatively straightforward and unproblematic return to a good republi-
can form of government that had existed at some point in time in the
national past.21 Already at the time the Leyden Draft was published, how-
ever, other Patriot authors were running into serious problems in their
attempts to apply the recipe of constitutional restoration. Remarkably
and significantly enough this was even true for the famous two-volume
Patriot handbook entitled Constitutional Restoration, which was published
18 Schutte, “Van grondslag tot breidel der vrijheid”, 199–202.

19 The best synthesis of the Patriot era is now Klein, Patriots Republikanisme.
20 Ontwerp, 9.
21 Recent publications on the Leyden Draft include Klein and Roosendaal, “Demo-
cratie in context” and Popkin, “Dutch Patriots, French Journalists, and Declarations of
Rights”.
between 1784 and 1786. The authors of this extremely important work
that marks the transition to a new concept of constitutionalism started
out with the intention of recovering something valuable from the Dutch
past, but largely failed in their attempt. They did so, because they were
no longer using the concept of constitution in the sense of form of gov-
ernment, but in the sense of a written set of rules specifying both indi-
vidual rights and the structure of government. The Dutch state, the
authors of Constitutional Restoration observed, had been imperfect since
its sixteenth century beginnings and its hybrid structure was incompati-
ble with “the essential principles of Republican Constitutions”.22 Those
essential principles could be observed in action in the “new Ameri-
can Republics” and it was high time that the Dutch Republic went the
same way. “The crucial thing that needs to happen is that the Nation
shows itself and that a complete set of Political and Civil laws is drawn
up in its name”.23 The authors of Constitutional Restoration, it is clear,
basically denied that the Dutch Republic had ever had a proper repub-
lican constitution. To them, the notion of constitutional restoration no
longer primarily referred to something to be found in the Dutch past,
but to the introduction of the universal republican principles of popular
sovereignty and a written constitution. They did however still expect
that the political practices of the glorious Dutch republican past would
supply important building blocks for the constitutional project they had
in mind.24 More radical Patriots such as Pieter Vreede and Petrus de
Wakker van Zon, however, were already abandoning that notion by
the time the work was published. Starting from the conviction that
only a document based on and enshrining the inalienable sovereignty
of the people could be called a proper republican constitution, they
rejected the entire Dutch republican past, which had never seen such a
document, as a period of unmitigated slavery. What was needed, they
insisted, was a clean break with the despotism characteristic of the old
Dutch Republic and the creation of an entirely new one, based on the
principles of enlightened republicanism.25
22 Grondwettige Herstelling, van Nederlands Staatswezen, I, 131. On Constitutional Restora-
tion see Leeb, Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution, 185–195; Van Himsbergen,
“Grondwettige Herstelling” and Chapter Six.
23 Grondwettige Herstelling, van Nederlands Staatswezen, I, 133, 139.
24 Ibidem, 139–140.
25 [Vreede] Waermond and Vryhart and Beoordelend en ophelderend Verslag; [De Wakker van
Zon] De Adel. On this type of Patriot radicalism see Chapter Seven.

188 chapter nine
The Dutch had evidently come a long way. Within a few years from
celebrating the bicentenary of the Union of Utrecht, they had discov-
ered that this once revered document could in no way qualify as a
constitution, for it was neither based on the sovereignty of the people,
nor did it contain a guarantee of rights or a description of the structure
and limits of government. Their desperate search for a constitutionally
usable Dutch past, conducted under the name of constitutional restora-
tion, moreover quickly led them to the conclusion that the country had
never had a proper republican constitution. Indeed, by the mid 1780s
the most radical Patriots were more than ready altogether to abandon
the Dutch old regime and to replace it with a new republican constitu-
tion. They would have to wait for eight more years, however, for their
movement was forcibly put down by the Orangist counter-revolution
of 1787, backed by England and Prussia.26 In the years between the
counter-revolution of 1787 and the final triumph of the Patriot cause—
with the help of the French armies—in 1795, radical thinking about the
need for an entirely new constitution considerably gained in strength.
Respect for the Union of Utrecht as the fundamental law of the Dutch
Republic declined to an absolute minimum, as witnessed by Samuel
Wiselius’s famous 1793 remark that the Union was a sorry piece of
“political nonsense”.27 The example of the French Revolution, more-
over, reinforced Patriot confidence that it was indeed possible to found
an entirely new political order on philosophical principles. If such a
thing could be done on the hierarchical ruins of an absolute monarchy,
then it could certainly be done on the remains of a much more egali-
tarian and freer old republic.28 Theory, however, is always easier than
practice. When the year 1795 finally came, most Patriots agreed that
what they wanted was a new republic based on popular sovereignty
and possessed of a written constitution. They would soon find out that
these seemingly clear and simple desires were much more difficult to
realize than they had expected. It is to their practical struggle with the
new concept of a constitution that we now turn.
26 The counter-revolution of 1787 is discussed at length in De Wit, De Nederlandse
Revolutie van de Achttiende Eeuw.

27 Quoted in Smit, Fruin en de partijen tijdens de Republiek, 76. On the political thought
of this important figure see Leeb, Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution, 229–251.
28 For the development of Patriotism between 1787 and 1795 see Baartmans, Hollandse
wijsgeren in Brabant en Vlaanderen and Rosendaal, Bataven!.

3. Debates over a New Constitution
The year 1795 saw an outburst of revolutionary political euphoria in

the Netherlands, soon to be known as the Batavian Republic. Liberty
trees were planted everywhere, provisional representatives of the people
were elected or appointed themselves, declarations of the rights of men
and citizen were proclaimed in most of the provinces, and the much
hated Orangists were forcibly removed from political life.29 The central
problem, however, all revolutionaries agreed was the foundation of a
new political order by means of a written constitution. This was the
subject that would preoccupy the Batavians over the next three years.
As it turned out, political euphoria soon gave way to bitter quarrels.
Indeed, the triumphant revolutionaries disagreed about virtually every
aspect of the much-desired new constitution. In this section, the most
important and explosive issues in Dutch constitutional debate between
1795 and 1798 will be discussed. After the detailed research of the
past years of among others De Gou, one trusts that it is no longer
necessary to demonstrate that the Dutch were allowed a large measure
of both factual and intellectual autonomy in the first period after 1795.
It was only when they kept failing to resolve the burning issue of the
constitution that French pressure gradually increased and even then, as
we shall see, the Batavians did not become slavish followers of Paris.30
The first issue that surfaced in the curious political void that existed
between the fall of the old regime early in 1795 and the meeting of the
first National Assembly on March 1, 1796, was the old question, hotly
debated but never entirely decided during the Patriot era, of constitu-
tional reform on the basis of the old republican institutions versus an
entirely new political founding. Was it going to be “improvement or a
new start?”31 It was J.H. Swildens, a moderate reformer who had also
played a prominent role in the 1780s, who succinctly listed the constitu-
29 For an overview of the history of the first years of the Batavian Republic see
Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 211–354. An interpretation of these years with an empha-
sis on political culture may be found in Van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland, 277–291.
For the various declarations of rights in 1795 see Van der Burg and Boels, Tweehonderd
jaar rechten van de mens in Nederland and the older but still valuable Goslinga, De rechten van
den mensch en burger.
30 On De Gou’s work see Grondwetgeving 1795–1806.
31 The dilemma is depicted on the title plate of [Swildens] Gelykheid-Vryheid-Broeder-
schap. 1795. Politiek Belang-Boek voor dit provisioneel Tydperk.

190 chapter nine
tional alternatives available in 1795. There were, it seemed to him, four

possible positions:
I. That the so-called (and now abolished) old Constitution would be the
best … II. That the truly Fundamental Constitution of our Ancestors,
which we Patriots wanted to restore in the period between 1782 and Sept.
1787, would be the best. III. That a Constitution completely and in all
respects similar to the French would be the best. IV. That a Constitution
in some points like the French, but in other constitutional Points designed
to fit the Character and Nature of our Country and People would be the
best.32
The first of these alternatives clearly was no longer viable, indeed
had been officially banned. The third option had few sympathizers on
either the moderate or the radical side. The vast majority of partic-
ipants in the Batavian constitutional debate were of the opinion that
a Dutch constitution should reflect the Dutch political situation and
national character and should therefore not be a copy of the French
constitution. As Pieter Vreede put it: “France has given France a con-
stitution and we must try and do it for ourselves”.33
What is perhaps most interesting in the passage cited above, how-
ever, is that even the moderate Swildens no longer believed the second
option of constitutional restoration to be applicable any longer. What
was left of that once so powerful formula in Swildens’s 1795 position,
was an appreciation for certain aspects of the old republican order, such
as the fact that in a federal republic government was always close to the
governed.34 Such valuable aspects of the old Republic he wished to see
incorporated in the new constitution the Dutch were to give themselves
and that was what he intended in opting for the fourth alternative. The
transition between the old and the new order, however, had to be a
gradual one. In urging that point, Swildens derived his metaphors from
architecture: rather than tearing it down, it was preferable to carefully
renovate and renew a still habitable old building, however dilapidated.
Where the moderate Swildens had dropped constitutional restoration
in favor of constitutional renovation, more radical Batavians insisted on
32 [Swildens] Circulaire Missive van eenen vryen Hollandschen burger, 59. On Swildens see
Boeles, De patriot J.H. Swildens.

33 De Gou, Het Ontwerp van Constitutie van 1797, I, 336. The desire to give a specifically
Dutch character to the constitution also surfaced in long debates over terminology. For
many Batavians, for instance, the word constitution was too foreign. The first Dutch
constitution of 1798 was therefore called Staatsregeling. Ibidem, 173–175.
34 [Swildens] Gelykheid-Vryheid-Broederschap. 1795. Politiek Belang-Boek voor dit provisioneel
Tydperk, 179.
an entirely new founding. Not only was there nothing to restore, they
maintained, there was also nothing to renovate. The old republic had
been illegitimate in all of its aspects and a monstrous despotism in its
political practice, “a perpetual and arbitrary tyranny, worse than that
of the Counts”.35 Nothing from the old republic was worth preserving
and certainly nothing constitutional. For what could that possibly be?
“Where can that old constitution be found?”, an anonymous pamphle-
teer asked and proceeded to supply the answer himself: “The previous
government was based on old privileges, customs, abuses and usurpa-
tions. It is therefore clear that our country has never had a fixed Con-
stitution, which has been approved by the people”.36 What was needed
was a completely new political order founded on popular sovereignty
and the rights of man. Remarkably enough, the building metaphor also
belonged to the favorite rhetorical devices of the radicals, albeit in a
very different way. “Politics is very much like architecture”, the enlight-
ened historian and politician Cornelis Zillesen remarked,
if the architect chooses to leave some parts of a poorly constructed old
dwelling standing and decides to tear down and to renovate other parts,
… the result is and remains misshapen; but if the architect decides to
tear everything down to the ground, he will thereafter be able to raise a
regular building.37
Yet even if it was decided to construct a new constitutional building,

as it eventually was, it needed to be known who was to design, build
and approve it. There was very little doubt among the Batavians that
a new constitution had to be based on the sovereignty of the people
or the nation. But how could this concept best be made to express
itself in practice? Indeed, was there a political nation at all? It was
H.T. Colenbrander, the first serious professional Dutch historian to
devote himself to the Dutch revolutions of the late eighteenth century,
who first pointed out how crucially important this question was for the
Dutch in 1795—much more so than for the French in 1789, for they
already lived in a unitary state when their revolution broke out.38 For
some participants in the debate over the new constitution it was obvi-
ous that there was no such thing as one Batavian nation or people.
35 [Bosch] Over de Constitutie, Constitutioneele Machten en de Regeringsvorm, 24.

36 Raad aan die myner medeburgers, welken aan de oude constitutie zyn toegedaan, 5.
37 Zillesen, Vrije gedachten en aanmerkingen, 33–34.
38 Colenbrander, Gedenkstukken der Algemeene Geschiedenis van Nederland, II, xxii. For the
great importance of this issue also see Palmer, “Much in Little”.

192 chapter nine
There were, these theorists maintained, seven separate peoples and the
new constitution needed to perpetuate this situation by instituting a fed-
eral republic. It has not been uncommon in modern historiography to
associate this federalist position with political conservatism.39 Nothing,
however, could be further from the truth. It was indeed the case that
the unitary constitution that was finally accepted in 1798 was mainly
backed by political radicals, but a close study of the federalist argument
clearly shows that it was anything but a simple defense of the old Dutch
system. As the American example showed, federalists such as Gerard
Dumbar maintained, a well-ordered republic was best organized along
federalist lines. America, after all, had become a stable popular repub-
lic, whereas the unitary system of France had rapidly spawned the ter-
ror.40 That federalism could be as forward looking as unitarism is also
evident from the work of the Zeeland author Van Sonsbeeck. It was
very telling, he observed in 1795, “that in the most enlightened times of
the world … a Franklin and a Washington have not hesitated to divide
their liberated and sovereign people into independent provinces and to
give each of these quasi-sovereign powers”.41 He went on to demon-
strate at great length that a federal republic best corresponded with
the political ideals of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, hardly a theorist known
for his political conservatism.42 Yet the radical Dutch federalists had
the misfortune that for most Batavian revolutionaries federalism had
become irretrievably associated with the despotic and aristocratic struc-
ture of the old republic. It was moreover quite difficult for them to
dissociate themselves from those groups who advocated federalism out
of genuinely conservative convictions. The cause of revolutionary fed-
eralism was therefore doomed to fail—and we all know it did.
Yet even among those who were willing to believe that, once pop-
ular sovereignty had been accepted, there was one Batavian nation or
people, there was substantial disagreement about who should give this
people a constitution. Looking at the French example, it was evident for
most revolutionaries that a constitution should be written by a national
39 E.g. De Wit, “De Noordelijke Nederlanden in de Bataafse en de Franse Tijd”,

164.
40 Dumbar, De oude en nieuwe Constitutie der Vereenigde Staaten van Amerika and Betoog,
dat een onverdeelde Regeeringsvorm. On Dumbar see Mecking, “Mr. Gerard Dumbar” and
Schulte Nordholt, The Dutch Republic and American Independence, 279–281.
41 [Van Sonsbeeck] Verhandeling over het Nadeel eener Nationaale Conventie, 48.
42 On the role of Rousseau’s political thought in the Batavian revolution see Gob-
bers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Holland, 239–259.

assembly elected by the sovereign people. But there were also theorists
who regarded this as a procedure highly dangerous to liberty. Thus in
1795 the learned jurist H.C. Cras published a pamphlet entitled Should a
Constitution precede the National Convention or a National Convention the Consti-
tution? No matter whether exercised by a king or by an elected assembly,
Cras argued, it would always remain true that unlimited power equaled
tyranny. “The French citizens”, he observed,
who elected Marat, Robespierre and their followers were acting in good
faith; those monsters were the fellow citizens of the innocent victims they
killed. This could never have happened, had there been a Constitution
before the National Convention, limiting its power.43
Cras failed to explain, however, how a constitution could be brought
about on the principles of popular sovereignty before a constitutional
convention would meet. The anonymous author who answered him
for that very reason called his argument “too idiotic to reply to”, but
nonetheless proceeded to do so at great length.44
By the time the first elected National Assembly met on March 1,
1796, it is clear from the above, a large number of constitutional issues
had already been exhaustively discussed: the matter of constitutional
renewal versus a completely new founding, the question of federalism
versus unitarism, and finally the issue of the powers of a constitutional
convention. Yet what was to become the most profound disagreement
among the Batavian revolutionaries was still to surface with full force:
the framers of the new Batavian constitution had to pronounce them-
selves on the ultimate goal of the constitution, on the very nature of
republican government. It was on this fundamentally important topic
that a veritable and unbridgeable abyss opened between the revolu-
tionaries, as is particularly clear from the debates concerning the first
constitutional proposal of 1797. It is with an analysis of the differences
of opinion about the nature of republican government that surfaced in
those debates then, that this discussion of the theoretical difficulties the
Dutch experienced in their attempts to give themselves a new constitu-
tion ends.
What emerged in these debates, it will be argued here, was noth-
ing less than a profound gap between liberal republicanism on the one
hand and radical republicanism on the other. Indeed, should one wish
43 [Cras] Gewigtig Advys, 6–7. On Cras see Kop, “Hendrik Constantijn Cras” and
Jansen, “H.C. Cras (1739–1820)”.

44 Vryheid, Volksstem en Nationale Repraesentatie, 138.
194 chapter nine
to use the terminology of modern Anglophone historiography on the

topic, one could say that the Dutch debates of 1797 gave birth to a full-
fledged opposition between liberalism and republicanism.45 Let us take
a look at what was at stake. Liberal and radical republicans were in
agreement over a number of important issues. They generally desired
a more unitary state and a written republican constitution, contain-
ing both a declaration of the rights of man and citizen and a descrip-
tion of the structure of government. What they profoundly disagreed
about was the ultimate nature of republican government. The moder-
ate or liberal republicans, of whom Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck—
later flawlessly to adapt himself to ever more authoritarian regimes—
was an eminent representative, above all desired a republican order in
which the protection of individual rights, prominently including prop-
erty rights, and the rule of law were guaranteed. In a way, one could
describe their goals as essentially modest. From politics and the state
they expected no more than the protection of a sphere in which pri-
vate happiness could flourish. Schimmelpenninck’s political ideal, for
instance, was a state that would secure its inhabitants “the quiet and
gentle enjoyment of a stable society” and above all “individual lib-
erty and domestic security”.46 Among the liberal republicans, it is clear,
negative liberty counted for more than positive liberty.47 The practi-
cal implementation of this political program required a constitutional
order in which, although it was theoretically based on the principle of
popular sovereignty, the actual exercise of the popular will was in fact
reduced to a minimum. To reach this desired state of affairs, the liberal
republicans first of all advanced a concept of representation in which
there was very little room for an active political role of the citizen. The
role of the citizen was reduced to the election, at regular intervals, of a
representative, who was deemed to operate independently and without
a binding mandate after his initial election. The elected representatives
in the National Assembly thus fully embodied and replaced the will of
45 The opposition between liberalism and republicanism during the late eighteenth-
century has generated a vast scholarly literature. Among the most important works are
Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment and Virtue, Commerce, and History; Kramnick, Republi-
canism and Bourgeois Liberalism; Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imag-
ination; Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern; Fontana, The Invention of the Modern Republic;
Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism.
46 Schimmelpenninck, Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck, I, 51. For Schimmelpenninck’s
early political thought see Klein, “Republikanisme en patriotisme”. A recent sketch

of his entire career may be found in Van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland, 293–302.
47 The locus classicus for this distinction is, of course, Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty.
the people. As Jacob van Manen put it: “In a Representative Democ-
racy the Legislative Power fulfils the role the People has in a Direct
Democracy”.48 The liberal republicans furthermore advocated an elec-
toral system that would, by means of property qualifications and indi-
rect elections, ascertain the political dominance of a propertied elite in
the representative assembly: “perhaps not the truly rich, but certainly
the orderly and solid Citizens”.49 Finally, they constantly emphasized
the danger of the emergence of a tyranny by majority in democratic
systems. They therefore regarded it as of the utmost importance that
the powers of government were effectively restrained by a rock-solid
guarantee of individual rights and by the strictest possible application
of the principle of the separation of powers.50
To the radical republicans, who found an important spokesman in
Pieter Vreede, the liberal republican worship of the private sphere and
individual liberty and happiness constituted the abandonment of the
essential principles of a republic.51 A true republic, they were con-
vinced, was a form of government primarily based on public virtue
and collective liberty. As direct descendants of the radical Patriots of
the 1780s, the radical Batavians combined natural rights theories, clas-
sical republicanism and enlightened optimism about the capacities and
virtues of the people in their political discourse.52 These various ele-
ments all came together in their central political demand. They insisted
that the new constitution should do full justice to the permanent and
inalienable sovereignty of the people. By this they meant that it should
not only be theoretically based on that principle, but that it should
make the active political participation of the citizens the very core of
the new republican order. The radicals greeted the moderate republi-
can attempts to limit the direct exercise of the popular will with incom-
prehension and alarm. Nothing was more dangerous to liberty, they
48 De Gou, Het Ontwerp van Constitutie van 1797, I, 396. Indispensable for an under-
standing of the history of the concept of representation are Pitkin, The Concept of Repre-
sentation and Manin, The Principles of Representative Government.
49 De Gou, Het Ontwerp van Constitutie van 1797, I, 600. On the electoral system during
these first years of the Batavian Republic see Overdijk, “Regeling en praktijk van het
algemeen kiesrecht”.
50 E.g. Joannes van Hooff in De Gou, Het Ontwerp van Constitutie van 1797, I, 125 and
II, 365–366.
51 On Vreede see M.W. van Boven a.o., “Pieter Vreede” in: Vreede, Mijn Levensloop;
H.M. Beliën, “Pieter Vreede. Strijder voor de gelijkberechtiging van Brabant” in:
Beliën a.o., Nederlanders van het eerste uur and Chapter Seven.
52 For these characteristics of Patriot political discourse see Chapter Six.
196 chapter nine
argued, than an interpretation of representation that made the elected

