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L E C T U R E
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‘Failed Enlightenment’:
Spinoza’s Legacy and the
Netherlands (1670-1800)
Jonathan Israel
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NIAS
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study
in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy
of Arts and Sciences
Meijboomlaan 1, 2242 PR Wassenaar
Telephone: (0)70-512 27 00
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E-mail: [email protected]
Internet: www.nias.knaw.nl
The fourth KB Lecture was held at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague on 21 June 2007
The Dutch translation In strijd met Spinoza. Het failliet van de Nederlandse
Verlichting (1670-1800) (translated by Hans van Cuijlenborg), ISBN 978-90-3513209-2, was published by Uitgeverij Bert Bakker (c) 2007.
NIAS, Wassenaar, 2007/5
ISBN: 978-90-71093-58-6
ISSN 1871-1480; 4
(c) NIAS 2007. No part of this publication may
be reproduced in any form by print, photoprint,
microfilm or any other means without written
permission from the publisher.
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‘Failed Enlightenment’:
Spinoza’s Legacy and the
Netherlands (1670-1800)
It is a great pleasure for me, and also an honour, to be delivering the Fourth KB
Lecture. In the last few years this has become an annual academic occasion of
some significance in the Netherlands, chiefly no doubt because it symbolizes the
collaboration in modern society between the staff and resources of a great
national library, like the Royal Library here, in The Hague, and the researchers and
academics who carry on research into, and teach, the humanities in our
universities. Hence, this very special lecture is also inherently linked to the
question of the relevance of the humanities to modern society.
Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), without question the Netherlands’ most important
thinker, was the first great philosopher in history systematically to advocate the
need for democracy and individual freedom, as well as equality, as the basis of a
purely secular social and moral theory. This lends him a pivotal importance in
Dutch as in all human history as well as in present-day debate about society,
politics and religion. Spinoza’s philosophy was an outright challenge not just to
the ancien régime, and to tradition and organized religion, but also a powerful
moral, social and political set of principles that lies at the heart of all nineteenth,
twentieth and no doubt also twenty-first century battles over the true nature of
modernity. Little wonder that Spinoza provoked unprecedented opposition not
only in his own time but throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “The
willingness to view the human situation”, as one recent commentator aptly
expressed it, “without recourse either to metaphysical comfort or to despair
constitutes a new kind of bravery, which Spinoza calls fortitude or strength of
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character – what Nietzsche later described as intellectual probity.”1 We have fairly
extensive evidence to show that in the Netherlands there many disciples of
Spinoza in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth. As the Harderwijk
professor Bernard Nieuhoff (1747-1831) expressed it, in his book Over Spinozisme
(Harderwijk, 1799):
“Men zegt, dat voorheen seer velen gevonden wierden, vooral in
Nederland, die het Spinozisme in stilte koesterden. Zeker is het,
dat zeer weinigen er openlijk voor uit kwamen; en geen wonder;
Spinozisme werd algemeen uit geekreten, als het allersnoodste
atheisme.” [It is said that very many were to be found, formerly,
who cultivated Spinozism in secret, especially in the Netherlands.
What is certain is that very few came out openly for that cause; and
no wonder! Spinozism was generally decried as the very vilest
atheism.]2
Nieuhoff then adds that “nowadays, yet again, Spinozism seems to be coming up
somewhat”.3 Some have chosen to interpret this as referring exclusively to
Germany where in the 1780s there was a great public controversy, the
Pantheismusstreit, about the significance of Spinoza in modern culture. But I shall
argue that it applies to the Netherlands too and that this fact is highly significant
for correctly understanding the Dutch Enlightenment and that the Dutch
Enlightenment is, in turn, a crucial episode – and perhaps the most crucial, at least
after the Dutch Revolt against Spain – for understanding the character of Dutch
modernity.
For if Spinoza, born and bred in Amsterdam, was the first great thinker to set out
the principles championed by democrats, egalitarians, systematic freethinkers and
men of comprehensive toleration (ie. not Locke’s limited toleration), and, hence,
can meaningfully be interpreted as the anchor-man of the Early Radical
Enlightenment, or Vroege Radicale Verlichting, as one says nowadays in Dutch,4
the Netherlands undeniably also played a pivotal role in the wider history of
1
2
3
4
S.B. Smith, Spinoza’s Book of Life (New Haven, Conn., 2003) p. 200.
Bernardus Nieuhoff, Over Spinozisme (Harderwijk, 1799), p. 40.
Ibid., p. 41.
Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested. Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man,
1670-1752 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 43-50.
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modern democracy and equality in another, and at first sight entirely different,
sense. The Patriottenbeweging (1779-87) and the revolutionary democratic
movement formed by the Patriot refugees in exile, in France (1787-95), constitutes
the first and only major European democratic mass movement prior to the French
Revolution, and only eighteenth-century mass movement explicitly demanding not
just democracy but also full individual freedom of thought, expression and
conscience (i.e. was in a significant sense anti-Rousseauist).
This imparts to the later Dutch Enlightenment era a central significance in the
history of the global Enlightenment as a whole which has by no means been
adequately recognized in the existing literature either by Dutch or foreign writers.
Indeed, scholars have been curiously reluctant to accept either that the ideas,
books and philosophical debates that lie behind the democratic projects and
demands
of
the
Patriotten
were
the
decisive
factor
in
turning
the
Patriottenbeweging into a genuinely mass democratic movement or that it did
constitute a decisively important aspect of the Western Enlightenment as a whole.
In fact, contrary to what I shall be saying this evening, nearly all Dutch historians
who have written about this subject, including E.H. Kossmann, have been inclined
to deny that the Patriottenbeweging was a major expression of the
Enlightenment’s general philosophical evolution. It is to attempting to right the
balance, as I see it, that this present lecture is largely devoted.
This now traditional neglect of the intellectual aspects of the Dutch radical
democratic ‘revolution’ of the 1780s seems to me to be trebly unfortunate. Firstly,
it utterly distorts history and as long as this preference for avoiding the ideas and
ideology of the Patriotten persists, it will be impossible to persuade readers to
view the Patriottenbeweging chiefly in terms of ‘Enlightenment’ and the
Enlightenment’s bearing on the emergence of modern democracy and equality.
Since preserving the values of our modern democracy, equality and individual
liberty against forces intent on destroying those values is today rightly considered
an urgent priority, and in the Netherlands more perhaps than anywhere else,
thoroughly demonstrating the wrong-headedness of the claim that the Dutch were
more or less untouched by international Enlightenment philosophical debates in
the 1770s and 1780s, and the, I believe, equally mistaken notion that it is
primarily the social-cultural not the intellectual aspects of the Patriottenbeweging
that matter, becomes a rather urgent priority.
Anyone who reads the pamphlet controversies in progress in the Netherlands
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during the years just preceding the outbreak of the American Revolution, in 1776,
will immediately see that the general public, and not least the Dutch Reformed
Church preachers, were profoundly agitated and uneasy about the impact of the
general European Enlightenment on Dutch culture and society.5 But they will also
see that during the early and mid 1770s, contemporaries were almost entirely
preoccupied with the religious and moral aspects of the Enlightenment’s impact,
and the issue of where to draw the bounds of toleration, and not at all, as far as
the public sphere was concerned, with the political and institutional dimension.
Those orthodox Calvinists who complained that ‘philosophy’ was beginning to
prevail over ‘Bible-teachings’ in many people’s minds, and that a mechanistic
world view was replacing a world governed by miracles and supernatural forces,
and there were very many, blamed not only the French philosophes, and the native
Dutch naturalisten – a key word at the time – but also the influence of mechanistic
and Deistic tendencies with a Leibnizian-Wolffian colouring emanating from
Germany.6
Those Dutch intellectual leaders, such as the Wolffian jurist and future Patriot
spokesman, Professor Friedrich Adolf van der Marck (1719-1800), at Groningen,
who expounded social theories based on purely secular philosophy, rather than
theology, or who like Professor Van Goens at Utrecht, were identified in the public
sphere as championing the ideas of Voltaire, d’Alembert, Diderot, and Hume,
found themselves caught up in a fraught, distinctly embattled, situation.
Admittedly, the religious and moral controversies of the late 1760s and early
1770s ultimately had deep political implications;7 but they were scarcely apparent
at the time. Although Van der Marck was officially dismissed from his chair at
Groningen, in 1773, by the university senate, under suspicion of Socinian
heterodoxy, especially for denying the Fall, and the incapacity of natural reason,
as well as the necessity of Christ’s intercession for human salvation, some (at least
later) viewed theology just a pretext, believing that the Stadholder, who
participated in his dismissal, did so in reality because Van der Marck was inspiring
5 A point stressed in E. van der Wall, Socrates in de hemel? Een achttiende-eeuwse polemiek over
deugd, verdraagzaamheid en de vaderlandse kerk, pp. 11, 27-8, 73.
6 See, for instance, De Waarheid van zyn luister beroofd door de Philosophie van Wolff (Utrecht, 1775)
(Knuttel: 19111) pp. 77-9, 81-2; Godert van Nieuwenburg, Heilzaame en welmeenende raad voor alle
voorstanders van de gevoelens van den Heer Professor Van der Marck (np. 1775) (Knuttel, 19040),
pp. 9-10, 27-3.
7 Van der Wall, Socrates, pp. 74-7
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students with the ‘sentiments of liberty’, as Mirabeau later put it, while the Prince
preferred ‘qu’on lui forme des esclaves’.8 But to all appearances, the public
controversies surrounding Enlightenment ideas in the Netherlands, before 1775,
had little to do with politics. The principal issue in the controversy surrounding
the Utrecht professor, Van Goens, down to 1775, for example was whether, as Van
Goens maintained, one can admire (and teach students about) the literary,
aesthetic and literary-philosophical ideas of, Voltaire d’Alembert, Diderot and
Hume, without admiring or encouraging students to absorb their anti-religious
attitude and basic philosophical principles. Van Goens adamantly insisted one
could and should; his many critics (rather more convincingly) held that one can
not, and if one wishes to preserve an essentially Reformed-minded society, should
not.9 Van Goens must have changed his mind about this later, for he subsequently
abandoned his earlier pro-Enlightenment stance and increasingly withdrew into an
intense Christian piety.
Viewing this from a European and trans-Atlantic perspective, one might say there
was nothing at all unusual here. But what was wholly unique was the way the
Dutch Enlightenment was suddenly politicized and polarized in the most dramatic
fashion, from 1776 onwards, by the outbreak of the American Revolution. Events
in America had a profound effect everywhere in Europe, of course; but only in the
United Provinces and not, I believe, anywhere else did this deep impact
immediately result, in a full-scale and intensely political public controversy in
which Enlightenment thought and philosophers played a key shaping role in the
domestic debate; and, secondly, owing to the Netherlands’ peculiar position,
internationally, at the time, caused a profound rift within the nation, a split that
was to have lasting and profoundly divisive consequences.
These two key features – the deep split in Dutch society and the Enlightenment
controversy were, in fact, inextricably connected because Dutch support for the
8 [Pieter Vreede?], Zakboek van Neerlands Volk, voor Patriotten, Antipatriotten, Aristokraten en
Prinsgezinden (Dordrecht, 1785) (Knuttel, 21041), pp. 35-8; W. Gobbers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in
Holland. Een onderzoek naar de invloed van de mens en het werk (ca.1760-ca.1810) (Gent, 1963),
p. 225.
9 Bericht van den Prof Van Goens rakende de recensie van zyne vertaling van de Verhandeling van
Mozes Mendelszoon (Utrecht, 1775)(Knuttel, 19107), pp. xxi-xxiv, xxxvii, xlii; Johannes Habbema,
Historisch Verhaal nopens het gebeurde te Utrecht (Rotterdam, 1775) (Knuttel, 19105), pp. 67-72,
75-8.
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American rebels, even if largely politically and commercially motivated, justified
itself to the public in terms of republican, democratic and ‘Left Wolffian’ natural
right theories, on the one hand, while the ties between the House of Orange and
Britain led the Stadholder’s supporters vigorously to oppose the American
Revolution not just through loyalty to the House of Orange but also because they
were convinced that “l’union la plus intime avec l’Angleterre”, as one of them put
it, was the proper basis for Dutch state policy and the best way to protect the
Republic’s political independence, trade and colonies.
Both sides in this bitter and escalating quarrel crucially invoked Enlightenment
ideas; however, the two sides appealed not just to different Enlightenment ideas
but to very different dimensions of the Enlightenment. A key spokesman for the
Orangist side, for example, was the Netherlands’ leading Jewish philosophe, the
wealthy patrician, Isaac de Pinto (1717-87), a long-standing opponent within the
Jewish community since his youth of both Spinozism, and the French materialism
which he rightly saw as its heir.10 De Pinto held that property and privilege were
the right basis for ‘Dutch liberty’ and, in consequence, fiercely denounced in the
press those Dutchmen who criticized Britain and supported the American
Revolution. Contending that “par l’extension de la participation du pouvoir, on
tend à détruire la liberté”, he powerfully invoked Montesquieu – a philosophe
widely known to have admired British mixed monarchy, and a philosophe often
appealed to in the 1780s on behalf of socially conservative causes, including the
defence of serfdom in Russia, and even slavery in the Caribbean. Citing
Montesquieu, De Pinto warned his countrymen: “il ne faut pas confondre le
pouvoir du people, avec la liberté du peuple.”11
Many Dutchmen, argued De Pinto, were overlooking the centrality of commercial
interest in the traditions and policy-making of their republic. Dutch supporters of
American independence were, he believed, being absurdly short-sighted in
maintaining that Britain had no right to tax the Americans without their consent.
What would Holland’s good burghers say were the inhabitants of towns, like The
Hague and Naarden, historically excluded from representation in the States of
10
11
I.J.A. Nijenhuis, Een Joodse philosophe. Isaac de Pinto (1717-1787) en de ontwikkeling van de
politieke economie in de Europese Verlichting (Amsterdam, 1992), p. 9.
[Isaac de Pinto], Réponse de Mr. I. de Pinto aux observations d’un homme impartial, sur sa lettre à
Mr S.B. […] au sujet des troubles qui agitent actuellement toute l’Amérique Septentrionale (The
Hague, 1776), p. 42.
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Holland or the inhabitants of Surinam, Saint Eustatius and the Dutch East Indies,
to demand representation in the States? Would not sensible Dutchmen firmly
oppose such demands precisely as the British Parliament refused the Americans?12
It was in the Dutch interest, argued De Pinto, to help Britain, and also Spain and
Portugal, to maintain their imperial systems in the New World.13 The American
insurgency, he contended, would not stop with the thirteen colonies. “Spain,
Portugal, and all Europe ought therefore to join with England”, he urged, “to
prevent or at least retard that independency.“ Were the Americans to win their
independence, they would soon extend their domination, he predicted, over all of
the New World: “Curaçao, Surinam, the islands of Jamaica, Martinique, St Domingo,
Guadaloupe, in a word, all the European possessions in America and the West
Indies, would pass under [their] dominion, bringing the Republic’s prosperity to
an end – no more could [the Dutch] republic boast of her riches and greatness!”14
De Pinto utterly repudiated the ‘declamations’ of Raynal (and hence also Diderot)
against “la prétendue tyrannie des Anglois” and detested their “abominables
éloges des rebelles”.15 In subsequent years De Pinto remained ardently Orangist
and pro-British and supported his equally conservative friend, Van Goens, who
between 1781 and 1783 endeavoured to check the Patriot ascendancy in the
Dutch press by propagating conservative Orangism through the pages of De
Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot, the paper supported by the Stadholder which
he edited.
