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History of European Ideas 36 (2010) 181–191

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History of European Ideas

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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. Montesquieu speaks about most of the Dutch Republic’s seven provinces, but the one he writes most eloquently about is the

3 Robert Shackleton, ‘La gene`se de l’Esprit des Lois’, in Essay on Montesquieu and on the Enlightenment, ed. David Gilson, Martin Smith (Oxford, 1988), pp. 49–63 (56 in particular). Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu. A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1961), p. 117. 4 Sheila Mason, ‘Montesquieu and the Dutch as a maritime nation’, SVEC 292 (1991), pp. 169–86 (174). Other studies of specific aspects of Montesquieu’s trip to the Dutch Republic include M.P. Masterson, ‘Holland’s Fifty Republics: Franc¸ois Michel Janic¸on and Montesquieu’s Federal Theory’, French Studies 29 (1975) pp. 27–41 and, from the same author, ‘Montesquieu’s Stadholder’, SVEC 116 (1973) pp. 81–107. 5 ‘Les re´publiques d’Italie ne sont que des mise´rables aristocraties, qui ne subsistent que par la pitie´ qu’on leur accorde, et ou` les nobles, sans aucun sentiment de grandeur et de gloire, n’ont d’autre ambition que de maintenir leur oisivete´ et leurs pre´rogatives’, Voyages, in Montesquieu, ¨uvres comple`tes, ed. Roger Caillois, vol. 1 (Paris, 1949), p. 715. Apart from the correspondence, all extracts from Montesquieu’s works are taken from the 1949 Caillois edition. All translations are mine. Strictly speaking, Holland was one of the seven provinces of the Dutch Republic. Like many eighteenth-century authors, Montesquieu uses thetwo terms interchangeably. Author's personal copy

C.-E. Levillain / History of European Ideas 36 (2010) 181–191 183 province of Holland. Predictably, Amsterdam is the city that attracts most of his attention. His travel notes offer a detailed account of the daily lives of Dutch people as much as it tries to probe the nature of the republican regime under which they live. Montesquieu casts a keen eye on Dutch customs whilst setting his insightful mind to Dutch fiscal, commercial and constitutional laws. He also shows an interest in the Dutch Republic’s geography and early history.6 The country he found unwelcoming, the people unfriendly. ‘‘All I had been told about the stingy, mischievous and swindling nature of the Dutch is no lie. It is the naked truth’’. He then hammers his point home: ‘‘Crippled as they are with taxes, they use all available means to get money. There are two principal means to achieve their goal: stinging and plundering. The lower classes will ask you to empty your purses for having carried your trunks’’.7 On the other hand, there were some bright sides to his trip. He admired the streets of Amsterdam, which he found ‘‘beautiful, clean and wide’’. He even goes so far as to say it was one of the most beautiful cities in the world.8 In a letter of October 1729, Montesquieu says that he goes for a walk every morning on the harbour and that he is most impressed by its toiling crowd of burden-carrying men, women and children. He compares them to the ants Jupiter transformed into men to populate the ancient Greek trading island of Aegina.9 Montesquieu’s visual impressions of Dutch life were complemented by a genuine attempt to reach a scholarly understanding of the working of the body politic. He dwells on the institutions of the Dutch Republic and he gets to grips with the minutiae of fiscal and financial administration.10

Sources, networks and contacts

One needs to pause here to ask a simple question: where and from whom did Montesquieu get his information? This question calls for a brief exploration of two issues: sources and networks and contacts. As is clear from his Pense´es and his Spicile`ge, Montesquieu was a great reader with an insatiable thirst for knowledge which covered a wide variety of subjects. At the time of his 1729 journey to the Dutch Republic, a large number of books about the Dutch Republic were in circulation in Europe, partly because the Dutch Republic constituted an ‘‘intellectual entrepot’’ whose power of influence had been boosted by post-1685 Huguenot immigration.11 There was also a sustained fascination among French elites – including Montesquieu – for a country that continued to play a pivotal role in international commerce despite its shrinking financial resources. ‘‘Holland’’, writes Montesquieu in the dossier to The Spirit of the Laws, ‘‘is the storehouse of the world’’12: a clear acknowledgement of Dutch commercial power, which does not necessarily contradict the fact that, in the late 1720s, the extent of this power was deemed to be diminishing. ‘‘There is no doubt’’, claims Montesquieu in his travel notes, ‘‘that Dutch commerce is waning dramatically’’.13 Jean-Baptiste de la Baume, who was commercial attache´ in The Hague from 1728 to 1730, came to the same conclusion when he emphasized the decay of the Dutch trading system in the Baltic, the Mediterranean and the East Indies.14 He also noted that, unlike the other deputies of the States of Holland, Grand Pensionary Slingelandt, was ‘‘not blind’’ and ‘‘never ceased to point to the depth of the wound’’ that the Dutch economy was suffering from.15 What made this commercial decay so significant was the memory of the Dutch Republic’s past glory. One should not forget that Colbert’s strenuous efforts to turn France into a commercial and maritime power in the late 1660s had been largely modelled on Dutch naval engineering techniques. As France was engaged in a fierce race for supremacy at sea against England and the Dutch Republic, Colbert had asked the then ambassador to the States General, Arnauld de Pomponne, to inform him ‘‘of all that pertains the navy and naval forces of neighbouring countries, and especially of Holland’’.16 Power by imitation: this lay at the heart of France’s rise to grandeur during the reign of the Sun King.

6 Montesquieu, Voyages, pp. 862–74. 7 ‘Tout ce qu’on m’avait dit de l’avarice, de la friponnerie, de l’escroquerie des Hollandais, n’est point farde´, c’est la ve´rite´ pure. (...) Comme ils sont accable´s d’impoˆts, il faut qu’ils aient de l’argent par toutes voies. Ces voies sont deux: l’avarice et la rapine’, Voyages, p. 863. 8 Voyages, p. 869. 9 Montesquieu to the baron de Stain, 17 October 1729, in ¨uvres comple`tes de Montesquieu, ed. Andre´ Masson, vol. 3 (Paris, 1955) (correspondance), p. 934. 10 Voyages, pp. 867–8. 11 G.C. Gibbs, ‘The role of the Dutch Republic as the Intellectual Entrepot of Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, BMGN 86, 3 (1971), pp. 323–49. 12 Dossier de l’Esprit des Lois, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 2, pp. 1082–83. 13 Voyages, p. 864. For more details on the Dutch economic context of the 1720s and 1730s, see Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 998–1005 and J. Aalbers, ‘Holland’s financial problems (1713–1733) and the wars against Louis XIV’, A.C. Duke, C.A. Tamse, Britain and the Netherlands, vol. IV, War and Society (The Hague, 1977), pp. 79–92. 14 Recueil des instructions donne´es aux ambassadeurs et ministres de France depuis les traite´s de Westphalie jusqu’a` la Re´volution franc¸aise, ed. Louis Andre´, Emile Bourgeois, Hollande, tome 2 (1698–1730), vol. 20 (Paris, 1930), p. 482. Montesquieu met de la Baume and found him conceited: ‘Le gentilhomme ordinaire Labaume qui un fat, quoique envoye´ de la France en Hollande’. Mes Pense´es, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 1, p. 979. The ambassador to the States General was the marquis de Fe´nelon. 15 AAECP, Hollande, vol. 378, de la Baume to Chauvelin, 27 October 1729, f.138. 16 Paris, Bibliothe`que de l’Arsenal, MS 4586, Colbert to Pomponne, 10 May 1669, f.25 v. For a general study of the French navy under Louis XIV, see Daniel Dessert. La Royale. Vaisseaux et marins du Roi-Soleil (Paris, 1996). The appeal to Dutch naval expertise, it should be noted, dated from Richelieu’s time. Pierre Castagnos, Richelieu face a` la mer (Rennes, 1989), pp. 100–1. Author's personal copy