representatives into independent actors, fully replacing their electorate.
This would indeed, Bernardus Bosch observed, “leave the People dead
and buried after the election of its representatives”.53 Pieter Toens, also
a member of the National Assembly, at the end of 1797 thus formulated
the issue:
Does a Mandator, who from experience finds out that the job he has
ordered is not being carried out to his satisfaction, not keep the right
to tell his Mandatory: I demand that you do as I say? If the Batavian
People, our Mandator, does not have the same right, I must confess that
I fail to understand what the concept of popular sovereignty means and
I am unable to regard it as more than an empty phrase.54
The radicals even refused to see an elected national representative

assembly as the heart and center of the political life of the nation.
Much more important, they claimed, was the formation of a network of
primary assemblies, in which the citizens could be permanently active
in a wide variety of ways. Equipped with such a participatory structure,
“the nation will gradually become freer and freer, until even all tyrants
of the earth working in unison will be unable to chain it again”.55
Within this conception of a republic as the embodiment of the per-
manent and active sovereignty of the people, there evidently was no
place for the various mechanisms the liberal republicans proposed in
order to limit the direct expression of the popular will. The radicals
found the notion that property should be a decisive factor in electoral
law both deeply offensive and entirely unacceptable. Whether rich or
poor, Pieter Vreede pointed out, a human being had certain rights as a
human being: “Among these, in a free state, is the right to vote, because
the right to vote is the basis of self-government and civil liberty is no
more than the right to govern yourself …”.56 The attempt to narrow
down the definition of the political nation on the basis of financial cri-
teria, Jacob Hahn claimed, meant the reintroduction of “the domina-
53 De Gou, Het Ontwerp van Constitutie van 1797, I, 40. In 1795, Bosch had already
emphasized that under no circumstances the representatives should become indepen-

dent. One possible way to prevent this from happening, he suggested, was the organiza-
tion of a yearly convention “where the Sovereignty of the People can show itself … and
can judge, approve or reject the actions of the representatives of the people”. [Bosch]
Over de Constitutie, Constitutionele Machten en de Regeringsvorm, 102–103.
54 De Gou, De Staatsregeling van 1798, I, 19.
55 Vryheid, Volksstem en Nationale Repraesentatie, 125.
56 De Gou, Het Ontwerp van Constitutie van 1797, I, 189.
tion of the so-called aristocracy of the rich”.57 The radical republicans

equally dismissed indirect elections, which served to increase the dis-
tance between the people and its representatives.58
Although these radical constitutional views can be found in a large
number of pamphlets and parliamentary speeches, they perhaps found
their most clear and succinct expression in a statement by twelve rad-
ical republican deputies of July 1, 1797. In this so-called Manifesto of the
Twelve Apostles, the first constitutional proposal to be submitted to the
electorate was totally rejected. Although the Manifesto criticized the 1797
constitutional proposal from a variety of angles, its argument boiled
down to one essential point: the proposal was unacceptable because it
cut the republican heart of popular sovereignty and popular participa-
tion out of politics. Whether it did so by instituting indirect elections,
by making representatives independent of their electors, by giving too
much power to the executive, or by rendering the process of constitu-
tional revision difficult (it in fact did all of this), the result would be the
same. The people would once again, as had been the case under the
old regime, come to consist of slaves and come to sigh under “an aris-
tocratic yoke, covered in soft velvet”.59 The adoption of such a consti-
tutional proposal would, in short, have utterly disastrous consequences.
Both the high constitutional hopes of the radicals and their deep disap-
pointment with the proposal of 1797 found pregnant expression in the
rhetoric with which they urged their compatriots to reject it:
As long as it does not participate in politics, the nation will not be
brought to great deeds. The minds will always remain in that black pit
where dependence on the will of others has thrown them. The hearts
will not feel the noble glow of Patriotism for something they do not
participate in. The Citizens will once again be strangers in their own
Fatherland; there will be no public spirit; every member of society will
remain the same old beast of burden … the Batavians will not become
Greeks or Romans, whose disinterested virtue and self-sacrifice for the
good of the Fatherland after so many centuries still brightly shines in our
eyes.60
The difference between the modest world of liberal republicanism and
the ambitious world of radical republicanism could not have been
expressed more clearly.
57 Ibidem, 190.
58 E.g. ibidem, 601.
59 De Gou, De Staatsregeling van 1798, I, 493.
60 Ibidem, 495–496.
198 chapter nine
4. The Constitution of 1798
Convinced as they were that their country was in a state of near mor-
tal crisis, the late eighteenth-century Dutch belonged to the first Euro-
peans to formulate plans for the fundamental reform of their state.
One of their central demands, already tentatively formulated during
the Patriot era, was a written constitution, which was regarded as the
only possible basis for a renewed national political life. It would take
the reformers fifteen years to realize their ambitious plans. This consid-
erable length of time may, of course, partly be explained by the fact that
the Patriot movement was temporarily crushed in 1787 by an Orangist
counter-revolution. Even after 1795, however, when the intervention of
the French revolutionary armies had dealt with the Orangist danger,
the Batavian revolutionaries experienced great difficulties in framing
the written constitution they all so ardently desired. Perhaps one should
not be too surprised at this. The changes the Batavian revolutionaries
desired to bring about were, after all, of a drastic and sweeping nature.
“There is perhaps not a single other state for which the great revolution
has been as radical”, the great historian Robert Fruin already observed
on the Batavian Republic in a famous essay written in 1865. With a use
of imagery strongly reminiscent of that of the constitutional debates of
the late eighteenth century, he continued: “In our country … all that
existed has been destroyed and has been replaced by an entirely new
building”.61
That is indeed the way things happened. The constitutional pro-
posal of 1797 had all the characteristics of a half-baked compromise. It
took an unfortunate middle position between federalism and unitarism
and it showed itself insufficiently responsive to the strong demand for a
substantial popular influence on politics. Indeed, its unworkable nature
was already sufficiently clear from the fact that it contained no fewer
than 918 articles and was therefore derisively nicknamed “the fat vol-
ume”. On August 8, 1797, an overwhelming majority of the electorate
rejected it.62 Since the second National Assembly was equally ideologi-
cally divided and politically inefficient, the process of constitution writ-
ing was now threatening to become an endless affair. At the same time,
the French increased pressure on their Batavian allies to come up with
a constitution. It was in this climate that the radicals, aided by the
61 Fruin, “De drie tijdvakken der Nederlandsche geschiedenis”, 25.

62 De Gou, Het Ontwerp van Constitutie van 1797, I, xl–xliv.
French, seized their opportunity. On January 22, 1798, the National

Assembly was purged and shortly thereafter a new constitutional pro-
posal was drawn up. On April 23 of that same year, it was approved by
the primary assemblies, which in the meantime had also been purged.63
The Batavians finally had their constitution.
The constitution of 1798 was, it is evident, adopted in a less than
perfect and exemplary manner. Yet there remained plenty of reasons
for the Batavian revolutionaries to be proud of what they had achieved.
Contrary to what has often been suggested in the older historiogra-
phy, the constitution did not slavishly copy the French constitution of
1795, but showed the mark of the national constitutional debate that
had been conducted over the previous years.64 Those who desired the
unitary state had triumphed and in the articles concerning for instance
the right to vote, the relation between the legislative and the execu-
tive power and the procedure for constitutional revision, the political
thought of the radical republicans had clearly been influential.65 No
wonder then that, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, the adop-
tion of the constitution of 1798 was celebrated with all the rhetoric
of triumphant radical republicanism. It would, however, prove to be
a short-lived victory. All the optimistic speeches could not obscure the
fact that the Batavian people, of which the radical republicans had such
high hopes, was gradually and increasingly turning away from politics
and thereby fatally undermining the entire basis of the radical repub-
lican ideal. To explain this process, one can point to the interminable
struggle over the new constitution, to the less than elegant way in which
it was finally adopted, and to the gradually increasing influence the
French exercised over Dutch politics.66 At least of equal importance,
perhaps, was the fact that the radical republicans seem to have overes-
timated the willingness of average citizens to devote themselves whole-
heartedly to politics for extended periods of time. However that may be,
the growing disillusionment with politics made the constitution of 1798
soon lose its luster. The first decade of the nineteenth century, which
witnessed the imposition of one new constitution after another upon
63 De Gou, De Staatsregeling van 1798, I, lxiii–lxvi.

64 This is demonstrated at length in Bauer, Der französische Einfluss auf die Batavische und
die Helvetische Verfassung and finds confirmation in De Gou, De Staatsregeling van 1798, I,
ix–lxvii.
65 Bauer, Der französische Einfluss auf die Batavische und die Helvetische Verfassung, 26–40.
66 On the declining interest in politics during the period under discussion see e.g.
Van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland, 86–96.

200 chapter nine
the Dutch by their French allies, made the respect for written constitu-
tions sink to a new low. Despite all this, however, the late eighteenth-
century revolutionaries had succeeded in making a written constitution
into the essential prerequisite of any subsequent Dutch political order.
Even Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, the conservative architect of a
nineteenth-century Dutch monarchical order that would have horrified
the Batavian radicals, could not afford to ignore this heritage of the
Batavian Republic.67
67 The best discussion of Van Hogendorp’s political thought remains Van der Hoe-
ven, Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp.

chapter ten
THE END OF REPUBLICAN POLITICS
“A kingdom! Yes my friend, that is what our country has now come to”,
Anton Reinhard Falck wrote in June 1806, in a letter full of anger and
frustration, to Johan Hora Siccama in Groningen.1 Falck was just one of
many contemporaries who initially regarded the end of republican gov-
ernment and the installment of Louis Napoleon as king of the Nether-
lands with disgust and disbelief. Such an attitude is easy to understand.
For more than two centuries, Dutchmen had sung the praises of their
republican form of government and had been convinced of its superi-
ority to monarchical government. During the entire eighteenth century,
to go back no further, first Staatsgezinden and Orangists and later revolu-
tionaries and conservatives had, despite all their fundamental political
differences, all agreed on one thing: the country should always remain
a republic. Given this remarkable, longstanding and unanimous pref-
erence of the Dutch for a republican form of government, one would
expect historians to have exhaustively studied and analyzed the sudden
transition to monarchical government in 1806. Nothing is further from
the truth, however, for this crucially important episode in the genesis of
the modern Dutch state has received very little scholarly attention.
The reason for this neglect is partly to be sought in the way histo-
rians nowadays view the years around 1800. After a period of intense
political activism, which started with the Patriot movement of the 1780s
and which ended with the adoption of the first Dutch constitution of
1798, they discern a clear turning point. Revolutionary political pas-
sion, exhausted by years of petty political struggles, slowly ebbed away
and was replaced by a desire for unity and harmony, a development
that was further reinforced by the return of the old elites to political
life in 1801. The ever-increasing French intervention in Dutch politics,
moreover, spelled the end of the radical republicanism of the previous
two decades. Revolutionary political theory was replaced by a new sen-
timental feeling for the unique value of the fatherland, which expressed
1 Colenbrander, Gedenkstukken der Algemeene Geschiedenis van Nederland, V, I, xlvi.

202 chapter ten
itself in an entirely different and much less political vocabulary.2 While

such an interpretation of the first decade of the nineteenth century con-
tains much that is undeniably true, it nonetheless does not tell the entire
story of these years and is therefore in need of modification. The one-
sided emphasis it puts on the importance of the cultural aspects of the
process of nation formation during the 1800s tends to obscure the fact
that it was during these very same years that a fundamental debate was
conducted over the question of the most suitable form of government
for the country. Indeed, any suggestion that the transition from repub-
lic to monarchy in 1806 went by almost unnoticed and was passively
undergone by completely disillusioned contemporaries, who had fled
into nostalgic cultural daydreaming, is entirely misleading. In order to
dispel this misunderstanding, I shall first of all attempt to demonstrate
that Dutch political debate in the years preceding the introduction of
the monarchy was largely devoted to the effort to safeguard the old
republican political identity of the country. I shall then discuss the sig-
nificance of the establishment of Louis Napoleon’s monarchy by look-
ing at it from the perspective of both the new king himself and that of
contemporary Dutchmen. Finally, I shall briefly speculate on the rea-
sons why the staunchly republican Dutch suddenly decided to accept a
form of government they had all detested until 1806.
1. Republicanism Defended, 1804–1806
The years of the Staatsbewind and of Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck’s

subsequent Grand Pensionaryship were a period of considerable polit-
ical and conceptual confusion for the Dutch. With growing astonish-
ment they observed the remarkable and theoretically almost incompre-
hensible development of the political system in France, where Napoleon
gradually gave a definitive shape to his idiosyncratic mixture of revolu-
tionary principles, ancien régime monarchy, and modern military dicta-
torship.3 Schimmelpenninck, who was intimately familiar with French
political life, characterized it as entirely military in 1804 and added to
2 This interpretation, which is now widely accepted among Dutch historians, was
originally advanced by N.C.F. van Sas in numerous publications, now collected in Van
Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland.
3 For some recent attempts to characterize Napoleonic rule see Baehr and Richter,
Dictatorship in History and Theory.

the end of republican politics 203
this: “I find it utterly disgusting”.4 In that same year, Jacob Blaauw

wrote to Samuel Wiselius that the things happening in French politics
completely defied the traditional lessons of political theory. Should the
Napoleonic regime survive, he observed, then the one thing one could
safely conclude was that
all those wise authors, who have written so many books about the proper
design and the durability of a good form of government, are complete
fools, whose writings may be committed to the flames without qualms.5
In their own country, increasingly dependent upon France, Dutch con-
temporary commentators also found little reason for optimism: the end-
lessly discussed reform of the state proceeded slowly and chaotically, the
calls for political harmony that had sounded so loudly since 1801 were
insufficiently heeded, and all political energy seemed to have flowed
from the nation.
Given this climate of political and intellectual uncertainty and dis-
orientation, it was all the more remarkable that the core political con-
viction of the eighteenth-century Dutch, their preference for a repub-
lican form of government, survived seemingly unscathed. With some
notable exceptions, this republicanism was no longer as passionate, rad-
ical and forward looking as it had been during the Patriot era and the
first years of the Batavian Republic. The prolonged and bitter politi-
cal conflicts of those years had taken their toll. The optimistic belief in
the imminent establishment of the reign of political virtue and in the
blessings of permanent popular sovereignty had almost completely van-
ished. Active political citizenship was no longer thought to be a viable
ideal. “The bulk of the nation, exhausted by a series of grave shocks,
and disappointed in its expectations, is no longer voluntarily interested
in the common good”, Schimmelpenninck already wrote in 1799.6 And
in 1803, François Ermerins observed: “Everyone is tired of the politi-
cal struggles …”.7 But this disillusionment with late eighteenth-century
revolutionary republicanism did not imply a rejection of republicanism
altogether. Far from it, for it was precisely in this politically and con-
ceptually chaotic and uncertain period that the Dutch eagerly and nos-
talgically looked back to their pre-revolutionary republican traditions
for guidance and stability. Thus the old anti-monarchical chestnuts, the
4 Colenbrander, Gedenkstukken der Algemeene Geschiedenis van Nederland, IV, II, 500–501.
5 Ibidem, 539.
6 Schimmelpenninck, Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck, I, 183–184.
7 Colenbrander, Gedenkstukken der Algemeene Geschiedenis van Nederland, IV, II, 429.
204 chapter ten
preference for a harmonious and collegial political administration and

a certain measure of civic equality, and the emphasis on the old repub-
lican virtues of moderation, sobriety, honesty, and simplicity all resur-
faced in Dutch political discourse. It was this old republican national
identity that seemed to be severely threatened by the growing French
desire to “monarchize” (“monarchaliseeren”) the country.8
The main political issue during the years 1804 and 1805 therefore
was the question of how far one could and should go in adapting the
republican form of government to French preferences. Obviously, the
constitution (Staatsregeling) of 1805 and Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck’s
appointment as Grand Pensionary were crucial events in this context.9
Schimmelpenninck’s new office was still republican in name and he
himself insisted that the new constitution was perfectly adapted to “the
nature of the manners and morals, the way of thought, and the char-
acter of our nation” and embodied a singularly fortunate combination
of “a concentrated and powerful government and a total security of
individual and civil liberty”.10 His opponents saw matters in a differ-
ent light, and vehemently opposed what they regarded as the introduc-
tion of a quasi-monarchical power in Dutch government. It was Isaac
Gogel, the former editor of the revolutionary journal The Democrats,
who tried to put a halt to these developments at the very highest
level by addressing both Schimmelpenninck and Napoleon himself.11
Although he would later serve under various monarchical regimes, in
1804 he was still dead against the introduction of “a single-headed gov-
ernment, or something that brings the same under a different name”.12
In opposing such a development, he made it perfectly clear that he no
longer regarded himself as a revolutionary republican and he assured
Schimmelpenninck that he rejected all “so-called excessive philosophi-
cal principles, which do not agree with the present state of humanity”.13
Instead, he appealed to the old and timeless Dutch national charac-
ter. This idea he further developed in a “profession de foi pour la
8 This neologism was coined by François Ermerins in 1804: De Gou, De Staatsregeling
van 1805 en de Constitutie van 1806, 210.

9 For a recent discussion of Schimmelpenninck see Van Sas, De metamorfose van
Nederland, 293–302.
11 On Gogel see Sillem, De politieke en staatkundige werkzaamheid van Isaac Jan Alexander
Gogel and Verberne, Gogel en de uniteit. On The Democrats see De Lange, “De politieke
actie van een bewuste publieke opinie”.
13 Ibidem, 525.
République batave”, which he sent to Napoleon on October 4, 1804,

through the French military commander in the Netherlands, general
Auguste de Marmont. The political message of this remarkable docu-
ment was that the Batavian Republic did indeed need a number of the
political reforms so ardently desired by Napoleon, and that a power-
ful central government was necessary to prevent the renewed threat of
particularism and federalism. Yet such a government, Gogel insisted,
should under no circumstances be single-headed, since that was clearly
contrary to the “esprit national” and would therefore never be accepted
by a public opinion that was deeply attached to “les anciennes opinions
de liberté”. But it was not only the ancient Dutch love of liberty that
was opposed to such an innovation. The nation also put a great value
on its “ancienne simplicité” and would certainly be disgusted with man-
ifestations of courtly splendor. It would therefore be much better, Gogel
suggested to Napoleon, to put the Dutch government in the hands of a
sober small council of three to five men.14
That a revolutionary such as Gogel should decide to appeal to the
commonplaces of pre-revolutionary republicanism in opposing Schim-
melpenninck’s appointment as Grand Pensionary was, of course, quite
remarkable. Less surprising perhaps was the fact that the resistance to
this development from the opposite end of the political spectrum used
exactly the same arguments. Since 1801, the Orangists had once again
become part of political life. The plans to introduce a powerful Grand
Pensionary offered them a chance to make themselves heard and to set-
tle old scores. Indeed, this opportunity to rub salt in the revolutionary
wounds was not to be missed. For was it not utterly scandalous that
former revolutionaries, who had over the past decades constantly and
wrongly accused the stadholders of attempting to establish a monar-
chy, were now themselves trying to introduce a real single-headed gov-
ernment? This was the main argument of a letter of protest sent by
twelve Orangist members of the Utrecht political elite to the Staatsbe-
wind and to Schimmelpenninck himself in 1805. The existing plans for a
new form of government, these gentlemen announced, were completely
contrary to “the Republican Liberty, for which our forefathers have
sacrificed their Blood and Goods”, since they abused the old repub-
lican name of Grand Pensionary in order to give “Despotic power”
to one single person. This unlimited power was “much greater and
14 Ibidem, 530–535.
206 chapter ten
more ample” than anything ever possessed by either the Counts of Hol-
land or the stadholders in the past, indeed even greater than “that of
a constitutional King”. It was as if the ancient republican lesson that
“a Sovereign and Unlimited power” should never be given to “a single
person, whoever he is, and under whatever name” had suddenly been
completely forgotten.15
Schimmelpenninck ignored all these protests and thought them com-
pletely ridiculous.16 The form of government did not matter all that
much, he argued, the time of “theoretical reflections” was over; the
thing that counted now was that “the government should have enough
power to implement those measures it holds to be salutary” and to
“crush all foolish or malevolent opposition”.17 Yet even for this most
pragmatic of politicians, it transpired within a year after his appoint-
ment as Grand Pensionary, there were political and conceptual limits
that could not be crossed. When it became clear that Napoleon had
plans to entrust the government of the country to a hereditary monarch
picked from his own family, Schimmelpenninck attempted to prevent
this with the entire arsenal of old republican arguments. Just as Gogel
had done two years earlier, Schimmelpenninck now appealed to the
old Dutch national character. Indeed, the only hope for the future of
the country was vested in the preservation of this courageous and inde-
pendent national character, which “is the only basis for our existence
as Republicans”. Dutch national character, always characterized by a
“loathing of hereditary power”, would be irreparably damaged by “the
establishment of a court” and the attendant culture of splendor, luxury,
and militarism. The coming of a French monarch would, in short, be
entirely contrary to “the spirit … of the people” and would be a dis-
aster for the country. Even the man who was accused of monarchical
ambitions by many of his contemporaries could not, it is clear, easily
or entirely shed the heavy weight of the old republican arguments and
concepts.18
15 The letter is printed in Van der Aa, Geschiedenis van het Leven, Character, en Lotgevallen
van wijlen Willem den Vijfden, IV, 655–663.

