Popular politics and the Dutch Patriot revolution

199 POPULAR POLITICS AND THE DUTCH PATRIOT REVOLUTION WAYNE P. TE BRAKE We were present at Utrecht at the August Ceremony of Swearing in their new Magistrates. In no instance, of ancient or modern History, have the People ever asserted more unequivocally their own inherent and unalienable Sovereignty. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson ~ September 11, 1786 John Adams was obviously excited by what he saw going on in the Dutch Republic in 1786. Having been closely associated with the Dutch since 1780, Adams had seen the Dutch Patriots' first halting steps toward demanding fundamental reform of their government. What he witnessed at Utrecht in August of 1786 was the culmination of a long political process that began in 1782 and was, in fact, a momentous victory for the Patriot movement: after years of struggle, the Patriots in Utrecht had purged the Municipal Council of their enemies and had inaugurated new Magistrates who had been democratically elected according to the provisions of a new municipal constitution. 2 To be sure, John Adams has a well-deserved reputatiort for volatility and exaggeration, but there can be no doubt that he saw the work of the Utrecht Patriots as profoundly revolutionary, even by comparison with what had just transpired in North America. Just fourteen months later, however, the Dutch situation would look dramatically different. As the Patriot Revolution heated up through the spring and summer of 1787, the Stadhouder, Prince William V of Orange, who had borne the brunt of the Patriots' attack throughout the decade, called on outside help. In May the English put up the money - 90,000 pounds - while in September the Prussians put up the troops - 26,000 men commanded by the Duke of Brunswick - and on October 10, 1787, the Patriots' last stronghold, the city of Amsterdam, capitulated to the invasion force. By the end of 1787, the Orangist "restoration" was complete. Adams's perception that the Dutch people were asserting their sovereignty in an unprecedented fashion in 1786 is a useful point of departure because it State University o f New York at Purchase. 200 projects an image of the Patriot Revolution that we are not accustomed to seeing. Ever since the debacle of 1787, historians have been inclined to second-guess the Patriots in order to explain their failure - they lacked sufficient popular support; they didn't properly understand what reforms the Dutch Republic needed; they were not brave enough to stand up to the counter-revolution; in short, they were not "truly revolutionary. "3 Adams, too, criticized some of the Patriots' leaders in November of 1787. 4 Suffice it to say here that, September, 1787 notwithstanding, the Dutch Patriots had been revolutionary and successful enough to elicit the same conservative response as did the French revolutionaries a few years later. For our purposes, what is most intriguing about Adams's characterization of the Patriot Revolution at Utrecht is his assertion that "the People" were the central actors. In the eighteenth century, politics was not routinely the concern of ordinary people; it was, rather, the private, exclusive domain of the sovereign - that is, of monarchs, of constituted aristocratic bodies, or most often of the two working uneasily in concert. In the last few decades, social historians of early modern Europe have done much to rediscover the many ways in which ordinary people nevertheless intruded into the world of aristocratic politics, even though these popular interventions were usually sporadic and temporary. 5 To say, however, as Adams did, that the people of Utrecht intervened in the name of their own sovereignty is to pinpoint precisely what was revolutionary about the Dutch Patriot Revolution. This paper follows Adams's lead and argues that ordinary people were critical actors in the development of the Dutch Patriot Revolution. In doing so, it differs substantially from the traditional historical wisdom on the Patriots. Most accounts of the Patriot Revolution either ignore or underestimate the role of popular political action in the development of the conflict. H . T . Colenbrander's late nineteenth-century standard work viewed the conflict primarily in terms of foreign diplomatic sources in order to explain the counter-revolutionary outcome of 1787; in his essentially Orangist view, the Patriots were marionettes whose fate was controlled by foreign ambassadors and secret agents. 6 Attacking Colenbrander, Pieter Geyl tried to rehabilitate the Patriots' reputation by emphasizing what he saw as their nationalist and moderately democratic ideas. 7 I. Leonard Leeb and C. H. E. de Wit, too, focus on the Patriots' ideas, and De Wit in particular portrays the more radical Patriots as the true progenitors of modern parliamentary democracy. s But in paying all this attention to what a few Patriots thought, these general accounts of the Patriot movement lose sight of what the Patriots actually did. 201 To the extent that common people enter into view at all, historians traditionally take the claims of eighteenth-century pamphleteers at face value and thus describe the Patriots as a relatively small band of socially respectable reformers. In his more polemical work, De Wit also argues, again using eighteenth-century polemical sources, that the most marginal elements of Dutch society were brought into action by money and alcohol as part of what he describes as an English-financed campaign of counter-revolutionary terror. 9 But in the last decade, a new interest in the social history of the Patriot Revolution has produced archival research that finally allows us to move beyond these stereotypes. We can begin to describe more precisely who became involved in the revolutionary struggle and to specify the conditions under which ordinary people were able to make a political difference. Rewriting the story of the Patriot Revolution is, however, more than a matter of purely antiquarian interest. For the pattern of popular politics and revolution that emerged in the Dutch Republic in the 1780s challenges some of our most habitual thinking about revolutionary conflict. There is always a temptation to sensationalize our historical accounts of revolution, the better to praise revolutionary heroes or to condemn revolutionary excesses. With regard to revolutions, at least, bigger has always seemed better - a maxim that clearly underwrites our perennial fascination with the so-called great revolutions.10 At the same time, as Theda Skocpol argues, most theories of revolution take the state for granted; the state is seen simply as an arena in which larger social and economic conflicts are played out. ~ But her own attempt to take states seriously as "potentially autonomous organizations," coupled as it is with her rigorous definition of "social" revolution, serves in the end to reinforce the notion that the revolutions that really count are sudden, national upheavals within centralized and autocratic monarchies. By comparison, Adams's remark about the revolution in Utrecht highlights the important fact that the Patriots' was a localized revolution within a decentralized republic. The Dutch Republic that emerged from the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) was a permanent confederation of seven sovereign provinces, which pledged themselves to a common defense and coinage and collectively ruled the so-called generality lands through delegates to the Estates General. ~2 The unplanned consequence of a successful revolt against Hapsburg dynasticism and religious intolerance, this Republic was a distinctively new polity, not a medieval remnant, but as modern and efficient in many ways as any of the larger centralizing, militarized monarchies with which it competed for some 200 years.