184 C.-E. Levillain / History of European Ideas 36 (2010) 181–191

The ground is now clear to tackle the problem of sources. G.C. Gibbs has rightly noted that, ‘‘Europe’s view of the Dutch Republic and its institutions came via Huguenot writers’’.17 In other words, there was a Huguenot bias in the way many Dutch-related topics were approached. Moreover, the contrast with the authoritarian nature of the French monarchy resulted in an idealization of the Dutch Republic. See, for example, Jean Le Clerc’s Histoire des Pays-Bas des Provinces-Unies, published in three volumes between 1723 and 1728, the first volume of which Montesquieu held in his library.18 Jean Le Clerc’s History of the Low Countries was dedicated to Johan Hendrik van Wassenaer Obdam (1683–1745), a leading figure of the Holland ridderschap and a staunch anti-Orangist. Together with his former pupil and prote´ge´ Willem Bentinck van Rhoon (1704–1774),19 he is one of the key political figures Montesquieu met during his stay in The Hague.20 Jean Le Clerc’s preface is permeated with the traditional sense of admiration that Huguenot writers characteristically expressed for the Dutch Republic. He ascribes the Dutch Republic’s rise to power to Providence, without appearing to make any difference between the country’s glorious fate in the seventeenth century and the delicate situation it was facing in the aftermath of the treaty of Utrecht (1713). Jean Le Clerc also contrasts the civic and moral virtues of his patron with the general state of society in a century that he finds ‘‘profligate’’.21 He probably had in mind the bad reputation of the French Court, which had long been a favourite target of Dutch republican writers.22 In Jean Le Clerc’s writing, one gets a flavour of a Huguenot driven approach to Dutch history, with frequent references made to the political ideas of the ‘‘True Freedom’’ regime. Yet, these were not the only sources Montesquieu had at his disposal. Other sources were more neutral in tone, mainly serving to provide information. For example, Nicolas Sanson’s Atlas nouveau du voyageur pour les dix-sept provinces des Pays- Bas (1700),23 which Montesquieu may well have consulted prior to his trip, contains geographical annotations on the Dutch Republic. Similarly, Montesquieu held in his library a two-volume compendium of Resolutions of the States of Holland and West-Friesland (1725) dating from Johan de Witt’s time,24 but this is not the kind of text that could have influenced Montesquieu’s thought in one direction or the other. The same applies to the four volumes of Johan de Witt’s Lettres et ne´gociations (1725),25 which contain a wealth of diplomatic material, but not much in terms of the political ideas behind the ‘‘True Freedom’’ regime. However, the same cannot be said about the French diplomatic material available to Montesquieu. One of the sources he refers to in a section of his Pense´es devoted to Louis XVI’s foreign policy is Godefroy d’Estrades’ Lettres, Me´moires et ne´gociations (first edition published in 1719).26 This reference is interesting because the Comte d’Estrades, as long-serving ambassador of the French Court to the States General, had frequently been involved in underhand negotiations with the Dutch and his correspondence makes no secret of the way he actively sought to bribe the regents into diplomatic compliance. The Dutch people he described in 1668 as ‘‘highly corruptible’’ and ‘‘likely to be convinced by other things than words’’.27 The use of inducements had in fact been the driving force behind all French attempts to lure the Dutch into a separate peace: in 1668, 1677–1678 or again during the Geertruidenberg negotiations of 1709–1710. It did not always work, far from it, but this is certainly how the regents earned their reputation for being corrupt magistrates, both in Orangist circles and among foreign observers. Before taking up his position as ambassador to the States General in 1725, the marquis de Fe´ nelon was alerted to the fact that the widespread use of ‘‘bribes’’ and the defence of ‘‘personal interests’’ could be ‘‘near insuperable hurdles’’ to achieving good for the Dutch Republic.28 Montesquieu’s comment that ‘‘the Republic lapses into corruption’’29 may refer to more than just domestic politics to incorporate the wider problem of Franco-Dutch diplomatic affairs. This leads to a final remark about Montesquieu’s contacts in The Hague. Meeting Johan Hendrik van Wassenaer Obdam and Willem Bentinck van Rhoon on several occasions, Montesquieu became increasingly comfortable in the company of two

17 G.C. Gibbs, ‘Some intellectual and political influences of Huguenot e´migre´s in the United Provinces c.1680–1730’, BMGN 90, 2 (1975), pp. 255–287 (282). 18 Catalogue de la bibliothe`que de Montesquieu a` La Bre`de, ed. Louis Desgraves, Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, Franc¸ois Weil, Voltaire Foundation (Oxford, 1999), p. 389. 19 The duchess of Portland had entrusted Wassenaer with the education of her son Willem Bentinck after having sent him to the Dutch Republic in 1719. Despite frequent misunderstandings between master and pupil, it seems Bentinck learnt a lot from Wassenaer. Their political paths were later to diverge. For more details on their intellectual relationship, see Pieter Geyl, ‘Een opvoeding in de achttiende eeuw’, Bijdragen voor Vaderlandsche Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde, 5th series IX (1922) pp. 233–68. 20 Voyages, p. 873. 21 Jean Le Clerc, Histoire des Pays-Bas des Provinces-Unies, vol. 1 (Paris, 1723–8), Preface, no page number. 22 See for example UBA, Pieter de La Court, Consideratı¨en en exemplen van staat, omtrent de fundamenten van allerley regering (Amsterdam, 1660), p. 148. One should bear in mind that the early eighteenth century had seen the publication of Johan de Witt’s Memoirs, keeping alive the republican tradition of the 1650–1672 period. See Emanuel Van der Hoeven, Leeven en dood der doorlugtige gebroeders Cornelis en Johan de Witt (Amsterdam, 1705). A French version was published in 1709. For a recent analysis of early eighteenth-century Dutch republican thought, see W.R.E. Velema, Republicans, Essays on Eighteenth- Century Dutch Political Thought (Leiden, 2007), chap. 2 passim. 23 Catalogue de la bibliothe`que de Montesquieu a` La Bre`de, p. 321. 24 Catalogue, p. 303. 25 Catalogue, p. 302. 26 Pense´es,in¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 1, p. 1121. 27 Lettres et ne´gociations de Monsieur le comte d’Estrades, vol. 6 (London, 1743), p. 440. 28 Me´moire pour servir d’instruction au marquis de Fe´nelon allant en Hollande en qualite´ d’ambassadeur, 10 January 1725, Recueil des instructions donne´es aux ambassadeurs et ministres de France, p. 447. 29 ‘La Re´publique tombe dans la corruption’, Voyages, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 1, p. 867. Author's personal copy

