This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier’s archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.elsevier.com/copyright Author's personal copy History of European Ideas 36 (2010) 181–191 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect History of European Ideas journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/histeuroideas Glory without power? Montesquieu’s trip to Holland in 1729 and his vision of the Dutch fiscal-military state Charles-Edouard Levillain Sciences Po Lille, Universite´ de Lille 2, France ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Available online 29 December 2009 This paper aims at setting Montesquieu’s 1729 sojourn in the Dutch Republic within its specific Dutch context whilst reconsidering the impact this short period may have exerted Keywords: on his work. Based on a wide variety of Dutch, English and French sources, the article offers Montesquieu a study of Montesquieu’s Dutch networks and contacts, a comparative Franco-Dutch Dutch Republic approach to taxation and fiscal policy and an insight into the history of the stadholderate Travel literature under William IV. The main argument made in the paper is two-fold: first, that the Dutch Fiscal-military state Republic was a mirror Montesquieu held up to the French monarchy, allowing him to put a Stadholderate number of ideas of government to the test; secondly that, owing to the fluctuating nature Orangism of Dutch political events between 1729 and 1748, the Dutch model remained somewhat elusive in Montesquieu’s broader understanding of the paradigm of republican regimes. ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. In 1728, Montesquieu embarked on a three-year Grand Tour across Europe which took him to Italy, Austria, Germany, the Dutch Republic and Britain, where he stayed for nearly two years, before returning to the castle of La Bre` de near Bordeaux. It was here he started to write The Spirit of the Laws (1748). Most Montesquieu scholars agree that this Grand Tour played a seminal role in the development of Montesquieu’s thought, in terms of both method and content.1 In terms of method, the trip grounded his blossoming theory of the State on the observation of facts and the power of experience. In terms of content, it may have cooled off his youthful enthusiasm for republican regimes and fed his admiration for the sense of constitutional balance of the British monarchy. In fact, this is very much how Montesquieu is remembered today: as an admirer of the British constitution which, it is true, forms the bedrock of his comparative approach to constitutional history. Yet, Montesquieu’s works also contain numerous references to the Dutch Republic which feeds into a more general understanding of European fiscal-military states. The fiscal-military state refers here to the fiscal and military activities of the state in a context of prolonged warfare and, more precisely, to the mutation of the state under the pressures of war.2 E-mail address: [email protected]. 1 Marco Platania, Montesquieu e la virtu`. Rappresentazioni della Francia di Ancien Re´gime e dei governi repubblicani (Turin, 2007), pp. 132–8. I would like to thank Marco Platania for having allowed me to peruse his work before it went to the press. I am also indebted to Hans Blom, Olivier Chaline, Jean-Franc¸ois Dunyach, Jean Marie Goulemot, Koen Stapelbroek and Koninklijk Huis Chief Archivist Charlotte Eymael for the help and assistance they provided in my research. The following abbreviations will be used: BMGN: Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden. AAECP: Paris, Archives du Ministe`re des Affaires e´trange`res, Correspondance politique. ADD MSS: Additional Manuscripts. BL: The British Library. KB: The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek. KHA: The Hague, Koninklijk Huis Archief. SVEC: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. TBL: Yale, The Beinecke Library. TNA, SP: London, The National Archives, State Papers. UBA: Universiteit Bibliotheek Amsterdam. This work was completed during my stay at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study (2007–2008). I am most grateful to Petry Kievit for having edited my article. This article is dedicated to the memory of Conrad Russell. 2 For a standard approach to the notion of fiscal-military state, see in particular John Brewer, The Sinews of Power. War, Money and the English State 1688– 1783 (New York, 1989). 0191-6599/$ – see front matter ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2009.11.004 Author's personal copy 182 C.