~3 Provincial Estates, comprised variously of noblemen (or designated rural landowners) and representatives of virtually independent free 202 cities, assumed the important fiscal and judicial functions that normally accrued to early modern sovereignties. ~4 The Stadhouders, traditionally Princes of Orange or Nassau, were actually appointees of the several provinces, and not until 1747 was the position unified in a single Prince of Orange and made permanent and hereditary. Even then, the Princes' influence was rooted in informal patronage networks and their traditional appointments as Captain General of the Army and Admiral General of the Navy, rather than in any direct decision-making authority that accrued to the position of Stadhouder. In this fragmented and decentralized political setting, revolution developed very slowly and only ended with a bang. After a period of politicization and initial mobilization primarily in opposition to the Prince of Orange (1782-1784), the Patriots only gradually radicalized their demands and challenged the old-regime oligarchy directly at its base in the free cities and the provincial Estates (1784-1786). By 1787, the Patriots had not only deprived the Stadhouder of his most important appointments but had begun to democratize municipal councils in a number of cities and towns. When foreign intervention abruptly halted the process in the fall of 1787, the political and social fabric of the old Republic was being torn apart by internal war. Behind this pattern of political conflict lay an unprecedented degree of popular mobilization and a novel pattern of popular politics, much of which is similar to the more familiar Anglo-American and French political struggles in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. But as John Adams suggested, there was also something extraordinary about the way ordinary people could and did intervene in this decentralized political arena. Patriots, American and Dutch Like any other revolutionary conflict, the Patriot Revolution has a complex prehistory to which a brief analysis like this must necessarily do violence. But with all due respect for some local variations, it is safe to say that the Dutch people first had a decisive impact on Dutch politics in 1782 in the context of the American Revolutionary War. Throughout the previous decade, the Dutch Republic had found itself in an exceedingly precarious position in European affairs. In the context of heightened Anglo-French rivalries, it was difficult for the Dutch to pursue their long-standing policy of strict neutrality, while internal conflicts between the Stadhouder and mercantile interests in the province of Holland over defense strategies (augmentation of the army vs. restoration of the navy) virtually paralyzed politics at The Hague.~5 The situation was greatly exacerbated by the advent of open hostilities in America in 1775, for Dutch smugglers in the Caribbean had been supplying arms to 203 the American rebels. Finally in December, 1780, the Dutch were dragged willy-nilly into war with England, ostensibly because representatives of the rebellious colonies and the city of Amsterdam had secretly been negotiating a commercial treaty with the United States. The Fourth English War, a naval confrontation with the undisputed master of the seas, was a political and economic disaster for the Dutch.~6 Among other things, it elicited a voluminous pamphlet literature in which the Orangists, who favored an early peace and alliance with England, and the so-called Patriots, who favored the American cause and alliance with France, sought to hold each other accountable for the War's disastrous effects. Iv Even before the Dutch had been dragged into the War, the American Congress had sent John Adams to the Netherlands in August, 1780 in search of Dutch loans to finance the war effort. ~8 Well aware that he would be persona non grata in official Orangist circles at The Hague, Adams settled in Amsterdam, where he expected a warmer reception. He soon discovered, however, that Dutch loans were contingent on Dutch recognition of the United States and that, like it or not, he would have to break in at The Hague before he could get any help on the financial markets in Amsterdam. After eight months of anxiety and frustration, Adams finally settled on a course of action that defied diplomatic protocol and was bitterly opposed by the French Ambassador: he appealed directly, without invitation, to the Estates General of the United Provinces for recognition of his ambassadorial status, and when the President of the Estates would not even receive his "Memorial," he had it published in Dutch, French, and English and distributed throughout the Republic. Such diplomacy was unheard of, and officialdom at The Hague was appalled. But in circumventing normal diplomatic channels and appealing directly to public opinion, Adams was allying himself with and indeed following the advice of the people in Holland who were most like himself- a group of political dissidents who, like the American rebels, called themselves "Patriots." As J. W. Schulte Nordholt has shown, Adams's closest Dutch friends all stood outside the world of aristocratic politics, and chief among them were Jean Lusac, a professor and publicist at Leiden; Francis Adrian van der Kemp, a radical Mennonite preacher from Leiden; and J. D. van der Capellen, an outspoken advocate of the American cause, whose radical politics had gotten him expelled from the provincial Estates of Overijssel.~9 Van der Capellen, in particular, had pioneered the tactic of publishing normally secret government documents in order to arouse public opinion. Adams's publication of his "Memorial" was a bold and controversial step, 204 but it was not by itself sufficient to the task of gaining Dutch recognition and loans. Its publication in the spring of 1781 was followed in the fall by the clandestine distribution of a remarkable pamphlet entitled " A a n het Volk van Nederland," written a n o n y m o u s l y by Van der Capellen. 20 Together, these two pamphlets signaled an informal alliance between the Dutch and A m e r i c a n Patriots. In his " M e m o r i a l " A d a m s appealed to the example of the Dutch Revolt against Spain to justify the American Revolution: The originals of the two republics are so much alike, that the history of the one seems but a transcript of the other; so that every Dutchman instructed in the subject must pronounce the American revolution just and necessary, or pass censure upon the greatest actions of his immortal ancestors; actions which have been approved and applauded by mankind, and justified by the decision of heaven3 t A d a m s ' republican ally, Van der Capellen, returned the favor in " A a n het Volk." In his long and stinging a t t a c k on the House of Orange and its pro-English politics, Van der Capellen invoked the Americans as the e x a m ple, p a r excellence, of republican virtue. Thus, his call to action ended as follows: Take up arms, all of you, choose yourselves those who must command you, and proceed with modesty and composure just like the people of America where not a single drop of blood was shed before the English attacked them, and Jehovah, the God of Liberty, who led the Israelites out of the house of bondage and made them a free people will also surely support our good cause.22 " A a n het Volk" was easily the most successful and influential Dutch p a m phlet of its time. A l t h o u g h it was banned immediately, it went through four clandestine printings yet that year, and it was immediately translated into French, German, and English. M u c h like T o m Paine's " C o m m o n Sense" had done in A m e r i c a in 1776, Van der Capellen's p a m p h l e t crystallized the o p p o s i n g sides in the political debate. Van der Capellen offered his readers a single, plausible explanation - the m e g a l o m a n i a of the Prince of Orange - for a host of domestic problems that might otherwise have seemed completely unrelated to the War, but more importantly, he offered his readers a plan of action - the election of citizens' committees and the f o r m a t i o n of free militias designed to reduce the overarching influence of the Prince and his "fawning lot of grandees." Within the next two years, this explosive political rhetoric was gradually translated into p o p u l a r political action. - The first concrete evidence of a p o p u l a r movement-in-the-making was a modest petition c a m p a i g n on behalf of J o h n A d a m s in the winter of 1782. In towns and cities t h r o u g h o u t the Republic, merchants especially, but also lawyers, artisans, and b o a t m e n signed petitions d e m a n d i n g recognition of 205 John Adams's credentials as minister of a sovereign state33 The Patriots had clearly picked up on Adams's promise of immense commercial advantage in alliance with America, for the petitions generally portrayed America as an underdeveloped source of raw materials and a market for Dutch manufactures34 The petitions requested that the municipal governments instruct their delegates to the provincial Estates, and that the provincial Estates, in turn, instruct their delegates to the Estates General to vote in favor of recognition of the United States of America. On February 26, 1782, the province of Friesland, and then one-by-one the other six provinces of the Republic, gave in to popular pressure from local constituencies and voted in favor of recognition of the United States. What I am suggesting, then, is that Dutch recognition of the United States on April 19, 1782, was hardly the result of a standard diplomatic process; it might better be seen as a profoundly subversive act subversive of the traditional aristocratic politics of the Dutch Republic and of the narrow pattern of diplomacy that accompanied it. 25A revolutionaryjournbethis was not, but for those involved, the experience turned out to be terribly educational. The government at The Hague, so impenetrable to Adams on his own, proved vulnerable to popular demands made outside the normal channels of politics. Thus, after this initial triumph, the mass petition campaign quickly became the preferred mechanism by which the Patriots pressed for governmental action on a broad range of issues not directly related to the War and the Americans. The People Enter Politics The greatest problem in describing the process by which the Patriot movement brought ordinary people into Dutch politics is that the campaign on behalf of John Adams was one of very few national campaigns that united the Patriots from all provinces. Very quickly, foreign policy and defense issues receded as matters of public debate, while provincial and local problems increasingly dominated the Patriots' agenda. And well they might. In the fragmented Dutch polity, such critical governmental functions as taxation and justice were almost exclusively the concern of provincial and local governments, 26and any attempt to influence or restructure domestic politics would necessarily reflect that political fragmentation. The result is an uneven political process in which the stages of mobilization and the issues at stake varied considerably from place to place. Still, there are some general patterns that emerge. The most striking feature of the popular Patriot movement is that it devel- 206 oped first and most forcefully in the land provinces: Utrecht, Gelderland, and Overijssel. 