In other words, the rift in Dutch public life between 1776 and 1780, already clearly
marked out the lines of ideological polarization that developed, subsequently,
during the Patriottenbeweging itself, inexorably pushing the two rival factions in
Dutch politics towards opposite poles of the Enlightenment: conservative
Orangists orientated towards Montesquieu, strong defence of empire, and
adamant insistence on the superiority of the British model; Dutch supporters of
the American rebellion gravitating towards the ideas of the Radical Enlightenment
whether these were packaged in a French republican, German ‘Left Wolffian’, or,
as with admirers of Thomas Paine (whose famous pamphlet Common Sense
appeared in French at Rotterdam as early as 1776), an Anglo-American libertarian
12
13
14
15
Ibid., p. 37.
Isaac de Pinto, Letters on the American Troubles (London, 1776), pp. 34-5, 40-1.
Ibid., pp. 41-2.
Nijenhuis, Joodse philosophe, pp. 30-1.
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format. During the decades, then, that democratic thinking, egalitarianism and full
freedom of expression and life-style first became major constituents of the Dutch
political and social scene, namely the 1780s and 1790s, Dutch society was
increasingly divided between the Patriots and their Orangist opponents, the strife
between them, though certainly a political struggle being at the same time a kind
of Kulturkampf, an irresolvable cultural and intellectual civil war over philosophy,
science, morality and religion.
After 1781, the Netherlands was split from top to bottom not only over the
question of democracy, toleration, political reform and the House of Orange, but
also over the wider intellectual changes introduced by the Enlightenment and
especially the issue of what kind of enlightenment should be embraced as the
basis of a free, successful and prosperous society. In the end, the democrats
resoundingly lost this historic struggle, being defeated by a combination of the
Orangist urban mob and those in Dutch society whom the Leidse Ontwerp of
1785, one of the key Patriot public declarations, called “heerschzugtige
Aristocraaten”, that is office-holders, regents and other elite groups.16 The
democrats were beaten that is by the defenders of social hierarchy, tradition,
aristocracy, empire, ecclesiastical authority and the monarchical principle who
won chiefly by using conservative Enlightenment concepts. But if, in the end, the
democratic Radical Enlightenment was roundly defeated in the Netherlands, it was
defeated only by means of massive interference in Dutch affairs by Britain and
Prussia, and only after a long and very bitter struggle, and after partially winning
for time; moreover, the Dutch democratic Enlightenment lost in a way which
continues to have great relevance and topicality for us today.
Ideas and ideology then are the key to understanding what was going on. I do not
mean to say by this that most people were interested in the ideas or the ideology.
No doubt the Patriot leader, Gerrit Paape (1752-98), was quite right in saying that
most ordinary Patriot supporters had only the vaguest, most incoherent notion of
what Patriot doctrine was about and took no interest in such debates. But this is
true of all modern ideologies; moreover, this lack of interest and understanding
16
Ontwerp om de Republiek door eene heilzaame vereeniging der belangen van regent en burger van
binnen gelukkig en van buiten gedugt te maaken volgens besluit der provinciale vergadering van
de gewapende corpsen in Holland den 4 Oktober 1785 binnen Leyden geopend (Leiden, 1785)
(Knuttel 21045), pp. 35, 47, 61.
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on the part of the vast majority did not prevent Patriot democratic doctrine from
developing coherently, very rapidly and with an impressive momentum among the
movement’s political and intellectual leadership. As Nieuhoff pointed out, there
were some in Holland and elsewhere at the time who identified Spinoza as the
philosophical root of the systematic democratic egalitarianism and materialism
culminating in the Système de la nature and other works by d’Holbach, Diderot,
Helvetius and their disciples as well as in the third edition of Raynal.17 The
connection was pointed to also by another Patriot activist, the French-born
republican journalist and historian, Antoine-Marie Cerisier (1749-1828), in his
important Tableau de l ‘Histoire Générale des Provinces-Unies, (10 vols.;Utrecht,
1777-84). Cerisier, a strong republican, remarkably bold in his published
statements about Spinoza (dating from 1783), observed that Spinoza’s system had
been powerfully renewed in our time by some new “Diagoras [an allusion to
Diderot and d’Holbach], qui n’avaient ni le génie, ni la profondeur et la subtilité
de Spinosa”.18
Spinozistic philosophy, then, culminating in d’Holbach and Diderot was the
philosophy intellectually most closely linked to full democracy, freedom of
expression and life-style, and individual freedom. Very few people, it is true, either
understood or were interested in this. But the emergence of the Patriots as a mass
movement, able to command strong support in the streets, and tendency of the
country’s many civic literary and debating clubs to split between the rival factions
as the political strife intensified, turned such reading and debating societies (and
the universities), into arenas where radical tendencies, nevertheless, indirectly, by
extension, so to speak, gained a huge following. Radical ideas, stripped of their
original philosophical baggage, sufficiently answered the needs of the moment, to
enable a philosophically articulate few, often, like Van der Marck and Nieuhoff,
professors, or else lawyers, doctors, or, like Cerisier and Gerrit Paape, journalists,
to gain a wholly disproportionate influence over what was soon to be a nation-wide
mass movement.
A good example of this remarkable filtering down of radical ideas is the splitting of
the several Leiden literary and debating circles. In the late 1770s and at the
17
18
Nieuhoff, Over Spinozisme, p. 82, 306
Antoine-Marie Cerisier, Tableau de l’histoire générale des Provinces-Unies (10 vols; Utrecht,
1777-84), ix, p. 571.
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beginning of the 1780s, these clubs accommodated both ardent Patriots, like Pieter
Vreede (1750-1837), son of a Leiden textile manufacturer who, by 1783, completely
rejected the old Dutch constitution and urged a democratic Enlightenment
conception of ‘vryheid’, on the one hand, and no less fervent Orangists, defending
the existing constitution, on the other.19 However, by the early and mid 1780s, as
the struggle intensified, the traditionalists were forced out, since relatively few
Leiden professional people, book-sellers or literary figures supported the kind of
conservative Orangism championed, for example, by the publisher and writer Elie
Luzac (1721-1796), or by Adriaan Kluit (1735-1807), the first professor of Dutch
history at Leiden and an adamant Orangist. In effect the clubs were conquered by
the Patriots. Just as Luzac became isolated among the Leiden book-sellers, so Kluit
became marginalized and heavily embattled at the university, his lectures leading
not just to some fierce criticism but several fist-fights.20 Like Van Goens at Utrecht,
he was unceremoniously dismissed from his chair, in 1783, by the Patriots after they
gained control, for the moment, of both universities.
Prior to 1785, admittedly, the public ideology of the Patriottenbeweging in the
Netherlands was not altogether a product of Enlightenment ideas. Dutch
historiography traditionally and still today points insistently to the numerous
examples in public declarations, and the writings of some early Patriot leaders like
Van der Capellen, where Patriot rhetoric and ideology, adorned with lengthy
recitals of historical events, still drew predominantly on alleged ancient
‘privileges’ and the Dutch past.21 Van der Capellen and other Dutch Patriots, it is
held, firmly eschewed abstract concepts, urging the “herstelling der voorregten en
vrijheden van ‘s Lands” [restoration of the privileges and freedoms of the land];
and where they did choose to cite Enlightenment authors uniformly preferred the
more conservative British strain of Enlightenment to the radical message of French
philosophes such as d’Holbach, Diderot, Helvetius and Raynal. Justification for
reform, at any rate down to 1784, allegedly, was predominantly still couched in
terms of what was or was not legitimated by the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt
against Spain and by such episodes from the Republic’s seventeenth-century
history as the First Stadholderless period (1650-72).
19
20
21
R. van Vliet, Elie Luzac (1721-1796). Boekverkoper van de Verlichting (Nijmegen, 2005), pp. 366-8.
Ibid., p. 371.
See, for instance, Joan Derk van der Capellen, Aan het volk van Nederland (1781) (ed.) H.L. Zwitzer
(Amsterdam, 1987), pp. 6-20.
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It is true that Patriot leaders continued, for some years, to show considerable
hesitation about the idea of democracy as a universal principle. De Post van den
Neder-Rhijn, for example, one of the main Patriot newssheets, and a paper resolute
in insisting that Dutch Catholics were co-citizens and should share equally in the
state, noted, in September 1785, that it remained “as opposed to a complete
democracy as it was to a complete aristocracy”.22 But what has been generally
missed is that the elements in early Patriot ideology that appeal to tradition and
reflect intellectual conservatism stemmed mainly from the unavoidable fact that
well-entrenched, old-fashioned notions remained vital for public consumption.
Other evidence proves, indisputably, that well before 1785, arguing for restoration
of the ‘true constitution’ on the basis of historical precedent, was by no means the
predominant tendency among the Patriot leaders and spokesmen. On the contrary,
from the first emergence of the Patriot movement, in the later 1770s, there were –
if we leave aside Van der Cappellen (who really was an aristocrat, a conservative
thinker and strongly aligned with English ideas) – at least five distinct and highly
innovative new strands, dominating the political discourse of the Patriots all of
which were fundamentally new, universal and impossible to justify under the
existing constitution; equally, all were unthinkable except in terms of
Enlightenment thought. These were, firstly, the elevation of the ‘people’ as the
primary source of legitimacy in politics, invoking the inherent legitimacy and
superiority of ‘een volmaakte volksregering’ [a perfect government of the people],
and the principle of volks-souvereiniteit [people’s sovereignty], in a far more
emphatic way than ever before, a shift closely linked, of course, to Patriot
enthusiasm for the American Revolution. The resulting stress on “the people’s
sovereignty and the power which it has delegated to the country’s high sovereigns,
as their representatives”, clearly meant that the people possessed the authority to
abolish the stadholderate, and the whole of the existing Aristodemocratiek
constitution, as one Patriot called it in 1785, should they see fit.23
Secondly, there was the remarkable redefinition of the idea of vryheid ‘freedom’
to mean not freedom under specific historical privileges, but the inalienable
freedom of everyone on an equal basis, the idea that individual “freedom was the
22
23
De Post van den Neder-Rhijn viii, pp. 366, 459; P.J.H.M. Theeuwen, ‘Pieter ‘t Hoen (1744-1828)’ in
O vrijheid! Onwaareerbaar pand!. Themanummer Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht 1987, pp. 43-77, here
p. 68.
[Pieter Vreede?], Zakboek, pp. 20-31.
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aim” of the Patriot movement: “de natie te verlichten”, as Pieter Vreede put it, “haar
deszelfs onvervreemdbaare regten, als een vry volk te leeren keenen, is de
onderneming” [to enlighten the nation to learn to know their own inalienable
rights as a free people, that is the undertaking].24 You can not be said to be free,
he explained, “as long as you have no control over yourselves, over your
belongings and over your own happiness”; hence, only representative democracy
can render individuals free.25
A third major strand of early Patriot republicanism unthinkable in terms of the
past and unimaginable except in terms of Enlightenment ideas was the, for many,
disturbing new doctrine that Catholics and Protestants (including the Mennonites)
were equal in their civil status, or as the Post van den Neder-Rhijn expressed the
point, “dus, zoo ver het het ‘s Lands behoud en welvaart aangaat, medebroeders”
[thus, as far as the country’s upkeep and prosperity is concerned, fellow
brethren].26 This was totally out of line with the whole history of the Republic and,
potentially, rendered Jews, Socinians and Muslims too part of society.
Fourthly, there was now a crucially important discourse of anti-Aristocratie,
deliberately stirring up popular resentment against both the ‘Alleenheerscher en
Aristocraat’, as a necessary part of consolidating the new concept of Vryheid and,
as Gerrit Paape was especially keen to do, in his De Aristocraat en de Burger
(Rotterdam, 1785), implanting the idea that de Vryheid is always in danger from
sinister Aristocraaten and clergy who know how to manipulate the “de afhanglyke,
de onverschillige, de onkundige burger” [the dependent, indifferent and ignorant
burgher].27 This, of course, went together with rhetoric firmly rejecting the
hereditary principle and reflected new social aspirations, urging the promotion of
a fresh set of office-holders who had supposedly demonstrated by their dedication
and abilities, that they were worthy of being elevated from lower to higher offices.
Finally, those Patriot leaders whom the Anti-Patriotten called the Patriot cabaal ,
that is those who led the democratic movement, were rightly seen by their
24
25
26
27
[Pieter Vreede], Beoordeelend en ophelderend verslag van de Verhandeling over de Vryheid
(Arnhem, 1783) (Knuttel, 20405), p. 6.
Pieter Vreede, Waermond en Vryhart. Gesprek over de waere Vryheid der Nederlandren, en den
aert der waere Vryheid (‘Holland’, 1783) (Knuttel, 20400), p. 4.
De Post van den Neder-Rhijn. ii, p, 728 and vi, pp. 945-6 (issue no. 263).
Gerrit Paape, De Aristocraat en de Burger (Rotterdam, 1785) (Knuttel 21046), pp. 9, 53, 55.
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adversaries (and particularly resented by the more conservatively orthodox
Reformed preachers), as the party advocating a universal “vryheid van dencken,
van sprecken, en van de drukpers” [freedom of thought, of speech and of the
press], something which had also never previously before been part of the
Republic’s cultural fabric, at least not in the broad secular sense of freedom of
thought and life-style now being demanded.28 This fifth new plank too stood in
starkest contrast to the style of justification based on tradition, religious doctrine
and precedent usual in practically the whole of ancien régime Europe.29 Leading
Orangist intellectual opponents, such as Kluit, Luzac, and Van Goens, were
entirely justified, therefore, in claiming the Patriots were totally subverting the
true Dutch constitution, past and present, by dragging in wholly extraneous
abstract principles, headed by their ‘philosophical’ concept of vryheid [freedom] –
something the Patriots, of course, mostly denied.30
The persistence of pre-Enlightenment ideas in the early public discourse of the
Patriottenbeweging, it is often pointed out, is confirmed by the most substantial
Patriot publication of the first phase of the movement, the two-volume
Grondwettige Herstelling [Constitutional Restoration] of 1784. This work,
compiled by a group of leading Patriots, including Van der Capellen, and
published anonymously claimed the institutions of the Republic were in a state of
chronic decay, and needed thoroughgoing reforms, to be secured by the ‘people’
with the help of the civic militias. Restoration here was certainly justified on the
basis of historical precedent and existing institutions, the United Provinces,
according to this text, having always been a Volksregeering that tended to
minimize the hereditary principle in society and politics.31 Arming the respectable
citizenry in the style of the American militias, held the Grondwettige Herstelling,
was the way to compel the Stadholder and provincial assemblies to respect the
rights of the ordinary burgher, irrespective of his religion, while simultaneously
keeping the unruly (Orangist) mob at bay.32
28
29
30
31
32
Rijklof Michael van Goens, De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot iii (1782), p. 290.
Israel, Enlightenment Contested, p. 397-405.
S.R.E. Klein, Patriots republikanisme. Politieke cultuur in Nederland (1766-1787), (Amsterdam,
1995), p. 286; W.R.E. Velema, ‘Vrijheid als volkssoevereiniteit. De ontwikkeling van het politieke
vrijheidsbegrip in de Republiek, 1780-1795’, in E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and W.R.E. Velema (eds.)
Vrijheid. Een geschiedenis van de vijftiende tot de twintigste eeuw (Amsterdam, 1999),
pp. 287-303, here pp. 271-2, 302.
Gobbers, Rousseau in Holland p. 224; I.L. Leeb, The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution
(The Hague, 1973), pp. 205-6.
Ibid., pp. 189-92.
