KB Lecture 4:KB Lecture 3

K B L E C T U R E 4

‘Failed Enlightenment’: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands (1670-1800)

Jonathan Israel

KB Lecture 4:KB Lecture 3 01-07-2007 12:33 Pagina 1

NIAS Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studyin the Humanities and Social Sciences

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The fourth KB Lecture was held at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) - National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague on 21 June 2007

The Dutch translation In strijd met Spinoza. Het failliet van de NederlandseVerlichting (1670-1800) (translated by Hans van Cuijlenborg), ISBN 978-90-351-3209-2, was published by Uitgeverij Bert Bakker (c) 2007.

NIAS, Wassenaar, 2007/5

ISBN: 978-90-71093-58-6ISSN 1871-1480; 4

(c) NIAS 2007. No part of this publication maybe reproduced in any form by print, photoprint,microfilm or any other means without writtenpermission from the publisher.

K B L E C T U R E 4


It is a great pleasure for me, and also an honour, to be delivering the Fourth KB

Lecture. In the last few years this has become an annual academic occasion of

some significance in the Netherlands, chiefly no doubt because it symbolizes the

collaboration in modern society between the staff and resources of a great

national library, like the Royal Library here, in The Hague, and the researchers and

academics who carry on research into, and teach, the humanities in our

universities. Hence, this very special lecture is also inherently linked to the

question of the relevance of the humanities to modern society.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), without question the Netherlands’ most important

thinker, was the first great philosopher in history systematically to advocate the

need for democracy and individual freedom, as well as equality, as the basis of a

purely secular social and moral theory. This lends him a pivotal importance in

Dutch as in all human history as well as in present-day debate about society,

politics and religion. Spinoza’s philosophy was an outright challenge not just to

the ancien régime, and to tradition and organized religion, but also a powerful

moral, social and political set of principles that lies at the heart of all nineteenth,

twentieth and no doubt also twenty-first century battles over the true nature of

modernity. Little wonder that Spinoza provoked unprecedented opposition not

only in his own time but throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “The

willingness to view the human situation”, as one recent commentator aptly

expressed it, “without recourse either to metaphysical comfort or to despair

constitutes a new kind of bravery, which Spinoza calls fortitude or strength of

Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands 3

‘Failed Enlightenment’: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands (1670-1800)


K B L E C T U R E 4

character – what Nietzsche later described as intellectual probity.”1 We have fairly

extensive evidence to show that in the Netherlands there many disciples of

Spinoza in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth. As the Harderwijk

professor Bernard Nieuhoff (1747-1831) expressed it, in his book Over Spinozisme

(Harderwijk, 1799):

“Men zegt, dat voorheen seer velen gevonden wierden, vooral in

Nederland, die het Spinozisme in stilte koesterden. Zeker is het,

dat zeer weinigen er openlijk voor uit kwamen; en geen wonder;

Spinozisme werd algemeen uit geekreten, als het allersnoodste

atheisme.” [It is said that very many were to be found, formerly,

who cultivated Spinozism in secret, especially in the Netherlands.

What is certain is that very few came out openly for that cause; and

no wonder! Spinozism was generally decried as the very vilest

atheism.]2

Nieuhoff then adds that “nowadays, yet again, Spinozism seems to be coming up

somewhat”.3 Some have chosen to interpret this as referring exclusively to

Germany where in the 1780s there was a great public controversy, the

Pantheismusstreit, about the significance of Spinoza in modern culture. But I shall

argue that it applies to the Netherlands too and that this fact is highly significant

for correctly understanding the Dutch Enlightenment and that the Dutch

Enlightenment is, in turn, a crucial episode – and perhaps the most crucial, at least

after the Dutch Revolt against Spain – for understanding the character of Dutch

modernity.

For if Spinoza, born and bred in Amsterdam, was the first great thinker to set out

the principles championed by democrats, egalitarians, systematic freethinkers and

men of comprehensive toleration (ie. not Locke’s limited toleration), and, hence,

can meaningfully be interpreted as the anchor-man of the Early Radical

Enlightenment, or Vroege Radicale Verlichting, as one says nowadays in Dutch,4

the Netherlands undeniably also played a pivotal role in the wider history of

4

1 S.B. Smith, Spinoza’s Book of Life (New Haven, Conn., 2003) p. 200.2 Bernardus Nieuhoff, Over Spinozisme (Harderwijk, 1799), p. 40.3 Ibid., p. 41.4 Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested. Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man,

1670-1752 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 43-50.



modern democracy and equality in another, and at first sight entirely different,

sense. The Patriottenbeweging (1779-87) and the revolutionary democratic

movement formed by the Patriot refugees in exile, in France (1787-95), constitutes

the first and only major European democratic mass movement prior to the French

Revolution, and only eighteenth-century mass movement explicitly demanding not

just democracy but also full individual freedom of thought, expression and

conscience (i.e. was in a significant sense anti-Rousseauist).

This imparts to the later Dutch Enlightenment era a central significance in the

history of the global Enlightenment as a whole which has by no means been

adequately recognized in the existing literature either by Dutch or foreign writers.

Indeed, scholars have been curiously reluctant to accept either that the ideas,

books and philosophical debates that lie behind the democratic projects and

demands of the Patriotten were the decisive factor in turning the

Patriottenbeweging into a genuinely mass democratic movement or that it did

constitute a decisively important aspect of the Western Enlightenment as a whole.

In fact, contrary to what I shall be saying this evening, nearly all Dutch historians

who have written about this subject, including E.H. Kossmann, have been inclined

to deny that the Patriottenbeweging was a major expression of the

Enlightenment’s general philosophical evolution. It is to attempting to right the

balance, as I see it, that this present lecture is largely devoted.

This now traditional neglect of the intellectual aspects of the Dutch radical

democratic ‘revolution’ of the 1780s seems to me to be trebly unfortunate. Firstly,

it utterly distorts history and as long as this preference for avoiding the ideas and

ideology of the Patriotten persists, it will be impossible to persuade readers to

view the Patriottenbeweging chiefly in terms of ‘Enlightenment’ and the

Enlightenment’s bearing on the emergence of modern democracy and equality.

Since preserving the values of our modern democracy, equality and individual

liberty against forces intent on destroying those values is today rightly considered

an urgent priority, and in the Netherlands more perhaps than anywhere else,

thoroughly demonstrating the wrong-headedness of the claim that the Dutch were

more or less untouched by international Enlightenment philosophical debates in

the 1770s and 1780s, and the, I believe, equally mistaken notion that it is

primarily the social-cultural not the intellectual aspects of the Patriottenbeweging

that matter, becomes a rather urgent priority.

Anyone who reads the pamphlet controversies in progress in the Netherlands


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during the years just preceding the outbreak of the American Revolution, in 1776,

will immediately see that the general public, and not least the Dutch Reformed

Church preachers, were profoundly agitated and uneasy about the impact of the

general European Enlightenment on Dutch culture and society.5 But they will also

see that during the early and mid 1770s, contemporaries were almost entirely

preoccupied with the religious and moral aspects of the Enlightenment’s impact,

and the issue of where to draw the bounds of toleration, and not at all, as far as

the public sphere was concerned, with the political and institutional dimension.

Those orthodox Calvinists who complained that ‘philosophy’ was beginning to

prevail over ‘Bible-teachings’ in many people’s minds, and that a mechanistic

world view was replacing a world governed by miracles and supernatural forces,

and there were very many, blamed not only the French philosophes, and the native

Dutch naturalisten – a key word at the time – but also the influence of mechanistic

and Deistic tendencies with a Leibnizian-Wolffian colouring emanating from

Germany.6

Those Dutch intellectual leaders, such as the Wolffian jurist and future Patriot

spokesman, Professor Friedrich Adolf van der Marck (1719-1800), at Groningen,

who expounded social theories based on purely secular philosophy, rather than

theology, or who like Professor Van Goens at Utrecht, were identified in the public

sphere as championing the ideas of Voltaire, d’Alembert, Diderot, and Hume,

found themselves caught up in a fraught, distinctly embattled, situation.

Admittedly, the religious and moral controversies of the late 1760s and early

1770s ultimately had deep political implications;7 but they were scarcely apparent

at the time. Although Van der Marck was officially dismissed from his chair at

Groningen, in 1773, by the university senate, under suspicion of Socinian

heterodoxy, especially for denying the Fall, and the incapacity of natural reason,

as well as the necessity of Christ’s intercession for human salvation, some (at least

later) viewed theology just a pretext, believing that the Stadholder, who

participated in his dismissal, did so in reality because Van der Marck was inspiring

6

5 A point stressed in E. van der Wall, Socrates in de hemel? Een achttiende-eeuwse polemiek over

deugd, verdraagzaamheid en de vaderlandse kerk, pp. 11, 27-8, 73.6 See, for instance, De Waarheid van zyn luister beroofd door de Philosophie van Wolff (Utrecht, 1775)

(Knuttel: 19111) pp. 77-9, 81-2; Godert van Nieuwenburg, Heilzaame en welmeenende raad voor alle

voorstanders van de gevoelens van den Heer Professor Van der Marck (np. 1775) (Knuttel, 19040),

pp. 9-10, 27-3.7 Van der Wall, Socrates, pp. 74-7



students with the ‘sentiments of liberty’, as Mirabeau later put it, while the Prince

preferred ‘qu’on lui forme des esclaves’.8 But to all appearances, the public

controversies surrounding Enlightenment ideas in the Netherlands, before 1775,

had little to do with politics. The principal issue in the controversy surrounding

the Utrecht professor, Van Goens, down to 1775, for example was whether, as Van

Goens maintained, one can admire (and teach students about) the literary,

aesthetic and literary-philosophical ideas of, Voltaire d’Alembert, Diderot and

Hume, without admiring or encouraging students to absorb their anti-religious

attitude and basic philosophical principles. Van Goens adamantly insisted one

could and should; his many critics (rather more convincingly) held that one can

not, and if one wishes to preserve an essentially Reformed-minded society, should

not.9 Van Goens must have changed his mind about this later, for he subsequently

abandoned his earlier pro-Enlightenment stance and increasingly withdrew into an

intense Christian piety.

Viewing this from a European and trans-Atlantic perspective, one might say there

was nothing at all unusual here. But what was wholly unique was the way the

Dutch Enlightenment was suddenly politicized and polarized in the most dramatic

fashion, from 1776 onwards, by the outbreak of the American Revolution. Events

in America had a profound effect everywhere in Europe, of course; but only in the

United Provinces and not, I believe, anywhere else did this deep impact

immediately result, in a full-scale and intensely political public controversy in

which Enlightenment thought and philosophers played a key shaping role in the

domestic debate; and, secondly, owing to the Netherlands’ peculiar position,

internationally, at the time, caused a profound rift within the nation, a split that

was to have lasting and profoundly divisive consequences.

These two key features – the deep split in Dutch society and the Enlightenment

controversy were, in fact, inextricably connected because Dutch support for the

8 [Pieter Vreede?], Zakboek van Neerlands Volk, voor Patriotten, Antipatriotten, Aristokraten en

Prinsgezinden (Dordrecht, 1785) (Knuttel, 21041), pp. 35-8; W. Gobbers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in

Holland. Een onderzoek naar de invloed van de mens en het werk (ca.1760-ca.1810) (Gent, 1963),

p. 225.9 Bericht van den Prof Van Goens rakende de recensie van zyne vertaling van de Verhandeling van

Mozes Mendelszoon (Utrecht, 1775)(Knuttel, 19107), pp. xxi-xxiv, xxxvii, xlii; Johannes Habbema,

Historisch Verhaal nopens het gebeurde te Utrecht (Rotterdam, 1775) (Knuttel, 19105), pp. 67-72,

75-8.


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American rebels, even if largely politically and commercially motivated, justified

itself to the public in terms of republican, democratic and ‘Left Wolffian’ natural

right theories, on the one hand, while the ties between the House of Orange and

Britain led the Stadholder’s supporters vigorously to oppose the American

Revolution not just through loyalty to the House of Orange but also because they

were convinced that “l’union la plus intime avec l’Angleterre”, as one of them put

it, was the proper basis for Dutch state policy and the best way to protect the

Republic’s political independence, trade and colonies.

Both sides in this bitter and escalating quarrel crucially invoked Enlightenment

ideas; however, the two sides appealed not just to different Enlightenment ideas

but to very different dimensions of the Enlightenment. A key spokesman for the

Orangist side, for example, was the Netherlands’ leading Jewish philosophe, the

wealthy patrician, Isaac de Pinto (1717-87), a long-standing opponent within the

Jewish community since his youth of both Spinozism, and the French materialism

which he rightly saw as its heir.10 De Pinto held that property and privilege were

the right basis for ‘Dutch liberty’ and, in consequence, fiercely denounced in the

press those Dutchmen who criticized Britain and supported the American

Revolution. Contending that “par l’extension de la participation du pouvoir, on

tend à détruire la liberté”, he powerfully invoked Montesquieu – a philosophe

widely known to have admired British mixed monarchy, and a philosophe often

appealed to in the 1780s on behalf of socially conservative causes, including the

defence of serfdom in Russia, and even slavery in the Caribbean. Citing

Montesquieu, De Pinto warned his countrymen: “il ne faut pas confondre le

pouvoir du people, avec la liberté du peuple.”11

Many Dutchmen, argued De Pinto, were overlooking the centrality of commercial

interest in the traditions and policy-making of their republic. Dutch supporters of

American independence were, he believed, being absurdly short-sighted in

maintaining that Britain had no right to tax the Americans without their consent.

What would Holland’s good burghers say were the inhabitants of towns, like The

Hague and Naarden, historically excluded from representation in the States of

8

10 I.J.A. Nijenhuis, Een Joodse philosophe. Isaac de Pinto (1717-1787) en de ontwikkeling van de

politieke economie in de Europese Verlichting (Amsterdam, 1992), p. 9.11 [Isaac de Pinto], Réponse de Mr. I. de Pinto aux observations d’un homme impartial, sur sa lettre à

Mr S.B. […] au sujet des troubles qui agitent actuellement toute l’Amérique Septentrionale (The

Hague, 1776), p. 42.



Holland or the inhabitants of Surinam, Saint Eustatius and the Dutch East Indies,

to demand representation in the States? Would not sensible Dutchmen firmly

oppose such demands precisely as the British Parliament refused the Americans?12

It was in the Dutch interest, argued De Pinto, to help Britain, and also Spain and

Portugal, to maintain their imperial systems in the New World.13 The American

insurgency, he contended, would not stop with the thirteen colonies. “Spain,

Portugal, and all Europe ought therefore to join with England”, he urged, “to

prevent or at least retard that independency.“ Were the Americans to win their

independence, they would soon extend their domination, he predicted, over all of

the New World: “Curaçao, Surinam, the islands of Jamaica, Martinique, St Domingo,

Guadaloupe, in a word, all the European possessions in America and the West

Indies, would pass under [their] dominion, bringing the Republic’s prosperity to

an end – no more could [the Dutch] republic boast of her riches and greatness!”14

De Pinto utterly repudiated the ‘declamations’ of Raynal (and hence also Diderot)

against “la prétendue tyrannie des Anglois” and detested their “abominables

éloges des rebelles”.15 In subsequent years De Pinto remained ardently Orangist

and pro-British and supported his equally conservative friend, Van Goens, who

between 1781 and 1783 endeavoured to check the Patriot ascendancy in the

Dutch press by propagating conservative Orangism through the pages of De

Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot, the paper supported by the Stadholder which

he edited.