C.-E. Levillain / History of European Ideas 36 (2010) 181–191 185 forceful figures standing at opposite ends of the Dutch political spectrum. It is difficult to deduce what Montesquieu might have been told as there is no surviving evidence. However, one can assume that Bentinck’s ardent and sedulous defence of the Stadholderate, which became increasingly apparent between 1747 and 1749,30 might have been behind some of Montesquieu’s remarks. The final part of this article elaborates on this hypothesis. Montesquieu also befriended Philip Stanhope, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield, during his stay in The Hague, later following him to London. Chesterfield’s mission in The Hague was two-fold: to secure the Dutch Republic’s adherence to the Treaty of Seville (1729) and the Treaty of Vienna (1731) and to facilitate a dynastic rapprochement between the Hanovers and the Oranges by encouraging the then eighteen- year old William IV to marry Anne of Hanover, George II’s daughter. For obvious reasons, the latter mission placed Chesterfield at the heart of the Dutch Republic’s domestic feuds.31 Some twenty years later, he admitted to having acted as far more than the representative of the British Crown in The Hague: ‘‘I am a sort of Dutchman’’, wrote Chesterfield in 1747, shortly after the restoration of the stadholderate.32 The seventeenth century saw two Anglo-Dutch dynastic alliances: the first in 1641 between William II and Mary Stuart daughter of Charles I and the second between William III and Mary Stuart daughter of James II in 1677. Both alliances had greatly enhanced the status and reputation of the Orange-Nassau dynasty in Europe. In 1641, the States General and the States of Holland had welcomed the former match as politically advantageous for the Dutch Republic in a context of Anglo- Spanish rivalry.33 By 1677, however, the international context had changed and the States feared that William III might use his alliance with the Stuarts to further his own interests in the Dutch Republic: ‘‘For they say that it [the match] is laying a foundation for his [William III] absoluteness here and that he may be assisted therein by his uncle’s [James II] power’’.34 As Chesterfield began negotiating a dynastic alliance between Orange and Hanover in 1728, he was all-too-aware of the political risks he was taking in a stadholderless period. That George II granted honours to William IV proved sufficient to arouse Slingelandt’s suspicion and hostility: ‘‘His [the Prince of Orange] coming here had already given alarm which would be very much increased, if it were accompanied with that mark of the king’s favour and distinction [one of the vacant Garters]’’.35 A rumour even circulated in September 1729 that George II would stop in The Hague on his way to the continent ‘‘to speak in favour of William of Orange’’ and ‘‘to make him stadholder’’.36 The perspective of a renewed dynastic Anglo- Dutch rapprochement explains why someone like Wassenaer so staunchly defended the alliance with France37 and why the birth of the Dauphin in September 1729 was greeted with lavish public celebrations in The Hague.38 Behind the fac¸ade of the Triple Alliance of 1717, France and England were vying against each other to influence the course of Dutch politics. France’s plan was ‘‘to drive a wedge between the two [republican and Orangist] parties’’ to buttress its alliance with the Dutch Republic and cushion the effects of the Orange-Hanover connection.39 Conversely, rival Dutch political factions were pitting France against England to bolster their own cause. The young Prince of Orange, born in 1711, was due to come of age in September 1729, shortly before Montesquieu’s arrival in the Dutch Republic.40 He was then stadholder of three provinces: Groningen, Gelderland and Friesland. The regents of the four remaining provinces of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht and Overijssel categorically denied his right to this title.41 One observer believed that only the people could tilt the balance in favour of the Prince, as they had done in 1672,42 and one does indeed find evidence for sustained popular support for the Orange cause in 1729.43 In early April 1729, William’s sojourn in The Hague aroused considerable hope among his partisans, who still dreamed of an Orangist restoration. Small wonder the Prince’s staunchest opponents floated the idea of renewing the Perpetual Edict of 1667.44 Montesquieu’s arrival in Holland coincided with a period of heated debate about William’s entry into the Council of State (Raad van State). The Council of State assisted the States General; it had limited political power but key functions, such as the administration of the army, fortresses and Generality lands. Wassenaer manoeuvred in the States General to try to rally the largely Orangist deputies of Gelderland and Friesland to support Holland and Zeeland’s opposition agenda.45 At a provincial

30 Herbert Rowen, The Princes of Orange. The Stadholders in the Dutch Republic (Cambridge, 1988) chap. 9 passim. One of Rowen’s interesting points is that Bentinck’s plans to beef up the stadholderate were modelled after the French system of government. 31 For a good insight into the international context of the early eighteenth century and the role played by Anglo-Dutch relations, see Hugh Dunthorne, The Maritime Powers 1721–1740. A Study of Anglo-Dutch Relations in the Age of Walpole (New York & London, 1986). 32 TBL, OSB-MSS-FILES ‘‘C’’, Chesterfield Papers, Folder 3136, Chesterfield to William Bristow, 13 August 1747, no fol. 33 Simon Groenveld, Verlopend getij. De Nederlandse Republiek en de Engelse Burgeroorlog 1640–1646 (Dieren, 1984), pp. 99–100. From the same author, see ‘The House of Orange and the House of Stuart 1639–1650: a revision’, The Historical Journal 39, 4 (1991) pp. 955–72. 34 TNA, SP 84/205, Meredith to Williamson, 9/19 October 1677, f.178. 35 Chesterfield to Townshend, 30 November 1728, The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, ed. John Stanhope, vol. 2 (London, 1893), p. 688. 36 AAECP, Hollande, vol. 378, de la Baume to Chauvelin, 22 September 1729, f.85 v. 37 AAECP, Hollande, vol. 377, de la Baume to Chauvelin, 2 August 1729, f.187 v. 38 AAECP, Hollande, vol. 378, de la Baume to Chauvelin, 9 September 1729, f.51. 39 AAECP, Me´moires et documents, Fonds divers, Hollande, 60 (1713–1782), Me´moire sur le re´tablissement du stathoude´rat (1729), f.135. 40 For a semi-biography of William IV, see Pieter Geyl, Willem IV en Engeland tot 1748 (The Hague, 1924). 41 A.J.C.M. Gabriels, De Heren als Dienaren en de Dienaar als Heer. Het stadhouderlijk stelsel in the tweede helft van de achttiende eeuw (Leiden, 1989), p. 50. 42 TNA, SP 84/296, d’Ittersum to Townshend, 1 April 1729, f.146 v. 43 TNA, SP 84/306, James Dayrolle to Townshend, 8 March 1729, f.44. 44 TNA, SP 84/296, d’Ittersum to Townshend, 1 April 1729, f.146 v. The perpetual edict of 1667 had abolished the stadholderate and transferred the political functions of the stadholder of Holland to the provincial States. 45 TNA, SP 84/296, d’Ittersum to Townshend, 1 April 1729, f.148 v. William III’s entry in the Council of State in 1670 had generated the same kind of opposition from the province of Holland. Author's personal copy

