The 18th century

Economic and political stagnation

Once the Dutch fleet had declined, Dutch mercantile interests became largely dependent on English goodwill, yet the rulers were more concerned with reducing the monumental debt that weighed heavily upon the country. During the 18th century, Dutch trade and shipping were able to maintain the level of activity reached at the end of the 17th century, but they did not match the dramatic expansion of French and especially English competitors. The Dutch near monopoly was now only a memory. Holland remained rich in accumulated capital, although much of it could find no outlet for investment in business. Some went into the purchase of country houses, but a great deal was used to buy bonds of foreign governments. The bankers of Amsterdam were among the most important in Europe, rivaling those of London and Geneva.

Dutch culture failed to hold its eminence; individuals such as medical scientist Hermann Boerhaave and jurist Cornelis van Bynkershoek were highly respected, but they were not the shapers and shakers of European thought. Dutch artists were no longer of the first order, and literature largely followed English or French models without matching their achievements. The quality of life changed: instead of the seething activity of the 17th century, the 18th century was one of calm and easeful pleasantness, at least for men of property. The middling classes in town and countryside also knew continuing prosperity; conditions for the labouring classes continued to be hard, although foreign visitors thought the workers lived better there than elsewhere. There was a residual class of unemployed who subsisted on the charity of town governments and private foundations. Religious life was more relaxed, particularly among Protestants. Roman Catholics, still without political rights but facing milder restrictions, fell into a quarrel between adherents of Jansenism, which followed Augustinian theology, especially in the matter of predestination, and supporters of Rome, in particular the Jesuits. The former split off to form the Old Catholic Church, a small denomination that still exists. The educated classes widely accepted the principles and attitudes of the Enlightenment, although without the sharp hostility to religion that characterized the French philosophes.

During the second stadtholderless period of Dutch government (1702–47), the republican system became an immobile oligarchy. The “liberty” defended by the regents as soundly republican was in practice the rule of hereditary patricians, responsible to neither the citizenry below nor a stadtholder above. Although William IV yearned for restoration to the offices held by the princes of Orange before him in the provinces to the south, he accepted, with no less admiration and commitment than the regents, the perfection and immutability of the Dutch constitutional system, with the single difference that he envisioned it including the stadtholderate for all the provinces.

It was not until the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) that the power of the regents began to crumble. As in 1672, disaster on the battlefield proved the Achilles’ heel of a regime that had not built up a broad popular political base. The regents had not been able to overcome the traditional commitment of the people to the house of Orange as their natural leader and saviour. French and Prussian armies swarmed over the Austrian (formerly Spanish) Netherlands and were poised for invasion of the United Provinces, which were linked by alliance with Britain, although they had remained formally neutral. When the French forces crossed into Dutch territory, rioting reminiscent of 1672, although less widespread and violent, led to the fall of the second purely republican government and the election of William IV as hereditary stadtholder of all the provinces. Otherwise there was little change; some regents were compelled to step down from their posts, and leadership in the hands of the prince of Orange was uncontested. William rebuffed the efforts of burghers in Amsterdam and other towns who had supported his restoration in order to achieve democratic reforms, in which participation in government would be extended to men of modest property (although not to wage workers or to paupers).

The Patriot movement

During the next decades, in the face of the rigid conservatism of the princes of Orange (William V succeeded his father in 1751 and assumed personal government in 1759) and under the influence of the French Enlightenment, an essentially new political force began to take shape. Known as the Patriot movement, after an old party term used by both republicans and Orangists, it applied fundamental criticism to the established government. Although the Patriot movement was representative of the new democratic and Enlightenment ideals, it had strong roots in native Dutch traditions. From the beginning, the United Provinces had rejected specifically democratic institutions in favour of frankly aristocratic government (in the Aristotelian sense), but the notion that the regents had a duty to serve not their own private interests but those of the country and the people had persisted in theory and in mood. When the aristocracy ceased to recruit new members from below and thus became an enclosed caste, the discrepancy between its claim of service to the general welfare and the reality of its practice became evident.

The Patriot movement took in a wide range of supporters: discontented noblemen such as the Gelderland baron Joan van der Capellen tot den Pol; wealthy bankers and businesspeople without a voice in government; artisans and shopkeepers, traditionally Orangist in sympathy, who were dismayed to find their claims to an effective role in the politics of their towns rebuffed by the princes; and intellectuals committed to the new Enlightenment rejection of arbitrary power. The Patriots included in their ranks many Protestant dissenters and Roman Catholics, but Jews continued to look to the prince of Orange as their protector. Some regents, holding firm to the republicanism of their ancestors and resenting the return of the stadtholderate, found a new base for their ideas in the Patriot movement. Most regents, however, saw more peril in the new movement for broader popular government than in the stolid conservatism of the princes of Orange. A reconciliation between the camps of the patrician republicans and the Orangists began to take shape under the impact of a common threat from below.