17 Ibidem, 546.
18 Schimmelpenninck, Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck, II, 344–353.
2. The Establishment of the Monarchy
Schimmelpenninck’s republican arguments failed to impress Napoleon,

who told him in none too subtle terms that he should stop his hypocrit-
ical whining about the dangers of a single-headed government, since
“in the present Dutch constitution the head of government already
has more power than many kings”.19 The rearguard battle fought by
a number of pamphleteers was equally unsuccessful, although it served
to demonstrate how hard it was for the Dutch to shed what was still left
of their republican identity. J.M. Kemper thought that although there
were no valid arguments for the introduction of the new monarchy,
it would still happen, since the population was completely exhausted
from decades of revolution, and experience taught that it was at pre-
cisely such moments that autocrats and conquerors struck: “The tired
and numbed minds look for peace and quiet: people are sick of the
endless struggles, and the conqueror therefore easily wins”.20 It was in
vain that the passionate Maria Aletta Hulshoff exhorted her compatri-
ots: “Republicans, do your duty! You can still save the Fatherland!”.21
An anonymous pamphleteer wrote that he could well imagine that a
sincere republican would become so disillusioned by the introduction
of monarchy that he would sooner follow the classical example of Cato
and Brutus and prefer to die “rather than be forced to witness the end
of liberty in his fatherland”.22 The political elite was almost equally
desperate. When Elias Canneman was shown the new constitution, he
simply could not believe his eyes:
Nowhere did I find even a single gleam of hope, nowhere did I see a
point of contact for my republican principles, nowhere any security for
the civil liberty of the inhabitants of our country.23
But what was there left to choose? It was either Louis Napoleon or
complete incorporation into France. “Republicanism”, Augustinus Be-
sier wrote to Wiselius in March 1806,
20 [Kemper] Brieven over de tegenwoordig in omloop zijnde geruchten, 17–18.
21 Hulshoff, Oproeping, van het Bataafsche volk, voorberigt. On Maria Hulshoff see
Wiersma, Mietje Hulshoff en de aanslag op Napoleon.

22 Vrymoedige bedenkingen over den tegenwoordigen toestand des vaderlands, 2.
208 chapter ten
is lost in both cases, but irretrievably in the latter case; we would then
lose our existence as a nation, everything that is still left of our old
character would entirely disappear …24
It was in this chilly political climate that the new king Louis Napoleon
arrived in the Netherlands.25 His new subjects regarded him as the less
harmful of two disgusting alternatives. Those who expected the king to
be intimidated by this hostility and therefore to look for cautious com-
promises with the old republican convictions were immediately proven
wrong. The physically handicapped and melancholic Louis turned out
to be a man with surprisingly firm and developed views on the place of
his monarchy in Dutch history and a keen sense of the weaknesses of
the Dutch republican tradition. Far from trying to reach some form of
accommodation with the old republicanism, he set out to convince the
Dutch that their political views were outdated and in need of serious
revision. Since Louis Napoleon belonged to the select company of kings
who put their views in writing, it is possible for us to follow him closely
in his political and conceptual battle for the monarchy and against the
Dutch republican tradition.26
Even before he arrived in the country, Louis Napoleon realized that
a most difficult task awaited him. The constitution he had to work with
for the time being had simply placed the monarchy on top of the exist-
ing republican institutions. For the monarchy, this unfortunate situation
had created “des obstacles nombreux pour son établissement et sa con-
solidation dans l’esprit de la nation”.27 Louis was, moreover, well aware
of the fact that sudden and radical reform was regarded with deep
suspicion in the political cultures of the old republics of Europe.28 His
fears were confirmed by the way in which the political elites of the
Dutch “nation républicaine” welcomed him to his new country. They
24 Ibidem, 623–624.
25 On Louis Napoleon’s reign see Colenbrander, Schimmelpenninck en Koning Lodewijk;
Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 466–610; Kikkert, Koning van Holland; Joor, De Adelaar en
het Lam; Hallebeek and Sirks, Nederland in Franse schaduw; Rem and Sanders, Lodewijk
Napoleon.
26 Louis Bonaparte, Documens historiques et réflexions. In 1910, Colenbrander described
this work as extremely one-sided, badly composed, and unsuitable as a source for
our knowledge of the period (Colenbrander, Gedenkstukken der Algemeene Geschiedenis van
Nederland, V, I, xxv). While there is much to be said for this view, the Documens historiques
et réflexions nonetheless remain indispensable for an analysis of Louis’s political views.
27 Louis Bonaparte, Documens historiques et réflexions, I, 142–143.
28 On the Dutch “horreur du changement”: ibidem, III, 54, 167–168. For a modern
interpretation of this theme see Venturi, Utopia and Reform.

bluntly told him that the happiness of a people completely depended

on its form of government and that this form should be characterized
by “la séparation et l’indépendance mutuelle des pouvoirs”.29 This was
a nation, the new king concluded, that was completely in thrall to “le
républicanisme des opinions et des sentimens”.30 All the more reason,
in short, to thoroughly inform the Dutch about the blessings of monar-
chy and to attempt to turn public opinion around.
Although for tactical reasons Louis repeatedly showed a certain will-
ingness to take the republican sensibilities of the Dutch people into
account, he left it in no doubt whatsoever that he considered the mod-
ern constitutional monarchy to be the best and most appropriate form
of government in post-revolutionary times. He referred to this rela-
tively recent invention with a great number of terms: “un gouverne-
ment monarchique, mais libre”, “l’état monarchique modéré”, “une
monarchie libre et constitutionnelle”.31 It was only through the rule of
a king bound by a constitution that the necessary unity in a country
could be achieved.
Le chef suprême de l’administration doit imprimer à toutes ses branches
son esprit, sa volonté: c’est l’unité de mouvement qui est le principal
avantage de la monarchie.32
It was high time that the Dutch learned this political lesson and came
to recognize that the severe political problems their federative republic
had always been confronted with would be a thing of the past once a
moderate monarchy was successfully introduced.
The old Dutch Republic, Louis insisted, had really never been a sta-
ble and truly independent state.33 His interpretation of the history of
the Republic largely revolved around the Dutch incapacity to establish
a regime based on “des lois uniformes, libérales et fortes” and around
the lack of homogeneity and unity in Dutch republican government.
With the constant increase in political centralization in the countries
surrounding the Dutch Republic during the early modern period, this
serious flaw in the organization of political life had become more and
more harmful to the country. The only persons in whose power it had
been to ameliorate this state of affairs had been the Orange stadhold-
29 Louis Bonaparte, Documens historiques et réflexions, I, 148.

30 Ibidem, 154.
31 Ibidem, I, 163, 221; III, 44.
32 Ibidem, I, 175.
33 Ibidem, 162.
210 chapter ten
ers, of whom particularly William III had missed a unique chance to

reform the Dutch political system along the lines of the free monarchi-
cal model of Britain. Louis had to admit, however, that the seventeenth-
century stadholders had to cope with formidable forces of opposition:
the proud and narrow-minded spirit of the bourgeois oligarchy, deeply
rooted prejudices concerning the perfection of the Union of Utrecht,
and ineradicable provincial and urban particularism. During the eigh-
teenth century, with its “esprit de nouveauté et de républicanisme”,
matters had gone from bad to worse, until the late eighteenth-century
Republic, fatally weakened by an apparently insurmountable lack of
uniformity, homogeneity, and centralization, had finally succumbed to
a combination of internal strife and external intervention.34 This histor-
ical analysis contained all the themes that Louis would return to over
and over again during his years as king. If the country were to survive
in the modern European system of states, it needed to be ruled by a
strong constitutional monarchy. That was the one and only way finally
to bury both the disastrous provincial and urban particularism of the
past centuries and the destructive party politics of recent decades. For
their own good, the Dutch should learn to except that their political
future would be “ni fédérative, ni républicaine”.35
But were the Dutch willing to listen to these arguments and to
change their republican ways? Surprisingly enough, they were. As we
have seen, Louis Napoleon had arrived in less than auspicious circum-
stances. Once his rule was established and his arguments for a mod-
ern monarchy were lucidly presented, however, the climate of opinion
dramatically changed. Indeed, it was as if the reign of this new king
suddenly allowed Dutch republicans to throw off an old and dead con-
ceptual weight. Those who looked back on this period shortly after
the French had been defeated all agreed that something quite remark-
able had happened. The Dutch were immediately happy with their
new monarch, the Prussian publicist Friedrich Buchholz wrote in 1813,
and he added “a happiness, which was all the more remarkable given
the original loathing the Dutch felt for a Monarchy”.36 A year later,
Johannes Kinker observed about Louis: “… it is impossible to deny that
he had the gift to make the monarchy acceptable to even the staunchest
34 Ibidem, 12–22. The interpretation of Dutch history summarized here recurs time
and again throughout the Documens historiques et réflexions.

35 Ibidem, II, 259.
36 Buchholz, Merkürdige Urkunden, 36. On Buchholz see Bahrs, Friedrich Buchholz.
republicans”.37 That these retrospective evaluations were entirely cor-

rect becomes clear when we look at commentaries written at the time
of Louis Napoleon’s reign itself. Anton Reinhard Falck, who had furi-
ously opposed the establishment of a monarchy, converted to the new
political order in a matter of days. “I admit”, he wrote in his mem-
oirs, “that within ten days of Louis’s arrival in the country, I had com-
pletely calmed down”.38 Falck’s change of mind was initially caused by
his admiration for Louis’s determined efforts to put an end to “those
dreadful political disagreements” from which the country had suffered
so long.39 The political reconciliation and harmony that had remained
impossible under the republican form of government now suddenly
seemed within reach. At a later stage, Falck fully embraced the his-
torical analysis Louis was advancing, in which the monarchy appeared
as the only possible remedy for the many problems of a hopelessly par-
ticularistic and thoroughly obsolete republican political system. In a
draft speech for the installation of the first members of the monarchi-
cal “Order of the Union”, he explained that the gradual decline of the
Republic had been caused by the fact that its political institutions had
always remained as they had been in the sixteenth century. It was only
the new monarchy that had ended this deplorable state of affairs and
that now undoubtedly offered the Dutch “la garantie la plus sûre de
leurs droits et de l’indépendance nationale”.40
Although Falck’s enthusiasm was judged by many to be somewhat
over the top, the advantages of monarchy were now widely praised.41
The former Orangist Johan Canter de Munck, who had provided
a running commentary on Dutch politics ever since the start of the
Patriot movement, warmly embraced the new regime. Following a line
of argument that was quite different from Falck’s, he regarded the new
monarchy as an ameliorated continuation of the political structure of
the former republic. “The most blessed Constitution for this Country”,
he wrote in 1806, “has always consisted of a mixture of aristocracy
and democracy, tempered by a Constitutional eminent Head”. This
37 Colenbrander, Gedenkschriften van Anton Reinhard Falck, 332.

38 Ibidem, 42. On Falck see Van der Horst, Van Republiek tot Koninkrijk.
39 Colenbrander, Gedenkschriften van Anton Reinhard Falck, 42.
40 Colenbrander, Gedenkstukken der Algemeene Geschiedenis van Nederland, V, II, 638–639.
41 Falck’s draft speech was never publicly presented and replaced with something
“less robust” by the actual speaker, Maarten van der Goes: ibidem, 638. The speech
held by Van der Goes is printed in Louis Bonaparte, Documens historiques et réflexions, II,
38–50.
212 chapter ten
ideal, he insisted, was now better realized than ever before.42 Others
preferred to view the new monarchy in the light of the country’s most
recent history, as the inevitable outcome of the process of administrative
renewal and reform that had started in 1795 and now culminated in
“l’introduction du gouvernement monarchique”.43 But whatever the
arguments were, very few Dutchmen any longer openly regretted the
passing away of their republican political world.
The historian is consequently left with somewhat of a mystery. How
to explain this fundamental and seemingly sudden transition in Dutch
political life during the first decade of the nineteenth century? There
are no easy answers. One could of course argue that the Dutch, who—
given the international political situation—had very few choices, in
1806 simply tried to make the best of a regime imposed from the out-
side. Such an interpretation, however, fails to explain their considerable
enthusiasm for the new monarchy and, even more important, the fact
that republicanism did not resurface in any significant way in the years
after the French were defeated.44 One could also maintain that Louis
Napoleon’s likeable personality, his considerable efforts to defend Dutch
interests against the demands of his brother, and above all his energet-
ically presented program of administrative centralization and political
reconciliation, succeeded in convincing the Dutch of the advantages of
a monarchical form of government. While such a view is, as we have
seen, not entirely implausible, it nonetheless remains true that it is gen-
erally not given to any single individual to put a sudden end to a tra-
dition of political argumentation that has flourished for more than a
century. There evidently has to be something more.
Perhaps important clues are provided by, on the one hand, the quite
rigid way in which the Dutch tried to hold on to their old republi-
can identity in the last years before 1806 and, on the other hand, the
almost casual manner in which they gave it up once Louis Napoleon
had arrived. Both phenomena seem to suggest that Dutch republican-
42 Canter de Munck, De Oorzaken van den Oorlog, 57. For an elaborate argument
about the necessity of an eminent head see his 1802 treatise Vrije Gevoelens over de beste
Staatsgronden, II, 95–126. On Canter de Munck see Van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland,
355–357.
43 Van Gennep in 1808, cited in Louis Bonaparte, Documens historiques et réflexions, II,
400.
44 On Dutch politics and political discourse in the decades after 1813 see Tamse and
Witte, Staats- en Natievorming in Willem I’s Koninkrijk; Van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland,
399–480; Van Zanten, Schielijk, Winzucht, Zwaarhoofd en Bedaard.
ism was conceptually exhausted at the beginning of the nineteenth cen-

tury.45 The attempts at republican renewal of the last decades of the
eighteenth century had ended in failure and disappointment. All over
Europe, revolutionary republicanism had fallen into disrepute. But to
revive the commonplaces of the pre-revolutionary republican tradition,
as the Dutch briefly tried to do at the beginning of the new century, also
constituted a less than adequate and creative response to the changed
political and intellectual circumstances of post-revolutionary Europe. It
was evidently time to look in a different direction and the brightest
minds proceeded to do so. Indeed, already since the late 1790s Gijs-
bert Karel van Hogendorp, who would become the founding father of
the nineteenth-century Dutch constitutional monarchy, had gradually
been developing the view that the early modern Dutch Republic had
been a political anomaly. The only way the Dutch state could survive,
he finally concluded, was by reviving the monarchical tradition that
had been so abruptly ended by the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt.46
In the course of the nineteenth century this view would become widely
accepted, as witnessed by Robert Fruin’s celebrated 1865 article “The
three eras of Dutch history”, in which the period of the Dutch Repub-
lic was presented as a politically unfortunate interlude between the
sixteenth-century monarchy of Charles V and the nineteenth-century
monarchy of William I.47 Seen in this light, the ease with which the
Dutch gave up their by now exhausted republican identity upon the
arrival of Louis Napoleon is perhaps not as surprising as it might at first
seem. Given the political and intellectual shape their republic was in
after the failed late eighteenth-century attempts at republican renewal,
a slight push was all that was needed. It is one of the ironies of history
that it was a French king who gave it.
45 Something similar was suggested by the great Dutch nineteenth-century liberal
statesman Johan Rudolf Thorbecke in his Historical Sketches: De Wit, Thorbecke en de

wording van de Nederlandse natie, 298.
46 On Van Hogendorp see Van der Hoeven, Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp and Velema,
“Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp. Wegbereider voor de monarchie”.