186 C.-E. Levillain / History of European Ideas 36 (2010) 181–191 level, the States of Holland voted for a resolution against William’s entry into the Council of State.46 ‘‘This is a proof how much they are mistaken who think it would be so easy to get him stadholder of this province’’, argued Chesterfield. ‘‘The match might probably facilitate it, but by no means insure it’’.47 William felt offended, weak and hopeless, begging George II to come to his help.48 ‘‘This is a time when everything seems to conspire against me’’,49 complained the Prince to his mother. These, then, were the political circumstances surrounding Montesquieu’s arrival in Holland in early October 1729. Chesterfield, it should be noted, played more than the role of an official adviser to William. He enjoyed an unusual degree of intimacy with the young Prince, even going so far as to offer him some tips as to the best way of losing his virginity in order to reach full manhood.50 Although a stable brotherly figure to William, Chesterfield also led an active social life, regularly hosting parties, which served as a platform to boost the Orangist cause.51 Although Montesquieu’s name never actually crops up in Chesterfield’s surviving papers, one may assume that Chesterfield acted as a mentor to Montesquieu, helping him become familiar with the intricacies of Dutch politics. Precisely what Montesquieu might have learned from Chesterfield, is hard to say. However, when examining Chesterfield’s correspondence over the years 1728–1729, there are several remarks, particularly about the stadholderate, which echo Montesquieu’s view of the stadholderate. Chesterfield also established fruitful links with Slingelandt and may well have provided Montesquieu with the gist of his exchanges with the Grand Pensionary. To sum up, one could say that Montesquieu’s contacts with Obdam, Bentinck and Chesterfield allowed him to look at the Dutch with the eye of an insider, or at least with greater acumen than the solitary visitor who is unable to bridge the psychological gap between himself and the local ruling elites.

Taxation and fiscal policy: a Franco-Dutch comparative approach

Let us now turn to two complementary aspects of the Dutch fiscal-military state explored by Montesquieu. The main point made in this section is that the fiscal activity of the Dutch state was a mirror that Montesquieu held up to the fiscal activity of the French state. There are two main reasons to conclude this. In both countries, the eighteenth century was a period of fiscal reform, albeit, of course, on different scales. Montesquieu’s travel notes include a reference to Slingelandt’s decision to revise Holland’s Versponding52 and the rest of his works is filled with allusions to the French Crown’s fiscal innovations: the capitation, the dixie`me or the vingtie`me.53 The second reason is that a number of French fiscal reforms derived from the Dutch model. Such was the case for the dixie`me, a universal direct tax established in 1710 to pay for the soaring costs of the Spanish War of Succession. After 1715, the French Crown’s priority was to clear its massive war debts. Hence the prolongation of the dixie`me, which finance Minister Nicolas Desmaretz justified in the following way. He wrote to Louis XIV in 1715, ‘‘I have informed myself of what is practised in Germany, Holland and England to pay off their debts’’, clearly acknowledging his debt to the Dutch fiscal system.54 Both France and England looked to the Dutch fiscal pattern, which reflected the Dutch Republic’s ability to survive, and even thrive, while in a state of perpetual war. This is something Montesquieu must have been aware of as the author of a Memoir on the State’s Debts (1716).55 As suggested in the opening section of this article, Montesquieu’s travel notes offer a picture of a tax-burdened country with a population that had no other choice but to extort money from anyone they could, especially from foreigners. ‘‘Holland’’, suggests Montesquieu, ‘‘is full of ridiculous taxes. (...) Every step forward you take you will find a tax’’.56 On a first reading, this could be taken as a classic anti-Dutch statement. On a second reading, however, one wonders if Montesquieu was not making a statement about the French fiscal system, or at least about the way the French fiscal system was changing under Dutch influence. The need for fiscal reform in France was a financial consequence of the Sun King’s wars. ‘‘On the death of Louis XIV’’, wrote Montesquieu in The Persian Letters (1721), ‘‘France was a body burdened by countless evils’’.57 One of the main evils it suffered from was the burden of taxes. As Montesquieu added in his Pense´es, the Sun King had ‘‘an immoderate desire to

46 KHA, A17-135 A, William IV Archives, Extrait des re´solutions des E´tats de Hollande, prises dans l’Assemble´e de leurs nobles puissances, 18 August 1729, no fol. 47 TNA, SP 84/305, Chesterfield to Townshend, 26 August 1729, f.65 v. 48 BL, M 645/13, Chesterfield Papers, William IV to Chesterfield, 30 October 1729, no fol. 49 KHA, A.10A, Marie-Louise van Hessen-Kassel Archives, William IV to Marie-Louise van Hessen-Kassel, 22 October 1729, no fol. 50 KHA, A17-173-10, William IV Archives, Chesterfield to William IV, 19 December 1729, no fol. 51 TNA, SP 84/306, James Dayrolle to Townshend, 25 February 1729, f.35 v. 52 The Versponding was the province of Holland’s main direct tax on houses and land. 53 For Montesquieu’s reference to the revision of the Versponding, see Voyages, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 1, p. 874. For more details on eighteenth century French taxation and fiscal policy, see in particular Michael Kwass, Priviledge and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth Century France (Cambridge, 2000). For a comparative view of the same problem, see Richard Bonney, The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe c.1200–1815 (Oxford, 1999) and Wantje Fritschy, ‘Taxation in Britain, France and the Netherlands in the Eighteenth Century’, Economic & Social History 2 (1990) pp. 57–79. 54 Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth Century France, 35. The dixie`me was suppressed in 1717 and then re-established during the War of the Polish Succession (1733–1737) and then again during the War of the Austrian Succession (1741–1749). 55 For more details on this pamphlet and a broader reflection on Montesquieu’s approach to fiscal policy, see David W. Carrithers, ‘Montesquieu and the spirit of French finance: an analysis of his Me´moire sur les dettes de l’e´tat (1715)’, in Montesquieu and the Spirit of Modernity, ed. D.W. Carrithers, Patrick Coleman, SVEC (2002), 9, pp. 159–90. 56 Voyages, p. 864. 57 ‘La France, a` la mort du feu Roi, e´tait un corps accable´ de mille maux’. Lettres persanes, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 1, p. 339. Author's personal copy