In other words, the rift in Dutch public life between 1776 and 1780, already clearly

marked out the lines of ideological polarization that developed, subsequently,

during the Patriottenbeweging itself, inexorably pushing the two rival factions in

Dutch politics towards opposite poles of the Enlightenment: conservative

Orangists orientated towards Montesquieu, strong defence of empire, and

adamant insistence on the superiority of the British model; Dutch supporters of

the American rebellion gravitating towards the ideas of the Radical Enlightenment

whether these were packaged in a French republican, German ‘Left Wolffian’, or,

as with admirers of Thomas Paine (whose famous pamphlet Common Sense

appeared in French at Rotterdam as early as 1776), an Anglo-American libertarian

12 Ibid., p. 37.13 Isaac de Pinto, Letters on the American Troubles (London, 1776), pp. 34-5, 40-1.14 Ibid., pp. 41-2.15 Nijenhuis, Joodse philosophe, pp. 30-1.


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format. During the decades, then, that democratic thinking, egalitarianism and full

freedom of expression and life-style first became major constituents of the Dutch

political and social scene, namely the 1780s and 1790s, Dutch society was

increasingly divided between the Patriots and their Orangist opponents, the strife

between them, though certainly a political struggle being at the same time a kind

of Kulturkampf, an irresolvable cultural and intellectual civil war over philosophy,

science, morality and religion.

After 1781, the Netherlands was split from top to bottom not only over the

question of democracy, toleration, political reform and the House of Orange, but

also over the wider intellectual changes introduced by the Enlightenment and

especially the issue of what kind of enlightenment should be embraced as the

basis of a free, successful and prosperous society. In the end, the democrats

resoundingly lost this historic struggle, being defeated by a combination of the

Orangist urban mob and those in Dutch society whom the Leidse Ontwerp of

1785, one of the key Patriot public declarations, called “heerschzugtige

Aristocraaten”, that is office-holders, regents and other elite groups.16 The

democrats were beaten that is by the defenders of social hierarchy, tradition,

aristocracy, empire, ecclesiastical authority and the monarchical principle who

won chiefly by using conservative Enlightenment concepts. But if, in the end, the

democratic Radical Enlightenment was roundly defeated in the Netherlands, it was

defeated only by means of massive interference in Dutch affairs by Britain and

Prussia, and only after a long and very bitter struggle, and after partially winning

for time; moreover, the Dutch democratic Enlightenment lost in a way which

continues to have great relevance and topicality for us today.

Ideas and ideology then are the key to understanding what was going on. I do not

mean to say by this that most people were interested in the ideas or the ideology.

No doubt the Patriot leader, Gerrit Paape (1752-98), was quite right in saying that

most ordinary Patriot supporters had only the vaguest, most incoherent notion of

what Patriot doctrine was about and took no interest in such debates. But this is

true of all modern ideologies; moreover, this lack of interest and understanding

16 Ontwerp om de Republiek door eene heilzaame vereeniging der belangen van regent en burger van

binnen gelukkig en van buiten gedugt te maaken volgens besluit der provinciale vergadering van

de gewapende corpsen in Holland den 4 Oktober 1785 binnen Leyden geopend (Leiden, 1785)

(Knuttel 21045), pp. 35, 47, 61.



on the part of the vast majority did not prevent Patriot democratic doctrine from

developing coherently, very rapidly and with an impressive momentum among the

movement’s political and intellectual leadership. As Nieuhoff pointed out, there

were some in Holland and elsewhere at the time who identified Spinoza as the

philosophical root of the systematic democratic egalitarianism and materialism

culminating in the Système de la nature and other works by d’Holbach, Diderot,

Helvetius and their disciples as well as in the third edition of Raynal.17 The

connection was pointed to also by another Patriot activist, the French-born

republican journalist and historian, Antoine-Marie Cerisier (1749-1828), in his

important Tableau de l ‘Histoire Générale des Provinces-Unies, (10 vols.;Utrecht,

1777-84). Cerisier, a strong republican, remarkably bold in his published

statements about Spinoza (dating from 1783), observed that Spinoza’s system had

been powerfully renewed in our time by some new “Diagoras [an allusion to

Diderot and d’Holbach], qui n’avaient ni le génie, ni la profondeur et la subtilité

de Spinosa”.18

Spinozistic philosophy, then, culminating in d’Holbach and Diderot was the

philosophy intellectually most closely linked to full democracy, freedom of

expression and life-style, and individual freedom. Very few people, it is true, either

understood or were interested in this. But the emergence of the Patriots as a mass

movement, able to command strong support in the streets, and tendency of the

country’s many civic literary and debating clubs to split between the rival factions

as the political strife intensified, turned such reading and debating societies (and

the universities), into arenas where radical tendencies, nevertheless, indirectly, by

extension, so to speak, gained a huge following. Radical ideas, stripped of their

original philosophical baggage, sufficiently answered the needs of the moment, to

enable a philosophically articulate few, often, like Van der Marck and Nieuhoff,

professors, or else lawyers, doctors, or, like Cerisier and Gerrit Paape, journalists,

to gain a wholly disproportionate influence over what was soon to be a nation-wide

mass movement.

A good example of this remarkable filtering down of radical ideas is the splitting of

the several Leiden literary and debating circles. In the late 1770s and at the

17 Nieuhoff, Over Spinozisme, p. 82, 306 18 Antoine-Marie Cerisier, Tableau de l’histoire générale des Provinces-Unies (10 vols; Utrecht,

1777-84), ix, p. 571.


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beginning of the 1780s, these clubs accommodated both ardent Patriots, like Pieter

Vreede (1750-1837), son of a Leiden textile manufacturer who, by 1783, completely

rejected the old Dutch constitution and urged a democratic Enlightenment

conception of ‘vryheid’, on the one hand, and no less fervent Orangists, defending

the existing constitution, on the other.19 However, by the early and mid 1780s, as

the struggle intensified, the traditionalists were forced out, since relatively few

Leiden professional people, book-sellers or literary figures supported the kind of

conservative Orangism championed, for example, by the publisher and writer Elie

Luzac (1721-1796), or by Adriaan Kluit (1735-1807), the first professor of Dutch

history at Leiden and an adamant Orangist. In effect the clubs were conquered by

the Patriots. Just as Luzac became isolated among the Leiden book-sellers, so Kluit

became marginalized and heavily embattled at the university, his lectures leading

not just to some fierce criticism but several fist-fights.20 Like Van Goens at Utrecht,

he was unceremoniously dismissed from his chair, in 1783, by the Patriots after they

gained control, for the moment, of both universities.

Prior to 1785, admittedly, the public ideology of the Patriottenbeweging in the

Netherlands was not altogether a product of Enlightenment ideas. Dutch

historiography traditionally and still today points insistently to the numerous

examples in public declarations, and the writings of some early Patriot leaders like

Van der Capellen, where Patriot rhetoric and ideology, adorned with lengthy

recitals of historical events, still drew predominantly on alleged ancient

‘privileges’ and the Dutch past.21 Van der Capellen and other Dutch Patriots, it is

held, firmly eschewed abstract concepts, urging the “herstelling der voorregten en

vrijheden van ‘s Lands” [restoration of the privileges and freedoms of the land];

and where they did choose to cite Enlightenment authors uniformly preferred the

more conservative British strain of Enlightenment to the radical message of French

philosophes such as d’Holbach, Diderot, Helvetius and Raynal. Justification for

reform, at any rate down to 1784, allegedly, was predominantly still couched in

terms of what was or was not legitimated by the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt

against Spain and by such episodes from the Republic’s seventeenth-century

history as the First Stadholderless period (1650-72).

12

19 R. van Vliet, Elie Luzac (1721-1796). Boekverkoper van de Verlichting (Nijmegen, 2005), pp. 366-8.20 Ibid., p. 371.21 See, for instance, Joan Derk van der Capellen, Aan het volk van Nederland (1781) (ed.) H.L. Zwitzer

(Amsterdam, 1987), pp. 6-20.



It is true that Patriot leaders continued, for some years, to show considerable

hesitation about the idea of democracy as a universal principle. De Post van den

Neder-Rhijn, for example, one of the main Patriot newssheets, and a paper resolute

in insisting that Dutch Catholics were co-citizens and should share equally in the

state, noted, in September 1785, that it remained “as opposed to a complete

democracy as it was to a complete aristocracy”.22 But what has been generally

missed is that the elements in early Patriot ideology that appeal to tradition and

reflect intellectual conservatism stemmed mainly from the unavoidable fact that

well-entrenched, old-fashioned notions remained vital for public consumption.

Other evidence proves, indisputably, that well before 1785, arguing for restoration

of the ‘true constitution’ on the basis of historical precedent, was by no means the

predominant tendency among the Patriot leaders and spokesmen. On the contrary,

from the first emergence of the Patriot movement, in the later 1770s, there were –

if we leave aside Van der Cappellen (who really was an aristocrat, a conservative

thinker and strongly aligned with English ideas) – at least five distinct and highly

innovative new strands, dominating the political discourse of the Patriots all of

which were fundamentally new, universal and impossible to justify under the

existing constitution; equally, all were unthinkable except in terms of

Enlightenment thought. These were, firstly, the elevation of the ‘people’ as the

primary source of legitimacy in politics, invoking the inherent legitimacy and

superiority of ‘een volmaakte volksregering’ [a perfect government of the people],

and the principle of volks-souvereiniteit [people’s sovereignty], in a far more

emphatic way than ever before, a shift closely linked, of course, to Patriot

enthusiasm for the American Revolution. The resulting stress on “the people’s

sovereignty and the power which it has delegated to the country’s high sovereigns,

as their representatives”, clearly meant that the people possessed the authority to

abolish the stadholderate, and the whole of the existing Aristodemocratiek

constitution, as one Patriot called it in 1785, should they see fit.23

Secondly, there was the remarkable redefinition of the idea of vryheid ‘freedom’

to mean not freedom under specific historical privileges, but the inalienable

freedom of everyone on an equal basis, the idea that individual “freedom was the

22 De Post van den Neder-Rhijn viii, pp. 366, 459; P.J.H.M. Theeuwen, ‘Pieter ‘t Hoen (1744-1828)’ in

O vrijheid! Onwaareerbaar pand!. Themanummer Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht 1987, pp. 43-77, here

p. 68.23 [Pieter Vreede?], Zakboek, pp. 20-31.


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aim” of the Patriot movement: “de natie te verlichten”, as Pieter Vreede put it, “haar

deszelfs onvervreemdbaare regten, als een vry volk te leeren keenen, is de

onderneming” [to enlighten the nation to learn to know their own inalienable

rights as a free people, that is the undertaking].24 You can not be said to be free,

he explained, “as long as you have no control over yourselves, over your

belongings and over your own happiness”; hence, only representative democracy

can render individuals free.25

A third major strand of early Patriot republicanism unthinkable in terms of the

past and unimaginable except in terms of Enlightenment ideas was the, for many,

disturbing new doctrine that Catholics and Protestants (including the Mennonites)

were equal in their civil status, or as the Post van den Neder-Rhijn expressed the

point, “dus, zoo ver het het ‘s Lands behoud en welvaart aangaat, medebroeders”

[thus, as far as the country’s upkeep and prosperity is concerned, fellow

brethren].26 This was totally out of line with the whole history of the Republic and,

potentially, rendered Jews, Socinians and Muslims too part of society.

Fourthly, there was now a crucially important discourse of anti-Aristocratie,

deliberately stirring up popular resentment against both the ‘Alleenheerscher en

Aristocraat’, as a necessary part of consolidating the new concept of Vryheid and,

as Gerrit Paape was especially keen to do, in his De Aristocraat en de Burger

(Rotterdam, 1785), implanting the idea that de Vryheid is always in danger from

sinister Aristocraaten and clergy who know how to manipulate the “de afhanglyke,

de onverschillige, de onkundige burger” [the dependent, indifferent and ignorant

burgher].27 This, of course, went together with rhetoric firmly rejecting the

hereditary principle and reflected new social aspirations, urging the promotion of

a fresh set of office-holders who had supposedly demonstrated by their dedication

and abilities, that they were worthy of being elevated from lower to higher offices.

Finally, those Patriot leaders whom the Anti-Patriotten called the Patriot cabaal ,

that is those who led the democratic movement, were rightly seen by their

14

24 [Pieter Vreede], Beoordeelend en ophelderend verslag van de Verhandeling over de Vryheid

(Arnhem, 1783) (Knuttel, 20405), p. 6.25 Pieter Vreede, Waermond en Vryhart. Gesprek over de waere Vryheid der Nederlandren, en den

aert der waere Vryheid (‘Holland’, 1783) (Knuttel, 20400), p. 4. 26 De Post van den Neder-Rhijn. ii, p, 728 and vi, pp. 945-6 (issue no. 263).27 Gerrit Paape, De Aristocraat en de Burger (Rotterdam, 1785) (Knuttel 21046), pp. 9, 53, 55.



adversaries (and particularly resented by the more conservatively orthodox

Reformed preachers), as the party advocating a universal “vryheid van dencken,

van sprecken, en van de drukpers” [freedom of thought, of speech and of the

press], something which had also never previously before been part of the

Republic’s cultural fabric, at least not in the broad secular sense of freedom of

thought and life-style now being demanded.28 This fifth new plank too stood in

starkest contrast to the style of justification based on tradition, religious doctrine

and precedent usual in practically the whole of ancien régime Europe.29 Leading

Orangist intellectual opponents, such as Kluit, Luzac, and Van Goens, were

entirely justified, therefore, in claiming the Patriots were totally subverting the

true Dutch constitution, past and present, by dragging in wholly extraneous

abstract principles, headed by their ‘philosophical’ concept of vryheid [freedom] –

something the Patriots, of course, mostly denied.30

The persistence of pre-Enlightenment ideas in the early public discourse of the

Patriottenbeweging, it is often pointed out, is confirmed by the most substantial

Patriot publication of the first phase of the movement, the two-volume

Grondwettige Herstelling [Constitutional Restoration] of 1784. This work,

compiled by a group of leading Patriots, including Van der Capellen, and

published anonymously claimed the institutions of the Republic were in a state of

chronic decay, and needed thoroughgoing reforms, to be secured by the ‘people’

with the help of the civic militias. Restoration here was certainly justified on the

basis of historical precedent and existing institutions, the United Provinces,

according to this text, having always been a Volksregeering that tended to

minimize the hereditary principle in society and politics.31 Arming the respectable

citizenry in the style of the American militias, held the Grondwettige Herstelling,

was the way to compel the Stadholder and provincial assemblies to respect the

rights of the ordinary burgher, irrespective of his religion, while simultaneously

keeping the unruly (Orangist) mob at bay.32

28 Rijklof Michael van Goens, De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot iii (1782), p. 290.29 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, p. 397-405.30 S.R.E. Klein, Patriots republikanisme. Politieke cultuur in Nederland (1766-1787), (Amsterdam,

1995), p. 286; W.R.E. Velema, ‘Vrijheid als volkssoevereiniteit. De ontwikkeling van het politieke

vrijheidsbegrip in de Republiek, 1780-1795’, in E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and W.R.E. Velema (eds.)

