The Dutch Revolution of 1795 and the History of Republicanism Wyger RE
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Much in Little Revisited: The Dutch Revolution of 1795 and the History of Republicanism Wyger R.E. Velema, Department of History, University of Amsterdam Paper prepared for the conference ‘The Republican Tradition: From the Hanseatic League to the Era of the Enlightenment’, European University at St. Petersburg, December 7-9, 2012 Not to be quoted or cited without permission from the author It is more than half a century ago that R.R. Palmer, who was soon to become famous with his magisterial work The Age of the Democratic Revolution, introduced an international scholarly audience to the Dutch revolution of 1795, also known as the Batavian revolution. In his pioneering article ‘Much in Little: the Dutch Revolution of 1795’, he pointed out that the fall of the Dutch ancien régime and the revolutionary transformation of the Netherlands that followed this downfall could best be understood as part of an international and interlinked series of revolutionary events.1 On a small scale, the Batavian revolution therefore could serve to ‘illuminate the whole complex of war and revolution which then gripped the Western world’.2 As he made abundantly clear in the title of his later magnum opus, Palmer had a relatively simple and straightforward view of the struggles that tore the Western world of the late eighteenth century apart. Just as democracy had been at issue in the Dutch revolution of 1795, the whole European and American world of the final decades of the century of Enlightenment saw the rise of a new and historically unprecedented democratic opposition against all sorts of aristocratic ‘constituted bodies’. The international democratic movement of the later eighteenth century opposed ‘the possession of government, or any public power, by any established, privileged, closed, or self-recruiting group of men’.3 In Palmer’s view, this democratic movement was a more or less direct consequence of the progressive political thought of the Enlightenment and was the very embodiment of political modernity. Indeed, the ‘Age of the Democratic Revolution’, of which the Dutch revolution of 1795 was such a perfect example, undoubtedly was the most crucial episode in the rise of the modern political world. In the more than fifty years that have passed since Palmer developed his thesis about the ‘Age of the Democratic Revolution’, scholarship on both the politics and the political thought of the eighteenth century has been transformed.4 From the perspective of the history of political thought, perhaps the most crucial development since Palmer formulated his thesis has been the discovery of early modern republicanism and of its continued importance during the eighteenth century. Already in 1971, just a few years after the appearance of the second volume of Palmer’s Age of the Democratic Revolution, the Italian historian Franco Venturi suggested that ‘it is more worthwhile to follow the involvement, modifications and dispersion 1 R.R. Palmer, ‘Much in Little: The Dutch Revolution of 1795’, Journal of Modern History 26 (1954) 15-35; R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution. A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 (2 vols. Princeton 1959-1964). 2 Palmer, ‘Much in Little’, 15. 3 Palmer, Age of the Democratic Revolution, I, 4. 4 Recent reassessments of the Palmer thesis include Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York 2009); Manuela Albertone and Antonino de Francesco, ed. Rethinking the Atlantic World: Europe and America in the Age of Democratic Revolution (Basingstoke 2009) and David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed. The Age of Revolution in Global Context, c. 1760-1840 (Basingstoke 2010). of the republican tradition in the last years of the eighteenth century, than to examine the emergence of the idea of democracy in those same years’.5 Since then, the work of John Pocock, Quentin Skinner and many of their pupils has provided us with a rich and complex panorama of the varieties of early modern – and ultimately classical – republican thought. Yet until very recently, this new historiography of republicanism presented students of the European revolutions of the late eighteenth century with a curious problem, since it largely ignored Venturi’s illuminating suggestion and therefore failed to include the revolutions analyzed by Palmer in the history of republican political thought. John Pocock, who in his Machiavellian Moment famously described the American revolution as the ‘last act of the civic Renaissance’, has remained remarkably silent about the fate of the Atlantic republican tradition in all other late eighteenth-century revolutions.6 Quentin Skinner, too, has shown himself rather reluctant to discuss the relationship between neo-roman thought and the revolutions of the later eighteenth century in any detail. The eighteenth-century rise of classical utilitarianism and liberalism, he simply tells us, meant that ‘the theory of free states fell increasingly into disrepute, and eventually slipped almost wholly out of sight’.7 The two leading