C.-E. Levillain / History of European Ideas 36 (2010) 181–191 187 increase his power over his subjects’’, and, knowing ‘‘neither how to start his wars, nor how to terminate them, he lost the heart of his subjects by the imposition of unbearable taxes’’.58 Early eighteenth-century French taxation was problematic for structural reasons rather than the height of taxes. Most of the problems, in fact, resulted from a discrepancy between a narrow tax base and a rising level of taxation, so that, as Montesquieu himself put it in his Pense´es, ‘‘taxes are laid on the lower classes who are overburdened’’.59 In other words, the poor were paying for the rest of the country. The main goal of the fiscal innovations of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was to widen the tax base and so levy more fiscal revenue, so that the French Crown could bridge the gap between income and expenditure. ‘‘By nature the French nation has a liking for expenditure’’, observed Montesquieu in his travel notes.60 Hence the Crown’s decision to try to increase the number of tax-payers and restrict the number of tax exemptions. This was the aim behind the capitation,thedixie`me,thevingtie`me and the cinquantie`me: universal direct taxes designed to make up for the social inequity of the taille. The search for new fiscal instruments, however, was at odds with the age-old principle of fiscal privilege. The clergy and the nobility took a jaundiced view of any fiscal innovation that seemed to call into question their social status. As an eminent member of the noblesse de robe, Montesquieu was no exception to this rule, repeatedly sending warnings against any fiscal measures that could lead to a retrenchment of what he deemed to be the nobility’s fundamental rights.61 Montesquieu’s aversion to Dutch-inspired fiscal reforms was rooted in two principles. One was the pivotal principle underlying The Spirit of the Laws: the idea that the nobility, as an intermediary body, played a moderating and regulating role in the French monarchy. As he famously sums up The Spirit of the Laws ‘‘No monarch no nobility; no nobility no monarch’’.62 He had a deep hatred of John Law, whom he describes as ‘‘one of the greatest promoters of despotism in Europe’’ for having sought, among other things, to clip the nobility’s wings through the establishment of a universal land tax.63 And secondly the principle of non-de´rogeance, which refers to the French nobility’s abhorrence of any type of business-related activity. There were some exceptions, but generally speaking, the eighteenth-century French nobility held on to the idea that the feudal basis of its social standing was irreconcilable with a business-orientated occupation.64 There is a sense in which the nobility’s code of honour in France restricted the development of a commercial society, in contrast to England, where, since the Middle Ages, the gentry included some prominent merchant families. This is something the promoters of a nation of ‘‘true merchants’’ deeply regretted, calling for a mitigation of France’s protectionist measures to make everyone – including the nobility – aware of the benefits of trade.65 This would be the only way to challenge the Dutch Republic’s dominance of world trade and boost France’s commerce. The above affords a neat transition back to the Dutch Republic. When Louis XIV’s armies stormed the Low Countries in 1672, French royal propaganda had been very keen to emphasize the contrast between the Sun King’s sense of honour and the insolence of ‘‘cheese merchants’’ and ‘‘saffron vendors’’.66 Through this recurring satire of the Dutch, one gets a clear notion of the French Crown’s patronizing view of a commercial society dominated by what many nobles thought to be the bourgeois values of profit and lucre. Montesquieu was not entirely immune to this trend of opinion. As he writes in his travel notes: ‘‘The hearts of the inhabitants of commerce-thriving countries is entirely corrupt: they won’t do you the slightest favour because they hope you will pay for it’’.67 Montesquieu also describes the corrupting effects of commerce and the crippling burden of indirect taxation as the two sides of the same coin: that is a profit-seeking society. This view underpins his belief that the nobility becoming involved in commercial activities was incompatible with the spirit of the monarchy.68 One needs to be careful, however, to avoid taking Montesquieu’s travel notes as a definitive account of commercial societies based on his experience of the Dutch. A safer approach to the problem would be to say that his impression of the Dutch commercial and fiscal-military state served as a point of departure for what was to become a more complete and substantial reflection on the complex relation between the nature of a political regime and its underlying principles. Montesquieu makes it clear in The Spirit of the Laws that the underlying principle of a properly functioning republic was virtue, not in the moral or the Christian sense of the word, but in the political sense of the ‘‘love of one’s homeland, that is the love of equality’’.69 The ‘‘spirit of commerce’’, as Montesquieu calls it, is not problematic in itself. Problems arise when virtue

58 Mes Pense´es, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 1, p. 1123. 59 ‘La taxe est donc sur le bas du peuple qui est e´crase´’. Mes Pense´es, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 1, p. 1512. 60 ‘Le caracte`re de notre nation est bien d’aimer la de´pense’, Voyages, p. 629. 61 Me´moire sur les dettes de l’e´tat, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 1, p. 70. Or again Dossier de l’Esprit des Lois, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 2, p. 1044. 62 ‘Point de monarque, point de noblesse; point de noblesse, point de monarque’. De l’Esprit des Lois, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 2, p. 247. 63 De l’Esprit des Lois, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 2, p. 248. 64 Pierre Goubert & Daniel Roche, Les Franc¸ais et l’Ancien Re´gime, vol. 1 (Paris, 2001), pp. 126–27. One should note that, before marrying Jeanne Lartigue in 1715, Montesquieu had briefly been engaged to the daughter of a wealthy Bordeaux wine merchant called Daniel Denis who may have been notaire- secre´taire to the King. Caroline Le Mao, D’une Re´gence a` l’autre: le Parlement de Bordeaux et ses magistrats au temps de Louis XIV (University of Bordeaux unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 2005), p. 599. I owe this point to Olivier Chaline. 65 Me´moire des de´pute´s du commerce pour re´tablir le commerce en droiture entre la France et les nations du Nord, dont les Hollandais se sont rendus maıˆtres (n.d., early eighteenth century), in Quelques documents sur les relations commerciales entre la France et la Hollande au de´but du dix-huitie`me sie`cle, ed. Henri See´,Le´on Vignols, Economisch-Historisch Jaarboek, vol. 15 (1929), pp. 300–2 (302). 66 Lettre aux Hollandais par M.P. (1672), TNA, SP 117/705, f.107. 67 ‘Le coeur des habitants des pays qui vivent de commerce est entie`rement corrompu; ils ne vous rendront pas le moindre service, parce qu’ils espe`rent qu’on leur ache`tera’, Voyages p. 864. 68 ‘Il est contre l’esprit de la monarchie que la noblesse y fasse le commerce’, De l’Esprit des Lois, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 2, p. 598. 69 De l’Esprit des Lois, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 2, p. 227. Author's personal copy

188 C.-E. Levillain / History of European Ideas 36 (2010) 181–191 is lost and commerce is no longer based on the spirit of ‘‘frugality, thrift, work, wisdom, tranquillity, order and rules’’,70 which results in public treasure turning into private patrimonies.71 This, in turn, leads to a breach of the fundamental republican principle of equality. To sum up, two points can be stressed: first, Montesquieu’s interest in the Dutch commercial and fiscal-military state is symptomatic of a deeper reflection on the interactions and links between Dutch and French state building. Secondly, his travel notes offer an invaluable insight into the way his ideas departed from the common trend of opinion and transformed into a more personal and all-encompassing view of the functioning of the state.