Vrijheid. Een geschiedenis van de vijftiende tot de twintigste eeuw (Amsterdam, 1999),

pp. 287-303, here pp. 271-2, 302.31 Gobbers, Rousseau in Holland p. 224; I.L. Leeb, The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution

(The Hague, 1973), pp. 205-6.32 Ibid., pp. 189-92.


K B L E C T U R E 416

A notable difficulty with adjusting new social aspirations to old ideas, however, is

that such arguments can then easily be challenged on grounds of their highly

dubious historical accuracy. Outraged by what he saw as its flagrant

unconstitutionality, Kluit penned an incisive reply, entitled De souvereiniteit der

Staaten van Holland, verdedigt tegen de hedendaagsche leere der volks-regeering

(1785). The whole point about the constitution of the United Provinces (like that

of Britain), Kluit pointed out, was that Dutch sovereignty, the highest authority,

was not vested in the people. The philosophical doctrine being spread about by

the likes of Rousseau, Paine, and Price according to which the people are always

the true sovereign is roundly rejected by him in favour of the views of Grotius,

Pufendorf, Coccejus, Huber, Thomasius and others who insisted on the purely

institutional character of sovereignty.33 In his later Academische Redevoering

published at Leiden, in 1787, Kluit chiefly blamed for what he saw as the Dutch

catastrophe on the (in his eyes ruinous) influence of Rousseau, Raynal, Mably,

Price and ‘the Americans’.34 This writer continued deep into the 1790s,

contrasting despotisme populaire with Dutch ‘true freedom’, denouncing

democracy which he deemed catastrophically pernicious with “de waare

republikeinsche vrijheid, gebouwd op wettige en welhebragte privilegien” [the true

republican freedom built on lawful and properly established privileges].35

Those addicted to radical intellectual influences nurtured a body of political theory

which justified and legitimated wholesale revolutionary constitutional and

institutional reform. Perhaps the most articulate expression of this, from the

period before 1787, were the ideas of the lawyer and later diplomat and

statesman, Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck (1761-1825), the son of a Mennonite

family, raised at Deventer, who is usually designated a ‘moderate’ Patriot, since he

never went into exile and later became skilled at placating Napoleon. But although

his career culminated in his becoming the last Grand Pensionary of the Batavian

Republic (1805-6), earlier, in the 1780s he appears to have been a thoroughgoing,

if inconspicuous, radical republican, ‘moderate’ only in the sense that he relegated

activism to others and ardently believed in non-violent methods, as well as the rule

of law and decency, values which, after all, all the Patriot leaders subscribed to.

33 Adriaan Kluit, Academische Redevoering, over het misbruik van ‘t algemeen staatsrecht (Leiden,

1787) pp. 27-8.34 Ibid., p. 90n, 93n.35 A. Kluit, De rechten van den Mensch in Vrankrijk geen gewaande rechten in Nederland

(Amsterdam, 1793), pp. 66, 103.


17Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands

In 1784, Schimmelpenninck published, first in Latin and then, the following year,

in Dutch, his Verhandeling over eene wel ingerichte volksregeering holding that

representative democracy, through regular elections, was the best and most

orderly way to extend democratic principles to larger countries and those with a

federal tradition, like the Netherlands. This doctrine undoubtedly owed much to

the example of the American Revolution but is expounded by Schimmelpenninck

in a systematic, highly theoretical manner not unlike that developed by d’Holbach

in the early 1770s, prior to the American rebellion. The theme of representative

democracy was taken up by Schimmelpenninck, as by Paulus and other Dutch

radical theorists, in the context of criticism of Rousseau and with a degree of

emphasis which had no real parallel in the Europe of the mid 1780s.36

Although it has been claimed that Schimmelpenninck’s intellectual inspiration was

mainly British and American;37 the evidence for this is not very convincing.38 He

esteemed Machiavelli, knew the ancient republican texts, and was familiar with the

Dutch translations of the constitutions of the American states; but the chief

influences on his democratic republican ideology, judging by the authors he

quotes, were Rousseau of whom he was nevertheless rather critical, Mably,

Montesquieu, Diderot and Raynal.39 In his Verhandeling, he translates into Dutch

Rousseau’s claim, in the Contrat Social, that the sovereign power of the people can

not be represented, for the same reason that it cannot be alienated and then

vigorously attacks it, along with Price’s and Priestley’s somewhat equivocal

qualifications of it, stressing the distinction between opperste magt (majestas)

[sovereign power] and the opperste bewind (summum imperium) [executive

power]. Agreeing with Rousseau that the people’s sovereign power can never be

alienated, much less irrevocably surrendered, he denies it follows from this that

executive power can not be entrusted to delegates chosen from among the

people, provided this occurs through the mechanism of democratic elections.40

Hence, a republican legislature should never enact laws in the name of the

assembly itself, like the British Parliament, but always in that of the people as a

whole. Responsibility for enacting laws must necessarily be entrusted to an

elected assembly; but the authority to do this always rests with the people. Elected

36 R.J. Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling over eene wel ingerigte volksregeering (Leiden, 1785), pp. 4-5.37 Klein, Patriots republikanisme, pp. 193-4.38 Ibid., p.193; Leeb, Ideological Origins, p. 182n. 39 Kluit, Akademische Redevoering, pp. 90n, 93n.40 Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling pp. 6-7, 35; Klein, Patriots republikanisme, pp. 222, 266.


deputies, he insists, are never justified in proceeding against the people’s wishes

or staying in power against the people’s will.

Authority to proclaim laws in the name of the people, held Schimmelpenninck,

derives not from any contract or agreement between society and the executive but

rather from the “contract each burgher concludes with his fellow citizens when he

undertakes to subordinate his own will to the common will of his fellow

citizens”.41 Citing the Dutch-language versions of the constitutions of the states

of Pennsylvania, Georgia, South Carolina, Massachussetts, and New York, and

Mably’s analysis of these, he also considers how best to organize democratic

elections for legislative assemblies. Should the voting, as he and others thought,

be in secret, to protect the individual’s freedom? Or would an open declaration of

votes, as argued by Mably, better ensure that voters did not vote according to

petty personal whims and biases, rather than for the common good? 42

The doctrine that democratic republicanism is the most natural, rational and

fitting form of government for humans, as formulated by Schimmelpenninck, was

based on arguments chiefly drawn from Rousseau and Mably but resonated

unmistakably with echoes of the Brothers De la Court and Spinoza who, however,

are never named.43 Crucial in this kind of democratic republic, argues

Schimmelpenninck, is that the citizenry should possess enough insight and

awareness of politics to be able to judge fittingly over the gemeenebest [common

good]. “Those who have fallen into poverty should be excluded from electing high

office-holders, he maintains, lest they be bought or corrupted and also out of fear

of their all too great ignorance”. Thus, Schimmelpenninck sought to exclude the

poorest but was also at pains to ensure that all those who are householders, or

who in countryside own a piece of land of modest value, should have the right to

vote. The level of property ownership required for eligibility, he emphasized,

should be so moderate that only the lowest stratum of the ‘common people’ – and

nobody else – was excluded, with all those of middling standing being guaranteed

the right to vote.44

A sure sign of the drift away from traditionalist arguments towards a radically

18 K B L E C T U R E 4

41 Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling pp. 7-8.42 Ibid., pp. 12-13.43 Ibid., pp. 54-5.44 Ibid., p. 22.


enlightened stance, during the mid 1780s, was the other, of the two, most famous

Patriot declarations, the Leidse Ontwerp of 1785. “The most striking attempt yet

to win over the ran-and-file of the Free Corps to the more advanced views of its

democratically inclined leadership”,45 as Schama describes this document, its

importance lies in its establishing as a general principle that “eene waare

representative Democratie” [a true representative democracy], is the best form of

government, that a society’s laws and institutions must have the people’s consent,

and that “freedom is an inalienable right belonging to all members of Dutch

society”.46 The manifesto’s publication was closely associated with Wybo Fijnje

from Delft, a radical Patriot leader named beneath it; and he was long supposed

to have written it together with Vreede.47 In recent years, however, it has emerged,

thanks to new research, that others also participated, notably Schimmelpenninck

and, also, Cerisier who, it turns out, to have actually composed the draft, originally

in French, from which it was then translated into Dutch.48

As a journalist Cerisier, a no less consistently staunch supporter of the Patriot

cause than the American Revolution, might have played a publicly more

conspicuous role in the democratic movement than he actually did. For both the

British and German press of the time were firmly opposed to the democratic

pretensions of the Patriots and supported the Stadholder and his court, while the

French-language press outside of the Netherlands, in France, the southern

Netherlands and elsewhere, was also predominantly anti-democratic. This offered

a unique opportunity for the prestigious Gazette de Leyde, the French-language

Leiden paper Cerisier edited, from 1785 onwards, as this newspaper was

practically the only voice supporting the Dutch democratic republican revolution

to be heard internationally. But Cerisier was reined in by the paper’s owner, Jean

Luzac, a cousin and rival of the Orangist publisher, Elie Luzac who, if less openly

anti-Patriot than the latter, was nevertheless increasingly troubled by the overtly

egalitarian character of the Patriot cause.49


45 S. Schama, Patriots and Liberators (London, 1977), p. 95.46 Ontwerp om de Republiek, pp. 49, 62-3.47 Ibid., p. 68; Klein, Patriots republikanisme, p. 251; Maarten Prak, ‘Citizen Radicalism and

Democracy in the Dutch Republic. The Patriot Movement of the 1780s’, Theory and Society xx

(1991), pp. 73-102, here, pp. 89-90.48 Jeremy Popkin, ‘Dutch Patriots, French Journalists, and Declarations of Rights: The Leidse Ontwerp

of 1785 and Its Diffusion in France’, in The Historical Journal xxxviii (1995), pp. 553-65, here

pp. 557-60.49 Ibid., p. 562.



The significance of the new finds surrounding the Leidse Ontwerp lies less in

Cerisier’s being its principal author than the fact that he was undeniably an

outright democrat and Radical Enlightenment republican theorist, and also an

erudite Spinozist besides being a direct bridge to Mirabeau, Brissot and other

French republican ideologues of the early and mid 1780s. A Frenchman who had

settled in Holland in 1774, Cerisier, an ardent admirer of the early Dutch

Enlightenment of Spinoza and Bayle (as well as Balthasar Bekker who, he says,

despite being suppressed in his day, by his Dutch Reformed Church opponents,

won in the end, since “ses opinions ont pénétré et même prévalu”),50 was the ideal

person to help graft Dutch and French Radical thought onto the emerging Dutch

democratic republican tradition. If Cerisier, inspired by the American rebel capture

of Montreal, in 1776 and the ensuing fighting between the British and

revolutionaries in Canada, dreamt of a future French-speaking republic in North

America guided by the voice of “a Rousseau, a Mably, a Lauraguais, a Raynal, a

Mercier, etc.”,51 his ambition to help establish democratic republics in the

Netherlands and later France itself, were equally guided by universal democratic

principles and very broad anti-Christian, radical, philosophical concerns.

What became the core Patriot doctrines then, were based on ideas drawn from the

Radical Enlightenment. It has often been claimed that in the Netherlands, the

ideologues of both political factions could with justification claim to be ‘verlichte’

[enlightened] men. While, in a very loose sense this is true; it is also highly

misleading unless carefully qualified. For the two sides increasingly represented

not just different but opposing and wholly irreconcilable wings of the

Enlightenment, one Christian the other essentially non-Christian. It is true that like

their adversaries, leading Orangist ideologues of the day, such as Kluit, Luzac, De

Pinto, Van Goens, and Hennert, built their ideas around the quest for ‘freedom’, the

‘common good’, toleration and republican virtue; but, by each of these, they plainly

meant something quite different from their opponents. In particular, Orangist

conservative Enlightenment intellectuals did not agree that ‘reason’ is humanity’s

sole guide, insisting rather on the centrality of tradition, social hierarchy and

precedent as well as faith and ecclesiastical authority. Equally, they totally rejected

the democratic doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, indeed rejected

‘philosophical’ democracy, equality, full toleration and the comprehensive

50 Cerisier, Tableau ix, p. 569.51 Jeremy Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), pp. 175-8


individual liberty upheld by the Patriots.52 Thirdly, Orangists tended to be ardent

admirers of the British model, as well as British ideas, and especially of the ideal of

mixed monarchy which was anathema to the Patriots. Finally, they disagreed

broadly about human rights. Luzac indignantly repudiated the key Spinozistic idea,

so important to Paape, for instance,53 that natural right is carried over from the

state of nature into political society; he considered it an outrage that men should

formulate abstract principles on the basis of natural right, and philosophy, and

then, where these clash with the positive laws of society, seek to elevate the former

above the law, overriding the actual constitution.54

While the growing split over philosophy, political theory and science was thus

inextricably bound up from the outset with the political struggle between Patriots

and Orangists, and support for and against the American Revolution,55 it would,

admittedly, be a gross oversimplification to suppose there was ever anything like

a neat or thoroughgoing correlation between ‘aristocratic’ Orangism with British

moderate mainstream Enlightenment, on the one hand, and, on the other,

democratic Patriotism with the Radical Enlightenment. The strong religious

leanings of most of Dutch society rendered this impossible. If the antagonism

between the two wings of the Enlightenment among the more highly literate

sections of Dutch society was uninterrupted and ubiquitous, the relation of this

all-pervasive intellectual rift to political loyalties and mass politics remained

veiled, highly unstable, and extremely complex throughout.

As the neo-Cocceian preacher, IJsbrand van Hamelsveld (1743-1812), an eager

admirer of Johan de Witt and Grotius and one of the leading pro-Patriot preachers,

declared, in his book on the moral decline of the Dutch, in 1791, the European

Enlightenment remained for everyone a highly volatile dichotomy, a Janus-headed

phenomenon, or as he put it a force for both good and evil. He fervently supported

what he saw as the ‘good’ Enlightenment which balances reason with faith and

promotes education, religion and love of reading among the people, celebrating

the literary and debating society Tot Nut van het Algemeen as especially

52 Leeb, Ideolgical Origins, pp. 206-9; Israel, Dutch Republic, p. 1104.53 Gerrit Paape, De Hollandsche wijsgeer in Braband (4 vols. Antwerp-Dordrecht, 1788-90) iv,

pp. 40-6, 53-4, 62-3.54 W.R.E. Velema, Enlightenment and Conservatism in the Dutch Republic. The Political Thought of

Elie Luzac (1721-1796) (Assen, 1993), pp. 171-2.55 Van Vliet, Elie Luzac, pp. 369-70.




embodying its spirit; but he was equally uncompromising in opposing the ‘bad’

Enlightenment, as he saw it, that is the radical, freethinking tendency that rejects

theology, and ecclesiastical authority and invokes philosophical reason alone.56

The kind of atheism and materialism associated with Diderot, Helvetius and

d’Holbach, furthermore, were generally deemed to be less prevalent in the Dutch

Republic than in England, or “in France especially”, as the Utrecht Orangist

professor Johan Frederik Hennert (1733-1813) affirmed, in 1782, where “both

among the learned and unlearned these every day seem to increase”;

nevertheless, Dutch contemporaries tended to agree, as Hennert also noted, that

“yes, in the Netherlands too here and there, people are infected by this sickness

via their neighbours”.57 He added, moreover, that it seemed to him that Dutch

theologians had become too complacent about this phenomenon: “in our days,

and who would have thought this! more Atheisten appear in the Netherlands ‘dan

sommige theologanten zich schijnen te verbeelden’” [than some theologians seem

to suppose].58

But if open atheism was less commonly to be found in the Netherlands than in

France, the intellectual divisions within Dutch culture, through their being

inextricably linked to the political struggle, were, until 1789, much more obviously

divisive than elsewhere, and this open antagonism between the two conflicting

enlightenments seemingly drove many more to embrace outright egalitarian and

democratic views than were to be found anywhere else at the time, even America

where full ‘philosophical’ egalitarianism was still rather rare. Thus the Patriotten

formed their own political clubs and societies and these to an extent overlapped

with the literary and debating societies of the age even if by no means wholly or

exactly.