analysts of early modern republicanism thus, for once, seem to agree: the early modern republican tradition came to an abrupt end at some point in time before the eruption of the French revolution and was replaced completely by something else, be it utilitarianism or liberalism. Virtue gave way to rights; liberty no longer meant living in a free state, but just being free from coercion and interference.8 Both the Palmer-thesis and the historiography on early modern republicanism thus present the student of the late eighteenth-century continental European revolutions with the image of a complete watershed. The sudden emergence of ‘democracy’ and ‘liberalism’, almost ex nihilo, is held to constitute a clean break with both the institutions of the old order and its various modes of political discourse. The most obvious problem with this entire line of interpretation is the fact that late eighteenth-century European revolutionaries, while certainly shedding the pejorative connotations which had always been attached to the term ‘democracy’, never used the term liberalism and first and foremost regarded themselves as republicans. Indeed, these were the very decades in which the term ‘republicanism’ was invented and was for the first time widely used in public discourse.9 It might of course be argued that the revolutionary use of republican vocabulary is in fact a case of spurious persistence and that continuities in vocabulary mask fundamental changes in substance. 10 The ‘modern’ republic the revolutionaries envisaged, in other words, was something fundamentally different from both the classical and the early modern republic. There is certainly something to be said for this point of view, for it is undeniably true that many late eighteenth-century republicans considered the republics they were trying to establish as 5 Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge 1971) 90. 6 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton 1975) 462. 7 Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge 1998) 96. 8 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Virtues, rights, and manners: A model for historians of political thought’ , in: J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History. Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge 1985) 37-50; Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 96-99. 9 On the conceptual history of ‘republic’ and ‘republicanism’ see Wolfgang Mager, ‘Republik’ , in: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhardt Koselleck, ed. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch- sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (8 vols. Stuttgart, 1972 - 1997) V, 549-651. 10The term ‘spurious persistence’ was coined by Peter Gay in his polemic with Carl Becker. See Peter Gay, ‘Carl Becker’s Heavenly City’, in: Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity. Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York 1971) 188-210. something new and historically unprecedented.11 Yet it is equally undeniable that a great number of the conceptual problems they were wrestling with were rooted in the pre-existing republican tradition. Rather than constituting a clean break with the republican past, late eighteenth-century revolutionary republicanism should therefore be understood as an extremely complex intellectual struggle to adapt classical and early modern republicanism to the circumstances of the modern age. That such a case can indeed be convincingly argued has particularly transpired in recent scholarship on the French case. In a rather dramatic shift of emphasis, historians have started to argue that viewing French revolutionary republicanism as an attempted transformation of rather than as a complete break with classical and early modern republicanism allows us a much deeper and better understanding of French late eighteenth-century republican discourse than was the case hitherto.12 It also allows us to see the eventual emergence of liberalism more as a gradual development than as a sudden and dramatic rupture with the republican past. In the words of Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson: ‘liberalism as we know it was born from the spirit of republicanism, from the attempts to adapt republicanism to the political, economic, and social revolutions of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth’, or more succinctly: ‘political liberalism burst from the shell of a republican chrysalis’.13 Both the rise of the historiography of republicanism in general and our recent renewed understanding of the relationship between classical and early modern republicanism on the one hand, and the republican revolutions of the later eighteenth century on the other, provide ample reasons to take a new look at the Dutch revolution of 1795. Palmer was indeed right in suggesting that the Batavian revolution of 1795 offered ‘much in little’ to the historian, but his preoccupation with the sudden rise of modern democracy prevented him from seeing that the true richness of this revolution must be sought in its attempt to transform the classical and early modern republican tradition and to adapt it to the modern age.