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A notable difficulty with adjusting new social aspirations to old ideas, however, is
that such arguments can then easily be challenged on grounds of their highly
dubious historical accuracy. Outraged by what he saw as its flagrant
unconstitutionality, Kluit penned an incisive reply, entitled De souvereiniteit der
Staaten van Holland, verdedigt tegen de hedendaagsche leere der volks-regeering
(1785). The whole point about the constitution of the United Provinces (like that
of Britain), Kluit pointed out, was that Dutch sovereignty, the highest authority,
was not vested in the people. The philosophical doctrine being spread about by
the likes of Rousseau, Paine, and Price according to which the people are always
the true sovereign is roundly rejected by him in favour of the views of Grotius,
Pufendorf, Coccejus, Huber, Thomasius and others who insisted on the purely
institutional character of sovereignty.33 In his later Academische Redevoering
published at Leiden, in 1787, Kluit chiefly blamed for what he saw as the Dutch
catastrophe on the (in his eyes ruinous) influence of Rousseau, Raynal, Mably,
Price and ‘the Americans’.34 This writer continued deep into the 1790s,
contrasting despotisme populaire with Dutch ‘true freedom’, denouncing
democracy which he deemed catastrophically pernicious with “de waare
republikeinsche vrijheid, gebouwd op wettige en welhebragte privilegien” [the true
republican freedom built on lawful and properly established privileges].35
Those addicted to radical intellectual influences nurtured a body of political theory
which justified and legitimated wholesale revolutionary constitutional and
institutional reform. Perhaps the most articulate expression of this, from the
period before 1787, were the ideas of the lawyer and later diplomat and
statesman, Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck (1761-1825), the son of a Mennonite
family, raised at Deventer, who is usually designated a ‘moderate’ Patriot, since he
never went into exile and later became skilled at placating Napoleon. But although
his career culminated in his becoming the last Grand Pensionary of the Batavian
Republic (1805-6), earlier, in the 1780s he appears to have been a thoroughgoing,
if inconspicuous, radical republican, ‘moderate’ only in the sense that he relegated
activism to others and ardently believed in non-violent methods, as well as the rule
of law and decency, values which, after all, all the Patriot leaders subscribed to.
33
34
35
Adriaan Kluit, Academische Redevoering, over het misbruik van ‘t algemeen staatsrecht (Leiden,
1787) pp. 27-8.
Ibid., p. 90n, 93n.
A. Kluit, De rechten van den Mensch in Vrankrijk geen gewaande rechten in Nederland
(Amsterdam, 1793), pp. 66, 103.
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In 1784, Schimmelpenninck published, first in Latin and then, the following year,
in Dutch, his Verhandeling over eene wel ingerichte volksregeering holding that
representative democracy, through regular elections, was the best and most
orderly way to extend democratic principles to larger countries and those with a
federal tradition, like the Netherlands. This doctrine undoubtedly owed much to
the example of the American Revolution but is expounded by Schimmelpenninck
in a systematic, highly theoretical manner not unlike that developed by d’Holbach
in the early 1770s, prior to the American rebellion. The theme of representative
democracy was taken up by Schimmelpenninck, as by Paulus and other Dutch
radical theorists, in the context of criticism of Rousseau and with a degree of
emphasis which had no real parallel in the Europe of the mid 1780s.36
Although it has been claimed that Schimmelpenninck’s intellectual inspiration was
mainly British and American;37 the evidence for this is not very convincing.38 He
esteemed Machiavelli, knew the ancient republican texts, and was familiar with the
Dutch translations of the constitutions of the American states; but the chief
influences on his democratic republican ideology, judging by the authors he
quotes, were Rousseau of whom he was nevertheless rather critical, Mably,
Montesquieu, Diderot and Raynal.39 In his Verhandeling, he translates into Dutch
Rousseau’s claim, in the Contrat Social, that the sovereign power of the people can
not be represented, for the same reason that it cannot be alienated and then
vigorously attacks it, along with Price’s and Priestley’s somewhat equivocal
qualifications of it, stressing the distinction between opperste magt (majestas)
[sovereign power] and the opperste bewind (summum imperium) [executive
power]. Agreeing with Rousseau that the people’s sovereign power can never be
alienated, much less irrevocably surrendered, he denies it follows from this that
executive power can not be entrusted to delegates chosen from among the
people, provided this occurs through the mechanism of democratic elections.40
Hence, a republican legislature should never enact laws in the name of the
assembly itself, like the British Parliament, but always in that of the people as a
whole. Responsibility for enacting laws must necessarily be entrusted to an
elected assembly; but the authority to do this always rests with the people. Elected
36
37
38
39
40
R.J. Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling over eene wel ingerigte volksregeering (Leiden, 1785), pp. 4-5.
Klein, Patriots republikanisme, pp. 193-4.
Ibid., p.193; Leeb, Ideological Origins, p. 182n.
Kluit, Akademische Redevoering, pp. 90n, 93n.
Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling pp. 6-7, 35; Klein, Patriots republikanisme, pp. 222, 266.
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deputies, he insists, are never justified in proceeding against the people’s wishes
or staying in power against the people’s will.
Authority to proclaim laws in the name of the people, held Schimmelpenninck,
derives not from any contract or agreement between society and the executive but
rather from the “contract each burgher concludes with his fellow citizens when he
undertakes to subordinate his own will to the common will of his fellow
citizens”.41 Citing the Dutch-language versions of the constitutions of the states
of Pennsylvania, Georgia, South Carolina, Massachussetts, and New York, and
Mably’s analysis of these, he also considers how best to organize democratic
elections for legislative assemblies. Should the voting, as he and others thought,
be in secret, to protect the individual’s freedom? Or would an open declaration of
votes, as argued by Mably, better ensure that voters did not vote according to
petty personal whims and biases, rather than for the common good?
42
The doctrine that democratic republicanism is the most natural, rational and
fitting form of government for humans, as formulated by Schimmelpenninck, was
based on arguments chiefly drawn from Rousseau and Mably but resonated
unmistakably with echoes of the Brothers De la Court and Spinoza who, however,
are never named.43 Crucial in this kind of democratic republic, argues
Schimmelpenninck, is that the citizenry should possess enough insight and
awareness of politics to be able to judge fittingly over the gemeenebest [common
good]. “Those who have fallen into poverty should be excluded from electing high
office-holders, he maintains, lest they be bought or corrupted and also out of fear
of their all too great ignorance”. Thus, Schimmelpenninck sought to exclude the
poorest but was also at pains to ensure that all those who are householders, or
who in countryside own a piece of land of modest value, should have the right to
vote. The level of property ownership required for eligibility, he emphasized,
should be so moderate that only the lowest stratum of the ‘common people’ – and
nobody else – was excluded, with all those of middling standing being guaranteed
the right to vote.44
A sure sign of the drift away from traditionalist arguments towards a radically
41
42
43
44
Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling pp. 7-8.
Ibid., pp. 12-13.
Ibid., pp. 54-5.
Ibid., p. 22.
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enlightened stance, during the mid 1780s, was the other, of the two, most famous
Patriot declarations, the Leidse Ontwerp of 1785. “The most striking attempt yet
to win over the ran-and-file of the Free Corps to the more advanced views of its
democratically inclined leadership”,45 as Schama describes this document, its
importance lies in its establishing as a general principle that “eene waare
representative Democratie” [a true representative democracy], is the best form of
government, that a society’s laws and institutions must have the people’s consent,
and that “freedom is an inalienable right belonging to all members of Dutch
society”.46 The manifesto’s publication was closely associated with Wybo Fijnje
from Delft, a radical Patriot leader named beneath it; and he was long supposed
to have written it together with Vreede.47 In recent years, however, it has emerged,
thanks to new research, that others also participated, notably Schimmelpenninck
and, also, Cerisier who, it turns out, to have actually composed the draft, originally
in French, from which it was then translated into Dutch.48
As a journalist Cerisier, a no less consistently staunch supporter of the Patriot
cause than the American Revolution, might have played a publicly more
conspicuous role in the democratic movement than he actually did. For both the
British and German press of the time were firmly opposed to the democratic
pretensions of the Patriots and supported the Stadholder and his court, while the
French-language press outside of the Netherlands, in France, the southern
Netherlands and elsewhere, was also predominantly anti-democratic. This offered
a unique opportunity for the prestigious Gazette de Leyde, the French-language
Leiden paper Cerisier edited, from 1785 onwards, as this newspaper was
practically the only voice supporting the Dutch democratic republican revolution
to be heard internationally. But Cerisier was reined in by the paper’s owner, Jean
Luzac, a cousin and rival of the Orangist publisher, Elie Luzac who, if less openly
anti-Patriot than the latter, was nevertheless increasingly troubled by the overtly
egalitarian character of the Patriot cause.49
45
46
47
48
49
S. Schama, Patriots and Liberators (London, 1977), p. 95.
Ontwerp om de Republiek, pp. 49, 62-3.
Ibid., p. 68; Klein, Patriots republikanisme, p. 251; Maarten Prak, ‘Citizen Radicalism and
Democracy in the Dutch Republic. The Patriot Movement of the 1780s’, Theory and Society xx
(1991), pp. 73-102, here, pp. 89-90.
Jeremy Popkin, ‘Dutch Patriots, French Journalists, and Declarations of Rights: The Leidse Ontwerp
of 1785 and Its Diffusion in France’, in The Historical Journal xxxviii (1995), pp. 553-65, here
pp. 557-60.
Ibid., p. 562.
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The significance of the new finds surrounding the Leidse Ontwerp lies less in
Cerisier’s being its principal author than the fact that he was undeniably an
outright democrat and Radical Enlightenment republican theorist, and also an
erudite Spinozist besides being a direct bridge to Mirabeau, Brissot and other
French republican ideologues of the early and mid 1780s. A Frenchman who had
settled in Holland in 1774, Cerisier, an ardent admirer of the early Dutch
Enlightenment of Spinoza and Bayle (as well as Balthasar Bekker who, he says,
despite being suppressed in his day, by his Dutch Reformed Church opponents,
won in the end, since “ses opinions ont pénétré et même prévalu”),50 was the ideal
person to help graft Dutch and French Radical thought onto the emerging Dutch
democratic republican tradition. If Cerisier, inspired by the American rebel capture
of Montreal, in 1776 and the ensuing fighting between the British and
revolutionaries in Canada, dreamt of a future French-speaking republic in North
America guided by the voice of “a Rousseau, a Mably, a Lauraguais, a Raynal, a
Mercier, etc.”,51 his ambition to help establish democratic republics in the
Netherlands and later France itself, were equally guided by universal democratic
principles and very broad anti-Christian, radical, philosophical concerns.
What became the core Patriot doctrines then, were based on ideas drawn from the
Radical Enlightenment. It has often been claimed that in the Netherlands, the
ideologues of both political factions could with justification claim to be ‘verlichte’
[enlightened] men. While, in a very loose sense this is true; it is also highly
misleading unless carefully qualified. For the two sides increasingly represented
not just different but opposing and wholly irreconcilable wings of the
Enlightenment, one Christian the other essentially non-Christian. It is true that like
their adversaries, leading Orangist ideologues of the day, such as Kluit, Luzac, De
Pinto, Van Goens, and Hennert, built their ideas around the quest for ‘freedom’, the
‘common good’, toleration and republican virtue; but, by each of these, they plainly
meant something quite different from their opponents. In particular, Orangist
conservative Enlightenment intellectuals did not agree that ‘reason’ is humanity’s
sole guide, insisting rather on the centrality of tradition, social hierarchy and
precedent as well as faith and ecclesiastical authority. Equally, they totally rejected
the democratic doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, indeed rejected
‘philosophical’ democracy, equality, full toleration and the comprehensive
50
51
Cerisier, Tableau ix, p. 569.
Jeremy Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), pp. 175-8
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individual liberty upheld by the Patriots.52 Thirdly, Orangists tended to be ardent
admirers of the British model, as well as British ideas, and especially of the ideal of
mixed monarchy which was anathema to the Patriots. Finally, they disagreed
broadly about human rights. Luzac indignantly repudiated the key Spinozistic idea,
so important to Paape, for instance,53 that natural right is carried over from the
state of nature into political society; he considered it an outrage that men should
formulate abstract principles on the basis of natural right, and philosophy, and
then, where these clash with the positive laws of society, seek to elevate the former
above the law, overriding the actual constitution.54
While the growing split over philosophy, political theory and science was thus
inextricably bound up from the outset with the political struggle between Patriots
and Orangists, and support for and against the American Revolution,55 it would,
admittedly, be a gross oversimplification to suppose there was ever anything like
a neat or thoroughgoing correlation between ‘aristocratic’ Orangism with British
moderate mainstream Enlightenment, on the one hand, and, on the other,
democratic Patriotism with the Radical Enlightenment. The strong religious
leanings of most of Dutch society rendered this impossible. If the antagonism
between the two wings of the Enlightenment among the more highly literate
sections of Dutch society was uninterrupted and ubiquitous, the relation of this
all-pervasive intellectual rift to political loyalties and mass politics remained
veiled, highly unstable, and extremely complex throughout.
As the neo-Cocceian preacher, IJsbrand van Hamelsveld (1743-1812), an eager
admirer of Johan de Witt and Grotius and one of the leading pro-Patriot preachers,
declared, in his book on the moral decline of the Dutch, in 1791, the European
Enlightenment remained for everyone a highly volatile dichotomy, a Janus-headed
phenomenon, or as he put it a force for both good and evil. He fervently supported
what he saw as the ‘good’ Enlightenment which balances reason with faith and
promotes education, religion and love of reading among the people, celebrating
the literary and debating society Tot Nut van het Algemeen as especially
52
53
54
55
Leeb, Ideolgical Origins, pp. 206-9; Israel, Dutch Republic, p. 1104.
Gerrit Paape, De Hollandsche wijsgeer in Braband (4 vols. Antwerp-Dordrecht, 1788-90) iv,
pp. 40-6, 53-4, 62-3.
W.R.E. Velema, Enlightenment and Conservatism in the Dutch Republic. The Political Thought of
Elie Luzac (1721-1796) (Assen, 1993), pp. 171-2.
Van Vliet, Elie Luzac, pp. 369-70.
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embodying its spirit; but he was equally uncompromising in opposing the ‘bad’
Enlightenment, as he saw it, that is the radical, freethinking tendency that rejects
theology, and ecclesiastical authority and invokes philosophical reason alone.56
The kind of atheism and materialism associated with Diderot, Helvetius and
d’Holbach, furthermore, were generally deemed to be less prevalent in the Dutch
Republic than in England, or “in France especially”, as the Utrecht Orangist
professor Johan Frederik Hennert (1733-1813) affirmed, in 1782, where “both
among the learned and unlearned these every day seem to increase”;
nevertheless, Dutch contemporaries tended to agree, as Hennert also noted, that
“yes, in the Netherlands too here and there, people are infected by this sickness
via their neighbours”.57 He added, moreover, that it seemed to him that Dutch
theologians had become too complacent about this phenomenon: “in our days,
and who would have thought this! more Atheisten appear in the Netherlands ‘dan
sommige theologanten zich schijnen te verbeelden’ ” [than some theologians seem
to suppose].58
But if open atheism was less commonly to be found in the Netherlands than in
France, the intellectual divisions within Dutch culture, through their being
inextricably linked to the political struggle, were, until 1789, much more obviously
divisive than elsewhere, and this open antagonism between the two conflicting
enlightenments seemingly drove many more to embrace outright egalitarian and
democratic views than were to be found anywhere else at the time, even America
where full ‘philosophical’ egalitarianism was still rather rare. Thus the Patriotten
formed their own political clubs and societies and these to an extent overlapped
with the literary and debating societies of the age even if by no means wholly or
exactly.