At the same time, these reading and debating societies undoubtedly added to the

increasingly feverish ideological atmosphere by spreading awareness among the

reading and debating public of the ideas of the chief philosophers, and details of

56 IJsbrand van Hamelsveld, De zedelijke toestand der Nederlandsche natie (Amsterdam, 1791),

pp. 55, 76, 404-8, 480; Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness and Fall

1477-1806 (Oxford, 1995), pp.1110-11.57 Johan Frederik Hennert, Uitgeleezene verhandelingen over de wijsbegeerte (6 vols, Utrecht,

1780-95) ‘voorreede’ to vol. iii (June 1782), pp. 7-8.58 Ibid., ‘voorreede’ to vol 1 (1780), p. 8.



current scientific controversies. Van Hamelsveld, for example, a Patriot with

moderate Enlightenment views, resembled the Orangist professor Hennert, and

many others, in associating what he called the ‘bad’ enlightenment of libertinism

and materialism chiefly with French ideas and influences. Van Hamelsveld admired

Rousseau’s call for a more intense commitment to virtue, but denounced virtually

all other forms of French cultural, intellectual and social influence.59 “Contrary to

what the naturalisten maintain”, insisted this author, “it is religion which is the

chief pillar of a free and democratic republic”.60

Yet, the relentless political struggle inevitably intensified and polarized the

intellectual-scientific rift in Dutch society. Thus when the Orangist news-sheet, the

De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot (1781-3), a paper fiercely derided by all

democrats,61 accused those Dutch Reformed preachers, like Van Hamelsveld, who

chose the Patriot side not merely of forgetting all that the Reformed Church owed

to the House of Orange but also of failing to grasp “dat de hoofden van die party,

tot welke zy zich thans laten overhalen de grootste vyanden van hunne byzondere

leer zyn” [that the heads of the party to which they presently let themselves be

swayed towards are the greatest enemies of their particular teaching],62 they were

making a point which was not just largely correct but which was also a self-

fulfilling prophesy in the sense that it pushed more and more people into highly

unorthodox, radical modes of thought. Undoubtedly, the Patriottenbeweging

always included numerous more or less orthodox Reformed; but theological

Latitudinarians and neo-Socinians were particularly prominent and the movement

clearly acted as a hold-all facilitating the advance also of freethinking and

materialism, or what Gerrit Paape simply termed ‘philosophy’.

Admittedly, as many scholars have pointed out, the spread of reading and debate

in the Dutch cities in the 1770s and 1780s also reinforced popular Newtonian-

style physico-theology in the estimation of the ordinary reading public, albeit at

the very moment when physico-theology and Newtonianism were actually losing

their grip in the Dutch universities.63 Physico-theology was indeed fundamental to

the moderate mainstream Enlightenment and its spread must have further

59 Van Hamelsveld, Zedelijke toestand, pp. 38-9.60 Ibid., pp. 73-4.61 Van Vliet, Elie Luzac, p. 367.62 Van Goens, De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot iii (1782), p. 90.63 Van Hamelsveld, Zedelijke toestand p. 208.



intensified the growing polarity between an official, respectable Dutch

Enlightenment anchored in physico-theological ideas, on the one hand, and its

antagonist, Radical Enlightenment, which was philosophique in the special sense

intended by Diderot, Helvetius, d’Holbach and Mirabeau, on the other, a sense

adopted in the Netherlands by Patriot leaders like Cerisier and Paape. But it is also

arguable that while the spread of the reading societies certainly further stiffened

most readers’ fervent hostility to naturalism and materialism, this form of popular

philosophy must almost inevitably have simultaneously tended to inhibit

adherents of such ideas from embracing any kind of democratic Patriot ideology.

For Newtonianism as a popular philosophy heavily emphasized the idea that the

entire existing order is God-ordained and therefore essentially good.

The supreme voice of Dutch physico-theology in the late eighteenth century, for

example, the massively widely read and influential Johannes Florentius Martinet

(1729-95), a Reformed preacher at Zutphen, and ardent enthusiast for the new

science, did his best to stand aloof from the political conflict. He repeatedly

criticized Reformed traditionalists, and Orangists generally, for being

insufficiently tolerant, or charitable, towards Catholics and dissenters, but

simultaneously disassociated himself from the ideology of the Patriots. Physico-

theology led Martinet to apply much the same principle to history and political

institutions as he believed applied to the physical cosmos: the divine Creator had

ordered all in a harmoniously interacting whole and this should be regarded as the

basis of legitimacy in social life as it was in the physical order of things.64

Consequently, Patriot claims that everything was wrong with the existing political

order and that a general ‘reformation’ was needed, struck him as a sacrilegious

affront to the principle of divine providence.

Another ardently physico-theologial preacher inclined to link study of science

closely to a liberal theology, in opposition to radical ideas and far-reaching

institutional change, was Pieter Kaas (1742-1818), a member of the society

Verscheidenheid en Overeenstemming established in Rotterdam, in 1760. A

philosophical debating club with an originally Wolffian orientation, this group

sought to combine the thought of Leibniz and Wolff with Newtonian experimental

philosophy, the system which in Kaas’s view reveals the entire truth about nature.

Lecturing at one of the society’s weekly meetings, shortly after the Stadholder’s

64 Paasman, J.F.Martinet, pp. 66, 68.



restoration, in 1788, he publicly joined the struggle to demolish the naturalisme

(Spinoza) and materialism (La Mettrie) which he perceived to be posing a dire

threat to Dutch and all European society. Newton’s empiricism, held Kaas, proves

the fallacy of constructing hypothetical metaphysical systems vindicating Bernard

Nieuwentijt’s vigorously anti-Spinozistic physcio-theology. Newton, Leibniz, and

Wolff, in his opinion, successfully demonstrate how the divine Creator’s free

choice and conscious ordering of the world are compatible with human free will.65

Spinoza, held Kaas, nevertheless remained a dire threat, because his followers had

succeeded in scattering their seed widely in the Netherlands and drawn in many

who had allowed themselves to be seduced by his seductive but sophistic system,

generating a deep malaise in Dutch society.66

Adherents of Spinozistic naturalism, contended Kaas, were philosophically ‘blind’,

victims of fallacies and imposture. But this is unsurprising, he added, since human

reason, since the Fall, is deeply defective, which is what allows the arguments of

the Spinozists to appear convincing to superficial minds. He himself, he says, had

earlier been so attracted by the apparent cogency of reason that he too had been

disastrously lured by it ‘to the very borders of the Deists and atheists’ and now

thanked God for pulling him back ‘in time’ before he had succumbed to Spinoza

and ‘his ruinous followers’. Society in England, France, Germany and “also the

ground of our republic is sown”, he admonished, with the poisonous weeds

left by generations of “Spinozists, Deurhofisten, Hattemisten, Leenhofisten,

naturaalisten, materialisten, deisten, atheisten, vrijgeesten and Socinians”.67

Making matters even worse, he added, there were also some preachers blindly set

on elevating ‘reason’ above Revelation, his particular bête noir being the

philosopher-theologian, Paulus van Hemert (1756-1825), an ex-Reformed

preacher labelled by Kaas a ‘foul Socinian’ who during the 1780s frequented the

Remonstrants and Collegiants in Rotterdam and whose Bible exegesis showed

unmistakable traces of Spinoza’s influence.68

“Il est heureux”, remarked Cerisier, in his Tableau, with undisguised Spinozistic

sarcasm, “que des erreurs [ie. of Spinoza’s philosophy] qui ôtent encore la vraie

65 M.A. Wielema, Filosofen aan de Maas (Baarn, 1991), p. 116; Pieter Kaas, Verhandeling over de

waarheit (1788) printed in Wielema loc.cit, pp. 247-63, here pp. 251, 254.66 Wielema, Filosofen p. 55.67 Ibid., p. 257.68 Kaas, Verhandeling, pp. 255-6.



base de la morale, n’aient pas eu une influence dangéreuse sur ceux qui

l’enseignaient”, and even more fortunate for Spinoza himself, he added, “qu’il ait

passé sa vie au milieu d’un peuple tolérant”.69 Adolf Hendrik Hagedoorn (1732-

1806), a member of the same Rotterdam society as Kaas, and someone who

composed a treatise about freedom of the will around 1780, wholly disagreed with

such seditious insinuations.70 To claim, as Spinoza does, that nothing is without

a cause but yet that the universe, the totality of everything, has no cause, by

assigning the cosmos no maker, was, held Hagedoorn a flagrant contradiction in

terms, for this is to refuse to assign the whole what Spinoza allocates to its

parts.71 Such a non-sequitur, he argued, entirely undermines Spinozism, a vital

point to make, in his view, since all the naturalisten contend for fatality and deny

‘freedom’, thereby showing themselves to be disciples of Spinoza and destroying

all morality.72 The antidote, he too asserts, was the Newtonian philosophy which

eclipses Spinoza’s and proves beyond all possible doubt, against the naturalisten,

that the universe was created by an ‘intelligent’ maker and that moral ‘freedom’

is an actual thing.

But the revived Dutch Spinoza debate of the 1780s amounted to much more than

just a straightforward clash between the Cerisiers and the Hagedoorns. For there

were several remarkable interventions which greatly complicated the controversy.

The Orangist Hennert, for example, teaching at Utrecht was firmly convinced that

the conventional method of demolishing Spinoza, recommended by the likes of

Martinet, Hagedoorn, and Kaas, was a disastrous mistake. A fervent adherent of

Locke’s philosophy,73 he had no doubt that British empiricism had totally

destroyed the foundations of Spinoza’s metaphysics as of those of Leibniz and the

Wolffians. But he also judged that parts of Spinoza’s philosophy, notably his

psychology, analysis of the passions, and doctrine of association, were based on

an empirical methodology and of such high quality, that it would be disastrous to

permit the naturalisten and materialists to boast of Spinoza as the founder of their

world outlook. The entire Dutch Enlightenment tradition of condemning Spinoza

as intellectually inconsistent, atheistic, and materialist, he judged misconceived,

69 Cerisier, Tableau ix, p. 572.70 Wielema, Filosofen, pp. 115-16.71 Adolf Hendrik Hagedoorn, Verhandeling over de mogelijkheid en dadelijkheid der vrijheid printed

in Wielema, Filosofen, pp. 234-46, here pp. 234-8.72 Ibid., pp. 243, 245-6.73 Hennert, Uitgeleezene verhandelingen, ‘voorreede’ to vol i. (1780), pp. 2-2v.



and something immediately to be abandoned. For philosophical ideas, he pointed

out, were now massively penetrating Dutch coffee-house culture in a debased and

superficial form which was feeding the proliferation of cheap pamphlets and

wrong thinking.74

As vulgarized philosophy, observed Hennert, was being brought to the people in

heaps whether his academic colleagues liked it or not, it was vital for responsible

professors, like himself, to try to control this dangerous process. The correct

strategy, he held, was to accept his own far-reaching reassessment of Spinoza and

employ it to drive a broad wedge between Spinoza and the author of the Système

de la nature (d’Holbach) whom he, like so many at the time, considered the true

intellectual leader of the ‘hedendaagsche Atheisten’. Accordingly, Hennert sought

to deny that Spinoza did identify God and the cosmos as one. If Spinoza must be

designated an ‘atheist’ in public debates, then he insisted that “Spinoza’s atheism

is of the least dangerous kind as it is very difficult to understand and rests on

foundations far removed from the usual way of thinking”. Indeed, Hennert sought

to persuade readers that Spinoza was actually an ‘Idealist’, to be bracketed

together with Malebranche, Leibniz and Berkeley and “and no crass materialist who

derives all happenings from mechanistic causes, like a clock or other mechanism

but one who takes the divine understanding to be the origin of the world.”75

To abandon Spinoza to the materialists and atheists would be ruinous, according

to Hennert, not because the man in the street was likely to read Spinoza, or

understand his ideas, but for a quite different reason: because whatever the

dozens of writers who had tried to refute Spinoza had claimed, the fact was that

the most intelligent and learned were bound to find his reasoning cogent. For

within his own (mistaken) premises Spinoza was, contrary to traditional Dutch

arguments, supremely persuasive and often quite devastating. His demolition of

teology, for instance, was equalled by no other thinker: “niemand is my bekend”

[no-one is known to me], remarked Hennert, “die het stuk der eindoorzaken

sterker bestreden heeft dan Spinoza” [who has more powerfully countered the

doctrine of final causes than Spinoza].76 Spinoza, in other words, was simply too

74 Ibid., pp. 12-12v.75 J.F. Hennert, ‘Over den aart der wysgeerte van Spinoza’ in Hennert, Uitgeleezene verhandelingen i,

pp. 1-40, here pp. 31-3.76 Johan Frederik Hennert, ‘Derde verhandeling over de wijsgeerte van Spinoza’ in Hennert,

Uitgeleezene verhandelingen i, pp. 176-281, here, p. 252.



good a philosopher to be lightly left to the enemy. Rather it was a matter of vital

concern for society that this philosopher should be sanitized and incorporated

into the regular canon as a misguided ‘Idealist’ of extraordinary penetration and

cogency who did not, after all, attack religion or seek to undermine morality as

d’Holbach and Diderot certainly did.

Hennert’s solution to the new Spinoza probem in Dutch society may not sound very

convincing to us today but his focusing on the social and cultural mechanism by

which Spinoza was routinely linked to naturalism within Dutch society was highly

pertinent; for this clearly worried many at the time. If it remained scarcely feasible

openly to express favourable opinions about Spinoza, before a sizeable gathering,

and strong inhibitions persisted against mentioning Spinoza at all, except

privately, naturalism was clearly making massive inroads everywhere and becoming

more and more of a worry. The embattled Patriot professor, Van der Marck with his

doctrine of the pius Naturalista even held that naturalism was not irreligious – if

one sufficiently redefines the meaning of the word ‘religious’.77 Consequently, the

spread of radical thought, as the evidence of private letters and memoranda shows,

though chiefly a private affair or, at least, something that proceeded among small

informal circles, nevertheless produced a situation in which identification of both

naturalism and individual freedom with Spinozism could only reinforce the latter

right across the spectrum of the Dutch intellectual elite. Van der Marck himself

remarks that the fact he based everything on the unchanging order of nature led

people in Groningen to assume that he was ‘Spinozist’.78 When restored to

academe by the Patriots in Deventer, in 1783, this remarkable scholar celebrated

his return by publishing one of the most uncompromisingly egalitarian pamphlets

of the decade, claiming the Creator of nature had “established absolute equality

and perfect liberty for mankind and has ordained that whosoever violates these

rights is in a state of sedition against God’s lawful society”, urging everyone to

defend these rights against oppressors.79 Naturalism was indissolubly linked to

equality, democracy, and Spinozism.