27Each of these provinces was subject to a Governmental Regulation that gave the Stadhouder significant influence in the appointment of the most important officials in both provincial and local government. In the second half of the eighteenth century, that influence was parlayed into an elaborate patronage system, which gave the Prince, working through his so-called Lieutenants, considerable political leverage at all levels of government. 28 Since the patronage system could easily be seen as an Orangist usurpation of local sovereignties, the Governmental Regulations may help to explain why the Patriots could usually count on a fairly receptive audience among local Magistrates) 9 That official receptiveness must not, however, obscure the independence and self-sufficiency of the Patriot movement itself. The small province of Overijssel, Van der Capellen's home ground, illustrates how the mobilization proceeded. 30 By the time the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States had been signed in October, 1782, there was a new petition campaign underway in each of the principal cities of Overijssel: Deventer, Kampen, and Zwolle. By comparison with the first petition campaign, which in Deventer had garnered just sixty-six signatures, this one constituted a veritable tidal wave of popular political action. In Deventer the petition had some 1,460 signatures, representing more than two-thirds of the adult male population, while in Zwolle there were reportedly 2,000 signatories, a slightly smaller proportion of that city's population) ~The petitioners' demands included especially the readmission of Van der Capellen to the provincial Estates, and when this demand was satisfied on November 1, Van der Capellen returned triumphantly to the Assembly amid shouts of "Vivat Capellen" from the assembled crowds. In early December, flushed with success and clearly not wanting to lose their momentum, many Patriots in Deventer formally commissioned twelve representatives to serve as their Burgercommittee with the task of overseeing local government and drafting and circulating petitions on behalf of the citizens. The first of its kind in the Republic, the Burgercommittee swung into action with new petitions at the end of December and the beginning of February. Meanwhile it aided in setting up a similar committee in Zwolle. Among other things, the Patriots demanded that the Municipal Council hold a "free" election of Burgemeesters - free, that is, of the Stadhouder's influence. For their part, the local Magistrates agreed to act upon the Patriots' demands after each of the petitions, and though the Stadhouder did not relinquish his power without a fight, the Councils of all three cities managed to defy William's influence in the annual elections of new Burgemeesters. In Deventer, they actually removed his most outspoken supporter from office. 207 Now, who were these Patriots who so easily came to dominate the politics of cities like Deventer, Kampen, and Zwolle? From the sheer numbers involved in the October petitions, it is obvious that the movement was broadly based. In Deventer, where we can identify roughly half of the signatories, all sectors of the population were represented, though as Table 1 suggests, some occupational groups, such as manufacturing (the largest), were relatively overrepresented, judging by their overall share of the workforce in 1795, while others like common laborers and the unemployed were clearly underrepresented. 32 Still, in the context of the humiliating and economically disastrous War, a broad spectrum of the city's population could unite in opposition to the Stadhouder and in defense of"the delicate Freedom of City and Fatherland. ''33 At the same time it is clear that the driving force behind the movement in Deventer was that familiar collection of old-regime institutions - the guilds. The massive petition in October was organized by the generale ouderlieden of the guilds, and more than one-fourth of the signatories were guildsmen. Surely, the remarkable size of this petition is eloquent testimony to the political usefulness of these ostensibly apolitical associations. Later, the ad hoc leadership of the guilds was superseded by a formally appointed Burgercommittee. By adding eight at-large representatives to the guild leadership, this special-purpose association, not unlike the committees of correspondence in America, effected a more or less permanent coalition between guildsmen and their allies whom the petitions often referred to as particulieren (private persons). Still, as Table 2 indicates, the guild members remained TABLE 1 Occupational Profile of Active Patriots: Deventer, 1782 Occupation Manufacturing Trade and Transportation Social Services Agriculture Miscellaneous Common Laborers Inactive Census 1795 Petition Oct. 1782 Index Census = (%) (%) 100 39.1 16.4 5.4 6.1 7.7 7.6 17.6 Total 99.9 (n = 1929) 54.7 20.5 7.5 4.7 4.5 3.2 5.0 100.1 (n = 536) 140 125 139 77 58 42 28 208 TABLE 2 The Strength of Guild Participation: Deventer, 1782 1783 Occupation Petition Oct. 1782 G* Manufacturing Trade and Transportation Other Total Petition Dec. 1782 P* (%)* 91 38 8 202 72 125 31 35 6 137 399 26 G Petition Feb. 1783 P (%) G P (%) 83 39 9 31 27 34 73 60 26 102 51 8 87 44 66 54 54 I1 131 83 61 161 197 45 * G = guildsmen P = particulieren % = guildsmen as a percentage of the total in each category the most reliable core of the movement, for when the total numbers of signatories dropped in subsequent petitions, the numbers of guildsmen remained relatively constant and their share jumped as high as 60 percent of the total. With the exception of the rather large and diverse retail merchants' guild (Sluytersgilde), the fourteen guilds whose members joined the movement en masse were relatively homogeneous and mostly artisanal, ranging from seven (glass makers) to nearly fifty members (tailors). More broadly, the role of local guilds appears to have been crucial to the early mobilization of the Patriot movement throughout the land provinces. Thus, guildsmen also appear as leaders in Zwolle, Utrecht, and the principal cities of Gelderland where the growth of the Patriot movement followed much the same trajectory as in Deventer. 34 But in order to be politically effective, guilds had to enjoy a considerable amount of independence from their local Magistrates. Thus, for example, in Kampen where the guilds were dominated by the local oligarchy, popular mobilization remained weak and sporadic. Unable even to meet without permission, artisans and tradesmen in Kampen were incapable of organizing popular political action on the scale that their counterparts had done elsewhere in the land provinces. In the absence of a guild-sponsored Burgercommittee, members of the Municipal Council took on the responsibility of corresponding with Burgercommittees elsewhere. 