47 Fruin, “De drie tijdvakken der Nederlandsche geschiedenis”. On Fruin see Smit,
Fruin en de partijen tijdens de Republiek and Tollebeek, De toga van Fruin, 13–68.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
Aa, C. van der. Geschiedenis van het Leven, Character, en Lotgevallen van wijlen Willem
den Vijfden, Prinse van Oranje en Nassau. Uit echte bronnen en bescheiden bijeengebragt,
en in eene voegzame orde opgesteld. 5 vols. Amsterdam, 1806–1809.
Aan het volk van Nederland. S.l., 1785.
Aanhangsel van de Vrymoedige Bedenkingen over de Vryheid. Strekkende tot een vervolg van
de Vryheid in den Burgerstaat, etc. Amsterdam, 1739.
Algemeene Vaderlandsche Letter-Oefeningen, 1783, 1784.
[Allart, Johannes] De Vryheid. Amsterdam, 1783.
[Beaufort, Lieven Ferdinand de] Het Leven van Willem de I. Prins van Oranje, Graef
van Nassau, Stadhouder en Capitein Generael van Holland, Utrecht, en Vriesland, etc. 3
vols. Leyden and Middelburg, 1732.
[———] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaet. Second printing. Leyden and
Middelburg, 1737.
Beaufort, W.H. de, ed. Brieven aan R.M. van Goens en onuitgegeven stukken hem
betreffende. 3 vols. Utrecht, 1884–1890.
De Borger. 2 vols. Utrecht, 1778–1780.
[Bosch, Bernardus] Over de Constitutie, Constitutioneele Machten en de Regeringsvorm
toepasselyk op, en voor ons Vaderland. Amsterdam, 1795.
Brief over de waere Oorzaek van ’s Lands Ongeval; Gevonden tusschen Utrecht en Amersfoort
om deszelfs merwaerdigen inhoud met den druk gemeen gemaakt. S.l., 1782.
Broersma, R. and Fruin, R., ed. “Correspondentiën in steden van Zeeland”.
Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap, 23 (1902) 258–376.
Buchholz, Friedrich. Merkwürdige Urkunden die Abdankung des Königs von Holland
betreffend. Mit einer geschichtlichen Einleitung, etc. S.l., 1813.
[Burmania, Epo Sjuk van] Schuite-Praatje ofte Samenspraak Tusschen Drie Heeren met
de Schuit reisende van Amsterdam na Den Haag, Welke aan malkander haar Geboorte-
plaats, Sentimenten en Liefhebbery ontdekken, En vrindelyk te samen discoureren over
Saken van deese tyt. S.l., 1736.
[———] Schuite-Praatje ofte Samenspraak Tusschen Vier Heeren Met de Schuit reisende
van Leeuwarden naar Groeningen Over Menschen, Saaken en Boeken van deese tyt. S.l.,
1737.
Canter de Munck, Johan. De Tegenswoordige Regeeringsvorm der Zeven Vereenigde
Provintien, gehandhaafd en verdeedigd, etc. Middelburg, 1787.
[———] Vrije Gevoelens over de beste Staatsgronden, tot regeling van het bestuur in de
Nederlandsche Vereenigde Gewesten. 2 vols. The Hague, 1802.
———. De Oorzaken van den Oorlog en de Middelen tot Herstel der Vrede. Middelburg,
1806.
216 bibliography
[Capellen tot den Pol, Joan Derk van der] Aan het Volk van Nederland (1781).
H.L. Zwitzer, ed. Amsterdam, 1987.
Chomel, N.M. and Chalmot, J.A. de. Algemeen Huishoudelyk, Natuur—, Zedekundig
en Konstwoordenboek, etc. Vol. 7. Leyden and Leeuwarden, 1778.
Christius, J.F. De Nicolao Machiavello libri tres in quibus de vita et scriptis, etc. Leipzig
and Halle, 1731.
[Clerq, Pieter le] Het Leven van Frederik Hendrik, Prins van Oranje, Graaf van Nassau,
Stadhouder en Kapitein-Generaal van Gelderland, Holland, Zeeland, West-Friesland,
Utrecht en Overijssel, etc. 2 vols. The Hague, 1738.
Colenbrander, H.T., ed. Gedenkstukken der Algemeene Geschiedenis van Nederland
van 1795 tot 1840. Tweede deel. Vestiging van den Eenheidsstaat, 1795–1798. Rijks
Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, Grote Serie, nr. 2. The Hague, 1906.
———, ed. Gedenkstukken der Algemeene Geschiedenis van Nederland van 1795 tot 1840.
Vierde deel. Staatsbewind en raadpensionaris. 1801–1806. Rijks Geschiedkundige
Publicatiën, Grote Serie, nr. 5 and 6. 2 vols. The Hague, 1908.
———, ed. Gedenkstukken der Algemeene Geschiedenis van Nederland van 1795 tot 1840.
Vijfde deel. Koning Lodewijk. 1806–1810. Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën,
Grote Serie, nr. 11 and 12. 2 vols. The Hague, 1910.
———, ed. Gedenkschriften van Anton Reinhard Falck. Rijks Geschiedkundige Publi-
catiën, Kleine Serie, nr. 13. The Hague, 1913.
[Court, Johan and/or Pieter de la] Consideratien van Staat, Ofte Polityke Weeg-
schaal, Waar in met veele Reedenen, Omstandigheden, Exempelen en Fabulen werd
ooverwoogen; Welke forme der Regeeringe, in speculatie geboud op de practijk, onder de
menschen de beste zy. Beschreven door V.H. In deese derde editie naawkeurig ooversien,
merkelik vermeerdert, en in veelen klaarder gestelt. Amsterdam, 1662.
[———] Politike Discoursen handelende in Ses onderscheide Boeken, van Steeden, Landen,
Oorlogen, Kerken, Regeeringen, en Zeeden. Beschreven door D.C. Amsterdam, 1662.
[Cras, H.C.] Gewigtig Advys over de vraag: Moet eene Constitutie de Nationale Conventie;
of eene Nationale Conventie de Constitutie voorafgaan? Aan myne Societeits-Leden en alle
Eerlyke Vaderlanders. S.l., [1795].
Decker, Cornelis Willem. De volgens Eed en Plicht verschuldigde Achting en Eerbied der
Amsteldamsche Burgery opgewekt, etc. Amsterdam, 1785.
———. Proeve eener Verhandeling over de Natuur en Uitnemendheid der herstelde Regerings-
wijze van den Nederlandschen Republiek. Amsterdam, 1787.
De Democraten. Amsterdam, 1796–1798.
De Deugdelyke Burger. The Hague, 1743.
Diderot, Denis. Voyage en Hollande. Yves Benot, ed. Paris, 1982.
Dippel, Horst, ed., Die Anfänge des Konstitutionalismus in Deutschland. Texte deutscher
Verfassungsentwürfe am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main 1991.
Dumbar, G. De oude en nieuwe Constitutie der Vereenigde Staaten van Amerika, uit de
beste Schriften in haare Gronden ontvouwd. 3 vols. Amsterdam, 1793–1796.
[———] Betoog, dat eene onverdeelde Regeeringsvorm, in een Gemeene-best, uit haare eigen
Aart, onbestendig en voor de Vryheid van den Staat gevaarlyk zyn moet. S.l., [1801].
Effen, Justus van. Hollandsche Spectator. 6 vols. Second ed. Amsterdam, 1756.
Engelberts, E.M. Verdediging van de Eer der Hollandsche Natie. Amsterdam, 1776.
———. De Aloude Staat en Geschiedenissen der Vereenigde Nederlanden. 4 vols. Amster-
dam, 1784–1799.
bibliography 217
Engelen, C. van. Brieven over de Weelde; als hoogst nadeelig voor Deugd en Geluk, en
verderflyk voor den Burgerstaat. 2 vols. Haarlem, 1791.
Forster, Georg. Ansichten vom Niederrhein, von Brabant, Flandern, England und Frankre-
ich im April, Mai und Juni 1790. Ulrich Schlemmer, ed. Darmstadt, 1989.
———. “Rede bei der Errichtung des Freiheitsbaumes am 13. Januar 1793” in:
Jost Hermand, ed. Von deutscher Republik 1775–1795. Texte radikaler Demokraten.
Frankfurt, 1968.
[Goens, Rijklof Michael van] De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot. 65 numbers.
The Hague, etc., 1781–1783.
[———] “De la Liberté et de l’Utopisme politique”. Koninklijke Bibliotheek,
Afdeling Handschriften en Oude Drukken, 130 D9/D3.
Gou, L. de, ed. Het Plan van Constitutie van 1796. Chronologische bewerking van het
archief van de eerste constitutiecommissie ingesteld bij decreet van de Nationale Vergadering
van 15 maart 1796. Met een facsimile uitgave van het Plan van Constitie. Rijks
Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, Kleine Serie, nr. 40. The Hague, 1975.
———, ed. Het Ontwerp van Constitutie van 1797. De behandeling van het Plan van
Constitutie in de Nationale Vergadering. Met een facsimile uitgave van het Ontwerp van
Constitutie. Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, Kleine Serie, nr. 55, 56, 57. 3
vols. The Hague, 1983–1985.
———, ed. De Staatsregeling van 1798. Bronnen voor de totstandkoming. Rijks Geschied-
kundige Publicatiën, Kleine Serie, nr. 65, 67. 2 vols. The Hague, 1988–1990.
———, ed. De Staatsregeling van 1805 en de Constitutie van 1806. Bronnen voor de
totstandkoming. Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, Kleine Serie, nr. 89. The
Hague, 1997.
Grabner, J. Über die Vereinigten Niederlande. Briefe. Gotha, 1792.
Grondwettige Herstelling, van Nederlands Staatswezen zo voor het algemeen Bondgenootschap
als voor het Bestuur van elke byzondere Provincie; geschikt om het voornaam doelwit aan
te toonen, waar toe de poogingen van goede regenten en de requesten van vaderlandslievende
burgers moeten strekken. 2 vols. Amsterdam, 1784–1786.
Hamelsveld, Ysbrand van. De zedelyke Toestand der Nederlandsche Natie, op het einde
der achttiende eeuw. Amsterdam, 1791.
Handboekje voor Nederland, of bepaalingen van de meest gebruikt wordende staatkundige
woorden. Amsterdam, 1786.
Hedendaagsche Vaderlandsche Letter-Oefeningen, 1772, 1774.
Hoeven, Emanuel van der. Leeven en Dood der Doorlugtige Heeren Gebroeders Cornelis
de Witt, Ruwaard van den Lande van Putten, enz. enz. en Johan de Witt, Raad
Pensionaris van Holland en Westvriesland, enz. enz. Amsterdam, 1705.
———. Hollands Aeloude Vryheid, buyten het Stadhouderschap. By deszelfs eerste Vorm van
Staats-bestier; door de Eedelen en Steeden verdeedigd, tegen velerhande dwingelandyen: tot
na de dood van Willem de Derde, Koning van Groot Brittanie, etc. Amsterdam, 1706.
Hogendorp, Gijsbert Karel van. Brieven en Gedenkschriften. F. and H. van Hogen-
dorp, ed. 7 vols. The Hague, 1866–1903.
Hulshoff, Maria Aletta. Oproeping, van het Bataafsche volk, om deszelfs denkwijze
en wil openlijk aan den dag te leggen, tegen de overheersching door eenen vreemdeling
waarmede het vaderland bedreigd wordt. S.l., 1806.
Hunt, Lynn, ed. The French Revolution and Human Rights. A Brief Documentary
History. Boston and New York, 1996.
218 bibliography
[Itsma, Wybrandus van] Jagt-Praatje ofte Discours tusschen een Groeninger, een
Dockumer, en twee Zeeuwse Heeren, Met een Jagt van Harlingen en Amsterdam rei-
zende, welke te zamen spreken over eenige nieuws uitgekomene boeken. Leeuwarden,
1737.
[———] Jagt-Praatje ofte Samenspraak tusschen een Leyenaar, een Groeninger, en een
Franeker, Waar in verhandelt worden verscheiden stoffen, rakende de Oude en Heden-
daagse gesteltheit ven de Nederlandse Republyk: Zynde deese Heeren Reizigers in een Jagt
gevaaren van Amsterdam na Harlingen. Leeuwarden, 1738.
[———] Jagt-Praatje ofte Discours Gehouden tusschen een Groeninger, Amsterdammer, en
Harlinger, Reysende in een Jagt van Amsterdam na de Lemmer, over de hedendaagse
Levensbeschryvingen der Princen van Orangen, Hollandsche Keurdichten, de Vryheit in
den Burgerstaat, etc. Leeuwarden, 1738.
[Kemper, J.M.] Brieven over de tegenwoordig in omloop zijnde geruchten, omtrend eene
nadere vereeniging, van de Bataafsche Republiek met Frankryk. Amsterdam, 1806.
Kluit, A. Academische Redevoering, over het Misbruik van ’t Algemeen Staatsrecht, of over
de nadeelen en onheilen, die uit het misbruik in de beoefeninge voor alle burgermaatschap-
pijen te wachten zijn. Leyden, 1787.
———. De Souvereiniteit der Staten van Holland verdedigd tegen de hedendaagsche leer der
Volksregeering, etc. Second ed. Leyden, 1788.
[———] De rechten van den mensch in Vrankrijk, geen gewaande rechten in Nederland, of
Betoog, dat die rechten bij het volk van Nederland in volle kracht genoten worden, etc.
Amsterdam, 1793.
[Kumpel, J.W.] De Philarche of Vorsten-Vriend. Rotterdam, 1785.
La Barre de Beaumarchais, A.M. Le Hollandois, ou Lettres sur la Hollande ancienne
et moderne. 2 parts. Frankfurt, 1738.
Laursen, John Christian and Zande, Johan van der, ed. Early French and German
Defenses of the Freedom of the Press. Elie Luzac’s Essay on the Freedom of Expression
(1749) and Carl Friedrich Bahrdt’s On Freedom of the Press and its Limits (1787) in
English Translation. Leyden and Boston, 2003.
Leti, Gregorio. Kort Begrip der Helden-Deugden, ofte Historische en Staat-kundige
Verhandeling Van de Daden en Maximen, die tot voortplanting, en conservatie van alle
Staten, en Landen noodsakelijk zijn: Vertonende, nevens het Afbeeldsel van een Waar
Burger, de Redenen van den ondergang, van zo vele Vorstendommen, en Republijken, etc.
2 vols. The Hague, 1700.
Limburg, Laurens van. Bedenkingen over de eigentlijke Oorzaak, welke in de eerste
Plaats, den Ondergang van het Romeinsche Ryk bewerkt heeft. Toepasselyk op de tegen-
woordigen hachelyken Toestand van Nederland, etc. Utrecht, 1780.
Loe, H.J. van. Recherches sur la vraie Cause de nos Troubles, et sur le Moyen de les faire
tourner au Bonheur de la Patrie. Münster, 1789.
———. Antwoord op een Brief, getiteld: Nadere Redenen en Oorzaaken van de jongste
Onlusten in het Vaderland, etc. S.l., [1791].
Louis Bonaparte, Documens historiques et réflexions sur le gouvernement de la Hollande.
3 vols. Paris, 1820.
[Luzac, Elie] Essai sur la Liberté de Produire ses Sentimens. S.l., 1749.
[———] De Zugt van den Heere Raadpensionaris Johan de Witt, tot zyn Vaderland en
deszelfs Vryheid, etc. Leyden, 1757.
[———] Lettre d’un Anonime à Monsieur J.J. Rousseau. Paris, 1766.
bibliography 219
———. Hollands Rykdom, behelzende den Oorsprong van de Koophandel, en van de Magt
van dezen Staat, etc. 4 vols. Leyden, 1780–1783.
[———] Reinier Vryaarts Openhartige Brieven, Om te dienen tot opheldering en regte kennis
van de Vaderlandsche Historie, etc. 12 vols. S.l., [1781–1784].
[———] Vaderlandsche Brieven. 7 numbers. S.l., [1784–1785].
[———] De Vaderlandsche Staatsbeschouwers, overweegende alles wat ‘er binnen en buiten
het Vaderland omgaat en tot deszelfs belang betrekking heeft. 4 vols. S.l., [1784–1788].
[———] De Voor- en Nadeelen van den Invloed des Volks op de Regeering, etc. 3 vols.
Leyden, 1788–1789.
[———] Lettres sur les Dangers de changer la Constitution primitive d’un Gouvernement
public. Ecrites à un patriote hollandois. London [Leyden], 1792.
———. Du Droit Naturel, Civil et Politique, en forme d’entretiens. 3 vols. Amsterdam,
1802.
Maandelyke Uittreksels, of Boekzaal der Geleerde Waerelt, 1749, 1750.
Machiavel Republicain, Tegens den Anti-Machiavel Verdedigt. Waer achter bygevoegt is
Machiavel Boekdrukker. Utrecht, 1741.
Meerman, Johan. Discours qui a remporté le prix de l’Académie Royale des Inscriptions
et Belles-Lettres de Paris sur la question proposée en 1782: comparer ensemble la ligue
des Achéens 280 ans avant J.C., celle des Suisses en 1307 de l’ère chrétienne, et la ligue
des Provinces-Unies en 1579; dévelloper les causes, l’origine, la nature et l’objet de ces
associations politiques. The Hague, 1784.
———. De Burgerlijke Vryheid in haare heilzame, de Volks-Vryheid in haare schadelyke
gevolgen voorgesteld, inzonderheid met betrekking tot dit Gemeenebest. Leyden, 1793.
Mirabeau, Gabriel-Honoré Riqueti, Comte de. Aux Bataves sur le Stathouderat.
S.l., 1788.
Missive aan Mr. Pieter Paulus…Schryver eener verhandeling over de vraage: In welken zin
kunnen de menschen gezegd worden gelyk te zyn? En welken zyn de regten en pligten, die
daar uit voortvloeijen? S.l., 1793.
Missive betreffende de zo beruchte Aanspraak aan het Volk van Nederland. S.l., 1782.
Missive van een oud Regent, over de waare oorzaaken van den rampspoedigen en gevaarlyken
staat van de Republiecq. S.l., 1786.
Montesquieu, Ch. de Secondat, Baron de. De l’Esprit des Loix. Nouvelle Edi-
tion. Revue, corrigée, et considerablement augmentée par l’Auteur. Avec des Remarques
Philosophiques et Politiques d’un Anonyme [E. Luzac], qui n’ont point encore été pub-
liées. 4 vols. Amsterdam and Leipzig, 1763.
———. De Aart der Wetten. Door den Heer President De Montesquieu. Verrykt met
Philosoophische en Staatkundige Aanmerkingen, die tot noch toe niet in ’t licht gegeven
zyn. 4 vols. Amsterdam, 1771–1773.
———. De Geest der Wetten, door den Heere Baron de Montesquieu. Uit het Fransch
vertaald door Mr. Dirk Hoola van Nooten, etc. Met Wijsgeerige en Staatkundige Aan-
merkingen, zo van eenen Onbekenden, als van den Vertaaler. 4 vols. and an index.
Amsterdam, 1783–1787.
———. Oeuvres complètes. Roger Caillois, ed. 2 vols. Paris, 1976–1979.
Naauwkeurige en zedelyke Beschouwer, van de besmettelyke ziekte der zogenaamde Holland-
sche Patriotten. S.l., 1788.
Naber, Johanna W.A., ed. Correspondentie van de stadhouderlijke familie, 1777–1820. 5
220 bibliography
Nadere Redenen en Oorzaaken van de jongste Onlusten en nog heerschende Verdeeld-heden in

het Vaderland. En de Eenige waare Middelen, om dezelve te doen strekken tot Heil van
het Algemeen, etc. S.l., [1790].
De Nederlandsche Spectator. 12 vols. Leyden, 1749–1760.
Nieuwe Algemeene Vaderlandsche Letter-Oefeningen, 1786, 1787.
Nieuwe Vaderlandsche Letter-Oefeningen, 1771.
Onpartydige beschouwing, van de voorledene en tegenwoordige staatsgesteldheid van Holland,
etc. Amsterdam, [1787].
Ontwerp, om de Republiek door een heilzaame vereeniging der belangen van regent en burger,
van binnen gelukkig en van buiten gedugt te maaken, etc. Leyden, 1785.
Paape, Gerrit. Grondwettige Herstelling van het Geluk der Nederlandsche Maatschappy,
volgens de Wysgeerte en Menschkunde. Rotterdam, 1787.
Paine, Thomas. Collected Writings. Eric Foner, ed. New York, 1995.
De Patriot in de Eenzaamheid, of Proeve van Bespiegelingen, ter Opwekkinge van Vaderlands
en Vryheidsliefde. Second ed. Amsterdam, 1787.
[Paulus, Pieter] Het Nut der Stadhouderlyke Regering, aangetoond by gelegenheid der
geboorte van Willem Frederik, etc. Tweede druk, Waarby gevoegd is ene wederlegging
van Paulus Dortsma, etc. S.l., 1773.
———. Verklaring der Unie van Utrecht. Vooraf gaat de vertaling van ’t latynsche werk van
Mr. N. Bondt, bestaande (behalven de opdragt en voorrede) in de verklaring der inleiding,
en van ’t eerste, tweede, en derde, Artikel der Unie van Utrecht. 4 vols. Utrecht, 1775–
1777.
Pestel, F.W. Les Fondemens de la Jurisprudence Naturelle. Second ed. Leyden,
1775.
———. De Gronden der Natuurlyke Rechtsgeleerdheid. 2 vols. Utrecht and Gouda,
1783–1785.
[Pilati di Tassulo, Carlo Antonio] Lettres sur la Hollande. 2 vols. The Hague,
1780.
De Post van den Neder-Rhyn. 12 vols., 614 numbers. Utrecht, 1781–1787.
De Prince Vlag, Oranje Boven. S.l., s.a.
Raad aan die myner medeburgers, welken aan de oude constitutie zyn toegedaan, hoe zig
by deeze omwenteling te gedragen; door een oprecht beminnaar van zyn Vaderland. S.l.,
1795.
“Reglement, volgens hetwelk eene algemeene Nationale Vergadering door
het Volk van Nederland zal worden byeen geroepen en werkzaam zyn
(30 December 1795)” in: G.W. Bannier, ed. Grondwetten van Nederland. Tek-
sten der achtereenvolgende staatsregelingen en grondwetten sedert 1795. Met verschillende
andere staatsstukken, historische toelichtingen en eenige tabellen. Zwolle, 1936.
De Regtsgeleerde, in Spectatoriale Vertogen. 6 vols. Amsterdam, 1767–1772.
Rommelzootje, opgedischt voor de hedendaagsche Patriotten: of doolende Ridders van de
droevige figuur, etc. S.l., 1787.
Samenspraak tusschen de geest van een oudtydschen vaderlander en een hedendaagsch vry-
burger. S.l., [1784].
Scheels, Rab. Herm. Vertoog van de gemeene Vryheid; waar by nog komt Theoph. Hogers
Redevoering, betoogende dat Julius Caesar een Tiran is geweest. Uyt het Latyn vertaalt
door Otho Hendrik Ruperti. Met eene Voorreede, behelzende eene korte Schets van het
Leven des Schryvers. The Hague, 1742.
bibliography 221
Schimmelpenninck, G., ed. Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck en eenige gebeurtenissen van

zijnen tijd. 2 vols. The Hague and Amsterdam, 1845.
Schorer, W. Vertoog over de Ongerymdheid van het Samenstel van onze hedendaagsche
Regtsgeleerdheid en Praktyk. Middelburg and Amsterdam, 1777.
Slingelandt, Simon van. Staatkundige Geschriften, etc. 4 vols. Amsterdam, 1784–
1785.
[Sonsbeeck, J.W. van] Verhandeling over het Nadeel eener Nationaale Conventie, en daar
uit voortspruitende Eenheid van Bestuur voor de Nederlandse Republiek. S.l., [1795].
De Spiegel der Vryheid, waarin ten klaarsten word getoond hoe gemakkelyk de verlooren
Vryheid zonder oprigten van Vry-corpsen of het waapenen der Burgeryen weerom gevonden
kan worden. [Dordrecht], 1783.
De Staatsman. Vol. 5, 1782.
Sterre, Jan Pieter van der, ed. Voltaire en de Republiek. Teksten van Voltaire over
Holland en Hollanders. Amsterdam and Antwerpen, 2006.
Stijl, Simon. De Opkomst en Bloei der Vereenigde Nederlanden. Tweede druk. Vermeerderd
met een Slotzang, ter Liefde van het Vaderland. Amsterdam and Harlingen, 1778.
Strien, Kees van, ed. Touring the Low Counties. Accounts of British Travellers, 1660–
1720. Amsterdam, 1998.
Sturkenboom, Dorothée, ed. Een verdeelde Verlichting. Stemmen uit de spectators.
Amsterdam, 2001.
[Swildens, J.H.] Circulaire Missive van eenen vryen Hollandschen burger aan de represen-
tanten des volks en aan alle plaatselyke burger-regenten door geheel Nederland, zo wel ten
platten lande, als in de steden, etc. S.l., 1795.
[———] Gelykheid-Vryheid-Broederschap. 1795. Politiek Belang-Boek voor dit provisioneel
Tydperk. Gewigtig tans, Gedenkwaardig hierna. Amsterdam, 1795.
Temple, Sir William. Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands. Sir
George Clark, ed. Oxford, 1972.
[Tollius, Herman] Nederland’s Staatsgebreken en derzelver Geneesmiddelen. S.l., 1797.
Verhandeling over den Alouden en Teegenswoordigen Staat van Vryheid en Regeering van
Nederland. S.l., [1783].
Vervolg op het eeuwigduurend Zak-memorie-boekje, zo wel voor Edelen en Regenten, als
Borgers en Boeren van Nederland, etc. S.l., [1782].
[Vitringa, L.J.] De Eer der Hollandsche Natie, en van hare Wetgevers, Rechters, en Rechts-
geleerden, met eene zeedige, doch naar den Aard der Belediginge geschikte Vrymoedigheid
verdedigd, etc. The Hague, 1777.
Vloten, J. van, ed. Leven en werken van W. en O.Z. van Haren, Friesche edellui.
Deventer, 1874.
[Vogel, Kornelis de] Katechismus van het Stadhouderschap, der Prinsen en Vorsten uit het
doorlugtig Huis van Oranje en Nassauw, in de Republiek der Vereenigde Nederlanden, etc.
Rotterdam, [1786].
[———] Kleine Katechismus van het Stadhouderschap, der Prinsen en Vorsten uit het
doorlugtig Huis van Oranje en Nassauw, ten dienste van de jeugd en minvermogenden,
etc. Rotterdam, [1786].
———. Katechismus van het Stadhouderschap. Tweede Deel. Of uitbreidende verhandelingen
over onderwerpen in dien Katechismus voorkomende, etc. Rotterdam, [1787].
De Voortreflykheid van een vryen Staat; benevens de Middelen om het Genot der Vryheid te
behouden. Amsterdam, 1783.
222 bibliography
De Vredebazuin. Nr. 48, 1784.