Since the spread of naturalism, and the removal of the miraculous, could not be

77 Bedenkingen en Bezwaren […] uit name van de weleerwaerde classis van Groningen […] op en

tegen de academische lessen van Mr Frederik Adolph van der Marck […] met Deszelfs verklaring

op en tegen die bedenkingen (Groningen, 1782) (Knuttel, 18997), pp. 24, 42-3, 166, 221.78 Ibid, pp. 220-1.79 Schama, Patriots and Liberators, pp. 69-70.



halted, and since Spinoza seemed so formidable, Orangist philosophical

strategists could see no alternative but to segregate the one from the other.

Holland’s foremost philosopher at the time, Frans Hemsterhuis (1721-90), was a

senior Orangist official who detested democracy and the Patriots even more than

did Hennert, deeming them “la maladie mortelle de ma pauvre patrie”.80 Politically,

Hemsterhuis’ problem was that he knew that the ‘parti aristocratique’, to which he

belonged, was “sans comparaison le plus faible” in the main Dutch cities and that,

the ‘parti democratique’ was fast gaining the upper hand.81 He was no less

convinced than Kluit that the triumph of democracy and equality would deliver the

United Provinces into “la tyrannie la plus abominable”. Like Hennert who fled to

Germany during the last stages of the Patriot ascendancy but returned victoriously

to his chair in Utrecht, following the Stadholder’s restoration, Hemsterhuis was

immensely relieved by what he called the “revolution’ of 1787”. But he also clearly

understood that, despite the Patriot defeat, democratic ideas were becoming

deeply entrenched in Dutch culture and society.82 He himself had renounced

miracles, Christianity and Revelation. But, like Voltaire, Reimarus and Turgot, he

opted for a formal Deism and the immateriality of the soul, seeing these as the

only effective way to maintain a natural theology capable of blocking naturalism

and the kind of systematic determinism, sensationalism, and moral egalitarianism,

introduced by Spinoza and, in the 1770s, propagated by Diderot, Helvetius and

d’Holbach.

On this basis, Hemsterhuis repeatedly pronounced Spinoza’s philosophy “the

most diametrically opposed to my own”.83 However, closer inspection shows that

his stance was far more ambivalent in reality than it seems at first glance. While

his own philosophical efforts had originally begun with a determined effort to

counter “ce trop célèbre Spinoza”, as he called him, in 1789, and reduce

Spinozistic influence in Dutch society, his later works leaned in a different

direction. The aim of his first philosophical texts was to persuade his friend, the

Amsterdam silk merchant, banker, regent and fellow antiquarian much connected

80 Frans Hemsterhuis, Wijsgerige werken (ed.) M.J. Petry (Budel-Leeuwarden, 2001), p. 400.81 Ibid., p. 432.82 Ibid., pp. 442-4.83 M.F. Fresco, ’Hemsterhuis und seine Stellungnahme zu Spinoza’ in Mededelingen vanwege het

Spinozahuis 85 (Delft, 2003), pp. 3-32, here p. 4, 19-20, 31; Klaus Hammacher, Hemsterhuis und

Spinoza’ in Mededelingen vanwege het Spinozahuis 85 (Delft, 2003), pp. 33-43, here, pp. 31, 36,

38; Henri Krop, ‘A Dutch Spinozismusstreit : the new view of Spinoza at the end of the eighteenth

century, LIAS xxxii (2005) pp. 185-211, here p. 187.



with Russia, Baron Theodore de Smeth (1710-72) – who was privately an ardent

Spinozist84 – to abandon Spinozism. Yet despite a life-long emphasis on the

duality of body and soul, his ideas increasingly revealed a pantheistic tendency

which explains why it became possible in the 1780s to construe Hemsterhuis

himself as a ‘Spinozist’ which Lessing famously understood him to be. Earlier, De

Smeth also seems to have thought that Hemsterhuis was by no means so far

removed from Spinozism as he claimed.

Spinoza, undeniably (along with Diderot), always remained the philosopher with

whom Hemsterhuis chiefly engaged. He engaged with Spinoza for purely

philosophical reasons but also because he discerned Spinoza’s, and more

generally materialism’s, deep, continuing penetration of the Dutch cultural and

intellectual context. “Les Hollandois ont vecus avec [Spinoza]”, he wrote to his

close friend, the Princess Gallitzin, in March 1789, having been “ses disciples, ses

protecteurs, ses admirateurs; et ont fournis sans aucune comparaison les plus

sçavans, les plus rafinés et les plus determinés Spinozistes qui existent”.85 Having

long before known La Mettrie (whom he despised as a fool)86 and, in 1773, got to

know Diderot from whom he received a long list of detailed criticisms of his own

anti-Spinozistic theses, Hemsterhuis equally viewed the unfolding of the

democratic movement in the United Provinces and advance of the new French

philosophie with the utmost consternation and alarm.87

Hemsterhuis categorically rejected the Patriot doctrine of Vryheid. While he could

admire what the human individual can become, he considered the human

collectivity, society, something highly defective, even contemptible. To take Man

as the measure of what the state and its legislation are for, on the basis of

philosophical idealization of society and the individual, and strive to maximize

human happiness and freedom, as the Spinozists and the coterie d’Holbachique

were doing, seemed to him to entail colossal risks. His own view of mankind

84 H.Moenkemeyer, François Hemsterhuis (Boston, 1975), pp. 12-13, 32; P.C. Sonderen, ‘Passion and

Purity. From Science to Art: Descartes, Spinoza and Hemsterhuis’ in Claudia Melica (ed.),

Hemsterhuis: a European Philosopher Rediscovered (Naples, 2005), pp. 214-15.85 Hemsterhuis to Princess Gallitzin, 10 March 1789 quoted in Hammacher, ‘Hemsterhuis und

Spinoza’, p. 38.86 Hammacher, ‘Hemsterhuis und Spinoza’, p. 38.87 W. Loos, , ‘Politik und Gesellschaft im Urteil Hemsterhuis in seinen Briefen an Amalia von Gallitzin

(1786-1790)’, in Fresco, M.F., Geeraedts, L., Hammacher, K., (eds.) Frans Hemsterhuis

(1721-1790). Sources, Philosophy and Reception (Munster, 1995) pp. 445-69, 451, 453-4, 458.



remaining doggedly pessimistic and sceptical. Above all, he did not believe that

democracy can form the basis of either a stable or free republic.88 For him, men,

like the rest of nature, were created by a great and wise God while society, on the

other hand, is the work of highly imperfect and often deluded men.89 Morality, he

argued, therefore, can not be the creation of human society, as Spinoza

contended: rather, in his view, God imparts to each human individual his or her

moral sense whereby love and sympathy, and their duties towards their fellow

men, are felt.90 Equally, the monarchical element and hereditary principle, remain

indispensable for the sake of order and stability, being the vital prop of social

hierarchy and the foundation of aristocracy.

Accordingly, Hemsterhuis concurred with Hennert that publicly associating

Spinoza with the new French atheistic materialism was both undesirable and

dangerous. He did not agree, however, that one can detach Spinoza from the

matérialistes by writing treatises attempting to reconstruct him as an ‘Idealist’.

The crux of Hemsterhuis’ problem was that those who identified the new ‘atheism’

with Spinozism were, he thought, actually interpreting his philosophy correctly.

Hence, the only thing Orangists like himself could do to counter the danger was

systematically to delete all mention of Spinoza from their denunciation of

naturalism and materialism. The most astounding feature of Hemsterhuis’ explicit

discussion of Spinoza and Spinozism is that it was all confined to his letters and

conversation. Although his published works all demonstrably engage with

Spinoza, there he never mentions him by name!

The ascendancy of the Patriots in the literary and debating societies between 1780

and 1787, could not, of itself, lead to any form of public rehabilitation of Spinoza.

The States General’s and the States of Holland’s comprehensive ban on Spinoza’s

works, and all restatements of his ideas, enacted in 1678, remained in force and

over a century of strenuous denunciation of Spinozism by church and state as

godless, atheistic and materialist could not be conjured away. Nevertheless, the

Patriottenbeweging did open the way to an informal partial rehabilitation both in

the sense that many of his ideas could now be cautiously restated, without

mentioning his name, using different terminology, as we see in the many

88 Ibid., p. 464.89 Ibid., p. 461.90 Ibid., pp. 461-4, 467.



publications of Gerrit Paape, for example, and also in the sense that Patriot-

inclined established academics like Nieuhoff, helped by the ambivalence and

ambiguities of Hemsterhuis and Hennert, could now adopt a markedly more

detached and discriminating approach to Spinoza than in the past, albeit while still

denouncing the more obviously irreligious ideas.

Nieuhoff, a Leiden-trained philosopher, originally from Lingen, was appointed

professor at Harderwijk, in 1776, a town where he remained until the Napoleonic

dissolution of the university there in 1811. One of the three active, openly-

declared Patriots among the nine Harderwijk professors in the mid-1780s, he was

undoubtedly influenced many students with his intensely philosophical approach

to the task of advancing ‘freedom’ and improving society.91 For he was as

opposed to the stadholderate and the existing Dutch constitution as Hemsterhuis

and Hennert were intent on defending them. Disappointed by the comparatively

weak support the Patriots received in Gelderland, he lamenting in a letter, in

September 1786, “hoe diep, hoe seer diep de vrijheid bij ons gevallen is” [how

deeply, how very deeply freedom has decayed among us].92 Committed to the idea

of Enlightenment as a vehicle for reforming society and politics, and advancing

human happiness, his treatise, De wetenschappen en kunsten als hulpmiddel tot

het mensschelijk welzijn (Harderwijk, 1780) sought to show how science and the

arts can further this end.

Nieuhoff is an especially interesting figure in the later Dutch Enlightenment,

because he combined Patriot commitment not just with an indisputably radical

view of the Enlightenment as a process of social reformation and improvement but

combined both with a profound interest in Spinoza and Spinozism.93 His eventual

book on Spinoza and Spinozism – Over Spinozisme (Harderwijk, 1799) – published

shortly after his spending several years in The Hague as a member of the Batavian

Republic’s national assembly, marked the culmination of a long process of

philosophical searching and re-evaluation. Like Hennert and the German writer,

Jacobi, Nieuhoff attributed to Spinoza an almost unparalleled degree of cogency,

91 W. Christiaens and M. Evers, Patriotse illusies in Amsterdam en Harderwijk (Hilversum, 2002),

pp. 75, 77-8, 90, 95.92 Ibid., pp. 75, 78.93 Krop, ‘Dutch Spinozismusstreit’, p. 206; M.R. Wielema, ‘Dezen groten, verhevenen tekst onzer

hora!’ Het verlichtingsbegrip van Bernard Nieuhoff’, Geschiedenis van de Wijsbegeerte in Nederland

(1994), p. 184.



considering his system something by no means to be rejected out of hand but

rather as one that needed to be reformed, adjusted to theism, and then

incorporated into a new general synthesis, rationally ordering the relationship of

man, God and the universe.94

Spinoza was largely correct, in Nieuhoff’s eyes, in rejecting all teleology and

discarding the traditional anthropomorphic notions of God, but had finally

stepped beyond what was acceptable; fortunately, he had latterly been cut down

to size, argued Nieuhoff, by Kant’s critical philosophy. Niehhoff knew the

refutations of Spinoza by Condillac, Wolff, Nieuwentijt and Clarke, among others,

but rated these much less highly than that of Kant.95 The essentially ethical

philosophy which he himself developed during the years of his professorate at

Harderwijck (1775-1811), he characterized as a chaste, humble, and ‘moral

socratisme’ officially incompatible in its essence with Spinozism but well suited to

absorbing the latter’s numerous better elements. Thus Nieuhoff preferred not to

endorse Hennert’s contention that Spinoza was not an atheist or Cerisier’s

deliberately subversive claim that “le fameux Bayle […] ne croyoit pas que les

principes de Spinosa renfermassent l’athéisme”.96 Nevertheless, he too concurred

that Spinoza had to be partly rehabilitated.

The Patriottenbeweging reached its climax in 1786, after a faction of the

Amsterdam regents changed course and tried to reach a rapprochement with the

Stadholder and fire up the Orangist mob against the Patriots there. The Patriot

clubs reacted by organizing huge popular demonstrations which led to a local

coup bringing Amsterdam under Patriot control and setting off a wider chain

reaction. Utrecht, where university students and several professors played a

prominent role, fell firmly under Patriot control.97 At Rotterdam, Pieter Paulus and

his supporters took over the city while in the same month Wybo Fijnje, another

vigorous advocate of representative democracy,98 and Gerrit Paape, a close friend

of Fijnje,99 seized the Delft city hall; Leiden, Dordrecht and other towns likewise

94 Krop, ‘Dutch Spinozismusstreit’, pp. 206-7.95 Ibid., p. 178-9.96 Cerisier, Tableau ix, p. 571.97 R. de Bruin, Revolutie in Utrecht. Studenten, burgers en regenten in de Patriottentijd, 1780-1787

(Utrecht, 1987), p. 53.98 Schama, Patriots and Liberators, p. 141.99 Gerrit Paape, Mijne vrolijke wijsgeerte in mijne ballingschap (Dordrecht, 1790) p. 76.



fell into Patriot hands, while at Arnhem, Zutphen and other towns in the east of

the country, the Anti-Patriottten secured control and the Free Corps were

disbanded.

In Friesland, meanwhile, the young jurist, Professor Johan Valckenaer (1759-1821)

who had for years immersed himself in the works of the French philosophes as well

as Latin law treatises, initiated an abortive bid for a Patriot take-over there, an

effort which was in no small part a product of Franeker University. Nearly all the

provinces remained deeply divided, however, and the threat of civil war loomed.

At the same time, despite the vigour of popular support for both sides, albeit with

the least educated firmly behind the stadholder, there was also a widespread and

growing mood of uncertainty, drift and pessimism.

Intellectually, the Patriot leaders travelled a long way in a short space of time.

Pieter Paulus (1754-96), having become pensionary of Rotterdam at an early age,

developed into one of the foremost intellectual, as well as political, leaders of the

Dutch democratic revolution. During the 1780s, he, like others, abandoned his

own earlier rather traditional constitutional ideology and evolved into a

revolutionary democratic republican of the new type.100 His post-1780 egalitarian

theorizing eventually culminated in his 216-page Verhandeling over de Vraag: in

Welken Zin kunnen de Menschen gezegd worden Gelijk te zijn (1793), most of

which was written in 1791 and which had a considerable impact, rapidly going

through four editions.101 While it refers frequently to Montesquieu, and to a lesser

extent Locke, Price and Sydney, this text is chiefly based on the radically

egalitarian element in Rousseau’s political thought and especially the Spinozistic

idea that the equality of man in the state of nature, far from being dissolved with

the forming of the state, is carried over and reinforced in society in this way

becoming, as it was not before, a moral and legal equality firmly grounded in the

social pact itself.102

The post-1787 Paulus undoubtedly admired Rousseau. But in one important

respect he, like other Patriot leaders, was also an outspoken critic of the great

100 Schama, Patriots and Liberators, p. 70. 101 Joost Rosendaal, Bataven!, Nederlandse vluchtelingen in Frankrijk 1787-1795 (Nijmegen, 2003),

pp. 164-73.102 Pieter Paulus, Verhandeling over de Vrage: in welken Zin kunnen de menschen gezegd worden

gelijk te zijn (Haarlem,1793), p. 68.



