Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (120 page)

But the Revolution failed to disintegrate and from late 1794 its resilience posed a growing threat to the established order. Even a precarious, modest degree of political stabilization, as was achieved after Thermidor, sufficed to renew the menace along the lines posed in 1792. The dramatic expansion of the revolutionary armies achieved in 1793–94, thanks to Danton’s call for mobilizing the masses and rigorous conscription, along with the purging of the disloyal element and forging a new revolutionary army officer corps, and the huge expansion in the supply of weapons and munitions, raised the level of threat exponentially. In fact, by 1795 ancien régime Europe faced not just a threat but the
looming likelihood of extinction. Even standing resolutely all together, it could be predicted that Britain and the European great powers would not be able to withstand the Revolution militarily.

If the chances of Britain being successfully invaded were slim, Ireland looked vulnerable and the likelihood of England losing much of her global power and influence very real. If the catastrophic losses Britain suffered in the Caribbean during the years 1795–99 occurred only because the French were aided there by free blacks and emancipated (or hoping-to-be emancipated) slaves, in India and Europe too, large segments of society could be expected to ally with the French. If no other power had been remotely as successful as Britain in stripping France of prestige and her choicest colonies in the eighteenth century, the balance of power and resources appeared to be reversing itself. Thus, the British ruling classes shared in the anxieties gripping Prussia, Austria, Russia, Italy, and Spain; their leading position in European affairs and the country’s maritime and commercial primacy in the rest of the world appeared to be seriously threatened.

Nowhere were Prussian, Austrian, and British interests more immediately menaced than in the Low Countries. Republicanism had a long tradition in the Netherlands, and the democratic opposition to the nobility, churches, and stadtholderate, firmly anti-British and anti-Prussian in outlook, had already become a formidable if not very coherent force in the 1780s, before the French Revolution. By 1787, the Dutch democratic movement had virtually gained control of the United Provinces and was vigorously promoting democratic ideas. It had been halted and suppressed only by massive Prussian military intervention backed by Britain. Thousands of Dutch Patriots had been compelled to flee their homeland and seek refuge in Belgium and France. Thus far, stadtholder and Estates-General had experienced little difficulty in maintaining their grip. But what if the repressive apparatus of the Dutch ancien régime was challenged by a French follow-up invasion repeating the brief but successful incursion of 1793, only this time in greater force?

A month before Thermidor, on 26 June 1794, the Austrian army in the Low Countries, despite being reinforced by Dutch Orangist contingents and exceptionally large, suffered crushing defeat at Fleurus, just inside Belgium. Though well-equipped, the Austrian army was unable to withstand the size (80,000 men), élan, and massive artillery resources organized by Carnot and Saint-Just. To add insult to injury, the French commander, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan (1762–1833), was the
son of a common surgeon, a veteran of the American war, in which he had enrolled and fought as a common soldier. Like Hoche and Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (1763–1844)—later one of Napoleon’s key generals and from 1810 hereditary prince of Sweden—he was one of the new breed of non-noble officers selected from the ranks for high command by Carnot. Before long, the revolutionaries recaptured Brussels.

Hardly was Robespierre overthrown than the General Revolution recaptured Liège and Antwerp. Two months later, on 24 September, the French set siege to the principal Dutch fortress in North Brabant, ’s-Hertogenbosch, a vast stronghold taken after a three-week siege in which Daendels and De Winter, the commanders of the Dutch revolutionary legion, figured prominently. ’s-Hertogenbosch became a strategic base and propaganda center from where revolutionary incitement, newsletters, and pamphlets infiltrated the not-yet-liberated territory to the north.
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By October 1794, Jourdan had overrun not only much of Dutch Brabant but also Cologne, Coblenz, and Düsseldorf. How were Britain, Prussia, and Austria going to halt the democratic General Revolution?

