Tilburg University Regeneration and hegemony: Franco-Batavian relations in the Revolutionary Era: A legal approach (1795-1803) Kubben, R.M.H. Publication date: 2009 Link to publication in Tilburg University Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Kubben, R. M. H. (2009). Regeneration and hegemony: Franco-Batavian relations in the Revolutionary Era: A legal approach (1795-1803). Wolf Legal Publishers (WLP). 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Download date: 26. sep. 2021 REGENERATION AND HEGEMONY Franco-Batavian Relations in the Revolutionary Era; a legal approach 1795-1803 PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Tilburg, op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof. dr. Ph. Eijlander, in het openbaar te verdedigen ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties aangewezen commissie in de aula van de Universiteit op vrijdag 19 juni 2009 om 14.15 uur door Raymond Maria Hubertus Kubben geboren op 18 mei 1980 te Geleen promotiecommissie promotores: Prof. dr. R.C.H. Lesaffer Prof. mr. B.C.M. van Erp-Jacobs overige leden: Prof. dr. M. Belissa Prof. dr. A. Carty Prof. mr. W.J.M. van Genugten Prof. dr. F. Stevens ii During that twenty-year period an immense number of fields were left untilled, houses were burned, trade changed its direction, millions of men migrated, were impoverished or were enriched, and millions of Christian men professing the law of love of their fellows slew one another. What does all this mean? Why did it happen? What made those people burn houses and slay their fellow men? What were the causes of these events? What force made men act so? These are the instinctive, plain, and most legitimate questions humanity asks itself when it encounters the monuments and traditions of that period. [...] What force moves the nations? Leo Tolstoy (1868, p. 940 and p. 942) iii Contents Preface ix Part I. Révolution sans frontières Introduction 3 1. Power and law in international order 23 2. The French Revolution and the European order 71 Part II. Icy rivers, chains of gold: the Franco-Batavian alliance 1. Gallicus amicus 125 2. Clapping hands, fraternal style 146 3. A constitutive treaty? 199 4. War and peace 247 5. The limits of independence 330 6. The alliance renewed 407 Part III. The Batavian Republic and the struggle for peace 1. Revolutionary peace 439 2. Peace at last 461 3. Negotiating with Britain 498 4. A gathering in Rastatt 541 5. The Consul‘s peace 574 6. Bridging the Channel 602 Part IV. The Revolutionary alliance 621 Samenvatting 653 Appendices 670 Archivalia and Bibliography 686 iv v Part I Revolution sans frontières ”Order is a lawyer‘s paradise. Establishing and maintaining order is what law seems to be all about.‘ - Paul Vinogradoff -1 1 Vinogradoff, 1923, p. 4. 1 2 Introduction H8on't you realise I have power either to free you or to crucify you?‘ exclaimed Pontius Pilate, according to the Gospel by St. John,2 in reaction to the way the suspect brought before him responded to the accusations raised against Him. In a brave attempt to say anything sensible from a legal point of view about what probably is the most famous ”historical trial‘ in Western civilization, Eltjo Schrage claims to see in this verse one of the most impressing expressions of the preca- rious relation between power and law.3 If there was a trial altogether, the Roman governor in Judea here dropped the veil of justice to refer to his power. Law exists to bring and maintain order, to moderate power and prevent its arbitrary use and, at the same time, law needs power to be effective and power can make use of law. A sword can wound and kill and yet it has to be an attribute of justice, whereas the sword needs the scales and blindfold, too. Neither positions to which the law is nothing more than the command of those in power, nor ones to which the law upholds moral standards independent of and most often against mere power, can ignore this ambiguous relation between power and law that has dominated the domains of political philosophy and public law for centuries and will probably do so for as long as human society exists. At the national level power and law have merged into authority: legitimised, institutionalised and channelled power embedded in a constitution and centred in a political organisation that acts as the commanding sovereign and has monopolised the legitimate use of force. Characteristically for the modern states system, this national level is separated from the supranational or international level, where the relation between power and law is more ambiguous. International society, to use Hedley Bull‘s characterisation, is anarchical.4 There the ”struggle for power‘ peculiar to all politics takes place in different ways and within the framework of different institutions.5 It lacks a supreme command centre that determines what the law is and how the law is interpreted, administered, and enforced. That is not a sign of international law‘s immaturity œ it not having developed into a real and complete legal system yet, as Edward H. Carr has it œ,6 but of the very foundations international society is based upon: the co-existence of territorially based, autonomous political communities called sove- reign states. In that anarchical society both power and law can exist separately and in relation to one another. 2 John 19:10. 3 Schrage, 2003, p. 363. 4 Bull, 2002. 5 Morgenthau, 2004, p. 52. 6 Carr, 2001, p. 159. 3 At the centre of this study are the ways power affects the international legal order. Is power translated into law, legal status and legal procedures? Is power recognised by the law of nations and incorporated within the international legal order? Does law contain power or is law an instrument in the hands of the powerful? Unlike most studies in diplomatic history,7 the argument is not on great powers, but on relations between great powers and minor powers providing a case study on Revolutionary France and one of its satellite republics. Thus, this is especially a book on a period in European history œ the era of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802) œ in which one power œ the French Republic œ got in a political and military position that enabled it to undermine the legal assumption of the equality of autonomous actors within the international system, or at least in western Europe. This book sets out to find out whether France did and was allowed to do precisely this. One is not lead to believe that the kind of great power-minor power relations described and analysed throughout this volume is peculiar to the Revolutionary era. Asymmetric alliances and political dependence of formally independent entities, personal unions or entities united because of dynastic links between their respective rulers were not exceptional in early modern Europe: e.g. Austria and its Italian dominions and secundogenitures, Britain and Portugal, Britain and the United Provinces, Prussia and northern Germany, Spain and Parma. Nevertheless, this study sets out to deliver a case study on one of those situations in which a minor power was brought under the political and military control of a neighbouring power within a very specific context. Franco-Batavian relations, no doubt, were contingent of the Revolution and Revolutionary Wars. The Revolutionary Wars, in addition to the crisis in eastern Europe during the 1770s and 1780s,8 disrupted the European balance of power and the eighteenth-century political and legal order that had arisen after the great peace conferences of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.9 For some years Revolutionary and Napoleonic France dominated western Europe. Even in 1799-1800, when the joint effort of all other great powers save neutral Prussia gave the French a difficult time, the Revolutionary armies succeeded in turning the tide. From 1794 until the Battle of Leipzig (16-19 October 1813) there was an ever-increasing political and military imbalance within the European states system. The advance of the French Revolutionary armies caused the creation of allied republics in the Netherlands, Italy, and Switzerland. At the same time, that period witnessed an intensive debate on the European order and the law of nations due to a sense of a new world 7 Black, 2002, p. 42. 8 Schroeder, 1994, p. 23. 9 Kissinger, 1974, p. 4. 4 order arising or to be created. The Revolution introduced into political practice some, more or less new political and legal ideas that had potentially severe consequences for the international legal order. In the first place the influence of Enlightened idealism and cosmopolitanism was still felt, e.g. in the stress on pacifism, good faith in interstate relations and ”federalism.‘10 In the second place, the Revolutionary concept of popular sovereignty challenged or threatened to change some of the fundamentals of the European order: e.g.