Genevan. The freedom and equality of the individual proclaimed by Rousseau, he

believed, was directly contradicted by his interpretation of the doctrine of the

‘volonté generale’. To assert, like Rousseau, in the Contract social, objected

Paulus, in 1791, that each of us places his or her person and all his power “sous

la suprême direction de la volonté générale” so that each becomes indivisibly a

part of the whole and that where any individual refuses to obey the “general will”

that person then “must be forced to be free” was to invite terrible abuse,

suppression of individual rights and the kind of tyrannical behaviour which Paulus

already thought the French national assembly of the early 1790s was guilty of.103

Agreeing with Thomas Paine, while condemning the new conservative philosophy

of Edmund Burke, Paulus expounds the rights of man, as he understands them, in

sixteen points carefully limiting the power of the sovereign and ensuring

individual rights and freedom of expression in all circumstances, thereby negating

what he saw as the wrong-headed totalitarian dimension of Rousseau’s thought.

The influence of Rousseau’s political ideas on leading Patriot ideologues, after

1787, was undeniably substantial and, thus, indirectly, it can also said to have

been considerable on the Dutch revolutionary democratic movement as a whole.

But as filtered through writers like Paulus, Schimmelpenninck, Cerisier, Paape, and

others, this influence was highly selective and mixed with some vigorous criticism,

calling in question and sometimes rejecting outright many of Rousseau’s most

cherished doctrines, notably his refusal to embrace representative democracy and

his particular doctrine of volonté générale whose reading was, in fact, wholly at

odds with that of Diderot who had first introduced this term and of d’Holbach,

philosophes who developed a conception of the general good much closer to that

of the Patriot leaders. Consequently, the Patriot intellectual leadership preferred

alternative phrases, such as Paape’s “het algemeen welzijn” to designate the true

object of all legislation, a usage repudiating the “general will” of Rousseau and

faithful to the spirit of Spinoza, Diderot and d’Holbach.

The strong impact of Rousseau seems to have been largely confined, though, to

the upper, French-reading echelons of society. As regards Dutch-language culture,

it is difficult to speak of any marked influence of Rousseau before the early 1790s,

since there were remarkably few translations of his major works available in

Dutch. Although two different anonymous translations of the Contrat social

103 Ibid., pp. 90-96; Leeb, Ideological Origins, p. 226.



eventually appeared, the earlier came out at Dordrecht only in 1793, and again in

1795 and the second at Harlingen, in 1796.104 Equally, the Discours sur l’inégalité

first appeared in Dutch only in 1795, that is to say forty years after the first French

edition!105

After their rising ascendancy in Dutch life in the years 1783-7, the collapse of the

Patriots, later in 1787, in the face of the Prussian invasion, was abrupt and

spectacular. But so was the setback to France’s prestige and international

standing. The French crown had simply lacked the resources and the will to

embark on a huge new war, facing possibly three great powers (Britain, Prussia

and Austria), in the Low Countries. But a section of the ministry at Versailles,

headed by the minister of the marine, the marquis de Castries, a strongly anti-

British protogée of Marie Antoinette – and enemy of Vergennes, chief adversary of

Enlightenment ideas at the French court, had, prior to the Prussian invasion,

judged the alliance with the Dutch Patriots – and making it militarily effective by

land, sea and in the colonial sphere – the chief interest of the French crown abroad

at the time. The Anglo-Prussian intervention to restore the ascendancy of the

Prince of Orange hence only confirmed in several French ministers’ minds that the

victory of Dutch Orangism with Anglo-Prussian help was an international disaster

of the first magnitude for France.106

In 1787, the United Provinces had suddenly become a highly dependent client

state of Britain and Prussia, the powers which now formally guaranteed the old

constitution and the stadholderate. This result, as it turned out, was to have far-

reaching implications for the further diffusion of la philosophie, in the Diderotian

and d’Holbachian sense of the term, and hence for democratic revolutionary

ideology, as well as for the prospects for democratic revolution in Europe more

generally. It is hardly surprising that in the aftermath of this repression, the post-

1787 evolution of Dutch democratic thought continued to move more and more

into the orbit of French and away from that of Anglo-American thinkers and

writers. But we should be wary of the old habit in the Dutch historiography of

claiming that this shift away from British intellectual influences marked a profound

change of course. For the evidence shows exactly the contrary. Viewed in its full

104 Gobbers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Holland p. 59.105 Ibid., p. 63. 106 M. Price, Preserving the Monarchy. The Comte de Vergennes, 1774-1787 (Cambridge, 1995),

pp. 67-8, 214.



international and trans-Atlantic Enlightenment context, the Patriottenbeweging of

the period 1787-95 was an intellectual and political continuation of the earlier

movement, suppressed in 1787, even if it is true that, philosophically, it became

further radicalized. It was most certainly not a change of course. In 1787, the

Patriot leaders and many hundreds of activists had to flee the country. Many of the

refugees settled in Austrian territory, particularly Antwerp and Brussels, but many

transferred to France. In this way, colonies of Patriot exiles formed just over the

French border at Dunkirk, Béthune, Gravelines, Watte – where Fijnje, Valckenaer,

and the military commander, Daendels were all lodged in a former Jesuit cloister

for a lengthy period, – and Saint Omer, a garrison town where, around a thousand

refugees settled, from January 1788, and where the less affluent sections of the

refugee community were assigned the local barracks for their accommodation.107

In France, these exiles, Cerisier and Valckenaer prominent among them, received

support from a group of pro-Patriot personalities with influence at court, such as

Lafayette and Mirabeau, and, with the help of de Castries, secured not just

indefinite permission to stay but help with accommodation and direct financial

assistance. They also secured freedom of religious practice under the terms of a

royal edict issued at Versailles, in November 1787, and the transfer to them of

several churches for Reformed services together with legal recognition for their

marriages.108

Though riddled with personal feuds (and much wrangling over where to lay the

blame for the debacle of 1787), as well as disagreement over how to distribute

their exiguous resources, these colonies nevertheless evolved into something like

active Franco-Dutch democratic revolutionary cells. From 1789 onwards, they were

an intrinsic part of the French Revolution and remained so during the period of the

Jacobin ascendancy in 1793-1794. At Saint Omer, a ‘societé de Montagnards’,

affiliated with the Jacobin club, in Paris, was set up by Valckenaer who, though as

much a devotee of Roussseau, Voltaire and other philosophes as before, in practice

proved more of a mildly democratic pragmatist than doctrinaire Jacobin.109 Pieter

Vreede, initially taking refuge, like Paape, in Antwerp, later moved his entire textile

workshop, employing some eighty workers, to Lier where he established a

Protestant church community on the basis of Joseph II’s Toleration edict of 1781,

107 Rosendaal, Bataven!, pp. 164-73.108 Gerrit Paape, De Hollandsche Wijsgeer in Vrankrijk (Dordrecht, 1790), pp. 54-5, 61.109 Gobbers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Holland, p. 240; Rosendaal, Bataven!, p. 583.



a permission subsequently cancelled, in 1789, by the local authorities during the

spread of the anti-Josephine rebellion in the Austrian Netherlands.

Given the predominantly reactionary views of the south Netherlands Patriotten,

there is nothing surprising in the fact that the Dutch Patriot exiles tended to

support Joseph II against the rebels. According to Paape, one of the most radical

of the Dutch Patriotten, the Emperor deserved the backing of all ‘reason-loving’

democrats and enlightened men since these must scorn the ‘stupid’, priest-ridden,

so-called ‘Patriottismus’ of the southern Brabanders which solely consisted, in his

view, of yearning for “de oude constitutie” [the ancient constitution] and in “pure

fanaticism which the priests artfully know how to cultivate”; altogether he

reckoned Brabantsch Patriottismus something beneath contempt.110 Joseph, he

says, had tried to introduce much-needed legal and administrative reforms, and

dissolve some monasteries, to free the land from an unbelievable number of

parasites and make them into real persons, “om aldus het land van een

ongelooflijk getal lediggangers en opeters te ontlasten en er Menschen van te

maken”.111 And yet, in their blindness, the people doggedly opposed Joseph’s

reforms!

Paape deemed Antwerp a particularly dispiriting case, totally unreceptive to

‘philosophy’, though he grants that Ostend, Bruges and Ghent were marginally

better.112 It is noteworthy, given the Marxist notion that the economically most

advanced sector should also be ideologically the most developed, that the

mercantile middle class and business elite of what at the time was economically a

more dynamic city than any in Holland, struck Paape as no less retarded in their

thinking than the unruliest elements of the Orangist plebs of Amsterdam and

Rotterdam. There were no book-shops in Antwerp or Brussels and the local

bourgeoisie had no more access to, nor any more interest in, Enlightenment texts

and ideas than the most ignorant, unschooled sections of Amsterdam’s

population. In Paape’s view, the kind of burgher culture prevalent in Antwerp,

Mechelen and Brussels could never – so long as it remained thoroughly devout,

conformist, and anti-philosophical – produce any meaningful reforms whatsoever:

on the contrary, there “there arose a Patriottismus that strongly supported

110 Paape, Hollandse wijsgeer in Braband iv, pp. 140, 168, 202-3.111 Ibid. i, pp. 15, 16-18, 51-3, 71.112 Ibid. iv, pp. 75-7.



aristocracy” [aaldaar verhief zig een Patriottismus dat de Aristocratie ten sterksten

ondersteund].113

The Austrian Netherlands, today Belgium, seemed to him to illustrate the tragic

fact that while ‘reason is natural’ it can nevertheless be completely suppressed if

one goes about this as skilfully as the Catholic clergy knew how to do. Things had

gone so far, he says, that in Antwerp no-one ever read anything that appeals to

reason. He illustrates this by derisively narrating how an Antwerp connoisseur of

prints he knew of had purchased a complete set of Voltaire’s works so as to

extract the prints, after which he donated gratis a mountain of text for use as

waste paper.114 With the outbreak of the Revolution in France, the spirits of Paape,

Cerisier, Vreede, and the other exiles rose sharply. Fortunately for all Europe,

wrote Paape, “en tot eere van het gezond verstand” [and to the honour of healthy

reason], the French Revolution was now taking matters in hand and leading the

fight against superstition and prejudice. But Paape was not especially optimistic

about the outcome:

“de domheid, het bijgeloof, de heerschzugt en de vloekwaardigste

staatkunde vangen den verwoedsten krijg aan tegens de

Verlichting, de redenlijkheid, de vrijheid en de rechten van den

Mensch! De laatste zijn ongetwijfeld de sterksten, ingevalle hun

zaak voor de vierschaar van het gezond verstand en de

rechtvaardigste onzijdigheid bepleit moest worden – doch of zij in

‘t harnasch tegen hunne partijen zijn opgewaschen, is zeer

twijffelachtig!” [stupidity, superstition, lust for power and the most

damnable statecraft begin the most furious war against the

Enlightenment, reason, freedom and the rights of Man! The latter

is undoubtedly the stronger were the matter to be brought before

the tribunal of right reason and the most just impartiality were to

plead – but whether [the Enlightenment] is a match for its

opponents in war is very doubtful].115

Living, from December 1789, at Dunkirk, Paape was among the most relentless

113 Gerrit Paape, De Zaak der verdrukte Hollandsche Patriotten voor de vierschaar der Menschlijkheid

gebragt (Dunkirk, 1790), pp. 2-3.114 Paape, Hollandsche wijsgeer in Braband i, pp. 259-65.115 Ibid., iv, pp. 202-3.



adversaries of Orangist conservatism, among the exiles, and most dedicated to

furthering what he called “the happiness and freedom of peoples”. The latter

commitment stemmed from the fact that he was among the most adamant in

insisting that it was ‘philosophy’ that was the main active agent capable of

transforming society for the better, a stance he calls philosophische Patriottismus,

in direct opposition to his utterly despised ‘Brabantsch Patriottismus’.116 Human

beings, unfortunately for them, he contended, generally live their lives on the

basis of credulity, ignorance, false loyalties, and hopelessly wrong ideas; only

‘philosophy’ in his opinion, and the spread of understanding and science, holds

out any promise of the kind of general reformation that would create a better

world and enable individuals to lead happier lives.

Politically a crushing defeat, intellectually the year 1787, thus opened up fresh

perspectives, by radicalizing the Dutch democratic Revolution and its ideology, and

tightening the interaction between Dutch and French radical thought. It is probable

that it was in this intellectual and moral rather than in a more narrowly political

sense that one should construe Paape’s later remark, made after his return to

Holland, following the Batavian Revolution of 1795: “wanneer men de zaak van

agteren beschouwt, dan kan men zeggen, dat Oranje, de Patriotten verjaagende, of

tot de vlugt noodzaakende, niet anders deed dan hen naar de Hoogeschool van

Patriottismus en Revolutie te zenden” [when one looks back on the matter one can

say that Orange by driving out the Patriots, or forcing them to flee, did nothing

other than send them to the university of Patriottismus and Revolution].117

This transformation of ‘philosophy’ into the chief, indeed, the sole active agent

which was to change everything for the better, and bring about the universal

revolution to which the Patriot leaders in exile were committed and which they saw

in the making, was clearly intended to transform not just the Dutch context but,

in principle, to be applicable to all human society. The Patriot intellectual leaders

strove to advance their revolution by spreading awareness of the principles of

‘philosophy’ in society and, in this way, encouraging awareness of universal

egalitarian and democratic ideas or what Paape called “de heilzaame revolutie, die

een vrij algemeen begrip schijnt verspreid te hebben”.118

116 Peter Altena, ‘O Ondankbaar vaderland’. Gerrit Paape en de ‘vebeterende’ ballingschap’, De

Achttiende Eeuw xxxviii (2006), pp. 168-80, here pp. 171-2.117 Quoted in Altena, ‘O ondankbaar vaderland’, p. 180.118 Paape, Hollandsche wijsgeer in Vrankrijk, pp. 152, 172-3.



Since so much was wrong with mankind, in their estimation, the Patriot leaders

notion of ‘philosophy’ inevitably extended far beyond the sphere of political

theory. Paape, we may presume from his books, was a Deist or at least a writer

who sometimes invoked an Opperweezen; but for him human life in this world,

and especially overcoming the all-pervasive stupidity which, as he saw it,

everywhere oppresses mankind and replacing this stupidity with freedom, equality

and Enlightenment, was clearly the sole concern of all worthwhile philosophical

endeavour: “een waar wijsgeer bevordert altoos het genoegen en geluk zo van zig

zelve als van zijn medemensch” [ a true philosopher always promotes the pleasure

and happiness both of himself and his fellow man].119 While every aspect of

society and politics urgently needed reforming, as they saw it, morality and

education were especially crucial sectors. But even in the case of morality, it is

never religion, as with Van Hamelsveld, but specifically ‘philosophy’ which is the

guide to be trusted in transforming society for the better and putting new and

better structures in place. This was because only ‘philosophy’, as Paape and the

radicals conceived it, can teach men to order their lives, according to rationally-

conceived self-interest, in reciprocal harmony with one’s neighbours, and with

society and the state. In this way religion ceased to be the basis of what is

important in life. If one prefers to base one’s life on reason alone, then the worldly

happiness and general welfare of the people becomes the chief concern of all

clear-thinking persons.120

A characteristic and interesting feature of Paape’s Radical Enlightenment ideology,

particularly in the light of the (completely wrong) thesis, to be found in the recent

historiography, that Orangist and Patriots held similar enlightened views, was his

claim that there were actually no enlightened people on the Orangist side at all.