The successful advance triggered a buildup of prorevolutionary fervor in Holland’s main cities. The country’s numerous reading societies revived their former Patriot zeal and again openly propagated anti-Orangist sentiment and republican-democratic ideas. Enthusiasm for the Dutch democrat ex-patriots was openly displayed. The commander of the Dutch legion fighting with the French, Herman Willem Daendels, and his secretary, Gerrit Paape (1752–1803), a leading exponent of radical thought in the Low Countries, heartily loathed Robespierre and publicly rejoiced over his downfall, but were also strongly motivated republicans. Detailed information about the military and political situation in the Dutch Republic poured onto their desks from sympathizers, militant anti-Orangists, in Amsterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht, not least from Willem van Irhoven van Dam (1760–1802),
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the Dutch Legion’s principal contact within Holland, a preeminent intellectual and radical enlightener, as well as editor of the Amsterdam
Coerier
.

Irhoven had been warning of the “unruliness of an unlimited and incorrectly constructed democracy that we must avoid” for years, at least since 1783, insisting that what he (and Gerrit Paape) called “philosophical republicanism” was the only right path to republican liberty, equality, and stability.
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Citing Raynal, Diderot, Mably, Priestley, and Price, Irhoven employed the term “onweesgerige” (unphilosophical) to
mean anything undemocratic, intolerant, monarchical, and allied to aristocracy. One might object that he and Paape belonged to a tiny, unrepresentative fringe, and this is true. But it was precisely these men, believing philosophy alone could lead men to “love of man and the people’s liberty,” who were the active fringe at the forefront of revolutionary subversion in Holland. They led the group that initiated and steered the Batavian Revolution of 1795–1800.
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In fact, the collapse of aristocracy, court culture, conservatism, and Anglo-Prussian influence in the Northern Netherlands proved spectacularly swift. If mostly quiescent and sullen until the late summer of 1794, opposition to the stadtholderate became widespread and intense from August, active opposition in close contact with Daendels and Paape, and hence with the French commanders and executive committees in Paris. On 31 July 1794, thirty-six delegates from local clubs in Groningen, Overijssel, Utrecht, and Holland gathered in a tavern in Amsterdam, under Irhoven van Dam’s chairmanship, to coordinate plans with the advancing French.
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In Utrecht, where there were at least a dozen reading societies meeting in private homes, hundreds of former Free Corps democrat militiamen with guns in their houses were reportedly ready to come out and fight the Orangists as soon as the French appeared—information that proved correct. By late September Amsterdam was flooded with posters and pamphlets produced by the secret committee for the Patriot Revolution. In October, armed disturbances broke out, which the Orangist regime crushed, but with difficulty and only with the help of the Prussian and British contingents stationed in the country.

When the great rivers had frozen up sufficiently for cavalry to cross, in January 1795, the French revolutionary armies swept forward. If the allies’ military defeat, rather predictably, was crushing and extremely swift, the psychological and symbolic defeat was even more galling. Franco-Dutch republican entry into the core of the Republic in January 1795, British observers felt obliged to admit, resembled a carnival procession “happily conducted” more than a military campaign, with the towns bedecked with tricolor flags and revolutionary posters, as well as the black cockades of the Dutch democrats.
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Thoroughly humiliated, the stadtholder and his family fled to England on 18 January. On entering Utrecht, the French found the city festooned in tricolor pendants and the insignia of the Revolution, and packed with jubilant crowds. Three days before French troops entered Amsterdam, the local Comité Revolutionair had already overwhelmed the Orangist opposition and
taken over Holland’s principal city.
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Strikingly, there was little violence against—or pilfering the property of—the many thousands of fleeing Orangists.

Figure 19. Champions of the “General Revolution”: (a) Georg Forster, (b) Tom Paine.
(a) J.H.W. Tischbein (1751–1829), portrait of Georg Forster, painting. © TopFoto / The Image Works. (b) John Wesley Jarvis (ca. 1781–1839), portrait of Thomas Paine, ca. 1805, oil on canvas. © Atlas Archive / The Image Works.

