The Ideological Origins Of The Batavian Revolution

The "age of the democratic revolution" 1 in the Dutch Republic cul minated in two revolutions : the aborted Patriot Revolution of 1787 and the more successful Batavian Revolution of 1795. For the United Provinces that age had begun after a series of crises in 1747 and resulted in the un precedented establishment of a single individual in the office of chief executive in all of the component provinces. The new form which emerged from the foreign and domestic threats of midcentury was that of a hereditary Stadhouder in the House of Orange. That family had served the Dutch state in varying capacities and with disparate consequences from its inception in the Revolt of the sixteenth century, through the triumphs of the Golden Era, to the less glorious days of the Periwig Period. The accession of William IV in 1747, his early death followed by a lengthy regency from 1752, and the accession of his son, William V, as "eminent head" of each province and chief officer of the Generality in 1766, all brought forth renewed scrutiny of the family and the offices of the Princes of Orange in the political life of the Republic. Those who were most critical of the new powers of the Stadhouderate and most desirous of reducing the dangers they saw threatening the state from the aggrandizement of that office, came to usurp the nearly exclusive use of the hoary title of Patriot.

Thirteen chapters on individual authors such as Spinoza, Bayle, Van Effen and Hemsterhuis, and on schools of thought such as Dutch Cartesianism, Newtonianism and Wolffianism. It also addresses the early Dutch reception of Kant.

In 1975, a group of Dutch and British scholars published a conference volume of collected essays entitled "Some Political Mythologies." That conference sought to examine the political myth as an object of historical study, particularly in the context of the tumultuous and exceptional history of the Low Countries. Thirty years later, a more diverse group of scholars gathered to re-examine the history of Dutch myth-making in light of developments in theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the role of myths in national identity, moral geography, and community formation. The results of their efforts appear in this volume, "Myth in History: History in Myth." The essays cover developments in history, anthropology, cartography, philosophy, art history, and literature as they pertain to how the Dutch historically perceived these myths and how the myths have been treated by previous generations of historians.

By giving rise to new ideologies that in time transformed the political structure of much of the world, the American and French Revolutions stand as two of the most important political events in global history. The American establishment of a Republican government, and the gradual expansion of democracy that ensued, altered traditional political and social thought, thus shaping the later French Revolution and creating the core ethic of later American political values. The Enlightenment ideals of the French Revolution, as later spread by the armies of Napoleon, dissolved most traditional European notions of political authority. This encyclopedia offers current, detailed information on the people, events, movements, and ideas that defined the revolutions in France and America, as well as in other parts of the world during the late eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions. Besides numerous entries on various countries of Europe whose histories were affected by the French Revolution, such as Austria, Belgium, Germany, Poland, and Russia, the many entries covering the people, events, groups, and ideologies of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France include the following: Civil Constitution of the Clergy, Georges Jacques Danton, The Directory, Guillotine, Josephine, Empress of France, Law of Suspects, The Mountain, Prairial Insurrection, Tennis Court Oath, White Terror. Besides various entries covering American colonies/states, such as Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Virginia, the numerous entries covering the figures, events, and ideologies of the American Revolution and Early Federal Period of the United States include the following: Abigail Adams, Boston Massacre, Constitutional Convention, William Franklin, Lexington and Concord, Actions at Loyalists, Massachusetts Government Act, Edmund Randolph, Signers of the Declaration of Independence. Finally, the encyclopedia offers various entries covering important revolutionary figures and movements that were active in other parts of the world during the period 1760-1815, including the following: Simon Bolivar, Dutch Revolutions, Haitian Revolution, Hispaniola, Latin American Revolutions, Mexican Revolution, Pugachev Rebellion, Toussaint l'Ouverture. Besides over 450 clearly written and highly informative entries, the encyclopedia also includes primary documents, a chronology, an extensive introductory essay, a bibliography, a guide to related topics, and a series of useful maps.

This volume explores the relevance of decline within the republican tradition. While scholarship on republicanism thrives, the idea of decline, which has been prominent in republican theory since antiquity, has received relatively little attention. The essays in this volume take a broad cultural perspective and study a wide variety of authors and (con)texts to situate decline among the key concepts in the history of republicanism. Most contributions focus on the Dutch Republic during the Age of Enlightenment and Revolutions, the area of expertise of Wyger Velema, to whom this volume is dedicated. Other case studies include early modern Spain and Venice, the German Enlightenment, and the Weimar Republic. Contributors are: Remieg Aerts, Hans Erich Bödeker, Wiep van Bunge, Lisa Kattenberg, Wessel Krul, Matthijs Lok, Alessandro Metlica, Ida Nijenhuis, Eleá de la Porte, Jan Rotmans, Niek van Sas, Freya Sierhuis, and Lina Weber.

The Citizenship Experiment explores the fate of citizenship ideals in the Age of Revolutions. While in the early 1790s citizenship ideals in the Atlantic world converged, the twin shocks of the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolutionary Terror led the American, French, and Dutch publics to abandon the notion of a shared, Atlantic, revolutionary vision of citizenship. Instead, they forged conceptions of citizenship that were limited to national contexts, restricted categories of voters, and ‘advanced’ stages of civilization. Weaving together the convergence and divergence of an Atlantic revolutionary discourse, debates on citizenship, and the intellectual repercussions of the Terror and the Haitian Revolution, Koekkoek offers a fresh perspective on the revolutionary 1790s as a turning point in the history of citizenship.

This book offers a detailed investigation of the influence of public opinion and national identity on the foreign policies of France, Britain and the Netherlands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The quarter-century of upheaval and warfare in Europe between the outbreak of the French Revolution and fall of Napoleon saw important developments in understandings of nation, public, and popular sovereignty, which spilled over into how people viewed their governments—and how governments viewed their people. By investigating the ideas and impulses behind Dutch, French and British foreign policy in a comparative context across a range of royal, revolutionary and republican regimes, this book offers new insights into the importance of public opinion and national identities to international relations at the end of the long eighteenth century.

This 1999 book is a systematic pan-European survey of the theory, practice, and very real limits to toleration in eighteenth-century Europe.