Doubtless there were Orangists who claimed to hold ‘enlightened’ views. However,

as Paape saw it, the Stadholder’s triumph over the Patriots in 1787 was almost

exclusively due to his employing three key weapons to thwart “de gezonde

wijsgeerte der Patriotten” [the healthy philosophy of the Patriots], none of which

could possibly be condoned by anyone of a truly enlightened disposition. These

119 Ibid., p. 100; P. Altena, ‘De autobiografie van een Delfts patriot. Over Mijne vrolijke wijsbegeerte

in mijne ballingschap (1792) van Gerrit Paape’, in Spektator. Tijdschrift voor Nederlandistik xix

(1990), pp. 11-34, here, pp. 25-6; A. J. Hanou, ‘Verlichte vrijheid. Iets over een denkbeeld in

imaginaire reizen’, in Haitsma Mulier and Velema (eds.) Vrijheid, pp. 187-211, here pp. 204-5.120 Paape, Mijne vrolijke wijsbegeerte, pp. 611-12, 76; Paape, Hollandsche wijsgeer in Braband iv,

pp. 40, 42-62.



were, firstly, deliberate incitement of the devout, unruly, and ignorant mob up

against their Patriot opponents, secondly, extensive patronage and the bribing of

a large number of office-holders, and thirdly, the despicably ‘Machiavellian

statecraft’ of self-serving subservience to Prussia and Britain.121 Thus, the

conservative Orangism of men like De Pinto, Van Goens, Luzac, Hennert and

Hemsterhuis with its overriding political-cultural anglophilia, could be coherently

dismissed by radical Patriotten as something inherently anti-philosophique, a

stance structurally grounded on narrow self-interest, privilege, social hierarchy,

the hereditary principle, empire, irrationality, credulity and prejudice.

Here was a revolution of the mind marking a change from precedent to general

principles as the prime source of legitimacy in social theory, morality and politics,

and in evaluating social, legal and political institutions, and at the same time a

shift from an essentially domestic order of priorities to embracing an agenda built

on universal, secular egalitarian philosophical principles. One consequence of

‘philosophy’ rather than historical precedent becoming the chief criterion of what

is just and what is legitimate, was the growing intervention in the Dutch

ideological battle of outsiders intent on scoring philosophical-ideological points

by commenting on the Dutch experience. Long ignored, because this development

has little importance if one prefers to view history from a largely national

perspective, it becomes important when one looks at Dutch developments in the

1780s and 1790s in their true international and trans-Atlantic context.

Among Cerisier’s contributions to the welding of French Radical Enlightenment

and the Dutch Patriottismus together was the assistance he lent Mirabeau in

connection with the latter’s prime intervention on the Dutch scene – his long and

remarkable booklet on the Anglo-Prussian suppression of the Dutch democratic

revolution.122 Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791) was not

only, later, a leading personality of the French Revolution but also, together with

Brissot, Condorcet, Cloots, Paine, Forster, Vreede, Paape and Cerisier, one of a

whole phalanx of ‘philosophical’ republican ideologues in western Europe, active

in the wake of d’Holbach and Diderot, spreading a democratic, egalitarian

message throughout Europe during the years immediately prior to 1789.

Mirabeau’s book on Dutch politics, then, was part of a veritable international – but

121 Ibid., pp. 35, 102, 113-18.122 Popkin, ‘Dutch Patriots, French Journalists’, pp. 553, 560; Rosendaal, Bataven!, pp. 242, 244-6.



primarily French and Dutch – flood of egalitarian, libertarian, anti-monarchical

literature and ideas and which constituted, I contend, by far the most important

single causal factor shaping the coming French Revolution and simultaneously

inspiring the post-1787 Dutch democratic revolution.

Even without Cerisier, Mirabeau knew more about the Netherlands than most

other French democratic ideologues of the day, having lived a full year in Holland,

mainly at Amsterdam, in 1776-7 prior to his imprisonment at Vincennes (1777-82)

(for insulting various French aristocrats). After his release, and his causing fresh

offence by violently denouncing the French legal system, he returned to Holland

for a time as an exile. Renowned for his eloquence, Mirabeau was an obvious ally

and patron for Cerisier and the other Dutch exiles to seek. After being approached

by several Patriot leaders, in October 1787, and assuring them of his support, he

was spurred to intervene publicly, on the Patriots’ behalf, by the committee of

Patriot leaders in Brussels who published their Lettre sur l’invasion des provinces-

Unies à M. le comte de Mirabeau et sa réponse (Brussels, 1787). Mirabeau then

composed with the help of the fiercely anti-British Cerisier (and perhaps also

Brissot), his Aux Bataves sur le Stadholderat, originally published, at Paris, in

April, 1788 and then re-issued in several further French editions.123 A Dutch-

language version was then published by Paape, both in instalments in his

newssheet, De Verdeediger der Hollandsche Patriotten, and as a book, published

at Antwerp.

According to Mirabeau, all the peoples of Europe bitterly lamented the Patriot defeat

while only Europe’s princes and their courts applauded the Stadholder’s restoration.

If this savoured of wishful thinking, Mirabeau and Cerisier, were close to the mark

in high-lighting the broad European significance of the exodus of such a large group

of politically-aware exiles from the Netherlands. For these were highly articulate

men who had lost everything owing to political oppression. Their situation was thus

conducive to nurturing a resilient, well-organized liberation movement infused with

a revolutionary ideology of equality, democracy and individual liberty, the chief

business of which was to make revolution. Furthermore, their network while

spanning both parts of the Low Countries, had its head-quarters firmly in France,

partly in Paris and partly in and around Dunkirk, Saint Omer and neighbouring

places, close to France’s borders with the Austrian Netherlands.

123 Ibid., pp. 239-42, 244-5; B. Luttrell, Mirabeau (Carbondale, Ill.,1990), p. 89.



Mirabeau’s objective, like Cerisier’s and Paape’s, was to integrate the Dutch Patriot

cause into what they proclaimed to be the general cause of human freedom and

happiness. The Anglo-Prussian suppression of the Patriottenbeweging was styled

by Mirabeau an ‘odieuse revolution’ which had little chance of succeeding in the

long run. The Patriots had for the moment stumbled ‘dans la cause de l’humanité,

de la raison, de la justice’ but they were not beaten yet, contended Mirabeau, and

would never be.124 Nor would other Europeans ever forget that it was the Dutch,

as Cerisier liked to remind everyone, who were ‘le plus ancien des peuples libres’

and the first, more than two centuries before, to embrace that universal toleration

so necessary, as anyone with any grasp of ‘philosophical’ truth well knew for the

whole of humanity. What Mirabeau and Cerisier meant by ‘necessary’ for humanity

emerges plainly enough from the latter’s astounding remark about Dutch

seventeenth-century toleration in the ninth volume of his Tableau: “le plus grande

liberté de penser et d’écrire comme il parait suffisament par les ouvrages de

Spinosa et Bayle et de plusieurs autres sceptiques imprimés dans ce pays, et la

persecution qu’ils auraient éprouvée dans les autres, voilà les seuls

encouragements qu’ils y trouvaient”.125

Summoning the Dutch to undertake a new Dutch revolt against tyranny and

oppression, Mirabeau depicts Prince William V of Orange, much like Cerisier,

Vreede, Paape and Fijnje, as the most contemptible prince ever to see the light of

day, a creature so craven and subservient to Britain that he had deliberately kept

the Dutch navy as weak as possible, and the Dutch ships-of-the-line dispersed, to

render them ineffective in any conflict with the English: “il se plait à voir ses

concitoyens accablés d’humiliations et d’outrages; il ruine sa nation dans toutes les

parties du monde”.126 The Stadholder had, according to them, intrigued against his

own people, to assist a rival power which, since 1651, had launched no less than

four ‘unjust’ wars of aggression against the Dutch and whose Parliament had, in

the time of Queen Anne, with unheard of cynicism and arrogance, simply

abandoned the United Provinces to the tender mercies of Louis XIV.

The theme of the Dutch Revolt of 1572 being the precursor not just of the

Patriottenbeweging and, according to Cerisier, also the American Revolution,127

124 V.R. Mirabeau, Aux Bataves sur le stathouderat (n.p. [Amsterdam?], 1788), p. 2.125 Cerisier, Tableau ix, p. 577.126 Mirabeau, Aux Bataves, pp. 98-100.127 Cerisier, ‘Aux États Unis de l’Amérique’, in Tableau iii, pp. iii-vi.



but of the coming Revolution which would universally substitute representative

democracy for social hierarchy and monarchy throughout Europe, was to remain

an idée fixe of both the Patriot exiles and their French and other ideological allies.

Anarcharsis Cloots in his speech of December 1792, to the French National

Assembly, a speech especially addressed to the Dutch and Belgian exiles in France,

likewise assured the Patriotten that before long la philosophie would, finally,

conquer the ridiculous adoration orangienne and, just as Alva and superstition

had been crushed in the 1570s, so now again, with the help of the French people

and army tyranny would be thwarted and (Cloots being an atheist) ‘temples of

reason’ would arise in Holland.128

Ceaseless denunciation of the British crown, Parliament and empire, and of the

Dutch stadholderate, as well as Prussian militarism, in this way became integral to

both Dutch and French revolutionary democratic ideology. If the English showed

scant gratitude for the allegedly generous help the Dutch had given to save them

from ‘Stuart tyranny’, in 1688, still worse, held Mirabeau, was British arrogance,

oppression of others, and systematic “brigandage” around the world , the British

having become a nation which oppresses ‘la liberté’ everywhere as if it were an

enemy. They had let their successes go to their head in a shameless way “plus

digne de pitié que d’envie”.129 If it were not for the presence among them of the

“sublime philantropie de quelques hommes rares”, an allusion to Fox, Wilkes and

Tom Paine, British arrogance would suffice, held Mirabeau, to justify all the

peoples of the world banding together to oppose their “féroce patriotisme”.

He admired Fox and some other “illustrious citizens” of England, one of whom,

earlier, had been Edmund Burke of whose pre-1780 sentiments, regarding

America and India, Mirabeau warmly approved. But now that Burke had shown his

true colours, abandoning his earlier principles, and coming out in support of the

Dutch Orangists, he had seen him for what he really was: it is not for the British,

held Burke, Mirabeau reports with utter disgust, to enquire into the legality of this

or that government: “qu’il nous suffise d’avoir trouvé l’occasion de faire triompher

le parti le plus favourable à nos interêts”.130

128 Anarcharsis Cloots, Aux habitans des bouches du Rhin (Paris, 1792), p. 7.129 Mirabeau, Aux Bataves, p. 106.130 Ibid., p. 189.


When one thinks how Montesquieu and other philosophers have praised the

English constitution to the skies, regarding it as “le plus parfait modèle de la liberté

civile et politique”, protested Mirabeau, one can only sigh for the human race.131

How can civil and political liberty possibly be upheld by a hereditary monarch who

distributes offices and pensions, by a hereditary nobility endowed with “de grands

privilèges”, and a septennial Parliament to which non-existent towns send

‘representatives’ whilst other more substantial towns are excluded? The royal

prerogative in England might be more limited than in the time of Henry VIII, but is

it questionable whether it is any less of a threat to the people’s freedom for that.

The House of Lords, vestige as it is of a feudal hierarchy, does it not, demanded

Mirabeau, have a vested interest in maintaining and aggrandizing the crown?

Parliament, is it any less corrupt than when it was dissolved by Cromwell?132

The British consider their institutions the finest in the world. But what, asked

Mirabeau and Cerisier, do they offer other nations? As long as the court of Saint

James continues to distract the British people from their true interests with their

“pretensions gigantesques et barbares de preponderance du commerce, de

domination des mers”, one can not expect anything upright or truly great from

this nation, for they seek advantages only for themselves, for their island alone. It

was precisely to abase and ruin the Dutch and keep them subservient to Britain,

rendering them the ‘Indians’ of Europe, that the British government insists so

adamantly that the Republic must retain the stadhholderate and its traditional

constitution, the Princes of Orange being wholly indebted to the British crown and

Parliament for their authority, indeed owing them “un tribut continuel de

reconnoissance”.133

“Tous les hommes”, held Mirabeau, “sont nés libres et égaux”.134 Men being equal

and free by nature, they are further rendered equal by the original avowal

underlying all societies; for in constituting a primitive society all individuals

equally give up the same portion of their original liberty and equality. But this

precious legacy will soon disappear entirely wherever men fail to make the

conservation of these the ceaseless object of their efforts. Government is


131 Ibid., pp. 184-5, 211.132 Ibid., pp. 183-5.133 Ibid., p. 108.134 Ibid., p. 117; Roosendaal, Bataven!, p. 518.


135 Mirabeau, Aux Bataves, p. 120.136 Ibid., p. 127.137 [Justus Batavus], Brief van een Nederlander aan David Willem Elias hoofd-officier te Amsterdam

(np. 1794) (Knuttel, 22276), p. 4; Van Vliet, Elie Luzac, p. 639.138 ‘Justus Batavus’, Verhandeling over de gelijkheid der menschen (Amstedam, 1794) (Knuttel,

22275), pp. 5-6.


instituted for the happiness of the people and the people has the inalienable and

absolute right to reform, correct, or totally change its government “lorsque son

bonheur l’exige”.135 In fact, contended these ideologues, a people cannot

preserve a free government except through unrelenting adherence to the rules of

justice, moderation, virtue, economy “et par un recours frequent à ses principes

fondamentaux”.136 Morality, they contended, is the basis of politics; hence,

without such a moral base, the laws degenerate and happiness ceases.

Among the works which most clearly illustrates the emerging synthesis of French

materialism and democratic republicanism with Dutch Patriot democratic

republicanism and ‘philosophic’ egalitarianism after 1787 is the important sixty-

page Verhandeling over de gelijkheid der Menschen (Amsterdam, 1794). This

anonymous work, published under the pseudonym ‘Justus Batavus’, but

presumably not by the fervently Patriot ex-preacher, Bernardus Bosch who often

used this pseudonym (unless he had by now totally lost his faith), though not

published until 1794 was substantially written, we learn from its preface, in 1791-

2, that is before the treatise of Paulus on the same topic, and seems to have been

sent to Amsterdam, for publication, from abroad, presumably France.