The 1795 Batavian Revolution was thus a genuine liberation that swept away princely, Anglo-Prussian, and aristocratic control, aided by the relatively disciplined, tactful conduct of the French troops, which, on this occasion, contrasted strikingly with the conspicuous indiscipline of the retreating Prussians and British, who reportedly angrily pillaged whole towns and villages as they departed. Everywhere, revolutionary committees and their militias assumed control, removing Orangist officals and replacing them with Patriots. All the town oligarchies of the Northern Netherlands were thus purged. Those who took over were mostly the democratic Patriots of 1787. In the town of Deventer in Overijssel, for example, the first municipal elections after the Revolution in March 1795 resulted in no fewer than seven of the ten most popular candidates being anti-Orangist former members of the Patriot city council that had been suppressed following the Prussian invasion of 1787.
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This sense of the Batavian Revolution of 1795 being a restoration of democratic gains lost in 1787—as much or more than a new beginning based on French example—was reflected in the innumerable victory parades, thanksgiving ceremonies, banquets, and special theatrical performances that greeted its inception.

Leaving the Dutch to shape their own republican future, with a minimum of interference from Paris, had many advantages from the French standpoint, but also presented difficulties. How exactly the Dutch past could be reconciled with the demands of democratic republicanism and radical ideas remained unclear. The new Batavian Republic was bound to diverge from the French Republic in important respects. For one thing, religion continued to exert a strong hold on both the Protestant and Catholic Dutch, who evinced little sympathy either for French “atheism” or the comprehensive freedom from religious authority the French Revolution had introduced. There remained much resistance to according equal rights to Catholics, Jews, and Anabaptists, and a good deal of support also for the traditional federal structure of the Republic, which meant retaining many inequitable “privileges,” “rights,” and procedures from the past. Also, there was practically no discussion of black emancipation despite the fact that the General Revolution was now also engulfing all the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean and the Guianas. But there was no resisting the upsurge of feverish discussion in Holland’s clubs and revolutionary committees, which was about to
reshape Dutch politics and institutions. In December 1795, the purged but otherwise still unreformed oligarchic Estates-General yielded to demands for the convening of a National Assembly to reform the Republic’s Constitution along democratic lines. For the first time in Dutch history, this would be an assembly not of delegates of town oligarchies but representatives elected by the people, one delegate for every 15,000 inhabitants.

In the first Dutch democratic elections in early 1796, a great landmark in Dutch and world history, all male citizens older than twenty not receiving poor relief were entitled to vote. The first Dutch National Assembly duly convened on 1 March 1796. Amid the sunshine, applause, artillery salvos, and the hoisting of the new Dutch tricolor flag, and much cheering of “Vivat de Republiek!,” the 126 representatives of the Dutch National Assembly solemnly began their proceedings. Pieter Paulus (1754–96), a leader of the democratic movement of the 1780s, was elected chairman. Before anything else, he announced “in the name of the Dutch people which we here represent that this Assembly is the representative body of the Dutch people!” A great public festival in The Hague followed on 3 March. Among the Dutch National Assembly’s first acts was a decision to appoint a commission of twenty-one to study the Dutch constitutional debates of the 1780s, as well as the Unites States Constitution and the various French constitutions since 1791, and draw up proposals for the new Dutch constitution.
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Radiating from France, the Low Countries, the Rhineland, and Switzerland, by 1795 unrelenting ideological warfare penetrated most urbanized and literate parts of Europe, unnerving the authorities and stirring the populace. Fear lest French and Franco-Dutch democratic republicanism should prove contagious thus pervaded the Western world in a more urgent and immediate form from 1795 than it had in the early 1790s. The speed and ease with which the Austrian Netherlands and Dutch ancien régime had disintegrated under the impact of the General Revolution was bound to encourage republican democratic elements elsewhere, including in Ireland and Britain itself. In Britain, democratic radicalism was undoubtedly a small but also a highly motivated fringe, widely viewed as a threat to Crown, aristocracy, and Church, and not to be underestimated, even if the British radicals, continually denounced by the government and press, remained highly unpopular with most of society. For they nevertheless had some support in England and Scotland, and still more in Ireland, all of which greatly alarmed the government.