Again the events of war imperiled the established regime. Although the diplomacy of William V was firmly based upon the alliance with Britain, London became exasperated with the Dutch during the American Revolution (1775–83), when they attempted to continue to expand their profitable trade with the new American country as well as with France. Dutch flirtations with the Russian-sponsored League of Armed Neutrality, resistance to British searches of neutral vessels, and indications of Dutch negotiations for an alliance with the Americans only worsened relations. Finally, open hostilities erupted in the fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–84). The Dutch navy, sorely neglected for more than a half century, was utterly unprepared to battle the powerful British fleet, and the Dutch fleet’s attempts to convoy their merchantmen brought only disaster.

The onus of defeat fell upon the stadtholder. He was unable to stand firm against the increased agitation of the Patriots, who forced their way into governments of town after town in Holland and other provinces. Holland began organizing its own army, distinct from that under the prince’s command, and civil war seemed in the offing. William V fled to Gelderland with his wife, Wilhelmina, the sister of the Prussian king Frederick II. Holland declared him deposed.

It was the strong-willed Wilhelmina, rather than her hesitant and rather docile husband, who took the lead in the restoration of the stadtholderate. Dutch politics had now become a concern of the great powers. France sided with the Patriots, not out of sympathy with their principles but because they opposed the stadtholder, who had fallen back into dependence upon English and Prussian support. As long as Frederick II ruled in Prussia, Wilhelmina’s pleas for armed intervention fell on deaf ears, but when the throne passed to his nephew Frederick William II in 1786, the way opened for action. The Patriots counted on the support of the French, but the government at Versailles, then entering the final financial and political crisis of the monarchy that erupted in the Revolution of 1789, could give no more than verbal encouragement. Wilhelmina, working closely with the English ambassador, arranged to create a crisis by seeking to return to Holland. Her detention at the provincial border was taken by Prussia as justification to send an army into the United Provinces. The Prussians quickly swept away the makeshift militias of Holland and Utrecht and restored the stadtholder, William V, to his offices. A period of repression of Patriots followed; many went into exile, first in the Austrian Netherlands and then in France.

The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 gave new hope to the exiles and their friends at home. They looked now for more-effective French assistance and at the same time found in the French revolutionary experience practical ideas for the reorganization of the government at home—notably the principle of a single, indivisible republic. The Patriots’ hopes rose when the armies of the French Revolution swept over the Austrian Netherlands (which had had a brief interlude of independence in 1789–90) in 1792, but the French forces retreated the next year. It was not until 1794 that they returned to Belgium (as it now became customary to call the southern Netherlands), driving up to and then across the frontier of the United Provinces. The moment for which the Dutch Patriots had long been waiting was at hand: French power would more than outweigh the English and Prussian strength upon which the stadtholder relied (Prussia made a separate peace with France in 1795), and a democratic revolution, thwarted in 1787, would be possible. The freezing of the great rivers during the winter permitted the French forces to cross into the Dutch heartland, but, even before they arrived, the Patriots seized the reins of state from helpless William V, who abandoned office and fled to Britain.

The Batavian Republic (1795–1806)

The Batavian Republic lasted 11 years, during which it proclaimed the sovereignty of the people but was in many respects a protectorate of France. The organization of government had to be approved not only by the Dutch people but also by whatever government happened to be in control in France. The constitutions therefore reflected not only Dutch conditions and ideas but also the arrangements in effect in Paris. Nonetheless, they did create a new type of political system, a new regime, in the Netherlands. After much debate, the ancient historic provinces—so unequal in wealth, population, and influence—were replaced by a unitary republic divided into departments and electoral constituencies that were roughly equal in population, if not in wealth. The representatives elected to the National Assembly (which replaced the historic States General) were not delegates of provincial assemblies by whose decisions they were bound but deputies with full independence of judgment. The ancient system of government, with its medley of assemblies and boards with imperfectly differentiated functions, was replaced by a modern system of separate and explicitly defined legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Functionally organized ministries directed the work of foreign affairs, internal affairs, war, and navy. The full legal equality of all citizens in all parts of the country was proclaimed: the residents of North Brabant, Zeeland-Flanders, Limburg, and Drenthe gained the same rights as all other citizens of the republic, just as their districts, once excluded from the States General, now participated in the national government equally with all others.

The Reformed Church lost its standing as the sole official, protected church, supported out of state revenues, and equal status was accorded to all religions, including Roman Catholicism and Judaism. Yet full separation of church and state was not proclaimed, and their relationship was to continue as one of the central factors in Dutch politics for more than a century. The historic privileges of class and locality were abolished; the liberty of each and all under the law and before the courts replaced the diverse “liberties” of town and province, noble and regent. Where, before, town governments had co-opted their members, deputies to the National Assembly were now elected, but the franchise was limited to property holders, and these chose their representatives not directly but through electors named by primary assemblies. Most of these institutional changes were permanent, though the republican form of government was replaced by a kingdom in 1806 and never reestablished.