35 If Kampen is the exception that seems to confirm the rule of guild leadership in the eastern provinces, then its relatively weak guilds may also help us to understand the slow start of the Patriot movement in the urban and com- 209 mercial west. In the province of Holland, Rudolf Dekker tells us, the guilds "actually had more of the character of a government agency than of a pressure group. ''36 Throughout the history of the Republic, then, the guilds of Holland, with the notable exception of Dordrecht, had been unable to mobilize protest movements, and according to Dekker, Holland was remarkably free of guild-based riots and disturbances. Likewise, the relative weakness of the Patriot movement in Holland during the earliest phase of the conflict may be due, not to a lesser degree of disgruntlement or politicization, but to the diminished opportunity for artisans and shopkeepers to organize to pursue common interests because independent guilds were not among the resources available to them. 37 In any case, petition campaigns and Burgercommittees were not the only means by which the Patriots mobilized popular support for their cause. Petitions could be persuasive and Burgercommittees effective only as long as local Magistrates were receptive to the demands being placed on them. When they were not, something more forceful was needed. Ever since the national debates over defense policy in the 1770s, the more radical Patriots had called for an armed populace to counteract the tyrannical potential of a large standing army commanded by the Prince of Orange, and in "Aan het Volk" Van der Capellen had portrayed an armed citizenry, along Swiss or American lines, as the best defense of liberty. Thus, as the nascent Patriot movement set out to resuscitate the Fatherland, Patriots everywhere began to arm themselves. Again, the process varied from place to place, but in this case the patterns are more difficult to generalize. What Van der Capellen may originally have envisioned was something like the universal citizens' militia that was called for in the Eighth Article of the Union of Utrecht. 38 In the partisan atmosphere of the 1780s, however, the project of arming the people took on more explicitly political tones, and the Patriots turned to the idea of Vrijcorps - independent, voluntary militias also called e x e r c i t i e g e n o o t s c h a p p e n (exercise associations). The Patriots at Deventer began talking about such an organization in December, 1782 when they established their Burgercommittee, but the first of these Vrijcorps was actually formed in Dordrecht in January, 1783. During the next year or so, they seemed to pop up everywhere, both in the principal cities and in the smaller towns, even occasionally in the countryside. 39 By 1784 the movement was broad and self-confident enough to begin convening provincial and national meetings of Vrijcorps leaders to coordinate activities and to discuss mutual problems. Ideally, this armed wing of the Patriot movement was to have two distin- 210 guishing features. On the one hand, the Vrijcorps would be open to everyone regardless of social position or religion; on the other, they were to be independent and self-governing, that is, as Van der Capellen suggested, with the greatest possible influence, consistent with the needs of order and discipline, accorded to the members themselves. 40 In reality, of course, the social composition of these groups varied a great deal, not only geographically, but also depending on whether the members had to buy their own weapons and uniforms or not. 41 In many cases, we know that the Patriots recruited religious dissenters who were otherwise excluded from politics, but again the proportions must have varied greatly. 42 Perhaps the greatest variation in the militias was in their degree of independence. In some places, the officers were, indeed, chosen by the membership, and only the officers were required to make some kind of pledge to the established regime. At the other end of the spectrum, some of the Patriots' militias were actually revivals of the old municipal schutterijen or Civic Guards. In these cases, where the officers were likely to be appointed by the Magistracy, all the Patriot rhetoric in the world would not necessarily make up for the stodginess of established rules and traditions. Probably the most common situation was that the new organizations stood alongside or in some way had to accommodate themselves to the existing schutterij, with all the natural tensions attendent thereto. 43 Whatever their shape, the Patriot militias had an unmistakable political thrust. With names like "Pro Patria et Libertatia," they were explicitly intended to protect"Liberty" from"Tyranny." The question of whose liberty and what kind of tyranny might be intended was left intentionally unresolved and would, of course, have to be tested in action. But it was clear by 1784 that the Patriots represented a force to be reckoned with in Dutch politics. Patriot petitions signed by hundreds, even thousands, of citizens were, in fact, an effective means of communicating the "will of the People, T M but where those petitions were also backed by hundreds, even thousands, of men under arms, the movement must have seemed invincible, at least to the local governments to whom the petitions were most often addressed. The Rocky Road to Power It is, of course, entirely typical of the many revolutionary movements that appeared at the end of the eighteenth century that the Dutch Patriots should fancy themselves setting out on a task of restoration and preservation at the same time as they were building an unprecedented popular force in Dutch politics. Throughout the Atlantic world, popular movements adapted what was old and practiced in the vocabulary of protest and collective action to 211 new and changing political objectives and realities. The political realities of the Dutch Republic were such that the Patriots' protest and action necessarily challenged all levels of government simultaneously, but in different and sometimes unexpected ways. The first and most consistent objective of the Patriot movement was to reduce the power of the Stadhouder. To be sure, there were some well-known attempts to win William V's support for the Patriot's cause, but given the amount of water already over the dam and the demands the Patriots made on the Prince, one can safely assume they were doomed to failure. 45 In any case, from 1782 onward, the Patriots steadily chipped away at the Prince's power and influence. First, as we have seen in Overijssel, he was deprived of his influence in municipal elections; then, he was forced to get rid of his most trusted adviser, the Austrian Duke of Brunswick. 46 Gradually he lost control of the crucial garrison at The Hague, and in 1786 he retreated to his patrimonial estates in Gelderland. Eventually he lost his title of CaptainGeneral and Admiral-General of the Union, while in places like Overijssel he was stripped of the last vestiges of his patronage power at the provincial level. 47 From the Prince's point of view, then, foreign intervention came none too soon in 1787. 48 But the very success of the Patriots in curbing the influence of the Stadhouder forced them to face issues that were not easily resolved. From the beginning, the Patriots' leaders like Van der Capellen claimed resolutely that they were only seeking to purify the established republican system of its corruption and abuses. Thus, for example, the Patriots eliminated the Stadhouder's patronage in the principal cities of Overijssel by insisting on strict adherence to the language of the Governmental Regulation through which the Stadhouder had developed his patronage powers. Quickly, however, the Prince's supporters developed a strong legal defense of his prerogatives based on essentially the same conservative claim - adherence to the established order and the Governmental Regulation. In this clash, it soon became apparent that the Orangists' conservative credentials would prove to be the more convincing. 49 The most pressing problem confronting the Patriots was the question of who would fill the political void left by a much-diminished Stadhouder. Not surprisingly, in the course of 1783 and 1784, there was a decisive shift in the tenor of the pamphleteers and publicists who popularized and defended the Patriots' cause. Gradually, but unmistakably, the Patriots dropped their claim to be restoring the past and imagined themselves, instead, to be creating a new future purged of the mistakes of the past. Although Van der 212 Capellen never publicly renounced his allegiance to the existing Governmental Regulation, he anticipated a new Patriot consensus in a letter to a friend shortly before his untimely death in 1784: I am no friend of pure democracy,nor of large redressesor changes; but do not hide the fact that I also will never lend a hand to set up the aristocracy on the ruins of the Stadhouderschap ~o In short, one important mistake of the earlier Stadhouderless periods that the Patriot movement sought to avoid was simply letting a narrow, selfperpetuating oligarchy pick up the political slack. Accordingly, the Patriots began to look toward constitutional changes that would establish "the sovereignty of the people." In the reasoned eighteenth-century style, most writers shunned the extremes of aristocracy or "family government" on the one hand, and anarchy or "complete democracy" on the other. The middle course seemed to be some form of representative democracy (representatieve volksregering). As a result of this shift, then, the Patriots' catalogue of enemies, originally dominated by "Engelsgezinde" and "Prinsgezinde," expanded to include "aristocraten. TM The Patriots soon discovered, however, that decreeing the sovereignty of the people in their propaganda was one thing, and institutionalizing the principle of representative democracy was quite another. Many writers thought the Dutch were particularly fortunate in that it would be a relatively simple task to transform the Municipal Councils of the principal cities in each of the seven provinces into democratically representative bodies by replacing cooptation with popular election and by shifting major legislative authority within the municipal administration away from the Burgemeesters (the executive) and toward the Council. 