At the same time, these reading and debating societies undoubtedly added to the
increasingly feverish ideological atmosphere by spreading awareness among the
reading and debating public of the ideas of the chief philosophers, and details of
56
57
58
IJsbrand van Hamelsveld, De zedelijke toestand der Nederlandsche natie (Amsterdam, 1791),
pp. 55, 76, 404-8, 480; Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness and Fall
1477-1806 (Oxford, 1995), pp.1110-11.
Johan Frederik Hennert, Uitgeleezene verhandelingen over de wijsbegeerte (6 vols, Utrecht,
1780-95) ‘voorreede’ to vol. iii (June 1782), pp. 7-8.
Ibid., ‘voorreede’ to vol 1 (1780), p. 8.
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current scientific controversies. Van Hamelsveld, for example, a Patriot with
moderate Enlightenment views, resembled the Orangist professor Hennert, and
many others, in associating what he called the ‘bad’ enlightenment of libertinism
and materialism chiefly with French ideas and influences. Van Hamelsveld admired
Rousseau’s call for a more intense commitment to virtue, but denounced virtually
all other forms of French cultural, intellectual and social influence.59 “Contrary to
what the naturalisten maintain”, insisted this author, “it is religion which is the
chief pillar of a free and democratic republic”.60
Yet, the relentless political struggle inevitably intensified and polarized the
intellectual-scientific rift in Dutch society. Thus when the Orangist news-sheet, the
De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot (1781-3), a paper fiercely derided by all
democrats,61 accused those Dutch Reformed preachers, like Van Hamelsveld, who
chose the Patriot side not merely of forgetting all that the Reformed Church owed
to the House of Orange but also of failing to grasp “dat de hoofden van die party,
tot welke zy zich thans laten overhalen de grootste vyanden van hunne byzondere
leer zyn” [that the heads of the party to which they presently let themselves be
swayed towards are the greatest enemies of their particular teaching],62 they were
making a point which was not just largely correct but which was also a selffulfilling prophesy in the sense that it pushed more and more people into highly
unorthodox, radical modes of thought. Undoubtedly, the Patriottenbeweging
always included numerous more or less orthodox Reformed; but theological
Latitudinarians and neo-Socinians were particularly prominent and the movement
clearly acted as a hold-all facilitating the advance also of freethinking and
materialism, or what Gerrit Paape simply termed ‘philosophy’.
Admittedly, as many scholars have pointed out, the spread of reading and debate
in the Dutch cities in the 1770s and 1780s also reinforced popular Newtonianstyle physico-theology in the estimation of the ordinary reading public, albeit at
the very moment when physico-theology and Newtonianism were actually losing
their grip in the Dutch universities.63 Physico-theology was indeed fundamental to
the moderate mainstream Enlightenment and its spread must have further
59
60
61
62
63
Van Hamelsveld, Zedelijke toestand, pp. 38-9.
Ibid., pp. 73-4.
Van Vliet, Elie Luzac, p. 367.
Van Goens, De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot iii (1782), p. 90.
Van Hamelsveld, Zedelijke toestand p. 208.
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intensified the growing polarity between an official, respectable Dutch
Enlightenment anchored in physico-theological ideas, on the one hand, and its
antagonist, Radical Enlightenment, which was philosophique in the special sense
intended by Diderot, Helvetius, d’Holbach and Mirabeau, on the other, a sense
adopted in the Netherlands by Patriot leaders like Cerisier and Paape. But it is also
arguable that while the spread of the reading societies certainly further stiffened
most readers’ fervent hostility to naturalism and materialism, this form of popular
philosophy must almost inevitably have simultaneously tended to inhibit
adherents of such ideas from embracing any kind of democratic Patriot ideology.
For Newtonianism as a popular philosophy heavily emphasized the idea that the
entire existing order is God-ordained and therefore essentially good.
The supreme voice of Dutch physico-theology in the late eighteenth century, for
example, the massively widely read and influential Johannes Florentius Martinet
(1729-95), a Reformed preacher at Zutphen, and ardent enthusiast for the new
science, did his best to stand aloof from the political conflict. He repeatedly
criticized
Reformed
traditionalists,
and
Orangists
generally,
for
being
insufficiently tolerant, or charitable, towards Catholics and dissenters, but
simultaneously disassociated himself from the ideology of the Patriots. Physicotheology led Martinet to apply much the same principle to history and political
institutions as he believed applied to the physical cosmos: the divine Creator had
ordered all in a harmoniously interacting whole and this should be regarded as the
basis of legitimacy in social life as it was in the physical order of things.64
Consequently, Patriot claims that everything was wrong with the existing political
order and that a general ‘reformation’ was needed, struck him as a sacrilegious
affront to the principle of divine providence.
Another ardently physico-theologial preacher inclined to link study of science
closely to a liberal theology, in opposition to radical ideas and far-reaching
institutional change, was Pieter Kaas (1742-1818), a member of the society
Verscheidenheid en Overeenstemming established in Rotterdam, in 1760. A
philosophical debating club with an originally Wolffian orientation, this group
sought to combine the thought of Leibniz and Wolff with Newtonian experimental
philosophy, the system which in Kaas’s view reveals the entire truth about nature.
Lecturing at one of the society’s weekly meetings, shortly after the Stadholder’s
64
Paasman, J.F.Martinet, pp. 66, 68.
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restoration, in 1788, he publicly joined the struggle to demolish the naturalisme
(Spinoza) and materialism (La Mettrie) which he perceived to be posing a dire
threat to Dutch and all European society. Newton’s empiricism, held Kaas, proves
the fallacy of constructing hypothetical metaphysical systems vindicating Bernard
Nieuwentijt’s vigorously anti-Spinozistic physcio-theology. Newton, Leibniz, and
Wolff, in his opinion, successfully demonstrate how the divine Creator’s free
choice and conscious ordering of the world are compatible with human free will.65
Spinoza, held Kaas, nevertheless remained a dire threat, because his followers had
succeeded in scattering their seed widely in the Netherlands and drawn in many
who had allowed themselves to be seduced by his seductive but sophistic system,
generating a deep malaise in Dutch society.66
Adherents of Spinozistic naturalism, contended Kaas, were philosophically ‘blind’,
victims of fallacies and imposture. But this is unsurprising, he added, since human
reason, since the Fall, is deeply defective, which is what allows the arguments of
the Spinozists to appear convincing to superficial minds. He himself, he says, had
earlier been so attracted by the apparent cogency of reason that he too had been
disastrously lured by it ‘to the very borders of the Deists and atheists’ and now
thanked God for pulling him back ‘in time’ before he had succumbed to Spinoza
and ‘his ruinous followers’. Society in England, France, Germany and “also the
ground of our republic is sown”, he admonished, with the poisonous weeds
left by generations of “Spinozists, Deurhofisten, Hattemisten, Leenhofisten,
naturaalisten, materialisten, deisten, atheisten, vrijgeesten and Socinians”.67
Making matters even worse, he added, there were also some preachers blindly set
on elevating ‘reason’ above Revelation, his particular bête noir being the
philosopher-theologian, Paulus van Hemert (1756-1825), an ex-Reformed
preacher labelled by Kaas a ‘foul Socinian’ who during the 1780s frequented the
Remonstrants and Collegiants in Rotterdam and whose Bible exegesis showed
unmistakable traces of Spinoza’s influence.68
“Il est heureux”, remarked Cerisier, in his Tableau, with undisguised Spinozistic
sarcasm, “que des erreurs [ie. of Spinoza’s philosophy] qui ôtent encore la vraie
65
66
67
68
M.A. Wielema, Filosofen aan de Maas (Baarn, 1991), p. 116; Pieter Kaas, Verhandeling over de
waarheit (1788) printed in Wielema loc.cit, pp. 247-63, here pp. 251, 254.
Wielema, Filosofen p. 55.
Ibid., p. 257.
Kaas, Verhandeling, pp. 255-6.
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base de la morale, n’aient pas eu une influence dangéreuse sur ceux qui
l’enseignaient”, and even more fortunate for Spinoza himself, he added, “qu’il ait
passé sa vie au milieu d’un peuple tolérant”.69 Adolf Hendrik Hagedoorn (17321806), a member of the same Rotterdam society as Kaas, and someone who
composed a treatise about freedom of the will around 1780, wholly disagreed with
such seditious insinuations.70 To claim, as Spinoza does, that nothing is without
a cause but yet that the universe, the totality of everything, has no cause, by
assigning the cosmos no maker, was, held Hagedoorn a flagrant contradiction in
terms, for this is to refuse to assign the whole what Spinoza allocates to its
parts.71 Such a non-sequitur, he argued, entirely undermines Spinozism, a vital
point to make, in his view, since all the naturalisten contend for fatality and deny
‘freedom’, thereby showing themselves to be disciples of Spinoza and destroying
all morality.72 The antidote, he too asserts, was the Newtonian philosophy which
eclipses Spinoza’s and proves beyond all possible doubt, against the naturalisten,
that the universe was created by an ‘intelligent’ maker and that moral ‘freedom’
is an actual thing.
But the revived Dutch Spinoza debate of the 1780s amounted to much more than
just a straightforward clash between the Cerisiers and the Hagedoorns. For there
were several remarkable interventions which greatly complicated the controversy.
The Orangist Hennert, for example, teaching at Utrecht was firmly convinced that
the conventional method of demolishing Spinoza, recommended by the likes of
Martinet, Hagedoorn, and Kaas, was a disastrous mistake. A fervent adherent of
Locke’s philosophy,73 he had no doubt that British empiricism had totally
destroyed the foundations of Spinoza’s metaphysics as of those of Leibniz and the
Wolffians. But he also judged that parts of Spinoza’s philosophy, notably his
psychology, analysis of the passions, and doctrine of association, were based on
an empirical methodology and of such high quality, that it would be disastrous to
permit the naturalisten and materialists to boast of Spinoza as the founder of their
world outlook. The entire Dutch Enlightenment tradition of condemning Spinoza
as intellectually inconsistent, atheistic, and materialist, he judged misconceived,
69
70
71
72
73
Cerisier, Tableau ix, p. 572.
Wielema, Filosofen, pp. 115-16.
Adolf Hendrik Hagedoorn, Verhandeling over de mogelijkheid en dadelijkheid der vrijheid printed
in Wielema, Filosofen, pp. 234-46, here pp. 234-8.
Ibid., pp. 243, 245-6.
Hennert, Uitgeleezene verhandelingen, ‘voorreede’ to vol i. (1780), pp. 2-2v.
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and something immediately to be abandoned. For philosophical ideas, he pointed
out, were now massively penetrating Dutch coffee-house culture in a debased and
superficial form which was feeding the proliferation of cheap pamphlets and
wrong thinking.74
As vulgarized philosophy, observed Hennert, was being brought to the people in
heaps whether his academic colleagues liked it or not, it was vital for responsible
professors, like himself, to try to control this dangerous process. The correct
strategy, he held, was to accept his own far-reaching reassessment of Spinoza and
employ it to drive a broad wedge between Spinoza and the author of the Système
de la nature (d’Holbach) whom he, like so many at the time, considered the true
intellectual leader of the ‘hedendaagsche Atheisten’. Accordingly, Hennert sought
to deny that Spinoza did identify God and the cosmos as one. If Spinoza must be
designated an ‘atheist’ in public debates, then he insisted that “Spinoza’s atheism
is of the least dangerous kind as it is very difficult to understand and rests on
foundations far removed from the usual way of thinking”. Indeed, Hennert sought
to persuade readers that Spinoza was actually an ‘Idealist’, to be bracketed
together with Malebranche, Leibniz and Berkeley and “and no crass materialist who
derives all happenings from mechanistic causes, like a clock or other mechanism
but one who takes the divine understanding to be the origin of the world.”75
To abandon Spinoza to the materialists and atheists would be ruinous, according
to Hennert, not because the man in the street was likely to read Spinoza, or
understand his ideas, but for a quite different reason: because whatever the
dozens of writers who had tried to refute Spinoza had claimed, the fact was that
the most intelligent and learned were bound to find his reasoning cogent. For
within his own (mistaken) premises Spinoza was, contrary to traditional Dutch
arguments, supremely persuasive and often quite devastating. His demolition of
teology, for instance, was equalled by no other thinker: “niemand is my bekend”
[no-one is known to me], remarked Hennert, “die het stuk der eindoorzaken
sterker bestreden heeft dan Spinoza” [who has more powerfully countered the
doctrine of final causes than Spinoza].76 Spinoza, in other words, was simply too
74
75
76
Ibid., pp. 12-12v.
J.F. Hennert, ‘Over den aart der wysgeerte van Spinoza’ in Hennert, Uitgeleezene verhandelingen i,
pp. 1-40, here pp. 31-3.
Johan Frederik Hennert, ‘Derde verhandeling over de wijsgeerte van Spinoza’ in Hennert,
Uitgeleezene verhandelingen i, pp. 176-281, here, p. 252.
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good a philosopher to be lightly left to the enemy. Rather it was a matter of vital
concern for society that this philosopher should be sanitized and incorporated
into the regular canon as a misguided ‘Idealist’ of extraordinary penetration and
cogency who did not, after all, attack religion or seek to undermine morality as
d’Holbach and Diderot certainly did.
Hennert’s solution to the new Spinoza probem in Dutch society may not sound very
convincing to us today but his focusing on the social and cultural mechanism by
which Spinoza was routinely linked to naturalism within Dutch society was highly
pertinent; for this clearly worried many at the time. If it remained scarcely feasible
openly to express favourable opinions about Spinoza, before a sizeable gathering,
and strong inhibitions persisted against mentioning Spinoza at all, except
privately, naturalism was clearly making massive inroads everywhere and becoming
more and more of a worry. The embattled Patriot professor, Van der Marck with his
doctrine of the pius Naturalista even held that naturalism was not irreligious – if
one sufficiently redefines the meaning of the word ‘religious’.77 Consequently, the
spread of radical thought, as the evidence of private letters and memoranda shows,
though chiefly a private affair or, at least, something that proceeded among small
informal circles, nevertheless produced a situation in which identification of both
naturalism and individual freedom with Spinozism could only reinforce the latter
right across the spectrum of the Dutch intellectual elite. Van der Marck himself
remarks that the fact he based everything on the unchanging order of nature led
people in Groningen to assume that he was ‘Spinozist’.78 When restored to
academe by the Patriots in Deventer, in 1783, this remarkable scholar celebrated
his return by publishing one of the most uncompromisingly egalitarian pamphlets
of the decade, claiming the Creator of nature had “established absolute equality
and perfect liberty for mankind and has ordained that whosoever violates these
rights is in a state of sedition against God’s lawful society”, urging everyone to
defend these rights against oppressors.79 Naturalism was indissolubly linked to
equality, democracy, and Spinozism.
Since the spread of naturalism, and the removal of the miraculous, could not be
77
78
79
Bedenkingen en Bezwaren […] uit name van de weleerwaerde classis van Groningen […] op en
tegen de academische lessen van Mr Frederik Adolph van der Marck […] met Deszelfs verklaring
op en tegen die bedenkingen (Groningen, 1782) (Knuttel, 18997), pp. 24, 42-3, 166, 221.
Ibid, pp. 220-1.
Schama, Patriots and Liberators, pp. 69-70.
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halted, and since Spinoza seemed so formidable, Orangist philosophical
strategists could see no alternative but to segregate the one from the other.