The stadholderate

This final section looks at the stadholderate. The evolvement of Montesquieu’s thought shows remarkable parallels with the unfolding of Dutch early eighteenth-century history. The Spirit of the Laws was published in 1748, shortly after the revolution that marked the end of the second stadholderless period (1702–1747).72 This change of government, it seems, had an impact on the final sections of The Spirit of the Laws. On 17 July 1747, Montesquieu wrote a letter to the Abbe´ de Guasco to inform him that he had taken the decision to excise the chapter on the stadholderate. The reason, according to Montesquieu, was that ‘‘it would probably have been ill-received in France’’ and, he added, ‘‘I want to avoid any occasion to pick petty quarrels’’.73 Montesquieu was referring to the fact that the War of the Austrian Succession had strained Anglo-French relations to breaking point in 1744, thus reviving the possibility of an Anglo-Dutch dynastic alliance against France. William III was still remembered as the Stadholder-King who stubbornly resisted Louis XIV’s relentless onslaughts against Flanders. Montesquieu may have felt it was too risky to stir up memories of late seventeenth-century Franco-Dutch military rivalries. ‘‘What made us think we could be defeated’’, writes Montesquieu in reference to the Glorious Revolution ‘‘was the invasion of England by a protestant prince’’.74 Looking at the history of the stadholderate over a century, say between 1650 and 1750, it would be tempting to say that the country was divided between supporters and opponents of the stadholder, who vied with each other for power. I believe this is mistaken for two reasons. To begin with, the stadholderate was a double-edged sword: in principle, there was little disagreement about its necessity, but in terms of practice, it had been used by the princes of Orange as an instrument to subvert the constitution, both in 1618 and 1650. Not to mention the fact that, as king and stadholder, William III had wielded extraordinary prerogatives that left a quasi-monarchical imprint on the stadholderate. This is a point which was made very clear in Franc¸ois Janic¸on’s Etat pre´sent de la re´publique des Provinces-Unies (1729): a compendium of information on the Dutch Republic which Montesquieu probably used as a source during his 1729 journey and then in the writing of The Spirit of the Laws.75 The recurring comparison between the Dutch stadholders and the dictators of the Roman republic,76 who were often described as republican monarchs or emperors in disguise, was a clear sign of the constitutional oddity of the stadholderate. A second reason why it would be misleading to speak of a radical divide between Republicans and Orangists is that political factions shifted as much as political ideas fluctuated. Historians have long struggled to come with terms with this ambiguity by offering alternative interpretations. Nicolaas Japikse spoke in 1915 of a ‘‘middle party’’ (midden partij) that transcended the differences between States and Orangist parties and Herbert Rowen described Orangists as a ‘‘movement’’, rather than a party, because of the loose organizational ties that bound them together.77 Slingelandt, whom Montesquieu may have met through Chesterfield, is a good example of someone whose political ideas adjusted to changing circumstances. Drafted during the Great Assembly of 1716–1717, although not published until 1784, Slingelandt’s Political Discourses evince no trace of outright hostility to the stadholderate. Quite the contrary, Slingelandt saw a stadholder with clearly restricted powers as a remedy for the defects of provincial government and a cure for the notoriously sluggish pace of deliberations.78 He also presented the stadholder as a factor of unity,79 an idea which came as a

70 De l’Esprit des Lois, p. 280. 71 De l’Esprit des Lois, p. 252. 72 For more details on the revolution of 1747, see Jan A.F. de Jongste, ‘The Restoration of the Orangiste Regime in 1747: the Modernity of a Glorious Revolution’, The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Margaret C. Jacob, Wijnand W. Mijnhardt (Ithaca & London, 1992), pp. 32–59. 73 ‘Il [le chapitre sur le stadhoude´rat] aurait e´te´ peut-eˆtre mal rec¸u en France et je veux e´viter toute occasion de chicane’, Montesquieu to the abbe´ de Guasco, 17 July 1747, ¨uvres comple`tes de Montesquieu, ed. Andre´ Masson, vol. 3 (Paris, 1955) (correspondance), p. 1094. 74 ‘Ce qui nous a pense´ perdre en France, c’est l’invasion de l’Angleterre par un prince protestant’, Voyages, p. 854. 75 Franc¸ois Michel Janic¸on, Etat pre´sent de la re´publique des Provinces-Unies, vol. 1 (The Hague, 1729), pp. 244–45. De l’Esprit des Lois, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 2, p. 370. Janic¸on’s work, it should be noted, was well-known to the Dutch political and intellectual elite. Wassenaer held an annotated copy of the Etat pre´sent des Provinces-Unies in his papers. Huisarchief Twickel, Johan Hendrik van Wassenaer Obdam Archives, MS 509, Memorı¨e van aanmerkingen op het in 1720 te Parijs verschenen Etat pre´sent des Provinces-Unies. 76 Marquis d’Argenson, Conside´rations sur le gouvernement ancien et pre´sent de la France (Amsterdam, 1765), p. 66. The marquis d’Argenson visited the Dutch Republic in 1717 and was one of the pivotal figures of the Club de l’Entresol, which Montesquieu regularly frequented. For more details on the role played by the Club de l’Entresol as a ferment of ideas, see Nick Childs, A Political Academy in Paris 1724–1731. The Entresol and its Members (Oxford, 2000). 77 Nicolaas Japikse, Johan de Witt (Amsterdam, 1915), p. 276. Herbert Rowen, ‘Neither Fish Nor Fowl: the Stadholderate in the Dutch Republic’, in Political Ideas and Institutions in the Dutch Republic, ed. Herbert Rowen, Andrew Lossky (Los Angeles, 1985), pp. 3–31 (21). 78 Simon Slingelandt, Discours over de defecten in de jeegenwoordige constitutie der regering van den staat der Verenigde Nederlanden en over de middelen van redres,inStaatkundige Geschriften, vol. 1 (Amsterdam, 1784–5), pp. 209–10. 79 Simon Slingelandt, Discours, p. 210. Author's personal copy