-E. Levillain / History of European Ideas 36 (2010) 181–191 Montesquieu’s interest in the Dutch Republic was triggered by a wide variety of writings but also by his six-week visit to the Netherlands in 1729, which gave him a first-hand, although unhappy, impression of the country. Apart from one or two exceptions, eighteenth-century scholars have devoted little attention to the impact this journey may have exerted on the formation of his ideas. It is a striking feature of Robert Shackleton’s otherwise remarkable analysis of the genesis of The Spirit of the Laws that no mention is made of the Voyage en Hollande and that his biography of Montesquieu jumps from the ‘‘travels in Italy’’ to the ‘‘travels in England’’ without making any room for the trip to the Dutch Republic.3 This may be partly due to Montesquieu’s somewhat fragmented and changing approach to Dutch topics. Sheila Mason claims that Montesquieu’s account of the Dutch in the foreword material to The Spirit of the Laws, which covers the 1729 trip to the Dutch Republic, ‘‘impresses by its coherence and pertinence.’’4 The question of the ‘‘pertinence’’ of Montesquieu’s remarks is not at stake here. As to their ‘‘coherence’’, one is entitled to have reservations, for the simple reason that Montesquieu never produced a full-scale and comprehensive analysis of the Dutch state. The collage technique which Sheila Mason rightly applies to Montesquieu’s 1729 trip to the Dutch Republic could well serve to qualify most of Montesquieu’s remarks about the Dutch Republic, which are liberally sprinkled throughout his work – and particularly in his Pense´es and his Spicile`ge. Montesquieu’s fragmentary notes on the Dutch Republic are not coherent in themselves, which explains why they are sometimes contradictory. They become coherent once a well-informed reader pieces them together in the light of the succinctness of The Spirit of the Laws. This nuance is helpful in mapping out the contours of this article. It is of little use to compare Montesquieu’s understanding of the early eighteenth-century Dutch Republic with our own twenty-first century knowledge of the same period and to hunt for errors and misjudgements. This chapter will not award Montesquieu marks for the accuracy of the information he provides or the quality of the analyses he produces. A more fruitful endeavour is to try and examine his vision of the Dutch fiscal-military state within the context of the contemporary climate of opinion by studying the sources he used and the people he met, both before and during his 1729 journey. So how does this endeavour tie in with an overarching reflection on Dutch Decline in Eighteenth-Century Europe? There are two main links. One is that a study of Montesquieu can reveal a lot about the European context. Montesquieu was no ordinary traveller. He made contacts which helped him to compile information and, on the basis of this information, to lay out a general theory of the state. From this perspective, Montesquieu’s account of the Dutch Republic is not merely a reflection of an individual’s developing thought, no matter how real his reaction to the country and its inhabitants. Frequently the process of state building is viewed through the lens of one’s own national identity. Montesquieu’s experiences of the Netherlands and the Dutch people can be seen as way to traverse national boundaries and to address two parallel issues: the interlocking of Dutch and French state building and the exchange, not to say the cross-fertilization, between Dutch and French ideas of government. In this sense, the Dutch Republic was a mirror Montesquieu held up to the French monarchy. A fragmented mirror, one might argue, owing to the lack of coherent and comprehensive analysis of Dutch politics on the part of Montesquieu. One way to overcome this methodological issue is to contextualize as much as possible Montesquieu’s ideas about the Dutch Republic and ultimately to show that the coincidence between the Orangist revolution of 1747–1748 and the completion of The Spirit of the Laws (1748) forced the pre´sident a` mortier to re-adjust his thinking about the nature of republican regimes. Montesquieu’s Holland: an overview One needs to start by giving a brief overview of Montesquieu’s 1729 relationship with the Dutch. Montesquieu’s fleeting stay in the Dutch Republic followed on from a longer tour of Italy, which gave him the opportunity to visit some of Europe’s most prestigious republics, including that of Genova and Venice. He came back with a disenchanted view of republican city- states. As he wrote in his travel notes: Italian republics are no more than miserable aristocracies which owe their survival entirely to the mercy people show to them and where the nobles, bereft as they are of any feeling of grandeur and glory, have no other ambition but to maintain their idleness and to uphold their prerogatives.5 Although Genova and Venice were no equivalents of the Dutch Republic, Montesquieu’s stay in the Dutch Republic only served to confirm his impression that the extinction of virtue had vitiated the founding principles of republican regimes.