Holland’s foremost philosopher at the time, Frans Hemsterhuis (1721-90), was a
senior Orangist official who detested democracy and the Patriots even more than
did Hennert, deeming them “la maladie mortelle de ma pauvre patrie”.80 Politically,
Hemsterhuis’ problem was that he knew that the ‘parti aristocratique’, to which he
belonged, was “sans comparaison le plus faible” in the main Dutch cities and that,
the ‘parti democratique’ was fast gaining the upper hand.81 He was no less
convinced than Kluit that the triumph of democracy and equality would deliver the
United Provinces into “la tyrannie la plus abominable”. Like Hennert who fled to
Germany during the last stages of the Patriot ascendancy but returned victoriously
to his chair in Utrecht, following the Stadholder’s restoration, Hemsterhuis was
immensely relieved by what he called the “revolution’ of 1787”. But he also clearly
understood that, despite the Patriot defeat, democratic ideas were becoming
deeply entrenched in Dutch culture and society.82 He himself had renounced
miracles, Christianity and Revelation. But, like Voltaire, Reimarus and Turgot, he
opted for a formal Deism and the immateriality of the soul, seeing these as the
only effective way to maintain a natural theology capable of blocking naturalism
and the kind of systematic determinism, sensationalism, and moral egalitarianism,
introduced by Spinoza and, in the 1770s, propagated by Diderot, Helvetius and
d’Holbach.
On this basis, Hemsterhuis repeatedly pronounced Spinoza’s philosophy “the
most diametrically opposed to my own”.83 However, closer inspection shows that
his stance was far more ambivalent in reality than it seems at first glance. While
his own philosophical efforts had originally begun with a determined effort to
counter “ce trop célèbre Spinoza”, as he called him, in 1789, and reduce
Spinozistic influence in Dutch society, his later works leaned in a different
direction. The aim of his first philosophical texts was to persuade his friend, the
Amsterdam silk merchant, banker, regent and fellow antiquarian much connected
80
81
82
83
Frans Hemsterhuis, Wijsgerige werken (ed.) M.J. Petry (Budel-Leeuwarden, 2001), p. 400.
Ibid., p. 432.
Ibid., pp. 442-4.
M.F. Fresco, ’Hemsterhuis und seine Stellungnahme zu Spinoza’ in Mededelingen vanwege het
Spinozahuis 85 (Delft, 2003), pp. 3-32, here p. 4, 19-20, 31; Klaus Hammacher, Hemsterhuis und
Spinoza’ in Mededelingen vanwege het Spinozahuis 85 (Delft, 2003), pp. 33-43, here, pp. 31, 36,
38; Henri Krop, ‘A Dutch Spinozismusstreit : the new view of Spinoza at the end of the eighteenth
century, LIAS xxxii (2005) pp. 185-211, here p. 187.
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with Russia, Baron Theodore de Smeth (1710-72) – who was privately an ardent
Spinozist84 – to abandon Spinozism. Yet despite a life-long emphasis on the
duality of body and soul, his ideas increasingly revealed a pantheistic tendency
which explains why it became possible in the 1780s to construe Hemsterhuis
himself as a ‘Spinozist’ which Lessing famously understood him to be. Earlier, De
Smeth also seems to have thought that Hemsterhuis was by no means so far
removed from Spinozism as he claimed.
Spinoza, undeniably (along with Diderot), always remained the philosopher with
whom Hemsterhuis chiefly engaged. He engaged with Spinoza for purely
philosophical reasons but also because he discerned Spinoza’s, and more
generally materialism’s, deep, continuing penetration of the Dutch cultural and
intellectual context. “Les Hollandois ont vecus avec [Spinoza]”, he wrote to his
close friend, the Princess Gallitzin, in March 1789, having been “ses disciples, ses
protecteurs, ses admirateurs; et ont fournis sans aucune comparaison les plus
sçavans, les plus rafinés et les plus determinés Spinozistes qui existent”.85 Having
long before known La Mettrie (whom he despised as a fool)86 and, in 1773, got to
know Diderot from whom he received a long list of detailed criticisms of his own
anti-Spinozistic theses, Hemsterhuis equally viewed the unfolding of the
democratic movement in the United Provinces and advance of the new French
philosophie with the utmost consternation and alarm.87
Hemsterhuis categorically rejected the Patriot doctrine of Vryheid. While he could
admire what the human individual can become, he considered the human
collectivity, society, something highly defective, even contemptible. To take Man
as the measure of what the state and its legislation are for, on the basis of
philosophical idealization of society and the individual, and strive to maximize
human happiness and freedom, as the Spinozists and the coterie d’Holbachique
were doing, seemed to him to entail colossal risks. His own view of mankind
84
85
86
87
H.Moenkemeyer, François Hemsterhuis (Boston, 1975), pp. 12-13, 32; P.C. Sonderen, ‘Passion and
Purity. From Science to Art: Descartes, Spinoza and Hemsterhuis’ in Claudia Melica (ed.),
Hemsterhuis: a European Philosopher Rediscovered (Naples, 2005), pp. 214-15.
Hemsterhuis to Princess Gallitzin, 10 March 1789 quoted in Hammacher, ‘Hemsterhuis und
Spinoza’, p. 38.
Hammacher, ‘Hemsterhuis und Spinoza’, p. 38.
W. Loos, , ‘Politik und Gesellschaft im Urteil Hemsterhuis in seinen Briefen an Amalia von Gallitzin
(1786-1790)’, in Fresco, M.F., Geeraedts, L., Hammacher, K., (eds.) Frans Hemsterhuis
(1721-1790). Sources, Philosophy and Reception (Munster, 1995) pp. 445-69, 451, 453-4, 458.
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remaining doggedly pessimistic and sceptical. Above all, he did not believe that
democracy can form the basis of either a stable or free republic.88 For him, men,
like the rest of nature, were created by a great and wise God while society, on the
other hand, is the work of highly imperfect and often deluded men.89 Morality, he
argued, therefore, can not be the creation of human society, as Spinoza
contended: rather, in his view, God imparts to each human individual his or her
moral sense whereby love and sympathy, and their duties towards their fellow
men, are felt.90 Equally, the monarchical element and hereditary principle, remain
indispensable for the sake of order and stability, being the vital prop of social
hierarchy and the foundation of aristocracy.
Accordingly, Hemsterhuis concurred with Hennert that publicly associating
Spinoza with the new French atheistic materialism was both undesirable and
dangerous. He did not agree, however, that one can detach Spinoza from the
matérialistes by writing treatises attempting to reconstruct him as an ‘Idealist’.
The crux of Hemsterhuis’ problem was that those who identified the new ‘atheism’
with Spinozism were, he thought, actually interpreting his philosophy correctly.
Hence, the only thing Orangists like himself could do to counter the danger was
systematically to delete all mention of Spinoza from their denunciation of
naturalism and materialism. The most astounding feature of Hemsterhuis’ explicit
discussion of Spinoza and Spinozism is that it was all confined to his letters and
conversation. Although his published works all demonstrably engage with
Spinoza, there he never mentions him by name!
The ascendancy of the Patriots in the literary and debating societies between 1780
and 1787, could not, of itself, lead to any form of public rehabilitation of Spinoza.
The States General’s and the States of Holland’s comprehensive ban on Spinoza’s
works, and all restatements of his ideas, enacted in 1678, remained in force and
over a century of strenuous denunciation of Spinozism by church and state as
godless, atheistic and materialist could not be conjured away. Nevertheless, the
Patriottenbeweging did open the way to an informal partial rehabilitation both in
the sense that many of his ideas could now be cautiously restated, without
mentioning his name, using different terminology, as we see in the many
88 Ibid., p. 464.
89 Ibid., p. 461.
90 Ibid., pp. 461- 4, 467.
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publications of Gerrit Paape, for example, and also in the sense that Patriotinclined established academics like Nieuhoff, helped by the ambivalence and
ambiguities of Hemsterhuis and Hennert, could now adopt a markedly more
detached and discriminating approach to Spinoza than in the past, albeit while still
denouncing the more obviously irreligious ideas.
Nieuhoff, a Leiden-trained philosopher, originally from Lingen, was appointed
professor at Harderwijk, in 1776, a town where he remained until the Napoleonic
dissolution of the university there in 1811. One of the three active, openlydeclared Patriots among the nine Harderwijk professors in the mid-1780s, he was
undoubtedly influenced many students with his intensely philosophical approach
to the task of advancing ‘freedom’ and improving society.91 For he was as
opposed to the stadholderate and the existing Dutch constitution as Hemsterhuis
and Hennert were intent on defending them. Disappointed by the comparatively
weak support the Patriots received in Gelderland, he lamenting in a letter, in
September 1786, “hoe diep, hoe seer diep de vrijheid bij ons gevallen is” [how
deeply, how very deeply freedom has decayed among us].92 Committed to the idea
of Enlightenment as a vehicle for reforming society and politics, and advancing
human happiness, his treatise, De wetenschappen en kunsten als hulpmiddel tot
het mensschelijk welzijn (Harderwijk, 1780) sought to show how science and the
arts can further this end.
Nieuhoff is an especially interesting figure in the later Dutch Enlightenment,
because he combined Patriot commitment not just with an indisputably radical
view of the Enlightenment as a process of social reformation and improvement but
combined both with a profound interest in Spinoza and Spinozism.93 His eventual
book on Spinoza and Spinozism – Over Spinozisme (Harderwijk, 1799) – published
shortly after his spending several years in The Hague as a member of the Batavian
Republic’s national assembly, marked the culmination of a long process of
philosophical searching and re-evaluation. Like Hennert and the German writer,
Jacobi, Nieuhoff attributed to Spinoza an almost unparalleled degree of cogency,
91
92
93
W. Christiaens and M. Evers, Patriotse illusies in Amsterdam en Harderwijk (Hilversum, 2002),
pp. 75, 77-8, 90, 95.
Ibid., pp. 75, 78.
Krop, ‘Dutch Spinozismusstreit’, p. 206; M.R. Wielema, ‘Dezen groten, verhevenen tekst onzer
hora!’ Het verlichtingsbegrip van Bernard Nieuhoff’, Geschiedenis van de Wijsbegeerte in Nederland
(1994), p. 184.
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considering his system something by no means to be rejected out of hand but
rather as one that needed to be reformed, adjusted to theism, and then
incorporated into a new general synthesis, rationally ordering the relationship of
man, God and the universe.94
Spinoza was largely correct, in Nieuhoff’s eyes, in rejecting all teleology and
discarding the traditional anthropomorphic notions of God, but had finally
stepped beyond what was acceptable; fortunately, he had latterly been cut down
to size, argued Nieuhoff, by Kant’s critical philosophy. Niehhoff knew the
refutations of Spinoza by Condillac, Wolff, Nieuwentijt and Clarke, among others,
but rated these much less highly than that of Kant.95 The essentially ethical
philosophy which he himself developed during the years of his professorate at
Harderwijck (1775-1811), he characterized as a chaste, humble, and ‘moral
socratisme’ officially incompatible in its essence with Spinozism but well suited to
absorbing the latter’s numerous better elements. Thus Nieuhoff preferred not to
endorse Hennert’s contention that Spinoza was not an atheist or Cerisier’s
deliberately subversive claim that “le fameux Bayle […] ne croyoit pas que les
principes de Spinosa renfermassent l’athéisme”.96 Nevertheless, he too concurred
that Spinoza had to be partly rehabilitated.
The Patriottenbeweging reached its climax in 1786, after a faction of the
Amsterdam regents changed course and tried to reach a rapprochement with the
Stadholder and fire up the Orangist mob against the Patriots there. The Patriot
clubs reacted by organizing huge popular demonstrations which led to a local
coup bringing Amsterdam under Patriot control and setting off a wider chain
reaction. Utrecht, where university students and several professors played a
prominent role, fell firmly under Patriot control.97 At Rotterdam, Pieter Paulus and
his supporters took over the city while in the same month Wybo Fijnje, another
vigorous advocate of representative democracy,98 and Gerrit Paape, a close friend
of Fijnje,99 seized the Delft city hall; Leiden, Dordrecht and other towns likewise
94
95
96
97
98
99
Krop, ‘Dutch Spinozismusstreit’, pp. 206-7.
Ibid., p. 178-9.
Cerisier, Tableau ix, p. 571.
R. de Bruin, Revolutie in Utrecht. Studenten, burgers en regenten in de Patriottentijd, 1780-1787
(Utrecht, 1987), p. 53.
Schama, Patriots and Liberators, p. 141.
Gerrit Paape, Mijne vrolijke wijsgeerte in mijne ballingschap (Dordrecht, 1790) p. 76.
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fell into Patriot hands, while at Arnhem, Zutphen and other towns in the east of
the country, the Anti-Patriottten secured control and the Free Corps were
disbanded.
In Friesland, meanwhile, the young jurist, Professor Johan Valckenaer (1759-1821)
who had for years immersed himself in the works of the French philosophes as well
as Latin law treatises, initiated an abortive bid for a Patriot take-over there, an
effort which was in no small part a product of Franeker University. Nearly all the
provinces remained deeply divided, however, and the threat of civil war loomed.
At the same time, despite the vigour of popular support for both sides, albeit with
the least educated firmly behind the stadholder, there was also a widespread and
growing mood of uncertainty, drift and pessimism.
Intellectually, the Patriot leaders travelled a long way in a short space of time.
Pieter Paulus (1754-96), having become pensionary of Rotterdam at an early age,
developed into one of the foremost intellectual, as well as political, leaders of the
Dutch democratic revolution. During the 1780s, he, like others, abandoned his
own earlier rather traditional constitutional ideology and evolved into a
revolutionary democratic republican of the new type.100 His post-1780 egalitarian
theorizing eventually culminated in his 216-page Verhandeling over de Vraag: in
Welken Zin kunnen de Menschen gezegd worden Gelijk te zijn (1793), most of
which was written in 1791 and which had a considerable impact, rapidly going
through four editions.101 While it refers frequently to Montesquieu, and to a lesser
extent Locke, Price and Sydney, this text is chiefly based on the radically
egalitarian element in Rousseau’s political thought and especially the Spinozistic
idea that the equality of man in the state of nature, far from being dissolved with
the forming of the state, is carried over and reinforced in society in this way
becoming, as it was not before, a moral and legal equality firmly grounded in the
social pact itself.102
The post-1787 Paulus undoubtedly admired Rousseau. But in one important
respect he, like other Patriot leaders, was also an outspoken critic of the great
100 Schama, Patriots and Liberators, p. 70.
101 Joost Rosendaal, Bataven!, Nederlandse vluchtelingen in Frankrijk 1787-1795 (Nijmegen, 2003),
pp. 164-73.
102 Pieter Paulus, Verhandeling over de Vrage: in welken Zin kunnen de menschen gezegd worden
gelijk te zijn (Haarlem,1793), p. 68.
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Genevan. The freedom and equality of the individual proclaimed by Rousseau, he
believed, was directly contradicted by his interpretation of the doctrine of the
‘volonté generale’. To assert, like Rousseau, in the Contract social, objected
Paulus, in 1791, that each of us places his or her person and all his power “sous
la suprême direction de la volonté générale” so that each becomes indivisibly a
part of the whole and that where any individual refuses to obey the “general will”
that person then “must be forced to be free” was to invite terrible abuse,
suppression of individual rights and the kind of tyrannical behaviour which Paulus
already thought the French national assembly of the early 1790s was guilty of.103
Agreeing with Thomas Paine, while condemning the new conservative philosophy
of Edmund Burke, Paulus expounds the rights of man, as he understands them, in
sixteen points carefully limiting the power of the sovereign and ensuring
individual rights and freedom of expression in all circumstances, thereby negating
what he saw as the wrong-headed totalitarian dimension of Rousseau’s thought.
The influence of Rousseau’s political ideas on leading Patriot ideologues, after
1787, was undeniably substantial and, thus, indirectly, it can also said to have
been considerable on the Dutch revolutionary democratic movement as a whole.