C.-E. Levillain / History of European Ideas 36 (2010) 181–191 189 transposition of one of the most consistently held Orangist political commonplaces stemming from the time of the stadholderless period (1650–1672).80 This argument was to prove particularly useful to William IV and his supporters during the Orangist revolution of 1747. On becoming Grand Pensionary in 1727, the tide turned for Slingelandt and he ceased to support the stadholderate. Chesterfield’s impression was that the Grand Pensionary feared losing power.81 Slingelandt, in fact, had to provide evidence of his good intentions to his republican allies. This he did in late 1729 when he astutely fell into line with the deputies of the States of Holland’s plans to exclude William IV from the Council of State in exchange for their consent to a partial revision of the Versponding.82 Fiscal reform versus constitutional barriers against William IV, these were the terms of the deal. Slingelandt’s opinion of the Stadholderate varied according to the course of events, the particular situation of William IV, the ambitions of his partisans and the backing they expected from the British Crown. Commenting on the issue of the stadholderate, de la Baume came to a broader conclusion about the state of the Dutch Republic. He said it reminded him of early seventeenth-century Spain: ‘‘I very much fear this situation to be the same one Spain experienced under the reigns of Philip III and Philip IV and deceitful residues of grandeur to be actually concealing dire miseries’’.83 An interesting remark when one remembers that Montesquieu’s Considerations on the riches of Spain came as an early attempt in his career to address the problem of Spanish decline by showing how the unbridled circulation of gold had led the Spanish monarchy into bankruptcy. Montesquieu also noted that the English and the Dutch had taken over Spain’s position through their use of ‘‘public credit’’, which had superseded Spain’s gold mines.84 After 1715, however, the use of public credit by the Dutch had been worn out by a forty-year long struggle against Louis XIV so that, by French and English standards, the stadholder appeared as one of the only true remaining repositories of power, even in a stadholderless period. Foreigners’ perceptions of the stadholderate were very much dependent on the political regime of their own native country. For example, Chesterfield assumed that the restoration of the stadholderate, were it to happen, would lead to the establishment of a form of limited monarchy. To quote from his Account of the government of the seven United Provinces (1729): ‘‘If the young stadholder has abilities, he will, when he grows up, get all the powers of a limited monarch, such as England, no matter under what name’’.85 By the same token, Montesquieu saw the stadholderate through the lens of the French institutions. ‘‘The Dutch’’, he writes in his travel notes, ‘‘have two sorts of kings: the burgomasters, who dish out employments (...) and the lower classes, who are the most insolent tyrants you can get’’.86 In the eyes of Montesquieu, the Dutch Republic was a kind of world turned upside down in which local magistrates assumed kingly powers and the mob tyrannical powers. At the heart of Montesquieu’s reflection on the stadholderate lay a basic distinction between liberty and licence. ‘‘Political liberty’’, he writes in The Spirit of the Laws, ‘‘doesn’t consist in doing what you want. (...) Liberty is the right to do everything the laws permit’’.87 Licence, in this perspective, is a byword for lawlessness and, in the case of the Dutch Republic, lawlessness fostered tyranny in both local magistrates and the masses. ‘‘In Holland’’, argues Montesquieu in his Pense´es, ‘‘the people live in greater slavery now that there is no stadholder. All the cities’ magistrates are small tyrants’’.88 In his travel notes, Montesquieu was referring in particular to the magistrates’ misappropriation of public funds in their capacity as tax collectors.89 This is what made him claim in his Pense´es that anything could be bought in Holland.90 The spirit of the laws becomes more like a market of laws, turning Dutch liberties into what Montesquieu wryly terms ‘‘the liberty of the rabble’’.91 A stadholder, however, brings three things: moderation, unity and power. Moderation resulted from a ‘‘combination of powers’’ which allowed one power to balance the other.92 Unity resulted from the taming of factions. As Montesquieu put it, the domination of one faction over the other is no worse than the wrath of a prince,93 weighing the republic down.94 The stadholder, in contrast, plays the role of an arbiter between competing factions.95 He also wields power because, in the words

80 TNA, SP 119/787, Souverains antidotes contre les maux de Hollande cause´s par le mauvais re´gime de la cabale et la faction de Loevestein (1672), 3 ff. 81 Chesterfield to Townshend, 30 November 1728, The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, p. 691. 82 AAECP, Hollande, vol. 378, de la Baume to Chauvelin, 27 October 1729, f.139. 83 ‘Je crains fort que cette situation ne ressemble a` celle de l’Espagne sous les re`gnes de Philippe III et de Philippe IV et qu’un reste apparent de grandeur ne couvre au fond des grandes mise`res’. AACEP, Hollande, vol. 378, de la Baume to Chauvelin, 27 October 1729, f.140. 84 Conside´rations sur les richesses de l’Espagne, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 2, p. 13. 85 Some Account of the Government of the seven United Provinces, The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, p. 621. 86 ‘Les Hollandais ont deux sortes de rois: les bourgmestres, qui distribuent tous les emplois (...). Les autres rois sont le bas peuple, qui est le tyran le plus insolent que l’on puisse avoir’, Voyages, p. 863. 87 ‘La liberte´ politique ne consiste point a` faire ce que l’on veut. (...) La liberte´ est le droit de faire tout ce que les lois permettent’. De l’Esprit des Lois, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 2, p. 395. 88 ‘Cela se prouve en Hollande, ou` les peuples sont plus dans l’esclavage depuis qu’il n’y a plus de stathouder: tous les magistrats de chaque ville, de petits tyrans’, Mes Pense´es, ¨uvres comple`tes, vol. 1, p. 1402. 89 Voyages, p. 872. 90 Mes Pense´es, p. 1288. 91 ‘La liberte´ de la canaille’, Voyages, p. 876. 92 Mes Pense´es, p. 1429. 93 Mes Pense´es, p. 1431. 94 Mes Pense´es, p. 1435. 95 Voyages, p. 873. Author's personal copy

190 C.-E. Levillain / History of European Ideas 36 (2010) 181–191 of Montesquieu, ‘‘Holland had done great things’’ under a stadholder.96 He may have picked up this idea from Bentinck who, after 1747, clearly aimed to use the restoration of the stadholderate as a means of reviving Dutch international influence. In sum, Montesquieu’s understanding of the stadholderate was based on his own experience of French monarchical institutions but one may argue that some of the ideas he puts forward have obvious Orangist undertones. Not that Montesquieu flirted with Orangist ideas in 1729. The question of his political identity is not at stake here, and this still remains an elusive issue.97 What is at stake is the exchange of ideas about government between two countries which, in institutional terms, seemed to have so little in common.