52 In doing so, popular sovereignty would replace exclusive privilege throughout the system, since Municipal Councilors would elect Burgemeesters, Burgemeesters would select and charge delegates to the provincial Estates, and those delegates would, in turn, designate and charge the provincial delegations to the Estates General. Naturally, in proposing these "simple" changes, the Patriots stood to lose much of the receptiveness that had earlier characterized local governments. This was a phase of the action that required a broader repertoire of collective effort than the humble petitions to which the Patriots were by now accustomed. Given the fragmented power structure of the Dutch Republic and the specific objectives of the Patriots' new agenda for reform, the Patriot Revolution can best be understood as, at bottom, a series of municipal revolutions, which 213 were an essential precondition to structural changes at the provincial and national levels. ~3Once they overcame their inhibitions and learned how to do it, the Patriots found that making revolution in the municipal setting was a fairly straightforward, even easy task. The strategic problem was that it took so frightfully many of these local victories to consolidate their position nationally. Meanwhile, the Orangists found themselves with a pool of potential new allies, those "aristocrats" who were erstwhile Patriots, and ample time to organize their own counter-offensive. The revolution at Utrecht, which so captivated John Adams, was actually the first of the Patriots' municipal revolutions. Since it helped to condition expectations in later skirmishes, it is useful to look more closely at the pattern it established. 5~ The struggle for control of Utrecht began in 1784 when, in response to popular agitation, the government invited the populace to register their greivances against the existing Governmental Regulation. Among the responses was a Patriot proposal to democratize the Municipal Council by replacing cooptation with a complicated electoral system. In the primary elections all burghers, except those on poor relief, would be enfranchised. When the Patriots' proposal was rejected, there followed a series of confrontations between the Municipal Council and throngs of Patriots assembled outside the Stadhuis. A Burgercommittee first presented a petition with 1,215 signatures supporting the electoral proposal, but minor concessions by the Regents proved to be useless. In March 1785 representatives of the Committee, supported by an angry crowd, extorted a promise from the Council to withdraw the appointment of a Councilor whom the Patriots found unacceptable. That promise, like so many others, was soon recanted, and after a brief hesitation, the Patriots engineered more demonstrations and confrontations in August and December of 1785 and again in March of 1786. Each time, new concessions were wrested from the government until finally the Patriots forced the Council to accept the electoral principle and to remove from office those Regents who objected to the changes. On August 2, 1786, Utrecht's first elected officials finally took office, to Adams's great wonderment. In retrospect, both sides seem to have displayed remarkable patience as this complicated drama played itself out. The regents ultimately had no choice but to be long-suffering because unless they wanted to call in troops commanded by the Stadhouder, they simply did not possess sufficient resources to disperse the thousands of Patriots who gathered each time outside the Stadhuis. 55 For their part, the Patriots were obviously feeling their way through uncharted waters, at times simply incredulous when confronted with the duplicity of the local authorities, but never wavering on the goal of 214 electoral representation. As time went on and the situation seemed more urgent, the Patriots became considerably wiser and less patient. In the three principal cities of Overijssel, for example, there was roughly the same scenario, though it played in about half the time) 6 Petitions demanding the abolition of the Governmental Regulation in August, 1785 were followed by a call for grievances and a Burgercommittee report on those grievances by January of 1786. Draft constitutions, including provisions for the popular election of Councilors, were published for discussion in the spring and early summer, and when they met with opposition, crowds assembled, communicated their demands, and waited outside the Stadhuis until the Magistrates of Zwolle and Deventer were purged of Orangists in January and February, 1787, respectively) 7 The Patriot Revolution was much slower to develop in Holland, but when it did, the popular movement seized power with remarkable speed .58 One of the problems was that most of the municipal governments in Holland had always been essentially Patriot, in the original anti-Orange sense. In Amsterdam, especially, the moderate Patriot regency maintained a firm control of the Civic Guard throughout 1786, but in the first five months of 1787, the clamor of more radical voices grew louder. A steady stream of petitions combined with frequent appearances at meetings of the Municipal Council by the most aggressive junior officers of the Vrijcorps made a middle course less and less tenable. Finally a petition with 16,000 signatures and a massive demonstration on the Dam on April 21 broke the stalemate, and Amsterdam, too, was purged of Magistrates who would not accept democratic reforms) 9 Other Patriot coups followed in Rotterdam, Schiedam, and Gorinchem, but the Patriots' conquest of Holland was not completed until the so-called Flying Legion, a small militia unit commanded by a Vrijcorps officer from Delft, precipitated coups in Delft and seven other cities during the summer. When outside intervention cut this revolutionary process short in the fall of 1787, the Patriots had come a long way. 60 Their municipal revolutions had launched them into power in three provinces - Groningen, Overijssel, and Holland. Two provinces - Utrecht and Friesland - were divided by rival Patriot and Orangist Estates, both claiming sovereignty. Orangists controlled only two provinces - Zeeland and Gelderland - and there they still had to contend with significant Patriot challenges. The Patriots' revolutions were largely bloodless simply because when the popular movement finally decided to act, the local authorities were powerless to react. 61 In the final analysis, then, popular mobilization rooted in Burgercommittees and Vrijcorps proved to be decisive. 215 Popular Protest and Counter-Revolution This view of the Dutch Patriot Revolution differs substantially from the traditional historical wisdom on the crisis. It has long been said that the Patriot movement attracted only the more respectable elements in Dutch society and that the lower classes remained sentimentally loyal to the House of Orange. In focusing on Patriot mobilization and action at the local level, we have uncovered, not a narrowly middle-class and respectable club of reformers, but a broadly eclectic and well armed coalition, which threatened time and again to take the Stadhuis by storm. On the strength of their popular support, moreover, the Patriots were in many places successful in pressing their attack on both the Stadhouder and the patrician oligarchies, thereby opening up Dutch politics at the municipal level where it really mattered. Much more work needs to be done, of course, before we are able to catalogue the full range of these popular interventions or to identify and account for the pattern of Patriot success. At the same time, however, we must take into account the extent to which popular protest also underwrote Orangist counter-revolution in 1787. If it is true that one sure sign of a significant revolution is a violent counterrevolution, then the Orangist restoration of 1787 was a credit to the Patriots' efforts. Hundreds of officials who had accommodated themselves to the revolutionary regime were removed from office, and thousands of Patriot leaders fled to the Austrian Netherlands and France. 62 What the Patriots were fleeing was not only the Prussian army, but the wrath of Orangist crowds. Throughout the Patriot Crisis, there had been sporadic evidence of crowd-based support for the Prince of Orange, 63 but when the Stadhouder's troops began enforcing Orangist hegemony in Gelderland in 1786, the Patriots got a preview of what would happen if they lost the struggle: Orangist crowds plundered the houses of leading Patriots wherever the Prince's troops were victorious. 