But as filtered through writers like Paulus, Schimmelpenninck, Cerisier, Paape, and
others, this influence was highly selective and mixed with some vigorous criticism,
calling in question and sometimes rejecting outright many of Rousseau’s most
cherished doctrines, notably his refusal to embrace representative democracy and
his particular doctrine of volonté générale whose reading was, in fact, wholly at
odds with that of Diderot who had first introduced this term and of d’Holbach,
philosophes who developed a conception of the general good much closer to that
of the Patriot leaders. Consequently, the Patriot intellectual leadership preferred
alternative phrases, such as Paape’s “het algemeen welzijn” to designate the true
object of all legislation, a usage repudiating the “general will” of Rousseau and
faithful to the spirit of Spinoza, Diderot and d’Holbach.
The strong impact of Rousseau seems to have been largely confined, though, to
the upper, French-reading echelons of society. As regards Dutch-language culture,
it is difficult to speak of any marked influence of Rousseau before the early 1790s,
since there were remarkably few translations of his major works available in
Dutch. Although two different anonymous translations of the Contrat social
103 Ibid., pp. 90-96; Leeb, Ideological Origins, p. 226.
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eventually appeared, the earlier came out at Dordrecht only in 1793, and again in
1795 and the second at Harlingen, in 1796.104 Equally, the Discours sur l’inégalité
first appeared in Dutch only in 1795, that is to say forty years after the first French
edition!105
After their rising ascendancy in Dutch life in the years 1783-7, the collapse of the
Patriots, later in 1787, in the face of the Prussian invasion, was abrupt and
spectacular. But so was the setback to France’s prestige and international
standing. The French crown had simply lacked the resources and the will to
embark on a huge new war, facing possibly three great powers (Britain, Prussia
and Austria), in the Low Countries. But a section of the ministry at Versailles,
headed by the minister of the marine, the marquis de Castries, a strongly antiBritish protogée of Marie Antoinette – and enemy of Vergennes, chief adversary of
Enlightenment ideas at the French court, had, prior to the Prussian invasion,
judged the alliance with the Dutch Patriots – and making it militarily effective by
land, sea and in the colonial sphere – the chief interest of the French crown abroad
at the time. The Anglo-Prussian intervention to restore the ascendancy of the
Prince of Orange hence only confirmed in several French ministers’ minds that the
victory of Dutch Orangism with Anglo-Prussian help was an international disaster
of the first magnitude for France.106
In 1787, the United Provinces had suddenly become a highly dependent client
state of Britain and Prussia, the powers which now formally guaranteed the old
constitution and the stadholderate. This result, as it turned out, was to have farreaching implications for the further diffusion of la philosophie, in the Diderotian
and d’Holbachian sense of the term, and hence for democratic revolutionary
ideology, as well as for the prospects for democratic revolution in Europe more
generally. It is hardly surprising that in the aftermath of this repression, the post1787 evolution of Dutch democratic thought continued to move more and more
into the orbit of French and away from that of Anglo-American thinkers and
writers. But we should be wary of the old habit in the Dutch historiography of
claiming that this shift away from British intellectual influences marked a profound
change of course. For the evidence shows exactly the contrary. Viewed in its full
104 Gobbers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Holland p. 59.
105 Ibid., p. 63.
106 M. Price, Preserving the Monarchy. The Comte de Vergennes, 1774-1787 (Cambridge, 1995),
pp. 67-8, 214.
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international and trans-Atlantic Enlightenment context, the Patriottenbeweging of
the period 1787-95 was an intellectual and political continuation of the earlier
movement, suppressed in 1787, even if it is true that, philosophically, it became
further radicalized. It was most certainly not a change of course. In 1787, the
Patriot leaders and many hundreds of activists had to flee the country. Many of the
refugees settled in Austrian territory, particularly Antwerp and Brussels, but many
transferred to France. In this way, colonies of Patriot exiles formed just over the
French border at Dunkirk, Béthune, Gravelines, Watte – where Fijnje, Valckenaer,
and the military commander, Daendels were all lodged in a former Jesuit cloister
for a lengthy period, – and Saint Omer, a garrison town where, around a thousand
refugees settled, from January 1788, and where the less affluent sections of the
refugee community were assigned the local barracks for their accommodation.107
In France, these exiles, Cerisier and Valckenaer prominent among them, received
support from a group of pro-Patriot personalities with influence at court, such as
Lafayette and Mirabeau, and, with the help of de Castries, secured not just
indefinite permission to stay but help with accommodation and direct financial
assistance. They also secured freedom of religious practice under the terms of a
royal edict issued at Versailles, in November 1787, and the transfer to them of
several churches for Reformed services together with legal recognition for their
marriages.108
Though riddled with personal feuds (and much wrangling over where to lay the
blame for the debacle of 1787), as well as disagreement over how to distribute
their exiguous resources, these colonies nevertheless evolved into something like
active Franco-Dutch democratic revolutionary cells. From 1789 onwards, they were
an intrinsic part of the French Revolution and remained so during the period of the
Jacobin ascendancy in 1793-1794. At Saint Omer, a ‘societé de Montagnards’,
affiliated with the Jacobin club, in Paris, was set up by Valckenaer who, though as
much a devotee of Roussseau, Voltaire and other philosophes as before, in practice
proved more of a mildly democratic pragmatist than doctrinaire Jacobin.109 Pieter
Vreede, initially taking refuge, like Paape, in Antwerp, later moved his entire textile
workshop, employing some eighty workers, to Lier where he established a
Protestant church community on the basis of Joseph II’s Toleration edict of 1781,
107 Rosendaal, Bataven!, pp. 164-73.
108 Gerrit Paape, De Hollandsche Wijsgeer in Vrankrijk (Dordrecht, 1790), pp. 54-5, 61.
109 Gobbers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Holland, p. 240; Rosendaal, Bataven!, p. 583.
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a permission subsequently cancelled, in 1789, by the local authorities during the
spread of the anti-Josephine rebellion in the Austrian Netherlands.
Given the predominantly reactionary views of the south Netherlands Patriotten,
there is nothing surprising in the fact that the Dutch Patriot exiles tended to
support Joseph II against the rebels. According to Paape, one of the most radical
of the Dutch Patriotten, the Emperor deserved the backing of all ‘reason-loving’
democrats and enlightened men since these must scorn the ‘stupid’, priest-ridden,
so-called ‘Patriottismus’ of the southern Brabanders which solely consisted, in his
view, of yearning for “de oude constitutie” [the ancient constitution] and in “pure
fanaticism which the priests artfully know how to cultivate”; altogether he
reckoned Brabantsch Patriottismus something beneath contempt.110 Joseph, he
says, had tried to introduce much-needed legal and administrative reforms, and
dissolve some monasteries, to free the land from an unbelievable number of
parasites and make them into real persons, “om aldus het land van een
ongelooflijk getal lediggangers en opeters te ontlasten en er Menschen van te
maken”.111 And yet, in their blindness, the people doggedly opposed Joseph’s
reforms!
Paape deemed Antwerp a particularly dispiriting case, totally unreceptive to
‘philosophy’, though he grants that Ostend, Bruges and Ghent were marginally
better.112 It is noteworthy, given the Marxist notion that the economically most
advanced sector should also be ideologically the most developed, that the
mercantile middle class and business elite of what at the time was economically a
more dynamic city than any in Holland, struck Paape as no less retarded in their
thinking than the unruliest elements of the Orangist plebs of Amsterdam and
Rotterdam. There were no book-shops in Antwerp or Brussels and the local
bourgeoisie had no more access to, nor any more interest in, Enlightenment texts
and ideas than the most ignorant, unschooled sections of Amsterdam’s
population. In Paape’s view, the kind of burgher culture prevalent in Antwerp,
Mechelen and Brussels could never – so long as it remained thoroughly devout,
conformist, and anti-philosophical – produce any meaningful reforms whatsoever:
on the contrary, there “there arose a Patriottismus that strongly supported
110 Paape, Hollandse wijsgeer in Braband iv, pp. 140, 168, 202-3.
111 Ibid. i, pp. 15, 16-18, 51-3, 71.
112 Ibid. iv, pp. 75-7.
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aristocracy” [aaldaar verhief zig een Patriottismus dat de Aristocratie ten sterksten
ondersteund].113
The Austrian Netherlands, today Belgium, seemed to him to illustrate the tragic
fact that while ‘reason is natural’ it can nevertheless be completely suppressed if
one goes about this as skilfully as the Catholic clergy knew how to do. Things had
gone so far, he says, that in Antwerp no-one ever read anything that appeals to
reason. He illustrates this by derisively narrating how an Antwerp connoisseur of
prints he knew of had purchased a complete set of Voltaire’s works so as to
extract the prints, after which he donated gratis a mountain of text for use as
waste paper.114 With the outbreak of the Revolution in France, the spirits of Paape,
Cerisier, Vreede, and the other exiles rose sharply. Fortunately for all Europe,
wrote Paape, “en tot eere van het gezond verstand” [and to the honour of healthy
reason], the French Revolution was now taking matters in hand and leading the
fight against superstition and prejudice. But Paape was not especially optimistic
about the outcome:
“de domheid, het bijgeloof, de heerschzugt en de vloekwaardigste
staatkunde vangen den verwoedsten krijg aan tegens de
Verlichting, de redenlijkheid, de vrijheid en de rechten van den
Mensch! De laatste zijn ongetwijfeld de sterksten, ingevalle hun
zaak voor de vierschaar van het gezond verstand en de
rechtvaardigste onzijdigheid bepleit moest worden – doch of zij in
‘t harnasch tegen hunne partijen zijn opgewaschen, is zeer
twijffelachtig!” [stupidity, superstition, lust for power and the most
damnable statecraft begin the most furious war against the
Enlightenment, reason, freedom and the rights of Man! The latter
is undoubtedly the stronger were the matter to be brought before
the tribunal of right reason and the most just impartiality were to
plead – but whether [the Enlightenment] is a match for its
opponents in war is very doubtful].115
Living, from December 1789, at Dunkirk, Paape was among the most relentless
113 Gerrit Paape, De Zaak der verdrukte Hollandsche Patriotten voor de vierschaar der Menschlijkheid
gebragt (Dunkirk, 1790), pp. 2-3.
114 Paape, Hollandsche wijsgeer in Braband i, pp. 259-65.
115 Ibid., iv, pp. 202-3.
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adversaries of Orangist conservatism, among the exiles, and most dedicated to
furthering what he called “the happiness and freedom of peoples”. The latter
commitment stemmed from the fact that he was among the most adamant in
insisting that it was ‘philosophy’ that was the main active agent capable of
transforming society for the better, a stance he calls philosophische Patriottismus,
in direct opposition to his utterly despised ‘Brabantsch Patriottismus’.116 Human
beings, unfortunately for them, he contended, generally live their lives on the
basis of credulity, ignorance, false loyalties, and hopelessly wrong ideas; only
‘philosophy’ in his opinion, and the spread of understanding and science, holds
out any promise of the kind of general reformation that would create a better
world and enable individuals to lead happier lives.
Politically a crushing defeat, intellectually the year 1787, thus opened up fresh
perspectives, by radicalizing the Dutch democratic Revolution and its ideology, and
tightening the interaction between Dutch and French radical thought. It is probable
that it was in this intellectual and moral rather than in a more narrowly political
sense that one should construe Paape’s later remark, made after his return to
Holland, following the Batavian Revolution of 1795: “wanneer men de zaak van
agteren beschouwt, dan kan men zeggen, dat Oranje, de Patriotten verjaagende, of
tot de vlugt noodzaakende, niet anders deed dan hen naar de Hoogeschool van
Patriottismus en Revolutie te zenden” [when one looks back on the matter one can
say that Orange by driving out the Patriots, or forcing them to flee, did nothing
other than send them to the university of Patriottismus and Revolution].117
This transformation of ‘philosophy’ into the chief, indeed, the sole active agent
which was to change everything for the better, and bring about the universal
revolution to which the Patriot leaders in exile were committed and which they saw
in the making, was clearly intended to transform not just the Dutch context but,
in principle, to be applicable to all human society. The Patriot intellectual leaders
strove to advance their revolution by spreading awareness of the principles of
‘philosophy’ in society and, in this way, encouraging awareness of universal
egalitarian and democratic ideas or what Paape called “de heilzaame revolutie, die
een vrij algemeen begrip schijnt verspreid te hebben”.118
116 Peter Altena, ‘O Ondankbaar vaderland’. Gerrit Paape en de ‘vebeterende’ ballingschap’, De
Achttiende Eeuw xxxviii (2006), pp. 168-80, here pp. 171-2.
117 Quoted in Altena, ‘O ondankbaar vaderland’, p. 180.
118 Paape, Hollandsche wijsgeer in Vrankrijk, pp. 152, 172-3.
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Since so much was wrong with mankind, in their estimation, the Patriot leaders
notion of ‘philosophy’ inevitably extended far beyond the sphere of political
theory. Paape, we may presume from his books, was a Deist or at least a writer
who sometimes invoked an Opperweezen; but for him human life in this world,
and especially overcoming the all-pervasive stupidity which, as he saw it,
everywhere oppresses mankind and replacing this stupidity with freedom, equality
and Enlightenment, was clearly the sole concern of all worthwhile philosophical
endeavour: “een waar wijsgeer bevordert altoos het genoegen en geluk zo van zig
zelve als van zijn medemensch” [ a true philosopher always promotes the pleasure
and happiness both of himself and his fellow man].119 While every aspect of
society and politics urgently needed reforming, as they saw it, morality and
education were especially crucial sectors. But even in the case of morality, it is
never religion, as with Van Hamelsveld, but specifically ‘philosophy’ which is the
guide to be trusted in transforming society for the better and putting new and
better structures in place. This was because only ‘philosophy’, as Paape and the
radicals conceived it, can teach men to order their lives, according to rationallyconceived self-interest, in reciprocal harmony with one’s neighbours, and with
society and the state. In this way religion ceased to be the basis of what is
important in life. If one prefers to base one’s life on reason alone, then the worldly
happiness and general welfare of the people becomes the chief concern of all
clear-thinking persons.120
A characteristic and interesting feature of Paape’s Radical Enlightenment ideology,
particularly in the light of the (completely wrong) thesis, to be found in the recent
historiography, that Orangist and Patriots held similar enlightened views, was his
claim that there were actually no enlightened people on the Orangist side at all.
Doubtless there were Orangists who claimed to hold ‘enlightened’ views. However,
as Paape saw it, the Stadholder’s triumph over the Patriots in 1787 was almost
exclusively due to his employing three key weapons to thwart “de gezonde
wijsgeerte der Patriotten” [the healthy philosophy of the Patriots], none of which
could possibly be condoned by anyone of a truly enlightened disposition. These
119 Ibid., p. 100; P. Altena, ‘De autobiografie van een Delfts patriot. Over Mijne vrolijke wijsbegeerte
in mijne ballingschap (1792) van Gerrit Paape’, in Spektator. Tijdschrift voor Nederlandistik xix
(1990), pp. 11-34, here, pp. 25-6; A. J. Hanou, ‘Verlichte vrijheid. Iets over een denkbeeld in
imaginaire reizen’, in Haitsma Mulier and Velema (eds.) Vrijheid, pp. 187-211, here pp. 204-5.
120 Paape, Mijne vrolijke wijsbegeerte, pp. 611-12, 76; Paape, Hollandsche wijsgeer in Braband iv,
pp. 40, 42-62.
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were, firstly, deliberate incitement of the devout, unruly, and ignorant mob up
against their Patriot opponents, secondly, extensive patronage and the bribing of
a large number of office-holders, and thirdly, the despicably ‘Machiavellian
statecraft’ of self-serving subservience to Prussia and Britain.121 Thus, the
conservative Orangism of men like De Pinto, Van Goens, Luzac, Hennert and
Hemsterhuis with its overriding political-cultural anglophilia, could be coherently
dismissed by radical Patriotten as something inherently anti-philosophique, a
stance structurally grounded on narrow self-interest, privilege, social hierarchy,
the hereditary principle, empire, irrationality, credulity and prejudice.