Vreede, G.W., ed. Mr. Laurens Pieter van de Spiegel en zijne Tijdgenoten (1737–1800).
4 vols. Middelburg, 1874–1877.
[Vreede, Pieter] Waermond en Vryhart. Gesprek over de Vryheid der Nederlandren; en den
Aert der waere Vryheid. S.l., 1783.
[———] Beoordelend en ophelderend Verslag van de Verhandeling over de Vryheid. Gedrukt
by Johannes Allart, 1783. S.l., 1783.
———. Mijn levensloop. M.W. van Boven, A.M. Fafianie and G.J.W. Steijns, ed.
Hilversum, 2004.
De Vryheid der Drukpers, onafscheidelyk verknogt aan de Vryheid der Republiek, etc. Ams-
terdam and Harlingen, 1782.
Vryheid, Volksstem en Nationale Repraesentatie, in het waare daglicht geplaatst, en met
betrekking tot het Bataafsch Gemeenebest beschouwd; in brieven voor den meerkundigen ter
overweging, voor den minkundigen ter voorlichting. Amsterdam, 1795.
Waelwyk, A.G. Vaderlandsche remarques volgens en op de Staatkundige Geschriften van
Mr. Simon van Slingelandt, etc. The Hague, 1787.
Vrymoedige Bedenkingen over de Vryheid. Strekkende tot een vervolg van de Vryheid in
den Burgerstaat. Waar in de Natuur van de Vryheid, zo wel in ’t algemeen; als
in haare byzondere betrekkingen, uit vaste grondbeginzelen afgeleid, betoogd wordt, etc.
Amsterdam, 1738.
Vrymoedige bedenkingen over den tegenwoordigen toestand des vaderlands. S.l. [Delft],
1806.
[Wakker van Zon, Petrus de] Anonymus Belga, De Adel. S.l., 1786.
Welmeenende en Trouwhartige Waarschouwing, en Onderricht, aan myne minvermogende
Medeburgers, en Ingezetenen in Nederland, wegens de thans algemeen verspreid wordende
gevoelens van Vryheid en Gelykheid. Amsterdam, 1792.
Wiselius, S.I. Proeve over de Verschillende Regeringsvormen in derzelver betrekking tot het
Maatschappelijk Geluk. Leyden, 1831.
[Witt, Johan de] Deductie, ofte declaratie van de Staten van Hollandt ende West-
Vrieslandt; behelsende een waerachtich, ende grondich bericht van de fondamenten der
regieringe vande vrye vereenichde Nederlanden…ingestelt ende dienende tot justificatie van
’t verleenen van seeckere Acte van Seclusie, raeckende ’t employ vanden heere prince van
Oraigne. The Hague, 1654.
Wolff, Christian L.B. de. Institutions du Droit de la Nature et des Gens, Dans lesquelles,
par une chaine continue, on déduit da la Nature même de l’Homme, toutes ses Obligations
& tous ses Droits. Avec des Notes, etc. par Mre. Elie Luzac, etc. 2 vols. Leyden, 1772.
Zakboek van Neerlands Volk, voor Patriotten, Aristokraten en Prinsgezinden, etc. Amster-
dam and Harlingen, 1784.
Zamenspraken in het Ryk der Dooden tusschen Willem Carel Hendrik Friso, Eerste Dienaar
van Staat der Vereenigde Nederlanden, etc. Mr. Jan Hop, Raad en Thesaurier Generaal
van de Unie, etc. en Mr. Pieter Burman, Professor, etc. S.l., [1783].
Zillesen, Cornelis. Onderzoek der Oorzaaken van de Opkomst, het Verval en Herstel, der
Voornaamste Oude en Hedendaagsche Volken. 6 vols. Utrecht, 1781–1784.
———. Vrije gedagten en aanmerkingen over het ingeleverd Ontwerp der Constitutie ter
Nationaale Vergadering. Leyden, 1796.
bibliography 223
Secondary Literature
Adams, Willi Paul. The First American Constitutions. Republican Ideology and the
Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era. Chapel Hill, 1980.
Aerts, Remieg and Velde, Henk te, ed. De stijl van de burger. Over Nederlandse
burgerlijke cultuur vanaf de middeleeuwen. Kampen, 1998.
Ankersmit, F.R. Denken over geschiedenis. Een overzicht van moderne geschiedfilosofische
opvattingen. Groningen, 1984.
Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cam-
bridge, Mass. and London, 1992.
Arkel, J.A. van. De houding van den raadspensionaris Simon van Slingelandt tegenover het
huis van Oranje. Paris, 1925.
Baartmans, Jacques J.M. Hollandse wijsgeren in Brabant en Vlaanderen. Geschriften van
Noord-Nederlandse patriotten in de Oostenrijkse Nederlanden, 1787–1792. Nijmegen,
2001.
Baehr, Peter and Richter, Melvin, ed. Dictatorship in History and Theory. Bona-
partism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism. Washington and Cambridge, 2004.
Bahrs, Kurt. Friedrich Buchholz, ein preussischer Publizist, 1768–1843. Berlin, 1907.
Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge,
Mass., 1967.
Baker, Keith Michael. Inventing the French Revolution. Essays on French Political
Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, etc., 1990.
———, ed. The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture. Volume 1.
The Political Culture of the Old Regime. Oxford, etc., 1987.
Ball, Terence. Transforming Political Discourse. Political Theory and Critical Conceptual
History. Oxford, 1988.
Ball, Terence; Farr, James and Hanson, Russell L., ed. Political Innovation and
Conceptual Change. Cambridge, 1989.
Ball, Terence and Pocock, J.G.A. Conceptual Change and the Constitution. Law-
rence, Kansas, 1988.
Barcia, Franco. Un politico dell’età barocca: Gregorio Leti. Milan, 1983.
Bauer, Klaus F. Der französische Einfluss auf die Batavische und die Helvetische Verfas-
sung des Jahres 1798. Ein Beitrag zur französischen Verfassungsgeschichte. Erlangen
and Nuremberg, 1962.
Bausinger, Hermann; Beyrer, Klaus and Korff, Gottfried, ed. Reisekultur. Von der
Pilgerfahrt zum modernen Tourismus. Munich, 1991.
Beaufort, W.H. de, “Een vergeten boekje”. Nieuwe Bijdragen voor Regtsgeleerdheid
en Wetgeving, 20 (1870) 210–213.
Beliën, H.M.; Horst, D. van der and Setten, G.J. van, ed. Nederlanders van
het eerste uur. Het ontstaan van het moderne Nederland 1780–1830. Amsterdam,
1996.
Berlin, Isaiah. Two Concepts of Liberty: An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the
University of Oxford on 31 October 1958. Oxford, 1958.
Berry, Christopher J. The Idea of Luxury. A Conceptual and Historical Investigation.
Cambridge, 1994.
Bientjes, Julia. Holland und der Holländer im Urteil deutscher Reisender (1400–1800).
Groningen, 1967.
224 bibliography
Blaas, P.B.M. Geschiedenis en nostalgie. De historiografie van een kleine natie met een groot
verleden. Verspreide historiografische opstellen. Hilversum, 2000.
Blakemore, Steven. Burke and the Fall of Language. The French Revolution as Linguistic
Event. Hanover and London, 1988.
Blanning, T.C.W. The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture. Old Regime Europe
1660–1789. Oxford, 2002.
Blok, P.J. Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk. 4 vols. Third ed. Leyden, 1923–
1926.
Blom, Hans W. Morality and Causality in Politics. The Rise of Naturalism in Dutch
Seventeenth-Century Political Thought. Utrecht, 1995.
Blom, Hans W. and Wildenberg, Ivo W., ed. Pieter de la Court in zijn tijd.
Aspecten van een veelzijdig publicist (1618–1685). Voordrachten gehouden op het De la
Court symposium, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, 26 april 1985. Amsterdam and
Maarssen, 1986.
Bödeker, Hans Erich, “Reisebeschreibungen im historischen Diskurs der Aufk-
lärung” in: Hans Erich Bödeker; Georg G. Iggers; Jonathan B. Knud-
sen and Peter H. Reill, ed. Auklärung und Geschichte. Studien zur deutschen
Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert. Göttingen, 1986.
Boeles, W.B.S. De patriot J.H. Swildens. Zijn arbeid ter volksverlichting geschetst. Leeu-
warden, 1884.
Boogman, J.C. Raadpensionaris L.P. van de Spiegel: een reformistisch-conservatieve prag-
maticus en idealist. Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen,
Mededelingen van de Afdeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, Deel 51, nr. 6.
Amsterdam, etc., 1988.
Bosch, J.W. “Quelques remarques sur l’influence de l’Esprit des Loix dans
l’œuvre des juristes belges et néerlandais au XVIIIe siècle” in: Album J. Ba-
lon. Namur, 1968.
Bots, H. and Mijnhardt, W.W., ed. De Droom van de Revolutie. Nieuwe benaderingen
van het Patriottisme. Amsterdam, 1988.
Brake, W.Ph. te. “Staking a new claim to an old revolution: A review article”.
Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 104 (1991) 15–23.
Brewer, John. “English Radicalism in the Age of George III” in: J.G.A. Pocock,
ed. Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776. Princeton, 1980.
Browning, Reed. Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs. Baton Rouge
and London, 1982.
Brugger, Bill. Repubican Theory in Political Thought. Virtuous or Virtual? Hound-
mills, etc., 1999.
Brugmans, H. “Diderot. Le Voyage en Hollande” in: Connaissance de l’étranger.
Mélanges offerts à la mémoire de J.-M. Carré. Paris, 1964.
Brunner, Otto; Conze, Werner and Koselleck, Reinhart, ed. Geschichtliche
Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. 8
vols. Stuttgart, 1972–1997.
Buijnsters, P.J. Spectatoriale geschriften. Utrecht, 1991.
———. Justus van Effen (1684–1735). Leven en Werk. Utrecht, 1992.
Burg, F.H. van der and Boels, H., ed. Tweehonderd jaar rechten van de mens in
Nederland. De verklaring van de rechten van de mens en van de burger van 31 januari
1795 toegelicht en vergeleken met Franse en Amerikaanse voorgangers. Leyden, 1994.
bibliography 225
Burtt, Shelley. Virtue Transformed. Political Argument in England, 1688–1740. Cam-