Conclusion

The aim of this paper has been to set Montesquieu’s 1729 sojourn in the Dutch Republic within its specific Dutch background and to consider the impact this short period in his life may have exerted on his work. Although one can be quite certain that Montesquieu kept an eye on the latest Dutch news by reading the Gazette de Hollande or the Gazette d’Amsterdam,98 it always proves difficult to track down the process by which raw pieces of information morph into deeper thoughts and then diffuse through different routes into a major work like The Spirit of the Laws. One of the points made in this paper is that the completion of The Spirit of the Laws (1748) coincided with the immediate aftermath of the Orangist revolution of 1747, which brought to an end a second stadholderless period of more than forty years (1702–1747). As in 1672, the 1747 revolution came as an international phenomenon, involving several competing powers and reverberating far beyond the contested southern borders of the Dutch Republic. To conclude, I would like to look at the way this particular event of Dutch and European history resonated in Montesquieu’s work and how it can deepen our understanding of the notion of Dutch decline. One of the most remarkable consequences of the 1747 revolution was the appointment of William IV as stadholder, captain and admiral-general of the seven provinces and the transformation of the stadholderate into a hereditary office in the male line. The latter move, which fell little short of a switch to a monarchy, aimed at giving the government the ‘‘consistence’’99 it lacked to face the hardships of the siege of Bergen-op-Zoom by French troops. ‘‘It is not only the outward appearance but the whole system of the republic that is changed’’,100 observed the Earl of Sandwich, who was then actively promoting William’s cause in the name of British interests. Montesquieu’s understanding of the stadholderate was that, in contrast with the corrupt and despotic nature of a stadholderless regime, it brought unity, moderation and power. Unity was in fact a key term of Orangist phraseology and no one was in a better position than Bentinck to adapt the arguments of 1672 to the particular circumstances of 1747. This is the point he made as he addressed the Council of State in May 1747: ‘‘We hope that the reestablishment of the ancient form of our government will also lead to a reestablishment of the unity of the state’’.101 The 1747 revolution brought about sweeping changes. ‘‘The situation of this Republic is greatly altered from what Your Lordship has ever seen it’’, wrote the English envoy James Dayrolle to Chesterfield in June 1747. ‘‘The Prince of Orange is not only to be considered at present as the head of the commonwealth, but also chief promoter of their deliberations’’.102 In other words, the stadholder was not just the guarantor of concordia civilis against the looming danger of civil unrest or ‘‘anarchy’’, as the Earl of Sandwich called it.103 He was, as Montesquieu had described him in 1729, a dispute settler,104 striking a balance between conflicting particular interests and so maintaining what an Orangist pamphlet called ‘‘concordia ordinum’’.105 In Montesquieu’s perspective, moderation could be equated with virtue because it kept excesses in check and hence prevented corruption from taking hold.106 With the stadholderate came a final change: the restoration of international power. Montesquieu described this in his Pense´es107 and so believed many witnesses of the 1747 revolution. Unsurprisingly, Bentinck argued in front of the Council of State that the regime of the regenten had so miserably failed to bring ‘‘power’’ (macht) and ‘‘direction’’ (directie) to the Republic that it had become ‘‘a laughing-stock for its enemies and a useless burden for its allies’’.108 For Bentinck, there was, indeed, a connection between the ‘‘True Freedom’’ so dearly defended by the regenten and the decline of the Dutch Republic.

96 Mes Pense´es, p. 1435. 97 Ce´line Spector, Montesquieu. Pouvoir, richesses et socie´te´s (Paris, 2004), p. 14. 98 Spicile`ge, 1274, 1294, 1297, p. 1303. 99 KHA, A.10A, Marie-Louise van Hessen-Kassel Archives, William IV to his mother Marie-Louise van Hessen-Kassel, 2 December 1747, no fol. 100 TNA, SP 84/425, Sandwich to Chesterfield, 16 May 1747, f.230. 101 ‘Wij hopen dat de herstelling der oude manier van onze regering ook de eendracht in den staat zal herstellen’, KB, Knuttel no. 17596, Aanspraak gedaan door den voorgemelden Graaf van Bentinck bij het presenteeren van zijn Hoogheid als stadhouder der Geu¨nieerde Provintı¨en, aan de Ed.Mog. Raden van Staten (1747), no page number. For a French translation of Bentinck’s speech kept in British archives, see TNA, SP 84/425, 16 May 1747, f.244–5. 102 BL, ADD MSS 15880, Dayrolle to Chesterfield, 13 June 1747, f.4. Chesterfield was then Secretary of State for the Northern Department. 103 TNA, SP 84/425, Sandwich to Chesterfield, 5 May 1747, f.170. 104 Voyages, p. 873. 105 KHA, A.17-135, William IV archives, Considerationes omtrent de stadhouderlijke regering in de zeven Geu¨nieerde Provintı¨en, no date but probably early 1730s, no fol. 106 Anne Baudart, ‘De la vertu et de la corruption des hommes et des e´tats: une lecture de Montesquieu’, Cahiers de philosophie juridique et politique de Caen, no. 14 (1988), pp. 85–107, (88). 107 Pense´es, 1435. 108 KB, Knuttel no. 17596, op. cit., no page number. Author's personal copy

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The British supporters of a restored stadholder could not agree more. As Newcastle told Bentinck in April 1747: ‘‘There are all good reasons to hope that the Republic will soon be shining with the lustre of its pristine grandeur and reputation’’.109 All in all, it is not a matter of declaring Montesquieu to be right or wrong. It is far more interesting to show that the chronological synchronism between the completion of The Spirit of the Laws and the unfolding of the Orangist revolution of 1747 may have prevented Montesquieu from making a definitive statement about the decline of the Dutch Republic. Nowhere in his works, in fact, does one find a coherent and comprehensive analysis of the reasons behind the fall of the Dutch Republic. Only by piecing the puzzle together does one understand that there was a kind of contradiction between ‘‘the spirit of commerce’’ and ‘‘the spirit of conquest’’.110 The fall of the Dutch Republic was, according to Montesquieu, the story of a shift from a merchant to a fiscal-military state; a state forced by its belligerent neighbours to funnel the resources of its commercial prosperity into wasteful, however necessary, war expenditures. This by necessity turned the history of the Republic into a story of the whittling down of the public-minded spirit on which the commercial expansion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been based. The revolution of 1747 and the ensuing restoration of the stadholderate may have given the impression that the tide was turning for the Dutch Republic; or, at least, that the decline was coming to a halt. The Dutch political scene of 1747–1748 was in a flux and there is no way Montesquieu could reproduce a coherent line of thought merely by transposing the memory of his 1729 journey to his experience of the 1747 revolution. Unlike the Italian city-states, which he had visited in 1728–1729, the Dutch Republic was still undergoing huge political transitions and, even for the shrewdest political scientist, keeping up with the swiftly moving pace of history was a daunting task. In a nutshell: conjunctional rather than structural reasons meant that the Dutch Republic was a suitable, if somewhat elusive, model which Montesquieu used to get to grips with the profound nature of republican regimes. An elusive model but also a potential exception to the natural corruption process of commercial republics. By the Orangist standards Montesquieu aligned with, the revolution of 1747–1748 seemed to have arrested the decline of the Dutch Republic, restoring a political and institutional balance that had been undermined by a stadholderless regime since 1702. Unlike Rome, the Dutch Republic appeared to be able to reform itself and adjust to a novel situation by striking the right balance between power and commerce. In this sense, war and commercial competition played the role of a motor, at least in the dramatic circumstances of 1747–1748, educating the rulers of the Republic to the necessity of a healthier political order. Halfway as it stood between a republic and a monarchy, the Dutch Republic remained somewhat of a conundrum in the years 1747–1748, a slippery synthesis between various kinds of polities and various kinds of historical processes.

109 ‘On peut bien espe´rer de voir bientoˆte´clater dans son ancien lustre la grandeur et la re´putation de la Re´publique’. BL, ADD MSS 32808, Newcastle to Bentinck, 28 April 1747, f.148 v. 110 Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests. Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977), p. 80. Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade. International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (London, 2005), chap. 2 passim.