Here was a revolution of the mind marking a change from precedent to general
principles as the prime source of legitimacy in social theory, morality and politics,
and in evaluating social, legal and political institutions, and at the same time a
shift from an essentially domestic order of priorities to embracing an agenda built
on universal, secular egalitarian philosophical principles. One consequence of
‘philosophy’ rather than historical precedent becoming the chief criterion of what
is just and what is legitimate, was the growing intervention in the Dutch
ideological battle of outsiders intent on scoring philosophical-ideological points
by commenting on the Dutch experience. Long ignored, because this development
has little importance if one prefers to view history from a largely national
perspective, it becomes important when one looks at Dutch developments in the
1780s and 1790s in their true international and trans-Atlantic context.
Among Cerisier’s contributions to the welding of French Radical Enlightenment
and the Dutch Patriottismus together was the assistance he lent Mirabeau in
connection with the latter’s prime intervention on the Dutch scene – his long and
remarkable booklet on the Anglo-Prussian suppression of the Dutch democratic
revolution.122 Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791) was not
only, later, a leading personality of the French Revolution but also, together with
Brissot, Condorcet, Cloots, Paine, Forster, Vreede, Paape and Cerisier, one of a
whole phalanx of ‘philosophical’ republican ideologues in western Europe, active
in the wake of d’Holbach and Diderot, spreading a democratic, egalitarian
message throughout Europe during the years immediately prior to 1789.
Mirabeau’s book on Dutch politics, then, was part of a veritable international – but
121 Ibid., pp. 35, 102, 113-18.
122 Popkin, ‘Dutch Patriots, French Journalists’, pp. 553, 560; Rosendaal, Bataven!, pp. 242, 244-6.
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primarily French and Dutch – flood of egalitarian, libertarian, anti-monarchical
literature and ideas and which constituted, I contend, by far the most important
single causal factor shaping the coming French Revolution and simultaneously
inspiring the post-1787 Dutch democratic revolution.
Even without Cerisier, Mirabeau knew more about the Netherlands than most
other French democratic ideologues of the day, having lived a full year in Holland,
mainly at Amsterdam, in 1776-7 prior to his imprisonment at Vincennes (1777-82)
(for insulting various French aristocrats). After his release, and his causing fresh
offence by violently denouncing the French legal system, he returned to Holland
for a time as an exile. Renowned for his eloquence, Mirabeau was an obvious ally
and patron for Cerisier and the other Dutch exiles to seek. After being approached
by several Patriot leaders, in October 1787, and assuring them of his support, he
was spurred to intervene publicly, on the Patriots’ behalf, by the committee of
Patriot leaders in Brussels who published their Lettre sur l’invasion des provincesUnies à M. le comte de Mirabeau et sa réponse (Brussels, 1787). Mirabeau then
composed with the help of the fiercely anti-British Cerisier (and perhaps also
Brissot), his Aux Bataves sur le Stadholderat, originally published, at Paris, in
April, 1788 and then re-issued in several further French editions.123 A Dutchlanguage version was then published by Paape, both in instalments in his
newssheet, De Verdeediger der Hollandsche Patriotten, and as a book, published
at Antwerp.
According to Mirabeau, all the peoples of Europe bitterly lamented the Patriot defeat
while only Europe’s princes and their courts applauded the Stadholder’s restoration.
If this savoured of wishful thinking, Mirabeau and Cerisier, were close to the mark
in high-lighting the broad European significance of the exodus of such a large group
of politically-aware exiles from the Netherlands. For these were highly articulate
men who had lost everything owing to political oppression. Their situation was thus
conducive to nurturing a resilient, well-organized liberation movement infused with
a revolutionary ideology of equality, democracy and individual liberty, the chief
business of which was to make revolution. Furthermore, their network while
spanning both parts of the Low Countries, had its head-quarters firmly in France,
partly in Paris and partly in and around Dunkirk, Saint Omer and neighbouring
places, close to France’s borders with the Austrian Netherlands.
123 Ibid., pp. 239-42, 244-5; B. Luttrell, Mirabeau (Carbondale, Ill.,1990), p. 89.
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Mirabeau’s objective, like Cerisier’s and Paape’s, was to integrate the Dutch Patriot
cause into what they proclaimed to be the general cause of human freedom and
happiness. The Anglo-Prussian suppression of the Patriottenbeweging was styled
by Mirabeau an ‘odieuse revolution’ which had little chance of succeeding in the
long run. The Patriots had for the moment stumbled ‘dans la cause de l’humanité,
de la raison, de la justice’ but they were not beaten yet, contended Mirabeau, and
would never be.124 Nor would other Europeans ever forget that it was the Dutch,
as Cerisier liked to remind everyone, who were ‘le plus ancien des peuples libres’
and the first, more than two centuries before, to embrace that universal toleration
so necessary, as anyone with any grasp of ‘philosophical’ truth well knew for the
whole of humanity. What Mirabeau and Cerisier meant by ‘necessary’ for humanity
emerges plainly enough from the latter’s astounding remark about Dutch
seventeenth-century toleration in the ninth volume of his Tableau: “le plus grande
liberté de penser et d’écrire comme il parait suffisament par les ouvrages de
Spinosa et Bayle et de plusieurs autres sceptiques imprimés dans ce pays, et la
persecution qu’ils auraient éprouvée dans les autres, voilà les seuls
encouragements qu’ils y trouvaient”.125
Summoning the Dutch to undertake a new Dutch revolt against tyranny and
oppression, Mirabeau depicts Prince William V of Orange, much like Cerisier,
Vreede, Paape and Fijnje, as the most contemptible prince ever to see the light of
day, a creature so craven and subservient to Britain that he had deliberately kept
the Dutch navy as weak as possible, and the Dutch ships-of-the-line dispersed, to
render them ineffective in any conflict with the English: “il se plait à voir ses
concitoyens accablés d’humiliations et d’outrages; il ruine sa nation dans toutes les
parties du monde”.126 The Stadholder had, according to them, intrigued against his
own people, to assist a rival power which, since 1651, had launched no less than
four ‘unjust’ wars of aggression against the Dutch and whose Parliament had, in
the time of Queen Anne, with unheard of cynicism and arrogance, simply
abandoned the United Provinces to the tender mercies of Louis XIV.
The theme of the Dutch Revolt of 1572 being the precursor not just of the
Patriottenbeweging and, according to Cerisier, also the American Revolution,127
124
125
126
127
V.R. Mirabeau, Aux Bataves sur le stathouderat (n.p. [Amsterdam?], 1788), p. 2.
Cerisier, Tableau ix, p. 577.
Mirabeau, Aux Bataves, pp. 98-100.
Cerisier, ‘Aux États Unis de l’Amérique’, in Tableau iii, pp. iii-vi.
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but of the coming Revolution which would universally substitute representative
democracy for social hierarchy and monarchy throughout Europe, was to remain
an idée fixe of both the Patriot exiles and their French and other ideological allies.
Anarcharsis Cloots in his speech of December 1792, to the French National
Assembly, a speech especially addressed to the Dutch and Belgian exiles in France,
likewise assured the Patriotten that before long la philosophie would, finally,
conquer the ridiculous adoration orangienne and, just as Alva and superstition
had been crushed in the 1570s, so now again, with the help of the French people
and army tyranny would be thwarted and (Cloots being an atheist) ‘temples of
reason’ would arise in Holland.128
Ceaseless denunciation of the British crown, Parliament and empire, and of the
Dutch stadholderate, as well as Prussian militarism, in this way became integral to
both Dutch and French revolutionary democratic ideology. If the English showed
scant gratitude for the allegedly generous help the Dutch had given to save them
from ‘Stuart tyranny’, in 1688, still worse, held Mirabeau, was British arrogance,
oppression of others, and systematic “brigandage” around the world , the British
having become a nation which oppresses ‘la liberté’ everywhere as if it were an
enemy. They had let their successes go to their head in a shameless way “plus
digne de pitié que d’envie”.129 If it were not for the presence among them of the
“sublime philantropie de quelques hommes rares”, an allusion to Fox, Wilkes and
Tom Paine, British arrogance would suffice, held Mirabeau, to justify all the
peoples of the world banding together to oppose their “féroce patriotisme”.
He admired Fox and some other “illustrious citizens” of England, one of whom,
earlier, had been Edmund Burke of whose pre-1780 sentiments, regarding
America and India, Mirabeau warmly approved. But now that Burke had shown his
true colours, abandoning his earlier principles, and coming out in support of the
Dutch Orangists, he had seen him for what he really was: it is not for the British,
held Burke, Mirabeau reports with utter disgust, to enquire into the legality of this
or that government: “qu’il nous suffise d’avoir trouvé l’occasion de faire triompher
le parti le plus favourable à nos interêts”.130
128 Anarcharsis Cloots, Aux habitans des bouches du Rhin (Paris, 1792), p. 7.
129 Mirabeau, Aux Bataves, p. 106.
130 Ibid., p. 189.
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When one thinks how Montesquieu and other philosophers have praised the
English constitution to the skies, regarding it as “le plus parfait modèle de la liberté
civile et politique”, protested Mirabeau, one can only sigh for the human race.131
How can civil and political liberty possibly be upheld by a hereditary monarch who
distributes offices and pensions, by a hereditary nobility endowed with “de grands
privilèges”, and a septennial Parliament to which non-existent towns send
‘representatives’ whilst other more substantial towns are excluded?
The royal
prerogative in England might be more limited than in the time of Henry VIII, but is
it questionable whether it is any less of a threat to the people’s freedom for that.
The House of Lords, vestige as it is of a feudal hierarchy, does it not, demanded
Mirabeau, have a vested interest in maintaining and aggrandizing the crown?
Parliament, is it any less corrupt than when it was dissolved by Cromwell?132
The British consider their institutions the finest in the world. But what, asked
Mirabeau and Cerisier, do they offer other nations? As long as the court of Saint
James continues to distract the British people from their true interests with their
“pretensions gigantesques et barbares de preponderance du commerce, de
domination des mers”, one can not expect anything upright or truly great from
this nation, for they seek advantages only for themselves, for their island alone. It
was precisely to abase and ruin the Dutch and keep them subservient to Britain,
rendering them the ‘Indians’ of Europe, that the British government insists so
adamantly that the Republic must retain the stadhholderate and its traditional
constitution, the Princes of Orange being wholly indebted to the British crown and
Parliament for their authority, indeed owing them “un tribut continuel de
reconnoissance”.133
“Tous les hommes”, held Mirabeau, “sont nés libres et égaux”.134 Men being equal
and free by nature, they are further rendered equal by the original avowal
underlying all societies; for in constituting a primitive society all individuals
equally give up the same portion of their original liberty and equality. But this
precious legacy will soon disappear entirely wherever men fail to make the
conservation of these the ceaseless object of their efforts. Government is
131
132
133
134
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
46
pp. 184-5, 211.
pp. 183-5.
p. 108.
p. 117; Roosendaal, Bataven!, p. 518.
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instituted for the happiness of the people and the people has the inalienable and
absolute right to reform, correct, or totally change its government “lorsque son
bonheur l’exige”.135 In fact, contended these ideologues, a people cannot
preserve a free government except through unrelenting adherence to the rules of
justice, moderation, virtue, economy “et par un recours frequent à ses principes
fondamentaux”.136 Morality, they contended, is the basis of politics; hence,
without such a moral base, the laws degenerate and happiness ceases.
Among the works which most clearly illustrates the emerging synthesis of French
materialism and democratic republicanism with Dutch Patriot democratic
republicanism and ‘philosophic’ egalitarianism after 1787 is the important sixtypage Verhandeling over de gelijkheid der Menschen (Amsterdam, 1794). This
anonymous work, published under the pseudonym ‘Justus Batavus’, but
presumably not by the fervently Patriot ex-preacher, Bernardus Bosch who often
used this pseudonym (unless he had by now totally lost his faith), though not
published until 1794 was substantially written, we learn from its preface, in 17912, that is before the treatise of Paulus on the same topic, and seems to have been
sent to Amsterdam, for publication, from abroad, presumably France.
Unsurprisingly, it was immediately banned by the Orangist authorities in
Amsterdam, Leiden and other cities as a perniciously subversive work, unsold
copies being confiscated by the book-shops by the judicial authorities.137
‘Justus Batavus’ Verhandeling over de gelijkheid der menschen, unlike Paulus’
treatise, mentions no philosophers; but is even more ‘philosophical’, and more
radical. He begins by restating the Spinozistic claim that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ have no
meaning except in relation to the moral and social systems created by men.138 To
grasp the significance of this one must study man exclusively as a natural
phenomenon, a test which shows that every man longs to be happy but is in fact
unhappy. From this the author concludes, like Rousseau, that men are unhappy
because the social and political arrangements they have created estrange them
from their own natural selves. To emancipate man and restore him to his former
135 Mirabeau, Aux Bataves, p. 120.
136 Ibid., p. 127.
137 [Justus Batavus], Brief van een Nederlander aan David Willem Elias hoofd-officier te Amsterdam
(np. 1794) (Knuttel, 22276), p. 4; Van Vliet, Elie Luzac, p. 639.
138 ‘Justus Batavus’, Verhandeling over de gelijkheid der menschen (Amstedam, 1794) (Knuttel,
22275), pp. 5-6.
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natural context of individual freedom, a complete social and political
reconstitution is needed.139 The guiding principle of this universal revolution,
proclaims Justus Batavus, again following Spinoza as well as Diderot’s nouveaux
Spinosistes [ie. Diderot, Helvetius and d’Holbach], and Rousseau, must be that
equality should be adopted as the supreme law in the quest for men’s happiness
whether in the moral sphere, the social or political.140 Equality, declares Justus
Batavus, is the true basis of all human justice, morality and ‘salvation’:
“Zonder gelijkheid kon de mensch zijne verhevener zedenpligten
niet uitoefenen, geen hooger geluk bereiken en genieten dan de
dieren. Zonder gelijkheid kon hij geen regel vinden, om zijne
zedelijke werkzaamheden naar in te richten en uit te breiden –
geen toetsteen vinden, om de recht – of onrechtheid zijner daaden
te kennen, en te weeten, of hij overeenkomstig de pligten zijner
bestemming handelde, of daar van afweek.” [Without equality man
could not practice his more sublime moral obligations, neither
reach nor enjoy greater happiness than the animals. Without
equality he could find no rule by which to lay down or extend his
moral activities – find no touchstone whereby to recognize what is
right and wrong in his actions or know whether he dealt in
accordance with the obligations of his lot, or diverged from
them.]141
The institutionalization of social hierarchy is the root cause of all human error,
superstition and dissatisfaction, for as soon as one institutes monarchy,
priesthood and aristocracy, contends this author, it becomes necessary to abolish
basic freedoms and the dignity of the individual and replace these with false myths
and superstition, a veritable fog of ignorance and confused thinking, making use
of the people’s ignorance and credulity to persuade them to trust unquestioningly
in doctrines which have no basis whatever in truth, this being the only effective
way to get them to acquiesce in their own subordination, enslavement and
139 Jonathan Israel, ‘The Intellectual origins of Modern Democratic Republicanism (1660-1720)’, in
European Journal of Political Theory iii (2204), pp, 7-36, here p.12; M. Albertone, ‘Democratic
republicanism. Historical reflections on the idea of republic in the 18th century’, in History of
European Ideas xxxiii (2007), pp. 108-30, here pp. 111-13.