While these momentous changes were being debated and adopted, the ordinary work of state and nation had to continue amid conditions of almost unprecedented difficulty. Britain reacted to the French occupation of the Netherlands and the flight and overthrow of the stadtholder by a declaration of war and a blockade. Dutch overseas trade and fishing, the country’s most essential occupations, were brought to a near standstill, while most of the Dutch colonies were seized by the British on behalf of William V. The French, however, remained relentless in their own exploitation of the occupied “fraternal republic.” The Dutch government, which took over the whole accumulated burden of national and provincial indebtedness, had also to bear the costs of the French occupying forces and to pay immense sums in tribute to the Paris government. Indeed, the forced circulation of vastly inflated French assignats (paper currency) at face value was a scarcely disguised and very effective form of French taxation directly upon the Dutch people. Nor did the successive French governments—republican, consular, or imperial—grant the Dutch any greater freedom of trade with France or other countries under its control in compensation for the lost overseas business.

As trade declined and industry languished, Dutch agriculture began to resume a primacy in the economy; it had always employed the majority of the workforce. The venturesome spirit for which Dutch businesspeople had been so famed a century or two before seemed to be lost, replaced by what the Dutch themselves called a jansalie (stick-in-the-mud) attitude. Once-bustling cities dwindled to mere market towns; even Amsterdam lost much of its population. As a result, it became difficult to consolidate the new government. A multiple executive modeled on the French Directory and lacking a firm base in established political institutions and practices reflected the intrigues of individuals rather than the programs of clearly delineated parties. The victors quarreled among themselves and looked to Paris to decide between them, or at least passively accepted its dictum, given by coups d’état organized or approved by the French army command.

In 1805 Napoleon I gave quasi-dictatorial powers to R.J. Schimmelpenninck. Schimmelpenninck, called councillor pensionary after the fashion of the old provincial leaders, was actually an uncrowned and nearly absolute monarch (although, ultimately, power continued in Napoleon’s hands). He nonetheless carried into practice many of the modernizing reforms that had been proposed but not adopted. Napoleon, however, decided the next year to incorporate the Dutch state directly into his “Grand Empire” of vassal states.

The Kingdom of Holland and the French Empire (1806–13)

Renamed the Kingdom of Holland, the Netherlands received as its monarch Napoleon’s younger brother Louis. The four years of his kingship constituted one of the strangest episodes in Dutch history. Louis Bonaparte was a stranger in the land, yet he took its interests to heart, evading his brother’s commands and winning the respect, if not quite the affection, of his subjects. The reconciliation of former Orangists, republicans, and Patriots began under his rule, for, in the face of the apparent permanence of the Napoleonic empire, they entered his government and worked together. Nonetheless, the brute fact remained that, for Napoleon, Holland was the kingpin of the “continental system,” which he hoped would bring Britain to its knees by cutting off its continental exports. French officials enforced the vigorous suppression of the smuggling of British and colonial goods to the Continent through Holland that had sprung up over the previous decade with London’s connivance. King Louis’s resistance to his brother’s efforts and his refusal to put French interests ahead of those of the Dutch led to the emperor’s decision to oust his brother from his throne in 1810 and to incorporate Holland into the French Empire.

Little changed, however; the same officials—some Dutch, some French—continued to do the work of government in the country, which remained outside the French tariff system. As long as the Napoleonic empire seemed firmly based and permanent, Dutch people served the new sovereign as they had King Louis, all the more readily because the exiled prince of Orange gave permission for such collaboration. Dutch soldiers continued to fight in Napoleon’s campaigns and suffered heavy losses in the Russian invasion of 1812. But as it became increasingly obvious, after the failure of the Russian and Spanish campaigns, that the Napoleonic empire was collapsing, influential Dutch people began to prepare for the creation of a new and independent regime. It was taken for granted that its head would be the prince of Orange—the son of William V, who had died in 1806—and that it was desirable that it be established by the Dutch people rather than imposed by the eventual allied victors. The movement for restoration was led by a remarkable figure, Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, a man of firm political principle who had refused to serve any of the governments that ruled in Holland after 1795 yet accepted the necessity for a reestablished prince of Orange to govern the country as a limited constitutional sovereign.

During the autumn of 1813, van Hogendorp secretly planned a takeover of government from the French, which became possible without bloodshed during November as French troops withdrew to their homeland. On November 30 the hereditary stadtholder, at the invitation of van Hogendorp’s provisional authority, returned from Britain to proclaim his reign as hereditary prince. In 1814 he granted a charter establishing a constitutional monarchy, with restricted powers for a parliament elected by a narrow property suffrage. At the insistence of the victorious powers meeting at the Congress of Vienna, he took the title of king of the Netherlands and was also given sovereignty over the southern Netherlands, which included what are now Belgium and Luxembourg. During the campaign against Napoleon after his return from Elba in 1815, Dutch troops played a role in his defeat at Waterloo.