64 Prussian invasion simply afforded an opportunity for revenge on a much broader scale. C. H. E. de Wit, in his peculiarly polemical way, argues that there has been a sort of conspiracy among historians to cover up the true virulence of the Orangist "terror" in 1787 and 1788. His book, entitled De Nederlandse Revolutie van de achttiende eeuw. is actually an extended essay on the roots of the counter-revolution. Unfortunately, in De Wit's conspiratorial view, the Orangist crowds are portrayed as mobs manipulated by aristocrats and brought into action by liquor and money. The shock troops of the restoration, he argues, were recruited from among the pre-industrial "proletariat," which was made up of "the unemployed, those on poor relief, the paupers 216 and the seasonal workers in agriculture, plus the category of beggars, tramps and vagrants. ''65 After three decades of serious research on revolutionary crowds, the theoretical pitfalls of such a view of popular protest are readily apparent. What's more, the available archival evidence suggests a rather different view of the Orangist reaction. Consider, once again, the example of Ueventer. 66 In 1783 Deventer had been a model of Patriot mobilization, but in 1787 it was a deeply divided city. The unity that sustained the Patriot's drive for constitutioal reform had disappeared by the time the Constitutional Commission published a draft Constitution in the summer of 1786. Though the Constitution proposed popular election of the Municipal Council, it also attacked the corporative power of the guilds. Since 1785, guildsmen had gradually lost their leadership roles in the Patriot Burgercommittee to more articulate spokesmen of constitutional reform. 67 Thus, when the proposed Constitution failed to meet their expectations, the guilds did exactly what they had done nearly four years before: they created a new Burgercommittee to protect their interests, and they began arming themselves. Able to extract considerable concessions from the Stadhouder's former "Lieutenant," the guilds shifted en masse to the Orangist camp, openly coupling their opposition to the new Constitution with nominal support for the Stadhouder. 68 Having purged the Magistracy in February 1787, the Patriot regime in Deventer gradually tightened its repression of the newly popular Orangist movement. 69 Not surprisingly, when the Prussians took the city, they unleashed a wave of Orangist plunderings, which sent the Patriots scurrying, and the "restoration" brought many guild members into the municipal administration for the first time. In Deventer, then, the origin of a popular Orangist movement was the disintegration of the Patriot coalition. The result was a city divided, in large measure, between guild members and their erstwhile allies, theparticulieren; their disagreement was not about the need for reform, but about the shape reform would take. Similarly, in Amsterdam, the popular strength of the Orangists was chiefly among the bifltjes, the fiercely independent ships carpenters who lived in a separate district near the wharves and whose organizational base was the strongest and most independent guild in the city. 7~ Unlike the guildsmen of Deventer, the bifitjes had never been persuaded to join the Patriots' cause, but they also steadfastly refused to prop up an Orangist oligarcy until they had been directly attacked by the Patriots. 71 In the small city of Zierikzee (Zeeland), where more than one hundred Patriot houses were plundered in 1787, the Orangist plunderers were drawn from a fairly broad spectrum of the working population; the majority were 217 farmers (many from outside the city itself), boatmen, and artisans, while approximately 40 percent were unskilled wage laborers. Although we don't know how they were organized, the Orangist crowd in Zierikzee represented a broad coalition of interests united in opposition to a wealthy Patriot oligarchy supported especially by merchants (both retail and wholesale) and educated professionals. 72 Admittedly, this evidence is fragmentary, but it is clear enough that this kind of social conflict had deeper roots than money and alcohol. It is worth noting that in each of these three very different cases - Deventer, Amsterdam, and Zierikzee - the kind of violent crowd action that we might have expected to accompany the Patriots' conquest of power actually appears only after the Patriots had come to power locally and were in a defensive position. The fact that, on the whole, the popular protest of the Orangists was more violent - i.e., it caused more physical damage to persons and property - than the Patriots' actions probably tells us less about the psychological make-up or goals of the Orangist protesters than it does about the peculiar conditions under which they acted to protect their interests. If nothing else, the violence of the Orangist reaction impresses us with the depth of the divisions in Dutch society at the end of the old regime and the seriousness of the revolutionary struggle that was cut short in 1787. Back to Adams Surveying, even very briefly, the research of the last ten years or so, one has the impression that the Dutch Patriot Revolution is finally coming of age. Specific attention to the politics of the lower classes at the local level has led to a new appreciation of the depth and significance of a conflict that for a long time seemed petty and more than a bit embarrassing to the Dutch. Ironically, it has taken historians nearly two hundred years to realize the importance of the observation with which we began this article, for thus far, we have only discovered for ourselves what seemed obvious to Adams in 1786: that the Dutch people were asserting their sovereignty in a remarkable and unprecedented way. But in the process, of course, we have also been able to improve on Adams's description of the Patriot Revolution. His cryptic reference to "the People" may have conveyed more specific content to his friend Thomas Jefferson than it does to us, but recent research on petition signers, vrijcorps members, rioters, and plunderers reveals a full cast of old-regime characters, ranging from a sprinkling of daylaborers and a wide variety of artisans and shopkeepers to wholesale merchants, religious dissenters, and lawyers. The 218 relative autonomy of municipal politics in the Dutch Republic afforded these people ample, though variable, opportunities to press for action on a variety of important grievances and in many places to seize power in the name of their own sovereignty without firing a single shot. What we can see more clearly perhaps than Adams could is the essential fragility of this revolutionary coalition, this motley assemblage that most often made up "the People" in the eighteenth century. Unity in the face of a common enemy easily gave way to controversy and conflict over the extent of popular sovereignty once initial victories had been achieved. In this, the Dutch Patriots had yet another feature in common with the more successful revolutionaries of their time. We will never know, however, what kinds of political and social transformations a successful Patriot Revolution might have had in store. For just as Adams intervened to give the Patriots their first taste of victory in 1782, the English and Prussian friends of the Prince intervened to halt the spread of what seemed to them like a dangerous revolutionary contagion in 1787. To be sure, the rediscovery of the role of popular protest in the Patriot Revolution was an important and necessary step. Having identified what is interesting and worthy of careful study, we can now begin the more challenging task of situating what we know about the Patriot Revolution into larger contexts. We need especially to relate the deep divisions between Patriots and Orangists to the broader patterns of popular protest and ideology in the Low Countries and to the long-term social and economic processes that were transforming the Dutch Republic simultaneously - e.g., shifting patterns of international trade and finance, proto-industrialization, capitalization of agriculture, and growing urban and rural poverty. 73 But in the end, perhaps the most important consequence of the rediscovery of the Patriot Revolution is that we may now finally be in a position to extend R. R. Palmer's comparative analysis of eighteenth-century revolutions beyond the sphere of constitutional principles to the realm of local politics where old-regime structures still afforded ample space and opportunity for popular action. NOTES 1. 2. J. Boyd, ed., Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 10 (Princeton, 1954), 348. For a brief survey in English of the events in Utrecht, see S. Schama, Patriots and Liberators. Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780 1815 (New York, 1977), 88-100. See, for example, the criticism of the Patriots in H. T. Colenbrander, De Patriottentijd (3 vols., 's Gravenhage, 1897-99), R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, vol. 1, The Challenge (Princeton, 1959), 364-70; E. H. Kossmann, "The Crisis of the Dutch State, 1780-1813: Nationalism, Federalism, Unitarism," in J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann, eds., Britain and the Netherlands, vol. 4 (The Hague, 1971); and I. L. Leeb, The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution (The Hague, 1973). For an excellent survey 219 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. of the historiography primarily since World War 11, see E. O. G. Haitsma Mulier, "De geschiedschrijving over de Patriottentijd en de Bataafse Tijd," in W. W. Mijnhardt, ed., Kantelend geschiedbeeld (Utrecht/Antwerpen, 1983). C.F. Adams. ed., Works o f John Adams, vol. 8 (Boston, 1855), 462. See, for example, George Rude, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century. Studies in Popular Protest (New York, 1973); N. Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975); P. Zagorin. Rebels and Rulers, 1500-1660 (2 vols., Cambridge, 19823. Colenbrander, Patriottentijd. P. Geyl, De Patriottenbeweging 1780 1787(Amsterdam, 19473; idem, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Stare (6 vols., Amsterdam/Antwerpen, 1962), 5:1278 1372. Leeb, Ideological Origins; C. H. E. de Wit, De Nederlandse Revolutie van de Achttiende Eeuw, 1780 1787 (Oirsbeek, 19743; idem, De Strijd tussen Aristocratic en Democratie in Nederland: 1780 1848 (Heerlen, 19653. De Wit, Nederlandse Revolutie. Perhaps the most enduring work on the"great" revolutions is Crane Brinton, Anatomy o f Revolution (rev. ed., New York, 1965). For useful discussions of theories of revolution, especially those most often used by historians, see Lawrence Stone, "Theories of Revolution," Worm Politics, 18 (1966): 159 76; Isaac Kramminck, "Reflections on Revolution: Definition and Explanation in Recent Scholarship," History and Theory, II (1972): 26 63; Perez Zagorin, "Theories of Revolution in Contemporary Historiography," Political Science Quarterly. 88 ( 19733:23 52; Rod Aya, "Theories of Revolution Reconsidered," Theory and Society. 8 ( 19793:39 99. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, 19793, 24-33. S.J. Fockema Andreae, De Nederlandse staat onder de Republiek (Amsterdam, 1962). There is a new and growing interest in the distinctive patterns of Dutch state-making. See, in English, Jonathan Tumin, "The Theory of Democratic Development: A Critical Revision," Theory and Society, 1I. ( 1982): 143-164; Ton Zwaan, "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. Tumin's Theory of Democratic Development: A Comment," Theorr and Society. 11 ( 1982): 165-178. See also the long and occasionally acrimonious exchanges regarding Dutch political development and violence in the Sociologisch Tijdschr(ft from 1980 to 1984. Cf. Jan de Vries, "On the Modernity of the Dutch Republic," Journal o f Economic History. 33 (1973): 191-202. Though it had a much smaller population than its competitors, the Dutch Republic maintained one of Europe's largest standing armies and had arguably the most efficient taxation system in Europe; cf. G. Parker, Spain and the Netherlands, 1559-1659, Ten Studies (Glasgow, 1979), 96, and Charles Wilson, "'Taxation and the Decline of Empires, an Unfashionable Theme," Bijdragen en Mededelingen van her Historisch Genootschap, 77 ( 1962): 16ft. On the kinds of adjustments and transformations that were necessary in the early years of the Revolt, see R. Reitsma, Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces in the Early Dutch Revolt, The States o f Overijssel, 1566-1600 (Amsterdam, 1982). A.C. Carter, Neutrality or Commitment: The Evolution o f Dutch Foreign Policy, 1667 1795 (London, 19753, 89 106. On the debates over defense policy, see J. S. Bartstra, Vlootherstel en Legeraugmentatie 1770-1780 (Assen, 19523. The maritime provinces sought to equip more ships for convoy duty to protect Dutch shipping while the Stadhouder, supported by the land provinces, held to the demand that any increase in the navy be matched by an augmentation of the army. C.H. Wilson, "The Economic Decline of The Netherlands," The Economic History Review. 9 (19393: 136. Wilson agrues that the War was the coup de grace for the Dutch economy. Cf. W. Knuttel, ed., Catalogus van de Pamphletten-verzameling berustende in de Koninkli/ke Bibliotheek (9 vols., 's Gravenhage, 1899 1920). There is by now a fairly sizable literature on Adams's mission to the Dutch Republic. See especially F. Edler, The Dutch Republic and the American Revolution (Baltimore, 1911) and J. W. Schulte Nordholt, VoorbeeM in de l/erte, De invloed van de Americaanse revolutie in Nederland (Baarn, 19793 [translated as The Dutch Republic and American Independence (Chapel Hill, 1982)]. Schulte Nordholt, Voorbeeld, 105ft. [J. D. van der CapeUen tot den Pol], Aan het l/olk van Nederland(Ostende, 1781); modern ed. with introduction by W. F. Wertheim and A. H. Wertheim-Gijse Weenink (Amsterdam, 19813. C.F. Adams, ed., Works of John Adams. vol. 7 (Boston, 18563, 396-404. Aanhet Volk, 131. See the various reports on the petition campaign taken up in Nieuwe Nederlandsche Jaarboeken, 1782. See, for example, Egte stukken betreffende her voorgevallene te Deventer (Deventer, 17833, 5. 220 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. This is a slightly contentious interpretation in that it emphasizes the petition campaign mounted by the Patriots. Most diplomatic histories, however, fail to take Dutch politics into account at all. See especially J. Hutson, John Adams and the Diplomacy o f the American Revolution (Lexington, KY, 1980); using French diplomatic sources, Hutson quite mistakenly claims that the French ambassador, the Duc de la Vauguyon, not John Adams or the Patriots, was the person responsible for Dutch recognition. Fockema Andreae, Nederlandse staat, 95-187. Cf. Kossmann, "Crisis of the Dutch State." De Wit, Nederlandse Revolutie, 15 19. On the connection in Gelderland between the Patriot movement and the so-called "Plooierijen," anti-Orange movements earlier in the century, see A. H. Wertheim-Gijse Weenink, Democratische Bewegingen in Gelderland. 1672-1795 (Amsterdam, 1973). See also W. F. Werthiem and A. H. Wertheim-Gijse Weenink, Burgers in verzet tegen regenten-heerschappij, Onrust in Sticht en Oversticht. 1703-1706 (Amsterdam, 1975). Unless otherwise noted, the following account of mobilization in Overijssel is based on W. P. Te Brake, "Revolutionary Conflict in the Dutch Republic: The Patriot Crisis in Overijssel, 1780 1787" (Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Michigan, 1977); see especially the notes to Part 2, 180-90, and the Bibliography, 220 27, for full citation of archival and printed sources. These calculations are based on the assumption that one-fourth of the total population in the 1795 census was adult male. Cf. B. H. Slicher van Bath, Een samenleving onder spanning (Assen, 1957), 27-116. For comparable data on Zwolle, see M. W. Heuven-Bruggeman, "Een request in Zwolle in de nazomer van 1785," Verslagen en Mededelingen van Overijsselsch Recht en Geschiedehis [VMORG], 91 (1976): 70-95. Egte stukken, 3. On ZwoUe, see Te Brake, "Revolutionary Conflict;" for Gelderland, A. H. A. Westrate, Gelderland in de Patriottentijd ( Arnhem, 1903) and Wertheim-Gijse Weenink, Democratische Bewegingen; for Utrecht, I. Vijlbrief, Van Anti-aristocratie tot democratie, een bijdrage tot de politieke geschiedenis der Stad Utrecht (Amsterdam, 1950) and A. van Hulsen, Utrecht in de Patriottentijd (Zaltbommel, 1966). W . A . Fasel, "De Democratisch-Patriottische woelingen te Kampen," I,'MORG, 74 (1959):89 130, and Te Brake, "Revolutionary Conflict," 193 200. R . M . Dekker, Holland in beroering, Oproeren in de 17e en 18e eeuw ( Baarn, 1982), 67. What I have said here about the political usefulness of guilds could also apply to other old-regime corporations; see, for example, the relationship between communal organizations and Patriot mobilization in the countryside: W. P. Te Brake, "Revolution and the Rural Community in the Eastern Netherlands," Class Conflict and Collective Action, ed. L. A. and C. Tilly, (Beverly Hills/London, 1981), pp. 53 71. The special importance of guilds is that, in the all-important urban setting, guilds seem to have been the most effective means of quickly mobilizing the artisans and shopkeepers who appear as prominent actors in all eighteenth-century revolutions. For a general, but suggestive survey of the patterns of guild organization throughout the Dutch Republic, see L. Noordegraaf, "Bedrijfsvormen en Arbiedsorganizatie in de Nijverhied van de Noordelijke Nederlanden, 1400-1800," Historisch Seminarium van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, Werkschrift 11, 1976. This requirement of the Union of Utrecht was never met. Cf. E. H. Kossmann and A. F. Mellink, Documents Concerning the Revolt o f the Netherlands (Cambridge, 1974), and Fockema Andreae, Nederlandsche staat, 118-19. We don't know how extensive the Vrijcorps network actually was. At a Vrijcorps meeting in Utrecht in August, 1786, representatives from four provinces reported a total of 13,517 men under arms. For a map of the distribution of militia units in Overijssel, see Te Brake, "Revolutionary Conflict," 70. Post van de Neder-Rh)'n, hr. 221:591. Though the Vrijcorps are well known, there are precious few studies of who actually joined. It is often said, but never documented, that they were thoroughly middle class in their membership. In Deventer, however, the merchants and boatmen who were consistently over-represented on the petitions were less likely to be members of the militia; by contrast, common laborers who were relatively unlikely to be petition signers were actually well represented in the militia. Meanwhile, only a small proportion of the militia members (6%) were guildsmen. Cf. M. van der Heijden, De dageraad van de emancipatie der Katholieken in Nederland (Nijmegen, 1947). Cf. Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 80 8. Van der Capellen saw petitioning as a self-consciously political act, the functional equivalent of having representatives or public meetings to influence policy decisions. Cf. W. P. Te Brake, "On the Importance of a Failed Revolution: The Patriot Crisis, 1780-1787," Proceedings o f the First Interdisciplinary Conference on Netherlandic Studies (forthcoming). 221 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 5 I. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. Cf. Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 93. Not to be confused with his nephew, Charles William Ferdinand, also Duke of Brunswick, who issued the manifesto and led the invasion in 1787. Te Brake,"Revolutionary Conflict," 76. I do not wish to suggest that intervention came only at the Prince's initiative; for a full review of the cast of characters involved, see De Wit, Nederlandse Revolutie, 89ff. For an analysis of this development in a single province, Te Brake, "Revolutionary Conflict," pp. 56-62. A bibliography of the relevant literature in Overijssel can be found in M. van Doorninck, '~Staatkundige Vlugschriften, 1782 1799," Bijdragen tot de Gesehiedenis van Overijssel. 7 (1883): 34-78, 121 38. W. H.deBeaufort, BrievenvanenaanJoan DerckvanderCapellenvande Poll, Werken uitgegeven door het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht, New Series, 27 (Utrecht, 1879), 764. This is, of course, a very brief version of what was a fairly complex intellectual history, but in light of all the ink that has been spilled in trying to discern the Patriots' "real" ideology, brevity is its chief virtue. Cf. Leeb, Ideological Origins, 149-97. Unlike Bernard Bailyn, the title of whose book on the American Revolution he borrows, Leeb concentrates on relatively few writers and for that reason misses the glacial changes evident in the larger corpus of writing, including works relating to what are apparently local as opposed to national problems and reforms. See, for example, Tweede Rapport... over de verbetering van de Stedelijke Regeeringswvze... (Deventer, 1786), 150ff. This perhaps the most important structural difference between the Dutch and French Revolutions. In France, old regime centralization enabled a Paris-dominated conflict in which municipal revolutions were a consequence of, rather than a pre-condition for, transformation of power at the highest levels. Cf. Lynn A. Hunt, "Committees and Communes: Local Politics and National Revolution in 1789," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 18 (1976) and Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial France (Stanford, 1978). The American Revolution, by contrast, seems more like a series of thirteen provincial revolutions. On the struggle in Utrecht, see the works cited in note 34 above. Most historians see developments in Utrecht as pivotal; cf. R. R. Palmer, Democratic Revolution. 332, and Schama, Patriots and Liberators. 88-100. On the repressive capabilities of magistrates in the province of Holland, see Dekker, Holland in beroering. 95ff. Schama suggests that the Patriots in Utrecht could assemble between 2,000 and 5,000 people for each of these demonstrations. Te Brake, "Revolutionary Conflict," 62-3. Kampen avoided such a purge, which is not surprising in light of the weakness of the popular movement there. When the Magistrates submitted their own version of a new constitution to the burgerij, however, it was soundly defeated by the 61ectorate. Cf. Fasel, "'Woelingen." Geyl, Patriottenbeweging, 96ff. and Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 110-21. We will soon know a great deal more about the nature of the Patriot movement in Amsterdam, for there is currently a research project underway at the University of Amsterdam to determine the social background of the 16,000 signatories to this important petition. Cf. Haitsma Mulier, "Geschiedschrijving," n. 39. The Orangists were not alone in seeking outside help. The Patriots hoped to the very end for French help to counter British interests. But in the face of imminent financial collapse and increasing wariness about the Patriots' reforms, help from Louis XVI was not forthcoming. The relatively bloodless character of the Patriot Revolution calls into question much of the historical analysis of revolutionary conflict that implicitly equates radicalism with violence and measures revolutionary change in the amount of damage to persons and property. Cf. C. Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass., 1978), 172-88. Tilly sees violence as a by-product of the interaction of contenders for power and governments resisting their claims; the likelihood of violence, then, is a function of the relative strength of the opposing sides. Estimates of the number of refugees run as high as 40,000 to 50,000, though they are likely exaggerated. Cf. R. van Gelder, "Patriotten in ballingschap," (doctoraal scriptie, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1976), 15ft. In 1784 there were some sensational crowd actions in Rotterdam, Leiden, and The Hague, and in 1785, there was a spurt of nominally Orangist opposition, chiefly in the countryside, to a Patriot project for a universal militia a sort of levee en masse to save the Fatherland from Joseph II. See De Wit, Nederlandse Revolutie, 30-41. Wertheim-Gijse Weenink, Democratische Bewegingen. 136ff. Nederlandse Revolutie, 247. Te Brake, "Revolutionary Conflict," 109ft. 222 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. The intellectual leader of the Burgercommittee was the controversial professor of law at the Deventer Atheneum, F. A. van der Marck; cf. J. Lindeboom, "Het Deventer Professoraat van F. A. van der Marck," VMORG, 54 (1938). The only notable exceptions to the solidarity of the guild members were the retail merchants" guild, half the members of which remained loyal to the Patriot cause, and the silk merchants" guild, which remained solidly Patriot. After the Vrijcorps attacked the Orangist "society" and killed five persons, the Patriot government disarmed some 400 people who refused to pledge their allegiance to the revolutionary regime; they also forbad political discussions in the guilds. I. van Manen and K. Vermeulen, "Het lagere volk van Amsterdam in de strijd tussen Patriotten en Oranjegezinden 1780-1800," Tijdschrift voorsocialegeschiedenis, part I, no. 20 (1980) and part 2, no. 21 (1981). See also 1. van Manen, "De 'crowd' in de geschiedenis van Amsterdam, de jaren 1696, 1748, 1787," Mededelingblad, orgaan van de N VSG, 46 (1974), 42 73, and A. J. van Deurloo, "Bijltjes en Klouwers," Economisch- en Sociaal-Historisch Jaarboek, 34 (1971), 4 71. Schama, Patriots and Liberators, 115. P. van Rooden, "De plundringen op Schouwen-Duiveland in 1786, 1787 en 1788 en het Bataafse onderzoek daarnaar" (doctoraal scriptie, Leiden, 1979). I have tried to relate the pattern of rural mobilization in Overijssel to the capitalization of agriculture and the transformation of agrarian technology; see Te Brake, "Revolution and the Rural Community." Though the results are suggestive, much more work must be done before we can begin to generalize the patterns. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper was originally prepared for "Popular Protest and Popular Ideology: The Rud6 Colloquium," Concordia University, Montreal, October 16, 1982. The research was made possible by funds from a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship and the State University of New York Research Foundation. The author wishes to thank Rudolf Dekker for helpful criticism of an earlier draft. Theory and Society 14 (1985) 199 222 03404-2421/85/$03.30 9 1985 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V.