140 Justus Batavus’, Verhandeling over de gelijkheid pp. 10-13.
141 Ibid., p. 13.
142 Ibid., p. 21.
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exploitation. Thus kings become the ‘sons’ and priests the ‘interpreters’ of gods,
those who reveal the divine order and announce man’s divinely-ordained
obligations (especially to priests and kings).142 Hence, everything went
disastrously wrong with humanity, holds Justus Batavus, from the moment
inequality and social hierarchy were first institutionalized.143
Justus Batavus reveals his Spinozism, and apparent debt to d’Holbach, in various
places in his text, most notably at three points: where he says that ‘equality’ and
the moral system that is based on equality, is the sole message of the Bible, both
Old and New Testament;144 in his anti-Hobbesian claim that man’s natural right
carries over, and in a good state carries over as fully as possible, to life under the
state; and in his claim that politics must be structured on the same principle of
equality which forms the only rational basis of legislation and all valid moral
philosophy. To this he adds (following Diderot and d’Holbach but against
Rousseau) that since the life of reason teaches that one must respect and uphold
the rights of others if one wishes them to respect one’s own natural right, it is the
individual’s moral responsibility to defend the rights of others and repel “overal
de verstoorers der Menschelijke rechten” [everywhere those who violate human
rights].145
Accordingly, it follows that all territorial claims, national animosities, empires and
wars between peoples are irrelevant to the interests of the great majority of men
and are solely engineered by kings, priests, and other empire-builders, out of lust
for power, arrogance and contempt for others.146 To curb national animosities,
the future revolution must discredit all forms of chauvinism, and national pride,
replacing “de bekrompen volkshoogmoed en vaderlandsliefde” [the narrowminded national pride and love of one’s Fatherland] which wreaks so much havoc
in the world with “eene algemene Menschen- en volksliefde” [universal love of
humanity and all peoples] based on the principle of universal equality.147 What
Justus Batavus is proposing, plainly, like the other ‘philosophische’ Patriotten, is
universal revolution; but he finds the prospect of using violence to carry it
thoroughly repugnant; it is much better, he argues, to re-establish de algemeene
143
144
145
146
147
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
pp. 13-14, 23.
pp. 23, 31.
p. 41.
pp. 34, 36-7.
p. 34.
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gelijkheid, Man’s universal equality, overthrowing all aristocracy and superstition,
gradually, by persuasion, and other non-violent means.148
Recent Dutch historiography since the 1970s has produced something like a
consensus about the Patriottenbeweging, three major conclusions of which I have
sought to question in this lecture. Firstly, there is the oft-repeated view that the
chief theoretical foundations of the movement were essentially Lockean and
British, the principal source for the new ‘souvereiniteitsopvatting’, as one scholar
expressed it, adopting a similar perspective to that of Ernst Kossmann, “was
undoubtedly a radical working out of the Lockean doctrine of resistance to be
found in the political philosophy of Richard Price, Joseph Priestley and Francis
Hutcheson”.149 While not denying that Priestley and Price were sometimes
mentioned, I hope to have said enough to sow considerable doubt about this longstanding dogma of the Dutch historiography and to suggest that in reality far
more comprehensively and systematically radical ideas than Locke’s, ideas of
originally Dutch but latterly mainly French provenance, lay behind the ideology of
philosophische Patriottismus, the ideology that is of the radical Patriot leadership.
Secondly, there is the equally tenaciously-held tenet that the Dutch Enlightenment
was so eclectic, accommodating and elastic that virtually the same set of ideals,
and the same Enlightenment creed devoted to reforming society and promoting
the public welfare, was shared by both elite Orangists and leading Patriots.150 This
is a view which I myself was willing to accept some years ago151 but which I now
think is altogether unfounded and misleading. In reality, Orangists and Patriots, at
leadership level at least, gravitated towards opposite poles of the Enlightenment.
The so-called ‘enlightened’ Orangists were quickly reduced to an isolated,
intellectual minority adhering either to an increasingly conservative form of
moderate Enlightenment, as with Kluit, Hemsterhuis, Luzac, Hennert and de Pinto,
a set of ideas wholly different from, and consistently at odds with, the principles
148 Ibid., p. 32.
149 Klein, Patriots republikanisme, 287-8, 290; E.H.Kossmann, De Lage Landen 1780/1980 (1976; new
edn. 2 vols., Amsterdam, 1986) i, p. 48.
150 W. Mijnhardt, Tot heil van ‘t Menschdom. Culturele genootschappen in Nederland, 1750-1815
(Amsterdam, 1987), pp. 375; 414; ‘het paradoxale gevolg’, as this author puts it, ‘was dat het
nieuwe beschavingsideaal zowel door patriotten en bataven als door orangisten kon worden
gedeeld’; W.R.E.Velema, ‘Revolutie, contrarevolutie en het stadhouderschap, 1780-1795’, in
Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 102 (1989), pp. 517-33, here pp. 517-18.
151 Israel, Dutch Republic, p. 1112.
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of the radical Patriots or, as with Van Goens, abandoning Enlightenment altogether
for the embrace of the religious Counter-Enlightenment. In this respect, Gerrit
Paape’s claim that those with a ‘philosophical’ approach to life were all on the
Patriot side and that Dutch Orangism was merely a coalition of the ignorant, the
orthodox theologians, and a sprinkling of self-serving Aristocraaten and officeholders, is in large part justified.152
Thirdly and finally, there is a near unanimous conclusion in the recent
historiography with regard to the allegedly ‘Christian’ character of the ‘Dutch
Revolution of the 1780s’, a designation intended, in part, to mark it off in a
decisive fashion from the supposedly quite different, irreligious and materialist
revolutionary Enlightenment welling up in France.153 It is routinely claimed that it
was possible for much the same kind of undogmatic Protestant ethic to serve as
the core of both Orangism and the Patriot movement because both sides
proclaimed toleration and had a vested interest in downplaying the confessional
divisions of the past; and, also because both embraced a Biblically-based and
morally-orientated conception of religion which, at the same time, provided a
cogent basis for their rival political ideals and social perspectives.
As I hope to have shown, this is really a quite peculiar historiographical consensus
to have arrived at as it is indubitable that many, if not most, of the leading
intellectual figures of late eighteenth century Dutch society on both sides of the
Orangist-Patriot divide, at least in private, not only accord no role to Christianity
in defining the values that matter in human life but also more or less expressly
rejected Christian revelation, miracles, dogmas and the authority of the churches
– Hemsterhuis, Nieuhoff, Titsingh, Paape, De Pinto, Cerisier, Hennert, Van der
Marck, Valckenaar, and ‘Justus Batavus’ (whoever he was), prominent among
them. Finally, I hope to have established that the philosophische Patriottismus
which culminated among the Patriot exiles in France but had its roots in the
Holland of the 1770s and early 1780s was an integral part not of the moderate
mainstream but of the European and originally largely Dutch Radical
Enlightenment. Its Spinozistic foundational principles eventually came to shape
not just the failed Dutch ‘Jacobin’ Revolution of 1797 but the defeated, residual
152 [Gerrit Paape], Het Leven van zijne Doorlchtigste Hoogheid Willem den Vijfden, Prins van Oranje
[…] bijgenaamd De Bederver van zijn Vaderland (Dunkirk, 1791) pp. 167-70.
153 Rosendaal, Bataven!, pp. 584-6.
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opposition ‘on the left’ subsequently resisting the compromises of the Batavian
Republic and the Netherlands under Napoleon.
The Radical Enlightenment or what Paape considered to be the ‘true philosophy’
was certainly resoundingly defeated everywhere in Europe at the end of the
eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth and not least in The
Netherlands. The Revolutionairen, as Paape called them failed to make their
conception of ‘de algemeen welzijn’ the object of society, education and politics.
The people showed clearly enough that they simply do not want to throw out
kings, priests and aristocracy, or make equality the sacred rule or curb church
power, much less adopt a purely secular morality, education and social ethic.
Indeed, many Dutch as well as most British saw it as their patriotic duty to fight
the egalitarian principles of the French and Batavian revolutions to their last
breath. No wonder the radical Patriotten, despite their unbreakable conviction that
they were right, came to be increasingly filled with a sense of disillusionment and
despair. In one passage Paape laments:
“Ja! Men moet een wijsgeer worden, en dit is juist iets, dat de
meeste stervelingen niet weezen willen; zommigen zouden liever
het ampt van beul bekleeden! – Allen wenschen naar het waar
geluk, en allen hebben min of meer een heimlijken of openlijken
afkeer van het eenige middel om waarlijk gelukkig te worden.”
[Yes, one must become a philosopher and that is precisely
something which most mortals do not wish to be; some would
rather fill the office of executioner! – All desire true happiness nd
all have more or less a secret or open aversion to the only means
of becoming truly happy.]154
Paape who defines ‘true philosophy’ as being to gear one’s life to promoting the
happiness of the people on the basis of reason alone,155 rejecting all superstition,
had long advocated the need to bring ‘philosophy’ to the people.156 He was
certainly right about the people’s aversion to what he wanted to bring them. But
to what extent, one wonders, were he and the other Spinozists of the Dutch later
154 Paape, Hollandsche wijsgeer in Vrankrijk p. 261; see also Gerrit Paape, De Bataafsche Republiek zo
als zij behoord te zijn (1798) (ed.) P. Altena (Nijmegen, 1998), p. 7.
155 Paape, Mijne vrolijke wijsbegeerte, pp. 6, 11-12.
156 Paape, Hollandsche wijsgeer in Vrankrijk, pp. 172-3.
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Enlightenment also right in their conviction that ‘true philosophy’ as defined by
Paape and Cerisier, really is the exclusive path to an improved society and greater
human happiness?
Whether right of wrong, the later Dutch democratic and Spinozistic Enlightenment
of Cerisier, Paape, Vreede, Paulus, Schimmelpenninck, Nieuhoff
Batavus’ etc. was certainly
and ‘Justus
defeated at the end of the eighteenth and rebuffed
through the entire nineteenth century. Yet it survived as a freethinking
undercurrent and we can not say that it was conclusively defeated since the
egalitarian, libertarian and democratic aspirations of these men were in the end,
at least partly realized, following the defeat of Fascism and Stalinism, in the later
twentieth century. In any case, there is today in and outside the Netherlands an
urgent need to recognize a truth which on the whole Dutch historians have been
tenaciously disinclined to acknowledge: namely, that that aspect of the Dutch
eighteenth-century which is truly relevant to us today is the Dutch Radical
Enlightenment stemming from Spinoza and Spinozism and, not least, its later,
post-1770 phase. For here is something of central significance for our
understanding of the Western Enlightenment as a whole and a story which renders
eighteenth-century Dutch history itself pivotal to understanding the history of the
West as a whole.
The Dutch Patriottenbeweging was the first major democratic Enlightenment
movement in Europe and the only internationally important such movement to
precede (and help shape) the
French Revolution. Certainly, our American friends
can answer to this: yes, but America is much bigger than the Netherlands and our
Revolution began before the Patriottenbeweging in 1776. That, of course, is true:
but the Americans by and large – except for Raynal, Montesquieu and a little
Rousseau – were limited by their colonial intellectual heritage and background to
using mainly British intellectual resources where the democratic republican
tendency (until Paine) remained rather weak whereas the Dutch drew heavily also
on French and German thought as well as their own Spinozistic tradition. This
means that in the Netherlands prior to 1789, equality, individual liberty, freedom
of expression, representative democracy, full toleration, freedom of life-style, anticolonialism, anti-monarchism, opposition to the absolute sovereignty of
parliaments, and ‘anti-aristocracy’ in particular were all more widely, deeply and
thoroughly theorized in philosophical terms than was at that time possible in
America.
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About the Author
Jonathan Israel is Professor of Modern History at the Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton. In the first part of his academic career, during early 1970s, Professor
Israel taught in the north of England (Newcastle and Hull), and from 1974 to 2000,
at University College London, being from 1985 the first non-Dutchman to hold the
chair of Dutch history (in succession to Pieter Geyl, Gustav Reinier, Ernst
Kossmann and K. W. Swart) originally established there, on the initiative of the
Dutch government in 1919. He has been at the Institute for Advanced Study since
January 2001. Originally a Latin Americanist, his first book Race, Class and Politics
in Colonial Mexico (1975) was concerned with the social and political structure of
seventeenth-century New Spain. Subsequently, he worked on Dutch-Spanish
relations in the seventeenth century and then on the Dutch overseas and colonial
trading system during the Golden Age. Since 1993 he has been mainly working on
the history of the Enlightenment from Spinoza to the French Revolution. His later
books include The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World (1660-61) (1982),
European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism (1550-1750) (1985), Dutch Primacy in
World Trade (1585-1740) (1989), Empires and Entrepots: The Dutch, the Spanish
Monarchy and the Jews , 1585-1713 (1990); The Anglo-Dutch Moment. Essays on
the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact (1991); The Dutch Republic: Its Rise,
Greatness and Fall, 1477-1806 (1995); Conflicts of Empires: Spain, the Low
Countries and the Struggle for World Supremacy, 1585-1715 (1997); Radical
Enlightenment. Philosophy and the making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (2001);
Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires
(1540-1740) (2002); Enlightenment Contested. Philosophy, Modernity and the
Emancipation of Man, 1670-1752 (2006). Jonathan Israel is an honorary professor
of the University of Amsterdam and an honorary doctor of the universities of
Antwerp and Rotterdam, as well as a fellow of the British Academy and a
corresponding
fellow
of
the
Koninklijke
Nederlandse
Academie
Wetenschappen.
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KB LECTURES
KB Lectures are organized in conjunction with the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) –
National Library of the Netherlands, in The Hague. The Lecture is often based
on the KB’s special collections and is delivered by the KB Fellow.
Previous KB Lectures were:
1.
2005: Peter Burke
Lost (an Found) in Translation: A Cultural
History of Translators and Translating in
Early Modern Europe
Published by NIAS, 2005
2.
2006: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Weatherwise – The Impact of Climate on the
History of Western Europe, 1200-2000
Unpublished
3.
2006: Robert Darnton
Bohemians Before Bohemianism
Published by NIAS, 2006
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The KB Fellowship is a joint venture between the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) National Library of the Netherlands and NIAS. It is awarded to a renowned foreign
scholar in the humanities and offers sustained access to the extensive collections
of the National Library. The research facilities provided at both institutes allow the
recipient to reap the benefits of both places: the KB's unique collections and NIAS'
international and multidisciplinary environment. With the implementation of this
fellowship, NIAS and the National Library hope not only to encourage and
strengthen the collaboration between libraries and their collections and between
scholars and their research but also to further the dissemination of knowledge in
the humanities and to promote research in this area.
NIAS is an institute for advanced study in the humanities and social sciences. Each
year, the Institute invites approximately 50 carefully selected scholars, both from
within and outside the Netherlands, to its centre in Wassenaar, where they are
given an opportunity to do research for up to a ten-month period. Fellows carry
out their work either as individuals or as part of one of the research theme groups,
which NIAS initiates every year. In addition, through its conference facilities, the
Institute also functions as a meeting place for scientific programmes of a shorter
duration and more specific character, such as workshops, seminars, summer
schools, and study centres. NIAS is an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy
of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) - National Library of the Netherlands is located in
The Hague. The KB gives access to the knowledge and culture of the past and
present by providing high-quality services for research, study and cultural
experience. The KB's collection constitutes the living national memory of written,
printed and electronic publications. The humanities take pride of place, with
special attention being given to Dutch history, language and culture in a wide
international context. The KB is also a knowledge centre for the supply of scientific
and scholarly information and the pivot of national and international
co-operation.
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