bridge, etc., 1992.
Carcassonne, E. Montesquieu et le Problème de la Constitution française au XVIII Siècle.
Paris, 1927.
Carpanetto, Dino and Ricuperati, Giuseppe. Italy in the Age of Reason, 1685–
1789. London, 1987.
Carrithers, D.W. “Not So Virtuous Republics: Montesquieu, Venice, and the
Theory of Aristocratic Republicanism”. Journal of the History of Ideas, 51 (1991)
245–268.
Carter, Alice Claire. Neutrality or Commitment: The Evolution of Dutch Foreign Policy
1667–1795. London, 1975.
Chales de Beaulieu, Anja. Deutsche Reisende in den Niederlanden. Das Bild eines
Nachbarn zwischen 1648 und 1795. Frankfurt, etc., 2000.
Charlier, G. “Diderot en Hollande”. Revue de littérature comparée, 21 (1947) 190–
229.
Chaussinand-Nogaret, G. Mirabeau. Paris, 1982.
Claeys, Gregory. Thomas Paine. Social and Political Thought. Boston, etc., 1989.
Cohler, A.M. Montesquieu’s Comparative Politics and the Spirit of American Constitu-
tionalism. Lawrence, Kansas, 1988.
Colenbrander, H.T. De Patriottentijd voornamelijk naar buitenlandsche bescheiden. 3
———. Schimmelpenninck en Koning Lodewijk. Amsterdam, 1911.
Connolly, William E. The Terms of Political Discourse. Lexington, Mass., etc.,
1974.
Dagger, Richard. Civic Virtues. Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism. New
York and Oxford, 1997.
Darnton, Robert and Roche, Daniel, ed. Revolution in Print. The Press in France
1775–1800. Berkeley, etc., 1989.
Davids, Karel and Lucassen, Jan, ed. A Miracle Mirrored. The Dutch Republic in
European Perspective. Cambridge, 1995.
Derathé, Robert. Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps. Second
printing. Paris, 1979.
Deursen, A. Th. van. De last van veel geluk. De geschiedenis van Nederland, 1555–1702.
Amsterdam, 2002.
Dickinson, H.T. Liberty and Property. Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain.
London, 1977.
Duclos, Pierre. La Notion de Constitution dans l’Oeuvre de l’Assemblée Constituante de
1789. Paris, 1932.
Dunn, John. “The identity of the history of ideas” in: John Dunn, Political
obligation in its historical context. Essays in political theory. Cambridge, etc., 1980.
Durand, Yves. Les Républiques au temps des Monarchies. Paris, 1973.
Duyvendijk, A.J. van. De motivering van de klassieke vorming. Een historisch-paedago-
gische studie over twee eeuwen. Groningen and Jakarta, 1955.
Eijnatten, Joris van. God, Nederland en Oranje. Dutch Calvinism and the Search for the
Social Centre. Amsterdam, 1993.
———. Liberty and Concord in the United Provinces. Religious Toleration and the Public in
the Eighteenth-Century Netherlands. Leyden and Boston, 2003.
226 bibliography
Elias, Jeanette. Bijdrage tot de kennis van de historiographie der Bataafsche Republiek.
Leyden, 1906.
Elsner, Jaś and Rubiés, Joan-Paul, ed. Voyages & Visions. Towards a Cultural
History of Travel. London, 1999.
Emery, Christopher Ralph. “The Study of Politica in the Netherlands in the
Early Eighteenth Century”. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of
London, 1967.
Everdell, William R. The End of Kings. A History of Republics and Republicanism.
Second ed. Chicago and London, 2000.
Ferrari, Stefano and Romagnini, Gian Paolo, ed. Carlantonio Pilati. Un intellet-
tuale trentino nell’Europa dei lumi. Milan, 2005
Finley, M.I. The Ancestral Constitution. An Inaugural Lecture. Cambridge, 1971.
Fletcher, F.T.H. Montesquieu and English Politics (1750–1800). London, 1939.
Fockema Andreae, S.J. “Montesquieu en Nederland”. De Gids, 112 (1949) 176–
183.
Fontana, Biancamaria, ed. The Invention of the Modern Republic. Cambridge,
1994.
France, Peter. Politeness and its Discontents. Problems in French Classical Culture.
Cambridge, etc., 1992.
Frijhoff, Willem and Spies, Marijke. 1650. Bevochten eendracht. The Hague, 1999.
Fruin, Robert. “De drie tijdvakken der Nederlandsche geschiedenis” in: P.J.
Blok, P.L. Muller and S. Muller Fz., ed. Robert Fruin’s Verspreide Geschriften met
aanteekeningen, toevoegsels en verbeteringen uit des schrijvers nalatenschap. 10 vols. The
Hague, 1900–1905.
———. Geschiedenis der Staatsinstellingen in Nederland tot den val der Republiek. H.T.
Colenbrander, ed. With an introduction by I. Schöffer. The Hague, 1980.
Furet, François. Penser la Révolution française. Paris, 1978.
———. “Mirabeau” in: François Furet and Mona Ozouf, ed. Dictionnaire critique
de la Révolution française. Paris, 1988.
Furet, François and Ozouf, Mona, ed. The French Revolution and the Creation of
Modern Political Culture. Volume 3. The Transformation of Political Culture 1789–
1848. Oxford, etc., 1989.
Gabriëls, A.J.C.M. De heren als dienaren en de dienaar als heer. Het stadhouderlijk stelsel
in de tweede helft van de achttiende eeuw. The Hague, 1990.
Gamboni, Dario and Germann, Georg, ed. Zeichen der Freiheit. Das Bild der
Republik in der Kunst des 16. bis 20. Jahrhunderts. Bern, 1991.
Gauchet, Marcel. La Révolution des droits de l’homme. Paris, 1989.
Gelderen, Martin van. The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555–1590. Cam-
bridge, 1992.
Gelderen, Martin van and Skinner, Quentin, ed. Republicanism. A Shared Euro-
pean Heritage. 2 vols. Cambridge, etc., 2002.
Geyl, P. Willem IV en Engeland tot 1748 (Vrede van Aken). The Hague, 1924.
———. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Stam. 3 vols. Amsterdam and Antwerp,
1948–1959.
———. “Het stadhouderschap in de partij-literatuur onder De Witt” in: P. Geyl,
Pennestrijd over Staat en Historie. Opstellen over de Vaderlandse Geschiedenis aangevuld
met Geyl’s Levensverhaal (tot 1945). Groningen, 1971.
bibliography 227
———. “De Witten-oorlog, een pennestrijd in 1757” in: P. Geyl, Pennestrijd over
Staat en Historie. Opstellen over de Vaderlandse Geschiedenis aangevuld met Geyl’s
Levensverhaal (tot 1945). Groningen, 1971.
Gobbers, Walter. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Holland. Een onderzoek naar de invloed van
de mens en het werk (ca. 1760 – ca. 1810). Ghent, 1963.
Goldgar, Anne. Impolite Learning. Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters,
1680–1750. New Haven and London, 1995.
Gordon, Daniel. Citizens without Sovereignty. Equality and Sociability in French
Thought, 1670–1789. Princeton, 1994.
Goslinga, W.J. De rechten van den mensch en burger. Een overzicht der Nederlandsche
geschriften en verklaringen. The Hague, 1936.
Gou, L. de. Biografische bijdragen over achttiende-eeuwers. Fragmenten van jaarredes
gehouden in de algemene vergadering van de Hollandsche Maatschappij van Wetenschap-
pen, 1979–1985. Haarlem, 1985.
Granpre Moliere, Jean Jacques. La théorie de la constitution anglaise chez Mon-
tesquieu. Leyden, 1972.
Grijzenhout, Frans. Feesten voor het Vaderland. Patriotse en Bataafse feesten 1780–1806.
Zwolle, 1989.
Grijzenhout, Frans; Mijnhardt, W.W. and Sas, N.C.F. van, ed. Voor Vaderland en
Vrijheid. De revolutie van de patriotten. Amsterdam, 1987.
Grijzenhout, Frans and Tuyll van Seroosherken, Carel, ed. Edele eenvoud. Neo-
classicisme in Nederland 1765–1800. Zwolle, 1989.
Grijzenhout, Frans en Veen, Henk van, ed. De gouden eeuw in perspectief. Het beeld
van de Nederlandse zeventiende-eeuwse schilderkunst in later tijd. Nijmegen, 1992.
Grondwetgeving 1795–1806. Voordrachten gehouden bij de presentatie van ‘De Staatsregeling
van 1805 en de Constitutie van 1806. Bronnen voor de totstandkoming’ op 27 maart 1997
te Haarlem. Haarlem, 1997.
Gunn, J.A.W. Beyond Liberty and Property. The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-
Century Political Thought. Kingston and Montreal, 1983.
Haitsma Mulier, E.O.G. The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the
Seventeenth Century. Assen, 1980.
———. Het Nederlandse gezicht van Machiavelli. Twee en een halve eeuw interpretatie
1550–1800. Hilversum, 1989.
———. “De Bataafse mythe opnieuw bekeken”. Bijdragen en Mededelingen betref-
fende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 111 (1996) 344–367.
Haitsma Mulier, E.O.G. and Velema, W.R.E., ed. Vrijheid. Een geschiedenis van de
vijftiende tot de twintigste eeuw. Amsterdam, 1999.
Haley, K.H.D. The British and the Dutch. Political and Cultural Relations through the
Ages. London, 1988.
Hallebeek, J and Sirks, A.J.B., ed. Nederland in Franse schaduw. Recht en bestuur in
het Koninkrijk Holland (1806–1810). Hilversum, 2006.
Hampsher-Monk, Iain. A History of Modern Political Thought. Major Political Think-
ers from Hobbes to Marx. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1992.
Hampson, Norman. Will and Circumstance. Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French
Revolution. London, 1983.
Harline, Craig E. Pamphlets, Printing, and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic.
Dordrecht, etc., 1987.
228 bibliography
Hartog, J. De spectatoriale geschriften van 1741–1800. Bijdrage tot de kennis van het
huiselijk, maatschappelijk en kerkelijk leven onder ons volk, in de tweede helft der 18e
eeuw. Second ed. Utrecht, 1890.
Herdmann, F. Montesquieurezeption in Deutschland im 18. und beginnenden 19. Jahrhun-
dert. Hildesheim, etc., 1990.
Heuvel, Gerd van den. Der Freiheitsbegriff der Französischen Revolution. Studien zur
Revolutionsideologie. Göttingen, 1988.
Hexter, J.H. On Historians. Reappraisals of some of the makers of modern history.
Cambridge, Mass., 1979.
Hietbrink, A. “De deugden van een vrije republiek: opvattingen over be-
schaafdheid in de achttiende-eeuwse republiek” in: Pim den Boer, ed. Be-
schaving. Een geschiedenis van de begrippen hoofsheid, heusheid, beschaving en cultuur.
Amsterdam, 2001.
Himsbergen, E.J. van. “Grondwettige Herstelling” in: Figuren en Figuraties. Acht
Opstellen aangeboden aan J.C. Boogman. Groningen, 1979.
Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests. Political Arguments for Capital-
ism before Its Triumph. Princeton, 1978.
Hoak, Daniel and Feingold, Mordechai, ed. The World of William and Mary.
Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–1689. Stanford, 1996.
Hoeven, H. van der. Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp. Conservatief of Liberaal? Gronin-
gen, 1976.
Honohan, Iseult. Civic Republicanism. London and New York, 2002.
Horodisch, A. “Gregorio Leti: seine Neubewertung” in: Studia bibliographica in
honorem Herman de la Fontaine Verwey. Amsterdam, 1966.
Horst, D.J.H. ter. “Over het begrip ‘pamflet’”. Bibliotheekleven, 17 (1932) 8–
30.
Horst, D. van der. Van Republiek tot Koninkrijk. De vormende jaren van Anton Reinhard
Falck 1777–1813. Amsterdam, 1985.
Huisman, C. Neerlands Israël. Het natiebesef der traditioneel-gereformeerden in de acht-
tiende eeuw. Dordrecht, 1983.
Huizinga, J. “Nederland’s beschaving in de zeventiende eeuw. Een schets” in:
J. Huizinga, Verzamelde werken. 9 vols. Haarlem, 1948–1953.
Hulliung, Mark. Montesquieu and the Old Regime. Berkeley, etc., 1976.
Hulme, Peter and Youngs, Tim, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing.
Cambridge, 2002.
Hunt, Lynn. “Review of: François Furet, Penser la Révolution française”. History
and Theory, 20 (1981) 313–323.
———. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley, etc., 1984.
Hutchison, Terence. Before Adam Smith. The Emergence of Political Economy 1662–
1776. Oxford, 1988.
Huussen jr., A.H. “Freedom of the press and censorship in the Netherlands
1780–1810” in: A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse, ed. Too Mighty to be Free. Censor-
ship and the Press in Britain and the Netherlands. Papers delivered to the Ninth Anglo-
Dutch Historical Conference. Zutphen, 1987.
———. “1787. De Nederlandse revolutie?” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de
Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 104 (1989) 684–690.
Israel, Jonathan I. “Gregorio Leti (1631–1701) and the Dutch Sephardi Elite at
bibliography 229
the Close of the Seventeenth Century” in: Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven
J. Zipperstein, ed. Jewish History. Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky. London,
1988.
———, ed. The Anglo-Dutch moment. Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its world
impact. Cambridge, 1991.
———. The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806. Oxford, 1995.
———. Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750.
Oxford, 2001.
Jacob, Margaret C. The Radical Enlightenment. Pantheists, Freemasons and Republi-
cans. London, etc., 1981.
———. and Mijnhardt, Wijnand W., ed. The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth
Century. Decline, Enlightenment, and Revolution. Ithaca and London, 1992.
Jansen, C.J.H. Natuurrecht of Romeins Recht. Een studie over leven en werk van F.A. van
der Marck (1719–1800) in het licht van de opvattingen van zijn tijd. Leyden, 1987.
———. “Over de 18e-eeuwse docenten natuurrecht aan Nederlandse univer-
siteiten en de door hen gebruikte leerboeken”. Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiede-
nis, 55 (1987) 103–115.
———. “H.C. Cras (1739–1820). Hoogleraar en natuurrechtsgeleerde in hart
en nieren” in: E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier; C.L. Heesakkers; P.J. Knegtmans;
A.J. Kox and T.J. Veen, ed. Athenaeum Illustre. Elf studies over de Amsterdamse
Doorluchtige School 1632–1877. Amsterdam, 1997.
Jong, J.J. de. Met goed fatsoen. De elite in een Hollandse stad, Gouda 1700–1780.
Amsterdam, 1985.
Jongste, J.A.F. de. “Een bewind op zijn smalst. Het politiek bedrijf in de jaren
1727–1747” in: Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. 15 vols. Haarlem, etc.,
1977–1983.
Joor, Johan. De Adelaar en het Lam. Onrust, opruiing en onwilligheid in Nederland ten
tijde van het Koninkrijk Holland en de Inlijving bij het Franse Keizerrijk (1806–1813).
Amsterdam, 2000.
Keohane, N.O. “Virtuous Republics and Glorious Monarchies: Two Models
in Montesquieu’s Political Thought”. Political Studies, 20 (1972) 383–396.
Klashorst, G.O. van de. “De Nederlandsche Spectator, De Philanthrope en De
Philosooph. Drie spectatoriale geschriften tussen 1749 en 1769 over geloof,
mens en samenleving”. MA-thesis. Utrecht, 1982.
———. “‘Metten schijn van monarchie getempert’. De verdediging van het
stadhouderschap in de partijliteratuur, 1650–1686” in: H.W. Blom and I.W.
Wildenberg, ed. Pieter de la Court in zijn tijd. Aspecten van een veelzijdig publicist
(1618–1685). Voordrachten gehouden op het De la Court symposium, Erasmus Univer-
siteit Rotterdam, 26 april 1985. Amsterdam and Maarssen, 1986.
Klashorst, G.O. van de; Blom, H.W. and Haitsma Mulier, E.O.G., ed. Bibliog-
raphy of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Political Thought. An Annotated Inventory, 1581–
1710. Amsterdam and Maarssen, 1986.
Klein, Lawrence E. “The Political Significance of ‘Politeness’ in Early Eigh-
teenth-Century Britain” in: Gordon J. Schochet, ed. Politics, Politeness, and
Patriotism. Papers Presented at the Folger Institute Seminar “Politics and Politeness:
British Political Thought in the Age of Walpole” Directed by N.T. Phillipson. Wash-
ington, 1993.
230 bibliography
———. Shaftesbury and the culture of politeness. Moral discourse and cultural politics in
early eighteenth-century England. Cambridge, 1994.
Klein, S.R.E. “Republikanisme en patriotisme: Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck
en de klassieke wortels van het republikeinse denken (1784–1785)”. Tijdschrift
voor Geschiedenis, 106 (1993) 179–207.
———. Patriots Republikanisme. Politieke cultuur in Nederland (1766–1787). Amster-
dam, 1995.
Klein, S.R.E. and Rosendaal, Joost. “Democratie in context. Nieuwe perspec-
tieven op het Leids Ontwerp”. De Achttiende Eeuw, 26 (1994) 71–100.
Kley, Dale Van, ed. The French Idea of Freedom. The Old Regime and the Declaration
of Rights of 1789. Stanford, 1994.
Kloek, Joost. “De lezer als burger. Het literaire publiek in de achttiende eeuw”.
De Achttiende Eeuw, 26 (1994) 177–191.
Kloek, Joost and Mijnhardt, Wijnand. 1800. Blauwdrukken voor een samenleving.
The Hague, 2001.
Kloek, Joost and Tilmans, Karin, ed. Burger. Een geschiedenis van het begrip “burger”
in de Nederlanden van de Middeleeuwen tot de 21ste eeuw. Amsterdam, 2002.
Knuttel, W.P.C., ed. Catalogus van de pamfletten-verzameling berustende in de Konink-
lijke Bibliotheek, 1486–1853. 7 vols. The Hague, 1889–1920.
Koenigsberger, Helmut, ed. Republiken und Republikanismus im Europa der Frühen
Neuzeit. Munich, 1988.
———. “Republicanism, monarchism and liberty” in: Robert Oresko, G.C.
Gibbs and H.M. Scott, ed. Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern
Europe. Essays in Memory of Ragnhild Hatton. Cambridge, 1997.
Kop, P.C. “Hendrik Constantijn Cras (1739–1820)” in: T.J. Veen and P.C. Kop,
ed. Zestig Juristen. Bijdragen tot een beeld van de geschiedenis der Nederlandse rechts-
wetenschap. Zwolle, 1987.
Koselleck, Reinhart and Schreiner, Klaus, ed. Bürgerschaft. Rezeption und Inno-
vation der Begrifflichkeit vom Hohen Mittelalter bis ins 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart,
1994.
Kossmann, E.H. Politieke theorie in het zeventiende-eeuwse Nederland. Verhandelin-
gen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afd. Let-
terkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, Deel 67, nr. 2. Amsterdam, 1960.
———. The Low Countries 1780–1940. Oxford, 1978.
———. Politieke Theorie en Geschiedenis. Verspreide Opstellen en Voordrachten. Amster-
dam, 1987.
Kramnick, Isaac. Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism. Political Ideology in Late
Eighteenth-Century England and America. Ithaca and London, 1990.
Kruif, José de; Meijer Drees, Marijke and Salman, Jeroen, ed. Het lange leven van
het pamflet. Boekhistorische, iconografische, literaire en politieke aspecten van pamfletten
1600–1900. Hilversum, 2006.
Lange, Herman de. “De politieke actie van een bewuste publieke opinie”. De
Gids, 134 (1971) 505–515.
Leeb, I.L. The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Republic. History and Politics in the
Dutch Republic 1747–1800. The Hague, 1973.
Lowenthal, D. “Montesquieu and the Classics: Republican Government in the
Spirit of the Laws” in: J. Cropsey, ed. Ancients and Moderns. Essays on the
bibliography 231
Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss. New York and London,
1964.
Lucas, Colin, ed. The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture.
Volume 2. The Political Culture of the French Revolution. Oxford, etc., 1988.
M˛aczac, Antoni. Travel in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, 1995.
Malssen, P.J.W. Louis XIV d’après les pamphlets répandus en Hollande. Amsterdam
and Paris, 1936.
Manin, Bernard. The principles of representative government. Cambridge, 1997.
Martens, Wolfgang. Die Botschaft der Tugend. Die Aufklärung im Spiegel der deutschen
Moralischen Wochenschriften. Stuttgart, 1971.
Masterson, M.P. “Montesquieu’s Stadholder”. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth
Century, 116 (1973) 81–107.
May, Henry F. The Enlightenment in America. Oxford, etc., 1978.
Maynor, John W. Republicanism in the Modern World. Oxford, etc., 2003.
Mecking, G.J. “Mr. Gerard Dumbar, een verlicht historicus?”. Overijsselse His-
torische Bijdragen, 100 (1985) 167–193.
Meijer Drees, Marijke. Andere landen, andere mensen. De beeldvorming van Holland
versus Spanje en Engeland omstreeks 1650. The Hague, 1997.
Mijnhardt, W.W. Tot Heil van ’t Menschdom. Culturele genootschappen in Nederland,
1750–1815. Amsterdam, 1987.
Millar, Fergus. The Roman Republic in Political Thought. Hanover and London,
2002.
Mörke, Olaf. ‘Stadtholder’ oder ‘Staetholder’? Die Funktion des Hauses Oranien und
seines Hofes in der politischen Kultur der Republik der Vereinigten Niederlande im 17.
Jahrhundert. Münster, 1997.
Monnier, Raymonde. Républicanisme, Patriotisme et Révolution française. Paris, 2005.
Moorman van Kappen, O. and Coppens, E.C., ed. De Bataafse omwenteling en het
recht. Acta van het rechtshistorisch colloquium over de betekenis van de Bataafse Revolutie
(1795) voor de rechtsontwikkeling in Nederland (Utrecht–Nijmegen, 29 en 30 mei 1995).
Nijmegen, 1997.
Morpurgo, Enrico. “Leti en Nederland”. Neophilologus, 35 (1951) 193–201.
Murris, Roelof. La Hollande et les Hollandais au XVIIe et au XVIII siècles, vus par les
Français. Paris, 1925.
Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek. 10 vols. Leyden, 1911–1937.
Nijenhuis, I.J.A. Een joodse philosophe. Isaac de Pinto (1717–1787). Amsterdam,
1992.
Nimwegen, Olaf van. De Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden als grote mogendheid:
buitenlandse politiek en oorlogvoering in de eerste helft van de achttiende eeuw en in
het bijzonder tijdens de eerste Oostenrijkse successieoorlog (1740–1748). Amsterdam,
2002.
Okel, Hugo Sebastiaan. Der Bürger, die Tugend und die Republik. “Bürgerliche Leitkul-
tur” in den Niederlanden im 18. Jahrhundert im Spiegel der Moralischen Wochen-
schriften. Ph.D. Dissertation. Bonn, 2004.
Overmeer, P.C.H. De economische denkbeelden van Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp (1762–
1834). Tilburg, 1982.
Ozouf, Mona. “Liberté”in: François Furet and Mona Ozouf, ed. Dictionnaire
critique de la Révolution française. Paris, 1988.
232 bibliography
Palmer, R.R. “Much in Little: The Dutch Revolution of 1795”. Journal of

Modern History, 26 (1954) 15–35.
———. The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America,
1760–1800. 2 vols. Princeton, 1959–1964.
Pangle, Thomas L. Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism. A Commentary on the Spirit
of the Laws. Chicago and London, 1973.
Peitsch, Helmut. Georg Forsters “Ansichten vom Niederrhein”. Zum Problem des über-
gangs vom bürgerlichen Humanismus zum revolutionären Demokratismus. Frankfurt,
etc., 1978.
Pelckmans, P. “Le Voyage en Hollande de Diderot”. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 86
(1985) 294–306.
Peterse, J.M. “Publicist voor Oranje. R.M. van Goens en De Ouderwetse Ned-
erlandsche Patriot (1781–1783)”. Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiede-
nis der Nederlanden, 103 (1988) 182–208.
Pettit, Philip. Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford, 1997.
———. “Keeping Republican Freedom Simple. On a Difference with Quentin
Skinner”. Political Theory, 20 (2002) 339–356.
Phillipson, Nicholas. Hume. London, 1989.
———. “Politics and Politeness in the reigns of Anne and the early Hanoveri-
ans” in: J.G.A. Pocock, ed. The varieties of British political thought, 1500–1800.
Cambridge, 1993.
Philp, Mark. Paine. Oxford, 1989.
Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley, Los Angeles and
London, 1967.
Pocock, J.G.A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. A Study of English
Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, 1957.
———. The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Repub-
lican Tradition. Princeton, 1975.
———. “1776: The Revolution against Parliament” in: J.G.A. Pocock, ed. Three
British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776. Princeton, 1980.
———. “The Problem of Political Thought in the Eighteenth Century: Patri-
otism and Politeness (with replies by E.H. Kossmann and E.O.G. Haitsma
Mulier)”. Theoretische Geschiedenis, 9 (1982) 3–36.
———. Virtue, Commerce, and History. Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly
in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, 1985.
———. “Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political
Thought” in: Kevin M. Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, ed. Politics of Dis-
course. The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley, etc.,
1987.
———. “Quentin Skinner. The History of Politics and the Politics of History”.
Common Knowledge, 10 (2004) 532–550.
Popkin, Jeremy D. News and Politics in the Age of Revolution. Jean Luzac’s Gazette de
Leyde. Ithaca and London, 1989.
———. “Dutch Patriots, French Journalists, and Declarations of Rights: the
Leids Ontwerp of 1785 and its diffusion in France”. The Historical Journal, 38
(1995) 553–565.
Prak, Maarten. De Gouden Eeuw. Het raadsel van de Republiek. Nijmegen, 2002.
bibliography 233
Prokhovnik, Raia. Spinoza and Republicanism. Basingstoke, etc., 2004.

Pütz, Peter. “Zwischen Klassik und Romantik: Georg Forsters ‘Ansichten vom
Niederrhein’”. Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 97 (1978) 4–24.
Rahe, Paul A. Republics Ancient and Modern. Classical Republicanism and the American
Revolution. Chapel Hill and London, 1992.
Rawson, Elizabeth. The Spartan Tradition in European Thought. Oxford, 1969.
Reichardt, Rolf. “Revolutionäre Mentalitäten und Netze politischer Grundbe-
griffe in Frankreich 1789–1795” in: Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt,
ed. Die Französische Revolution als Bruch des Gesellschaftlichen Bewusstseins. Vorla-
gen und Diskussionen der internationalen Arbeitstagung am Zentrum für interdisziplinäre
Forschung der Universität Bielefeld 28. Mai – 1. Juni 1985. Munich, 1988.
Reichardt, Rolf and Schmitt, Eberhard, ed. Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbe-
griffe in Frankreich 1680–1820. Munich, 1985–.
Reid, John Phillip. The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution.
Chicago and London, 1988.
Reitsma, H. “‘Altoos gedenkwaardig’. De herdenkingsliteratuur naar aanleid-
ing van tweehonderd jaar Nederlandse Revolutie”. Theoretische Geschiedenis,
16 (1989) 255–275.
Rem, Paul and Sanders, George, ed. Lodewijk Napoleon. Aan het hof van onze eerste
koning, 1806–1810. Zutphen, 2006.
Rials, Stéphane, ed. La déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. Paris, 1988.
Richard, Carl J. The Founders and the Classics. Greece, Rome, and the American
Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1994.
Richter, Melvin. The Political Theory of Montesquieu. Cambridge, etc., 1977.
Ricken, U. “Réflexions du XVIIIe siècle sur ‘l’abus des mots’”. Mots, 4 (1982)
29–44.
Riesenberg, Peter. Citizenship in the Western Tradition. Plato to Rousseau. Chapel
Hill and London, 1992.
Rigatti, Maria. Un illuminista trentino del secolo XVIII: Carlo Antonio Pilati. Flo-
rence, 1923.
Roberts, Jennifer Tolbert. Athens on Trial. The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western
Thought. Princeton, 1994.
Roelevink, J. “‘Bewezen met authenticque stukken’. Juridisch-oudheidkundige
drijfveren tot het uitgeven van teksten op het terrein van de vaderlandse
geschiedenis in de achttiende eeuw” in: K. Kooijmans, Th.S.H. Bos, A.E.
Kersten, C.E. Keij and J.G. Smit, ed. Bron en publikatie. Voordrachten en opstel-
len over de ontsluiting van geschiedkundige bronnen, uitgegeven bij het 75-jarig be-
staan van het Bureau der Rijkscommissie voor Vaderlandse Geschiedenis. The Hague,
1985.
Rosendaal, Joost. Bataven! Nederlandse vluchtelingen in Frankrijk 1787–1795. Nijme-
gen, 2003.
———. De Nederlandse Revolutie. Vrijheid, volk en vaderland 1783–1799. Nijmegen,
2005.
Rosendaal, J.G.M.M.; Thissen, P.G.B. and Zee, Th.S.M. van der, ed. 1787. De
Nederlandse Revolutie? Amsterdam, 1988.
Rowen, Herbert H. The Low Countries in Early Modern Times. A Documentary
History. New York, etc., 1972.
234 bibliography
———. John de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland, 1625–1672. Princeton, 1978.

———. The Princes of Orange. The Stadholders in the Dutch Republic. Cambridge, etc.,
1988.
Sas, N.C.F. van. “Simon Schama: exponent van een nieuwe orthodoxie?”.
Kleio, 19 (1978) 276–283.
———. “The Netherlands, 1750–1813” in: Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows,
ed. Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820.
Cambridge, 2001
———. De metamorfose van Nederland. Van oude orde naar moderniteit, 1750–1900.
Amsterdam, 2004.
Schama, Simon. Patriots and Liberators. Revolution in the Netherlands 1780–1813. New
York, 1977.
———. The Embarrassment of Riches. An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden
Age. New York, 1987.
Schieder, Theodor. Friedrich der Grosse. Ein Königtum der Widersprüche. Frankfurt,
etc., 1983.
Schlumbohm, Jürgen. Freiheitsbegriff und Emanzipationsprozess. Zur Geschichte eines
politischen Wortes. Göttingen, 1973.
———. Freiheit. Die Anfänge der bürgerlichen Emanzipationsbewegung in Deutschland im
Spiegel ihres Leitwortes (ca. 1760 – ca. 1800). Düsseldorf, 1975.
Schöffer, I. “The Batavian Myth during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Cen-
turies” in: J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann, ed. Britain and the Netherlands.
Volume V. Some Political Mythologies. Papers delivered to the Fifth Anglo-Dutch Histor-
ical Conference. The Hague, 1975.
———. “Adriaan Kluit, een voorganger”. Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 101 (1988)
3–16.
Schulte Nordholt, Jan Willem. The Dutch Republic and American Independence.
Chapel Hill and London, 1982.
Schutte, G.J. “Van grondslag tot breidel der vrijheid. Opvattingen over de
Unie van Utrecht in het laatste kwart van de achttiende eeuw” in: S. Groen-
veld and H.L. Ph. Leeuwenberg, ed. De Unie van Utrecht. Wording en werking
van een verbondsacte. The Hague, 1979.
———. “Willem IV en Willem V” in: C.A. Tamse, ed. Nassau en Oranje in de
Nederlandse geschiedenis. Alphen aan den Rijn, 1979.
———. “Grondvester of belager der vrijheid? Willem van Oranje in de ban der
achttiende-eeuwse tegenstellingen” in: E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and A.E.M.
Janssen, ed. Willem van Oranje in de historie 1584–1984. Vier eeuwen beeldvorming
en geschiedschrijving. Utrecht, 1984.
Scott, Jonathan. Commonwealth Principles. Republican Writing of the English Revolu-
tion. Cambridge, 2004.
Sekora, John. Luxury. The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett. Baltimore
and London, 1977.
Sellers, M.N.S. American Republicanism. Roman Ideology in the United States Constitu-
tion. Houndmills and London, 1994.
Shackleton, Robert. Montesquieu. A Critical Biography. Oxford, 1961.
Shklar, Judith N. Montesquieu. Oxford and New York, 1987.
———. “Montesquieu and the New Republicanism” in: Gisela Bock, Quentin
bibliography 235
Skinner and Maurizio Viroli, ed. Machiavelli and Republicanism. Cambridge,

etc., 1990.
Sillem, J.A. De politieke en staatkundige werkzaamheid van Isaac Jan Alexander Gogel.
Amsterdam, 1864.
Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. 2 vols. Cambridge,
1978.
———. “Machiavelli on the Maintenance of Liberty”. Politics. Journal of the
Australasian Political Studies Association, 18 (1983) 3–15.
———. “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspec-
tives” in: Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner, ed. Philoso-
phy in History. Essays on the historiography of philosophy. Cambridge, etc., 1984.
———. Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge, 1998.
———. Visions of Politics. 3 vols. Cambridge, 2002.
———. “A Third Concept of Liberty”. Proceedings of the British Academy, 117 (2002)
237–268.
Smit, J.W. Fruin en de partijen tijdens de Republiek. Groningen, 1958.
Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals. Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New
Haven and London, 1997.
Spits, F.C. “Unie en militie” in: S. Groenveld and H.L.Ph. Leeuwenberg, ed.
De Unie van Utrecht. Wording en werking van een verbondsacte. The Hague, 1979.
Spitz, Jean-Fabien. La liberté politique. Essai de généalogie conceptuelle. Paris, 1995.
Spurlin, P.M. Montesquieu in America. Baton Rouge, 1940.
Star Numan, Oncko Wicher. Cornelis van Bynkershoek. Zijn leven en zijne geschriften.
Leyden, 1869.
Stourzh, Gerald. “Die tugendhafte Republik. Montesquieu’s Begriff der ‘vertu’
und die Anfänge der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika” in: H. Fichtenau
and H. Peichl, ed. Österreich und Europa. Festgabe für Hugo Hantsch zum 70.
Geburtstag. Graz, etc., 1965.
———. “Vom Aristotelischen zum liberalen Verfassungsbegriff. Zur Entwick-
lung in England und Nordamerika im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert” in: Fried-
rich Engel-Janosi, Grete Klingenstein and Heinrich Lutz, ed. Fürst, Bürger,
Mensch. Untersuchungen zu politischen und soziokulturellen Wandlungsprozessen im vor-
revolutionären Europa. Munich, 1975.
Strien, Cornelis Daniël van. British Travellers in Holland during the Stuart Period.
Edward Browne and John Locke as Tourists in the United Provinces. Ph.D. Disserta-
tion. Amsterdam, 1989.
Strien, Kees van. De ontdekking van de Nederlanden. Britse en Franse reizigers in
Holland en Vlaanderen, 1750–1795. Utrecht, 2001.
Strien-Chardonneau, Madeleine van. “Le Voyage en Hollande”. Récits de voyageurs
français dans les Provinces-Unies 1748–1795. Ph.D. Dissertation. Groningen,
1992.
———. “La Barre de Beaumarchais en Justus van Effen: karakter en zeden
der Hollanders in de achttiende eeuw of lofrede op het burgerlijk geluk”
in: Karel Enenkel, Sjaak Onderdelinden and Paul J. Smith, ed. “Typisch
Nederlands”. De Nederlandse identiteit in de letterkunde. Voorthuizen, 1999.
Sturkenboom, Dorothée. Spectators van Hartstocht. Sekse en emotionele cultuur in de
achttiende eeuw. Hilversum, 1998.
236 bibliography
Swart, K.W. The Miracle of the Dutch Republic as Seen in the Seventeenth Century.
London, 1969.
Tamse, C.A. and Witte, E., ed. Staats- en Natievorming in Willem I’s Koninkrijk
(1815–1830). Brussels and Baarn, 1992.
Theeuwen, P.J.H.M. Pieter ’t Hoen en De Post van den Neder-Rhijn (1781–1787). Een
bijdrage tot kennis van de Nederlandse geschiedenis in het laatste kwart van de achttiende
eeuw. Hilversum, 2002.
Teitler, Hans. De opstand der “Batavieren”. Hilversum, 1998.
Tijn, Th. van. “Pieter de la Court. Zijn leven en zijn economische denkbeel-
den”. Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 69 (1956) 304–370.
Tollebeek, Jo. De toga van Fruin. Denken over geschiedenis in Nederland sinds 1860.
Second printing. Amsterdam, 1996.
Troost, Wout. Stadhouder-koning Willem III. Een politieke biografie. Hilversum,
2001.
Uhlig, Ludwig. Georg Forster. Lebensabenteuer eines gelehrten Weltbürgers. Göttingen,
2004.
Veen, Th.J. Recht en nut. Studiën over en naar aanleiding van Ulrik Huber (1636–1694).
Zwolle, 1976.
———. “De legitimatie van de souvereiniteit der Staten bij Huber en Kluit”.
Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 97 (1982) 185–
215.
Velema, Wyger R.E. “Post-revisionistische perspectieven. De Franse revolutie
als transformatie van de politieke cultuur?”. Theoretische Geschiedenis, 16 (1989)
75–96.
———. Enlightenment and Conservatism in the Dutch Republic. The Political Thought of
Elie Luzac (1721–1796). Assen and Maastricht, 1993.
———. “Verlichtingen in Nederland. Het voorbeeld van de politieke theorie”.
Geschiedenis van de Wijsbegeerte in Nederland. Documentatieblad Werkgroep Sassen, 5
(1994) 45–53.
———. “Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp. Wegbereider voor de monarchie” in:
H.M. Beliën, D. van der Horst and G.J. van Setten, ed. Nederlanders van
het eerste uur. Het ontstaan van het moderne Nederland 1780–1830. Amsterdam,
1996.
———. “Politiek, pers en publieke opinie. Het debat over de vrijheid van
drukpers in de Bataafse tijd” in: Grondwetgeving 1795–1806. Voordrachten ge-
houden bij de presentatie van ‘De Staatsregeling van 1805 en de Constitutie van 1806.
Bronnen voor de totstandkoming’ op 27 maart 1997 te Haarlem. Haarlem, 1997.
Venturi, Franco. Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment. Cambridge, 1971.
———. The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1776–1789. 2 vols. Princeton, 1991.
Verberne, L.G.J. Gogel en de uniteit. Nijmegen, 1948.
Vierhaus, Rudolf. “Montesquieu in Deutschland. Zur Geschichte seiner Wir-
kung als politischer Schriftsteller im 18. Jahrhundert” in: Rudolf Vierhaus,
Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert. Politische Verfassung, Soziales Gefüge, Geistige Bewe-
gungen. Göttingen, 1987.
Vles, E.J. Pieter Paulus (1753–1796). Patriot en Staatsman. Amsterdam, 2004.
Vliet, Pieter van der. Onno Zwier van Haren (1713–1779). Staatsman en dichter.
Hilversum, 1996.
bibliography 237
Vries, Jan de and Woude, Ad van der. Nederland 1800–1815. De eerste ronde van de
moderne economische groei. Amsterdam, 1995.
Vries, Joh. De. De economische achteruitgang der Republiek in de achttiende eeuw.
Second ed. Leyden, 1980.
Weinbrot, Howard D. Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England. The Decline of a
Classical Norm. Princeton, 1978.
Wessels, L.H.M. “Tradition et lumières in politicis. Quelques remarques sur
l’argumentation et la position idéologique des patriotes aux Provinces-Unies
à l’aube de la révolution”. Documentatieblad Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw, XIX
(1987) 171–192.
———. “Het pamflet. De polsslag van het heden” in: Jo Tollebeek; Tom Ver-
schaffel and Leonard H.M. Wessels, ed. De palimpsest. Geschiedschrijving in de
Nederlanden 1500–2000. 2 vols. Hilversum, 2002.
Wiersma, Geertje. Mietje Hulshoff en de aanslag op Napoleon. Amsterdam,
2003.
Wildenberg, Ivo W. Johan & Pieter de la Court (1622–1660 & 1618–1685). Bib-
liografie en receptiegeschiedenis. Gids tot de studie van een oeuvre. Amsterdam and
Maarssen, 1986.
Wille, J. De literator R.M. van Goens en zijn kring. Studiën over de achttiende eeuw. 2
vols. Zutphen and Amsterdam, 1937–1993.
Wiskerke, Evert M. De waardering voor de zeventiende-eeuwse literatuur tussen 1780 en
1813. Hilversum, 1995.
Wit, C.H.E. de. De Strijd tussen Aristocratie en Democratie in Nederland 1780–1848.
Kritisch Onderzoek van een historisch Beeld en Herwaardering van een Periode. Heerlen,
1965.
———. De Nederlandse Revolutie van de Achttiende Eeuw 1780–1787. Oligarchie en
Proletariaat. Oirsbeek, 1974.
———. Het Ontstaan van het Moderne Nederland 1780–1848 en zijn Geschiedschrijving.
Oirsbeek, 1978.
———. Thorbecke en de wording van de Nederlandse natie. Nijmegen, 1980.
———. “De Noordelijke Nederlanden in de Bataafse en de Franse Tijd 1795–
1813” in: Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. 15 vols. Haarlem, etc., 1977–
1983.
Woltjer, J.J. “Dutch Privileges, Real and Imaginary” in: J.S. Bromley and
E.H. Kossmann, ed. Britain and the Netherlands. Volume V. Some Political Mytholo-
gies. Papers delivered to the Fifth Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference. The Hague,
1975.
Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787. Chapel Hill,
1969.
———. “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eigh-
teenth Century”. William and Mary Quarterly, XXXIX (1982) 401–441.
———. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York, 1992.
Wootton, David, ed. Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society 1649–1776.
Stanford, 1994.
Worst, I.J.H. “Staat, constitutie en politieke wil. Over F.W. Pestel en de var-
iëteit van het achttiende-eeuwse orangisme”. Bijdragen en Mededelingen betref-
fende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 102 (1987) 498–515.
238 bibliography
Woud, Auke van der. De Bataafse hut. Verschuivingen in het beeld van de geschiedenis
(1750–1850). Amsterdam, 1990.
Wuthenow, Ralph-Rainer. Die erfahrene Welt. Europäische Reiseliteratur im Zeitalter
der Aufklärung. Frankfurt, 1980.
Zanten, Jeroen van. Schielijk, Winzucht, Zwaarhoofd en Bedaard. Politieke discussie en
oppositievorming 1813–1840. Amsterdam, 2004.
INDEX
This index contains proper names in the main text.
Adams, J., 24 Cato Uticensis, 60, 63, 207

Addison, J., 33, 82, 85 Cats, J., 78
Affsprung, J., 22 Chalmot, J.A. de, 147
Allart, J., 150, 151, 153, 154 Charles II, king of England, 13
Anna, princes of Hanover, wife of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor,
William IV, 44, 54 90, 213
Antony, 64 Chomel, N.M., 147
Aristotle, 45, 83 Christius, J.F., 75
Augustus Caesar, 61 Cicero, 15, 45, 60, 64
Clerq, P. de, 69
Barbeyrac, J., 131 Colenbrander, H.T., 191
Beaufort, L.F. de, 3, 5, 6, 9, 28, 44– Condillac, E.B. de, 95
49, 53–56, 58–64, 67, 69, 70, 73, Cook, J., 22
74, 84, 117, 125, 142, 145, 171 Court, J. and P. de la, 2, 6, 27, 35–
Beaumarchais, la Barre de, A., 18, 43, 45–49, 63
19 Cras, H.C., 193
Besier, A., 207
Bielfeld, J.F. von, 96 Decker, C.W., 163, 164, 170, 172,
Blaauw, J., 203 173
Blanning, T.C.W., 4 Demosthenes, 60
Blom, H.W., 36 Descartes, R., 36, 45
Bosch, B., 196 Diderot, D., 17, 19, 20
Brewer, J., 123 Dumbar, G., 113, 192
Bruni, L., 26
Brutus, 60, 207 Effen, J. van, 18, 82, 84, 86–89,
Buchholz, F., 210 91
Burke, E., 142 Emery, C.R., 55
Burlamaqui, J.J., 131 Ermerins, F., 203
Burmania, E.S. van, 53, 55, 69
Bynkershoek, C.van, 53, 64 Falck, A.R., 201, 211
Forster, G., 22, 23
Caligula, 127 France, P., 85
Canneman, E., 207 Franklin, B., 192
Canter de Munck, J., 122, 163, 174, Frederick Henry, stadholder, 69
211 Frederick the Great, king in Prussia,
Capellen tot den Pol, J.D. van der, 4, 75
21, 27, 49, 115, 126, 147, 148, 163, Fruin, R., 198, 213
175 Furet, F., 160
240 index
Gentillet, I., 75 Kluit, A., 1, 121, 130, 132, 141–143,

George III, king of England, 124 156, 162, 167, 170, 171, 174
Geyl, P., 54, 69 Knuttel, W.P.C., 143
Goens, R.M. van, 111, 119, 142, 162, Koselleck, R., 116, 181
167, 170, 171, 173, 185 Kossmann, E.H., 25, 27, 28, 32, 36,
Gogel, I., 204–206 116, 120
Gou, L. de, 189 Kumpel, J.W., 132, 174
Grabner, J., 22
Grotius, H., 31, 117, 130, 131, 174 Leeb, I.L., 115, 139
Guicciardini, L., 18 Leti, G., 13–15
Limburg, L. van, 96, 171
Hahn, J., 196 Locke, J., 96, 120, 174
Haitsma Mulier, E.O.G., 32, 36 Loe, H.J. van, 108, 109
Hamelsveld, Y. van, 80, 91 Louis Napoleon, king of Holland,
Haren, O.Z. van, 77, 78, 80, 91 201, 202, 207–213
Haren, W. van, 76 Louis XIV, king of France, 2, 3, 13,
Harpe, J.-F. la, 141 48, 78, 90
Heiden Reinestein, count of, 119 Luzac, E., 5–7, 17, 27, 76, 96, 100–
Herdmann, F., 97 102, 104, 105, 113, 115, 120, 122,
Hobbes, Th., 37, 45 130–134, 137, 142, 143, 162, 166,
Hoeven, E. van der, 43, 44 169, 175, 176
Hogendorp, G.K. van, 173, 200, 213
Hooft, P.C., 27 Mably, G.B. de, 96
Hoola van Nooten, D., 6, 95, 102– Machiavelli, N., 26, 57, 62, 63, 75,
105, 140 149
Hop, J., 93 Manen, J. van, 195
Hora Siccama, J., 201 Marmont, A. de, 205
Hove, N. ten, 119 Meerman, J., 1, 6, 10, 130, 133, 157,
Huber, U., 71 163, 165, 167, 172, 175, 176
Huizinga, J., 81 Mirabeau, H.-G. Riqueti, count of,
Hulshoff, M.A., 207 20–23
Humboldt, A. von, 22 Montesquieu, Ch. de Secondat,
Hunt, L., 161 baron de, 3, 6, 9, 17, 33, 89, 93–
Hutcheson, F., 96 106, 108–114, 120, 135, 140, 181,
183, 186
Israel, J.I., 14
Itsma, W. van, 53, 69, 70, 73 Napoleon, emperor, 202, 204–207
Janiçon, F.M., 106 Oldenbarnevelt, J. van, grand

Jansen, C.J.H., 97 pensionary, 81, 179
Jesus Christ, 65
Julius Caesar, 62 Paape, G., 104
Justi, J.H.G. von, 96 Paine, T., 33, 174, 183, 184
Palmer, R.R., 139
Kemper, J.M., 207 Parival, J. de, 18
Kinker, J., 210 Paulus, P., 131, 185
Klein, L., 85 Pestel, F.W, 102, 106
index 241
Philipson, N.T., 84 Toens, P., 196

Philip II, king of Spain, 33, 90, 153 Tollius, H., 122
Pilati di Tassulo, C.A., 15–17 Tromp, M., 179
Plutarch, 45
Pocock, J.G.A., 26, 27, 32, 56, 57, 161 Uytenhage de Mist, J., 35, 44
Polybius, 59, 61
Pompey, 62, 63 Vattel, E. de, 182
Price, R., 96, 130, 174 Venturi, F., 26, 27, 29, 98
Priestley, J., 96, 130, 174 Vitringa, L.J., 97
Pufendorf, S., 96, 131 Vogel, K. de, 119, 130, 131, 133, 163,
168
Raynal, G.-T., 96 Voltaire, F.-M. Arouet, 17, 75
Robertson, W., 96 Vreede, P., 51, 152–154, 187, 190, 195,
Rousseau, J.-J., 96, 130, 174, 182, 192 196
Rowen, H.H., 31, 34 Vryhart, 152, 153
Ruyter, M. de, 78, 179
Waelwyk, A.G., 122
Sallust, 45, 64 Waermond, 152, 153
Schama, S., 83, 139, 159 Wagenaar, J., 101
Scheels, R.H., 6, 35, 58, 75 Wakker van Zon, P. de, 110, 111, 125,
Schimmelpenninck, R.J., 194, 202– 126, 152, 187
207 Washington, G., 192
Schorer, W., 97 Wilhelmina, princes of Prussia, wife
Shaftesbury, third earl of, 85 of William V, 120
Sidney, A., 96 William I, the Silent, stadholder, 21,
Skinner, Q., 57 69, 213
Slingelandt, S. van, 121, 122, 132 William II, stadholder, 34
Smith, A., 95 William III, stadholder-king, 43, 44,
Sonsbeeck, J.W. van, 192 78, 93, 109, 210
Spiegel, L.P. van de, 118, 120, 163, William IV, stadholder, 44, 53, 54,
165 69, 93
Spinoza, B. de, 27, 31, 35 William V, stadholder, 20–22, 49, 50,
Steele, R., 33, 82, 85 115, 118, 120, 124, 127, 134, 146,
Stijl, S., 8, 11 147
Studiosus, J., 151 Wiselius, S.I., 102, 188, 203, 207
Swildens, J.H., 189, 190 Wit, C.H.E. de, 159
Witt, J. de, grand pensionary, 21, 35,
Tacitus, 45 43, 44, 60, 78, 81, 179
Tarquin, 133 Wolff, C., 117, 130, 131
Temple, W., 11, 18
Tijn, Th. van, 36 Zillesen, C., 3, 6, 78–80, 91, 191
Brill’s Studies in
Intellectual History
Series Editor: A.J. Vanderjagt
56. Pranger, M.B. Bernard of Clairvaux and the Shape of Monastic Thought. Broken Dreams.
1994. ISBN 90 04 10055 5
57. Van Deusen, N. Theology and Music at the Early University. The Case of Robert Gros-
seteste and Anonymous IV. 1994. ISBN 90 04 10059 8
58. Warneke, S. Images of the Educational Traveller in Early Modern England. 1994.
ISBN 90 04 10126 8
59. Bietenholz, P.G. Historia and Fabula. Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from
Antiquity to the Modern Age. 1994. ISBN 90 04 10063 6
60. Laursen, J.C. (ed.). New Essays on the Political Thought of the Huguenots of the Refuge. 1995.
ISBN 90 04 09986 7
61. Drijvers, J.W. & A.A. MacDonald (eds.). Centres of Learning. Learning and Location in
Pre-Modern Europe and the Near East. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10193 4
62. Jaumann, H. Critica. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Literaturkritik zwischen
Quintilian und Thomasius. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10276 0
63. Heyd, M. “Be Sober and Reasonable.” The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seven-teenth
and Early Eighteenth Centuries. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10118 7
64. Okenfuss, M. J. The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism in Early-Modern Russia. Pagan Aut-
hors, Ukrainians, and the Resiliency of Muscovy. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10331 7
65. Dales, R.C. The Problem of the Rational Soul in the Thirteenth Century. 1995.
ISBN 90 04 10296 5
66. Van Ruler, J.A. The Crisis of Causality. Voetius and Descartes on God, Nature and
Change. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10371 6
67. Shehadi, F. Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10128 4
68. Gross-Diaz, T. The Psalms Commentary of Gilbert of Poitiers. From Lectio Divina to the Lec-
ture Room. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10211 6
69. Van Bunge, W. & W. Klever (eds.). Disguised and Overt Spinozism around 1700. 1996.
ISBN 90 04 10307 4
70. Floridi, L. Scepticism and the Foundation of Epistemology. A Study in the Meta-logical Falla-
cies. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10533 6
71. Fouke, D. The Enthusiastical Concerns of Dr. Henry More. Religious Meaning and the Psy-
chology of Delusion. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10600 6
72. Ramelow, T. Gott, Freiheit, Weltenwahl. Der Ursprung des Begriffes der besten aller mög-
lichen Welten in der Metaphysik der Willensfreiheit zwischen Antonio Perez S.J.
(1599-1649) und G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716). 1997. ISBN 90 04 10641 3
73. Stone, H.S. Vico’s Cultural History. The Production and Transmission of Ideas in Nap-
les, 1685-1750. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10650 2
74. Stroll, M. The Medieval Abbey of Farfa. Target of Papal and Imperial Ambitions. 1997.
ISBN 90 04 10704 5
75. Hyatte, R. The Prophet of Islam in Old French: The Romance of Muhammad (1258) and
The Book of Muhammad’s Ladder (1264). English Translations, With an Introduc-
tion. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10709 2
76. Jestice, P.G. Wayward Monks and the Religious Revolution of the Eleventh Century. 1997.
ISBN 90 04 10722 3
77. Van der Poel, M. Cornelius Agrippa, The Humanist Theologian and His Declamations. 1997.
ISBN 90 04 10756 8
78. Sylla, E. & M. McVaugh (eds.). Texts and Contexts in Ancient and Medieval Science. Studies
on the Occasion of John E. Murdoch’s Seventieth Birthday. 1997.
ISBN 90 04 10823 8
79. Binkley, P. (ed.). Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10830 0
80. Klaver, J.M.I. Geology and Religious Sentiment. The Effect of Geological Discoveries on
English Society and Literature between 1829 and 1859. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10882 3
81. Inglis, J. Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy. 1998.
ISBN 90 04 10843 2
82. McCalla, A. A Romantic Historiosophy. The Philosophy of History of Pierre-Simon Bal-
lanche. 1998. ISBN 90 04 10967 6
83. Veenstra, J.R. Magic and Divination at the Courts of Burgundy and France. Text and Context
of Laurens Pignon’s Contre les devineurs (1411). 1998. ISBN 90 04 10925 0
84. Westerman, P.C. The Disintegration of Natural Law Theory. Aquinas to Finnis. 1998.
ISBN 90 04 10999 4
85. Gouwens, K. Remembering the Renaissance. Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome.
1998. ISBN 90 04 10969 2
86. Schott, H. & J. Zinguer (Hrsg.). Paracelsus und seine internationale Rezeption in der frühen Neu-
zeit. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Paracelsismus. 1998. ISBN 90 04 10974 9
87. Åkerman, S. Rose Cross over the Baltic. The Spread of Rosicrucianism in Northern Euro-
pe. 1998. ISBN 90 04 11030 5
88. Dickson, D.R. The Tessera of Antilia. Utopian Brotherhoods & Secret Societies in the
Early Seventeenth Century. 1998. ISBN 90 04 11032 1
89. Nouhuys, T. VAN. The Two-Faced Janus. The Comets of 1577 and 1618 and the Decline
of the Aristotelian World View in the Netherlands. 1998. ISBN 90 04 11204 9
90. Muessig, C. (ed.). Medieval Monastic Preaching. 1998. ISBN 90 04 10883 1
91. Force, J.E. & D.S. Katz (eds.). “Everything Connects”: In Conference with Richard H. Popkin.
Essays in His Honor. 1999. ISBN 90 04 110984
92. Dekker, K. The Origins of Old Germanic Studies in the Low Countries. 1999.
ISBN 90 04 11031 3
93. Rouhi, L. Mediation and Love. A Study of the Medieval Go-Between in Key Romance
and Near-Eastern Texts. 1999. ISBN 90 04 11268 5
94. Akkerman, F., A. Vanderjagt & A. Van der Laan (eds.). Northern Humanism between 1469
and 1625. 1999. ISBN 90 04 11314 2
95. Truman, R.W. Spanish Treatises on Government, Society and Religion in the Time of Philip II.
The ‘de regimine principum’ and Associated Traditions. 1999. ISBN 90 04 11379 7
96. Nauta, L. & A. Vanderjagt (eds.) Demonstration and Imagination. Essays in the History of
Science and Philosophy Presented to John D. North. 1999. ISBN 90 04 11468 8
97. Bryson, D. Queen Jeanne and the Promised Land. Dynasty, Homeland, Religion and Violen-
ce in Sixteenth-Century France. 1999. ISBN 90 04 11378 9
98. Goudriaan, A. Philosophische Gotteserkenntnis bei Suárez und Descartes im Zusammenhang mit der
niederländischen reformierten Theologie und Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts. 1999.
ISBN 90 04 11627 3
99. Heitsch, D.B. Practising Reform in Montaigne’s Essais. 2000. ISBN 90 04 11630 3
100. Kardaun, M. & J. Spruyt (eds.). The Winged Chariot. Collected Essays on Plato and Pla-
tonism in Honour of L.M. de Rijk. 2000. ISBN 90 04 11480 7
101. Whitman, J. (ed.), Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period. 2000.
ISBN 90 04 11039 9
102. Jacquette, D., David Hume’s Critique of Infinity. 2000. ISBN 90 04 11649 4
103. Bunge, W. VAN. From Stevin to Spinoza. An Essay on Philosophy in the Seventeenth-
Century Dutch Republic. 2001. ISBN 90 04 12217 6
104. Gianotti, T., Al-Ghaz§lÊ’s Unspeakable Doctrine of the Soul. Unveiling the Esoteric Psycho-
logy and Eschatology of the IÈy§. 2001. ISBN 90 04 12083 1
105. Saygin, S., Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390-1447) and the Italian Humanists. 2002.
ISBN 90 04 12015 7
106. BEJCZY, I., Erasmus and the Middle Ages. The Historical Consciousness of a Christian
Humanist. 2001. ISBN 90 04 12218 4
107. Brann, N.L. The Debate over the Origin of Genius during the Italian Renaissance. The Theories
of Supernatural Frenzy and Natural Melancholy in Accord and in Conflict on the
Threshold of the Scientific Revolution. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12362 8
108. Allen, M.J.B. & V. Rees with M. Davies. (eds.), Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philoso-
phy, His Legacy. 2002. ISBN 90 04 11855 1
109. Sandy, G., The Classical Heritage in France. 2002. ISBN 90 04 11916 7
110. Schuchard, M.K., Restoring the Temple of Vision. Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Cul-
ture. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12489 6
111. Eijnatten, J. van. Liberty and Concord in the United Provinces. Religious Toleration and the
Public in the Eighteenth-Century Netherlands. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12843 3
112. Bos, A.P. The Soul and Its Instrumental Body. A Reinterpretation of Aristotle’s Philosophy
of Living Nature. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13016 0
113. Laursen, J.C. & J. van der Zande (eds.). Early French and German Defenses of Liberty of the
Press. Elie Luzac’s Essay on Freedom of Expression (1749) and Carl Friedrich Bahrdt’s On
Liberty of the Press and its Limits (1787) in English Translation. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13017 9
114. Pott, S., M. Mulsow & L. Danneberg (eds.). The Berlin Refuge 1680-1780. Learning and
Science in European Context. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12561 2
115. Gersh, S. & B. Roest (eds.). Medieval and Renaissance Humanism. Rhetoric, Repre-senta-
tion and Reform. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13274 0
116. Lennon, T.M. (ed.). Cartesian Views. Papers presented to Richard A. Watson. 2003.
ISBN 90 04 13299 6
117. Von Martels, Z. & A. Vanderjagt (eds.). Pius II – ‘El Più Expeditivo Pontefice’. Selected
Studies on Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1405-1464). 2003. ISBN 90 04 13190 6
118. Gosman, M., A. Macdonald & A. Vanderjagt (eds.). Princes and Princely Culture
1450–1650. Volume One. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13572 3
119. Lehrich, C.I. The Language of Demons and Angels. Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy.
2003. ISBN 90 04 13574 X
120. Bunge, W. van (ed.). The Early Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic, 1650–1750. Selected
Papers of a Conference held at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel 22–23
March 2001. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13587 1
121. Romburgh, S. van, “For My Worthy Freind Mr Franciscus Junius.” An Edition of the Cor-
respondence of Francis Junius F.F. (1591-1677). 2004. ISBN 90 04 12880 8
122. Mulsow, M. & R.H. Popkin (eds.). Secret Conversions to Judaism in Early Modern Europe.
2004. ISBN 90 04 12883 2
123. Goudriaan, K., J. van Moolenbroek & A. Tervoort (eds.). Educa-tion and Learning in the
Netherlands, 1400-1600. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13644 4
124. Petrina, A. Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Glou-
cester. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13713 0
125. Schuurman, P. Ideas, Mental Faculties and Method. The Logic of Ideas of Descartes and
Locke and Its Reception in the Dutch Republic, 1630–1750. 2004.
ISBN 90 04 13716 5
126. Bocken, I. Conflict and Reconciliation: Perspectives on Nicholas of Cusa. 2004.
ISBN 90 04 13826 9
127. Otten, W. From Paradise to Paradigm. A Study of Twelfth-Century Humanism. 2004.
ISBN 90 04 14061 1
128. Visser, A.S.Q. Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image. The Use of the Emblem in Late-
Renaissance Humanism. 2005. ISBN 90 04 13866 8
129. Mooij, J.J.A. Time and Mind. History of a Philosophical Problem. 2005.
ISBN 90 04 14152 9
130. Bejczy, I.P. & R.G. Newhauser (eds.). Virtue and Ethics in the Twelfth Century. 2005.
ISBN 90 04 14327 0
131. Fisher, S. Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy and Science. Atomism for Empiricists. 2005.
ISBN 90 04 11996 5
132. Wilson, S.A. Virtue Reformed. Rereading Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics. 2005.
ISBN 90 04 14300 9
133. Kircher, T. The Poet’s Wisdom. The Humanists, the Church, and the Formation of Phi-
losophy in the Early Renaissance. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14637 7
134. Mulsow, M. & J. Rohls (eds.). Socinianism and Arminianism. Antitrinitarians, Calvinists
and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe. 2005.
ISBN 90 04 14715 2
135. Rietbergen, P. Power and Religion in Baroque Rome. Barberini Cultural Policies. 2006.
ISBN 90 04 14893 0
136. Celenza, C. & K. Gouwens (eds.). Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance. Essays in
Honor of Ronald G. Witt. 2006. ISBN 90 04 14907 4
137. Akkerman, F. & P. Steenbakkers (eds.). Spinoza to the Letter. Studies in Words, Texts and
Books. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14946 5
138. Finkelstein, A. The Grammar of Profit: The Price Revolution in Intellectual Context. 2006.
ISBN 90 04 14958 9
139. Ittersum, M.J. van. Profit and Principle. Hugo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories and the
Rise of Dutch Power in the East Indies, 1595-1615. 2006. ISBN 90 04 14979 1
140. Klaver, J.M.I. The Apostle of the Flesh: A Critical Life of Charles Kingsley. 2006.
ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15128 4, ISBN-10: 90 04 15128 1
141. Hirvonen, V., T.J. Holopainen & M. Tuominen (eds.). Mind and Modality. Studies in the
History of Philosophy in Honour of Simo Knuuttila. 2006.
ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15144 4, ISBN-10: 90 04 15144 3
142. Davenport, A.A. Descartes’s Theory of Action. 2006. ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15205 2,
ISBN-10: 90 04 15205 9
143. Mazzocco, A. Interpretations of Renaissance Humanism. 2006.
ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15244 1, ISBN-10: 90 04 15244 X
144. Verbaal, W., Y. Maes & J. Papy (eds.). Latinitas Perennis, Volume I: The Continuity of Latin
Literature. 2007. ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15327 1, ISBN-10: 90 04 15327 6
145. Boulton, D’Arcy J.D. & J.R. Veenstra (eds.). The Ideology of Burgundy. The Promotion of
National Consciousness, 1364-1565. 2006. ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15359 2,
ISBN-10: 90 04 15359 4
146. Ruler, H. van, A. Uhlmann & M. Wilson (eds.). Arnold Geulincx Ethics. With Samuel
Beckett’s Notes. Translated by M. Wilson. 2006. ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15467 4,
ISBN-10: 90 04 15467 1 (Published as Vol. 1 in the subseries Brill’s Texts and Sources in
Intellectual History)
147. Radding, C.M. & A. Ciaralli (eds.). The Corpus Iuris Civilis in the Middle Ages. Manu-
scripts and Transmission from the Sixth Century to the Juristic Revival. 2007.
ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15499 5, ISBN-10: 90 04 15499 X
148. Birkedal Bruun, M. Parables: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Mapping of Spiritual Topography. 2007.
ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15503 9, ISBN-10: 90 04 15503 1
149. Lehner, U. Kants Vorsehungskonzept auf dem Hintergrund der deutschen Schulphilosophie und -
theologie. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15607 4
150. Warnar, G. Ruusbroec. Literature and Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century. Translated
by D. Webb. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15869 6
151. Treschow, M., Otten, W. & W. Hannam (eds.). Divine Creation in Ancient, Medieval, and
Early Modern Thought. Essays Presented to the Rev’d Dr Robert D. Crouse. 2007.
ISBN 978 90 04 15619 7
152. Juste, D. Les Alchandreana primitifs. Étude sur les plus anciens traités astro-
logiques latins d’origine arabe (Xe siècle). 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15827 6 (Published
as Vol. 2 in the subseries Brill’s Texts and Sources in Intellectual History)
153. Chardonnens, L.S. Anglo-Saxon Prognostics, 900-1100. Study and Texts. 2007. ISBN 978
90 04 15829 0 (Published as Vol. 3 in the subseries Brill’s Texts and Sources in Intellectual
History)
154. Melve, L. Inventing the Public Sphere. The Public Debate during the Investiture Contest
(c. 1030–1122). 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15884 9
155. Velema, W.R.E. Republicans. Essays on Eighteenth-Century Dutch Political Thought.
2007. ISBN 978 90 04 16191 7
156. Boone, R.A. War, Domination, and the Monarchy of France, Claude de Seyssel and the Lan-
guage of Politics in the Renaissance. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 16214 3
157. Smith, P.J. Dispositio: Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature. 2007.
ISBN 978 90 04 16305 8
158 . Heddle, D.C. John Stewart of Baldynneis’ Roland Furious, A Scots Poem in its European
Context. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 16318 8
159. Margret Schuchard (ed.). Bernhard Varenius (1622-1650). 2007.
ISBN 978 90 04 16363 8
160. István Bejczy (ed.). Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages, Commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics, 1200-1500. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 16316 4

(Brill S Studies in Intellectual History 155) Wyger Velema - Republicans - Essays On Eighteenth-Century Dutch Political Thought-BRILL (2007) PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Brill S Studies in Intellectual History 155) Wyger Velema - Republicans - Essays On Eighteenth-Century Dutch Political Thought-BRILL (2007) PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Republicans

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

printed in the netherlands

Une aubergiste de Helvoet demanda à George II deux guinées

Aber auch noch gegenwärtig ist Freiheit das Allerheiligste dieses

Chapter One: Introduction: “The First Republic of Europe” . . . . . . . 1

Chapter Two: Anti-Monarchism in Early Modern Dutch Political

Chapter Three: Early Eighteenth-Century Political Languages. . . . . 53

Chapter Four: Polite Republicanism and the Problem of Decline . . 77

Chapter Five: Republican Readings of Montesquieu: The Esprit

Chapter Six: Revolution, Counterrevolution and the

Chapter Seven: The Concept of Liberty in the Dutch Republic,

Chapter Eight: Contemporary Reactions to Patriot Political

Chapter Nine: Dutch Constitutionalism at the End of the

Chapter Ten: The End of Republican Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

der frühen Neuzeit, Beiheft 21 (1998) 69–82; “Vrijheid als volkssoeverei-

Amsterdam, I have over the years been supported and encouraged by

Wyger R.E. Velema

INTRODUCTION: “THE FIRST

In 1793, two leading Dutch conservatives published their views on the

1 [Kluit] De rechten van den mensch in Vrankrijk, 367.

4 E.g. Engelberts, Verdediging van de Eer der Hollandsche Natie, 104.

7 [De la Court] Consideratien van Staat, Ofte Polityke Weeg-schaal, 235–247.

die Tugend und die Republik.

Instead, the French were spending their days in slavish submission

12 Zillesen, Onderzoek der Oorzaaken, VI, 42–46.

point. It was certainly regarded with a considerable measure of sympa-

14 [Luzac] Essai sur la Liberté de Produire ses Sentimens, e.g. 104.

schdom; Grijzenhout and Tuyll van Serooskerken, Edele eenvoud.

oped system of commerce in antiquity. It was frequently pointed out

The ancient republics, in short, were generally characterized by an

19 Grondwettige Herstelling, van Nederlands Staatswezen, I, 308.

in common with us except the name of republic”.22 Although his views

22 Montesquieu, Esprit des Loix, I, 187.

Origins of the Batavian Revolution, 122–136.

lowed for citizen participation. To early eighteenth-century writers such

25 [De Beaufort] Verhandeling van de Vryheit in den Burgerstaat, 129.

Similar thoughts could be found even in the camp of the republican

27 Montesquieu, Oeuvres complètes, II, 369–370 (book IX, chapter 1).

The conclusion to be drawn from all these attempts at historical and

2. The Eighteenth-Century Republic Observed

In what has perhaps become the best-known seventeenth-century ac-

30 Stijl, Opkomst en Bloei der Vereenigde Nederlanden, 88.

as something quite exceptional, by many even as an outright miracle.33

competition, that Dutch international political power slowly declined,

Teatro Brittanico, published in 1683, turned out to oﬀend many sensibil-

39 Israel, “Gregorio Leti (1631–1701)”, 268.

historical works, and a man known for his virulent anti-clericalism.48

luxury”.54 Its commerce, although increasingly suﬀering from foreign

54 Ibidem, II, 189.

Montesquieu see Chapter Five.

All shamelessly plundered earlier descriptions of the United Provinces:

62 Van Strien-Chardonneau, “Le Voyage en Hollande”, 89–94.

Eﬀen and Chapter Four.

67 Ibidem, II, 58.

Charlier, “Diderot et la Hollande”. Other discussions of Diderot’s Voyage may be

enrich itself, not to expand”, came close to being a political paradise.74

74 Diderot, Voyage en Hollande, 56.

and work of Mirabeau see Chaussinand-Nogaret, Mirabeau and Furet, “Mirabeau”.

Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789.83 In Aux Bataves, Mirabeau depicted

83 Mirabeau, Aux Bataves, 117–138; Rials, La Déclaration des droits de l’homme.