Unsurprisingly, it was immediately banned by the Orangist authorities in

Amsterdam, Leiden and other cities as a perniciously subversive work, unsold

copies being confiscated by the book-shops by the judicial authorities.137

‘Justus Batavus’ Verhandeling over de gelijkheid der menschen, unlike Paulus’

treatise, mentions no philosophers; but is even more ‘philosophical’, and more

radical. He begins by restating the Spinozistic claim that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ have no

meaning except in relation to the moral and social systems created by men.138 To

grasp the significance of this one must study man exclusively as a natural

phenomenon, a test which shows that every man longs to be happy but is in fact

unhappy. From this the author concludes, like Rousseau, that men are unhappy

because the social and political arrangements they have created estrange them

from their own natural selves. To emancipate man and restore him to his former



natural context of individual freedom, a complete social and political

reconstitution is needed.139 The guiding principle of this universal revolution,

proclaims Justus Batavus, again following Spinoza as well as Diderot’s nouveaux

Spinosistes [ie. Diderot, Helvetius and d’Holbach], and Rousseau, must be that

equality should be adopted as the supreme law in the quest for men’s happiness

whether in the moral sphere, the social or political.140 Equality, declares Justus

Batavus, is the true basis of all human justice, morality and ‘salvation’:

“Zonder gelijkheid kon de mensch zijne verhevener zedenpligten

niet uitoefenen, geen hooger geluk bereiken en genieten dan de

dieren. Zonder gelijkheid kon hij geen regel vinden, om zijne

zedelijke werkzaamheden naar in te richten en uit te breiden –

geen toetsteen vinden, om de recht – of onrechtheid zijner daaden

te kennen, en te weeten, of hij overeenkomstig de pligten zijner

bestemming handelde, of daar van afweek.” [Without equality man

could not practice his more sublime moral obligations, neither

reach nor enjoy greater happiness than the animals. Without

equality he could find no rule by which to lay down or extend his

moral activities – find no touchstone whereby to recognize what is

right and wrong in his actions or know whether he dealt in

accordance with the obligations of his lot, or diverged from

them.]141

The institutionalization of social hierarchy is the root cause of all human error,

superstition and dissatisfaction, for as soon as one institutes monarchy,

priesthood and aristocracy, contends this author, it becomes necessary to abolish

basic freedoms and the dignity of the individual and replace these with false myths

and superstition, a veritable fog of ignorance and confused thinking, making use

of the people’s ignorance and credulity to persuade them to trust unquestioningly

in doctrines which have no basis whatever in truth, this being the only effective

way to get them to acquiesce in their own subordination, enslavement and

139 Jonathan Israel, ‘The Intellectual origins of Modern Democratic Republicanism (1660-1720)’, in

European Journal of Political Theory iii (2204), pp, 7-36, here p.12; M. Albertone, ‘Democratic

republicanism. Historical reflections on the idea of republic in the 18th century’, in History of

European Ideas xxxiii (2007), pp. 108-30, here pp. 111-13.140 Justus Batavus’, Verhandeling over de gelijkheid pp. 10-13.141 Ibid., p. 13.142 Ibid., p. 21.


49

exploitation. Thus kings become the ‘sons’ and priests the ‘interpreters’ of gods,

those who reveal the divine order and announce man’s divinely-ordained

obligations (especially to priests and kings).142 Hence, everything went

disastrously wrong with humanity, holds Justus Batavus, from the moment

inequality and social hierarchy were first institutionalized.143

Justus Batavus reveals his Spinozism, and apparent debt to d’Holbach, in various

places in his text, most notably at three points: where he says that ‘equality’ and

the moral system that is based on equality, is the sole message of the Bible, both

Old and New Testament;144 in his anti-Hobbesian claim that man’s natural right

carries over, and in a good state carries over as fully as possible, to life under the

state; and in his claim that politics must be structured on the same principle of

equality which forms the only rational basis of legislation and all valid moral

philosophy. To this he adds (following Diderot and d’Holbach but against

Rousseau) that since the life of reason teaches that one must respect and uphold

the rights of others if one wishes them to respect one’s own natural right, it is the

individual’s moral responsibility to defend the rights of others and repel “overal

de verstoorers der Menschelijke rechten” [everywhere those who violate human

rights].145

Accordingly, it follows that all territorial claims, national animosities, empires and

wars between peoples are irrelevant to the interests of the great majority of men

and are solely engineered by kings, priests, and other empire-builders, out of lust

for power, arrogance and contempt for others.146 To curb national animosities,

the future revolution must discredit all forms of chauvinism, and national pride,

replacing “de bekrompen volkshoogmoed en vaderlandsliefde” [the narrow-

minded national pride and love of one’s Fatherland] which wreaks so much havoc

in the world with “eene algemene Menschen- en volksliefde” [universal love of

humanity and all peoples] based on the principle of universal equality.147 What

Justus Batavus is proposing, plainly, like the other ‘philosophische’ Patriotten, is

universal revolution; but he finds the prospect of using violence to carry it

thoroughly repugnant; it is much better, he argues, to re-establish de algemeene

Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands

143 Ibid., pp. 13-14, 23.144 Ibid., pp. 23, 31. 145 Ibid., p. 41.146 Ibid., pp. 34, 36-7.147 Ibid., p. 34.



gelijkheid, Man’s universal equality, overthrowing all aristocracy and superstition,

gradually, by persuasion, and other non-violent means.148

Recent Dutch historiography since the 1970s has produced something like a

consensus about the Patriottenbeweging, three major conclusions of which I have

sought to question in this lecture. Firstly, there is the oft-repeated view that the

chief theoretical foundations of the movement were essentially Lockean and

British, the principal source for the new ‘souvereiniteitsopvatting’, as one scholar

expressed it, adopting a similar perspective to that of Ernst Kossmann, “was

undoubtedly a radical working out of the Lockean doctrine of resistance to be

found in the political philosophy of Richard Price, Joseph Priestley and Francis

Hutcheson”.149 While not denying that Priestley and Price were sometimes

mentioned, I hope to have said enough to sow considerable doubt about this long-

standing dogma of the Dutch historiography and to suggest that in reality far

more comprehensively and systematically radical ideas than Locke’s, ideas of

originally Dutch but latterly mainly French provenance, lay behind the ideology of

philosophische Patriottismus, the ideology that is of the radical Patriot leadership.

Secondly, there is the equally tenaciously-held tenet that the Dutch Enlightenment

was so eclectic, accommodating and elastic that virtually the same set of ideals,

and the same Enlightenment creed devoted to reforming society and promoting

the public welfare, was shared by both elite Orangists and leading Patriots.150 This

is a view which I myself was willing to accept some years ago151 but which I now

think is altogether unfounded and misleading. In reality, Orangists and Patriots, at

leadership level at least, gravitated towards opposite poles of the Enlightenment.

The so-called ‘enlightened’ Orangists were quickly reduced to an isolated,

intellectual minority adhering either to an increasingly conservative form of

moderate Enlightenment, as with Kluit, Hemsterhuis, Luzac, Hennert and de Pinto,

a set of ideas wholly different from, and consistently at odds with, the principles

148 Ibid., p. 32.149 Klein, Patriots republikanisme, 287-8, 290; E.H.Kossmann, De Lage Landen 1780/1980 (1976; new

edn. 2 vols., Amsterdam, 1986) i, p. 48.150 W. Mijnhardt, Tot heil van ‘t Menschdom. Culturele genootschappen in Nederland, 1750-1815

(Amsterdam, 1987), pp. 375; 414; ‘het paradoxale gevolg’, as this author puts it, ‘was dat het

nieuwe beschavingsideaal zowel door patriotten en bataven als door orangisten kon worden

gedeeld’; W.R.E.Velema, ‘Revolutie, contrarevolutie en het stadhouderschap, 1780-1795’, in

Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 102 (1989), pp. 517-33, here pp. 517-18.151 Israel, Dutch Republic, p. 1112.



of the radical Patriots or, as with Van Goens, abandoning Enlightenment altogether

for the embrace of the religious Counter-Enlightenment. In this respect, Gerrit

Paape’s claim that those with a ‘philosophical’ approach to life were all on the

Patriot side and that Dutch Orangism was merely a coalition of the ignorant, the

orthodox theologians, and a sprinkling of self-serving Aristocraaten and office-

holders, is in large part justified.152

Thirdly and finally, there is a near unanimous conclusion in the recent

historiography with regard to the allegedly ‘Christian’ character of the ‘Dutch

Revolution of the 1780s’, a designation intended, in part, to mark it off in a

decisive fashion from the supposedly quite different, irreligious and materialist

revolutionary Enlightenment welling up in France.153 It is routinely claimed that it

was possible for much the same kind of undogmatic Protestant ethic to serve as

the core of both Orangism and the Patriot movement because both sides

proclaimed toleration and had a vested interest in downplaying the confessional

divisions of the past; and, also because both embraced a Biblically-based and

morally-orientated conception of religion which, at the same time, provided a

cogent basis for their rival political ideals and social perspectives.

As I hope to have shown, this is really a quite peculiar historiographical consensus

to have arrived at as it is indubitable that many, if not most, of the leading

intellectual figures of late eighteenth century Dutch society on both sides of the

Orangist-Patriot divide, at least in private, not only accord no role to Christianity

in defining the values that matter in human life but also more or less expressly

rejected Christian revelation, miracles, dogmas and the authority of the churches

– Hemsterhuis, Nieuhoff, Titsingh, Paape, De Pinto, Cerisier, Hennert, Van der

Marck, Valckenaar, and ‘Justus Batavus’ (whoever he was), prominent among

them. Finally, I hope to have established that the philosophische Patriottismus

which culminated among the Patriot exiles in France but had its roots in the

Holland of the 1770s and early 1780s was an integral part not of the moderate

mainstream but of the European and originally largely Dutch Radical

Enlightenment. Its Spinozistic foundational principles eventually came to shape

not just the failed Dutch ‘Jacobin’ Revolution of 1797 but the defeated, residual

152 [Gerrit Paape], Het Leven van zijne Doorlchtigste Hoogheid Willem den Vijfden, Prins van Oranje

[…] bijgenaamd De Bederver van zijn Vaderland (Dunkirk, 1791) pp. 167-70.153 Rosendaal, Bataven!, pp. 584-6.


opposition ‘on the left’ subsequently resisting the compromises of the Batavian

Republic and the Netherlands under Napoleon.

The Radical Enlightenment or what Paape considered to be the ‘true philosophy’

was certainly resoundingly defeated everywhere in Europe at the end of the

eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth and not least in The

Netherlands. The Revolutionairen, as Paape called them failed to make their

conception of ‘de algemeen welzijn’ the object of society, education and politics.

The people showed clearly enough that they simply do not want to throw out

kings, priests and aristocracy, or make equality the sacred rule or curb church

power, much less adopt a purely secular morality, education and social ethic.

Indeed, many Dutch as well as most British saw it as their patriotic duty to fight

the egalitarian principles of the French and Batavian revolutions to their last

breath. No wonder the radical Patriotten, despite their unbreakable conviction that

they were right, came to be increasingly filled with a sense of disillusionment and

despair. In one passage Paape laments:

“Ja! Men moet een wijsgeer worden, en dit is juist iets, dat de

meeste stervelingen niet weezen willen; zommigen zouden liever

het ampt van beul bekleeden! – Allen wenschen naar het waar

geluk, en allen hebben min of meer een heimlijken of openlijken

afkeer van het eenige middel om waarlijk gelukkig te worden.”

[Yes, one must become a philosopher and that is precisely

something which most mortals do not wish to be; some would

rather fill the office of executioner! – All desire true happiness nd

all have more or less a secret or open aversion to the only means

of becoming truly happy.]154

Paape who defines ‘true philosophy’ as being to gear one’s life to promoting the

happiness of the people on the basis of reason alone,155 rejecting all superstition,

had long advocated the need to bring ‘philosophy’ to the people.156 He was

certainly right about the people’s aversion to what he wanted to bring them. But

to what extent, one wonders, were he and the other Spinozists of the Dutch later

154 Paape, Hollandsche wijsgeer in Vrankrijk p. 261; see also Gerrit Paape, De Bataafsche Republiek zo

als zij behoord te zijn (1798) (ed.) P. Altena (Nijmegen, 1998), p. 7. 155 Paape, Mijne vrolijke wijsbegeerte, pp. 6, 11-12.156 Paape, Hollandsche wijsgeer in Vrankrijk, pp. 172-3.



Enlightenment also right in their conviction that ‘true philosophy’ as defined by

Paape and Cerisier, really is the exclusive path to an improved society and greater

human happiness?

Whether right of wrong, the later Dutch democratic and Spinozistic Enlightenment

of Cerisier, Paape, Vreede, Paulus, Schimmelpenninck, Nieuhoff and ‘Justus

Batavus’ etc. was certainly defeated at the end of the eighteenth and rebuffed

through the entire nineteenth century. Yet it survived as a freethinking

undercurrent and we can not say that it was conclusively defeated since the

egalitarian, libertarian and democratic aspirations of these men were in the end,

at least partly realized, following the defeat of Fascism and Stalinism, in the later

twentieth century. In any case, there is today in and outside the Netherlands an

urgent need to recognize a truth which on the whole Dutch historians have been

tenaciously disinclined to acknowledge: namely, that that aspect of the Dutch

eighteenth-century which is truly relevant to us today is the Dutch Radical

Enlightenment stemming from Spinoza and Spinozism and, not least, its later,

post-1770 phase. For here is something of central significance for our

understanding of the Western Enlightenment as a whole and a story which renders

eighteenth-century Dutch history itself pivotal to understanding the history of the

West as a whole.

The Dutch Patriottenbeweging was the first major democratic Enlightenment

movement in Europe and the only internationally important such movement to

precede (and help shape) the French Revolution. Certainly, our American friends

can answer to this: yes, but America is much bigger than the Netherlands and our

Revolution began before the Patriottenbeweging in 1776. That, of course, is true:

but the Americans by and large – except for Raynal, Montesquieu and a little

Rousseau – were limited by their colonial intellectual heritage and background to

using mainly British intellectual resources where the democratic republican

tendency (until Paine) remained rather weak whereas the Dutch drew heavily also

on French and German thought as well as their own Spinozistic tradition. This

means that in the Netherlands prior to 1789, equality, individual liberty, freedom

of expression, representative democracy, full toleration, freedom of life-style, anti-

colonialism, anti-monarchism, opposition to the absolute sovereignty of

parliaments, and ‘anti-aristocracy’ in particular were all more widely, deeply and

thoroughly theorized in philosophical terms than was at that time possible in

America.

53Failed Enlightment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands



About the Author

Jonathan Israel is Professor of Modern History at the Institute for Advanced Study,

Princeton. In the first part of his academic career, during early 1970s, Professor

Israel taught in the north of England (Newcastle and Hull), and from 1974 to 2000,

at University College London, being from 1985 the first non-Dutchman to hold the

chair of Dutch history (in succession to Pieter Geyl, Gustav Reinier, Ernst

Kossmann and K. W. Swart) originally established there, on the initiative of the

Dutch government in 1919. He has been at the Institute for Advanced Study since

January 2001. Originally a Latin Americanist, his first book Race, Class and Politics

in Colonial Mexico (1975) was concerned with the social and political structure of

seventeenth-century New Spain. Subsequently, he worked on Dutch-Spanish

relations in the seventeenth century and then on the Dutch overseas and colonial

trading system during the Golden Age. Since 1993 he has been mainly working on

the history of the Enlightenment from Spinoza to the French Revolution. His later

books include The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World (1660-61) (1982),

European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism (1550-1750) (1985), Dutch Primacy in

World Trade (1585-1740) (1989), Empires and Entrepots: The Dutch, the Spanish

Monarchy and the Jews , 1585-1713 (1990); The Anglo-Dutch Moment. Essays on

the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact (1991); The Dutch Republic: Its Rise,

Greatness and Fall, 1477-1806 (1995); Conflicts of Empires: Spain, the Low

Countries and the Struggle for World Supremacy, 1585-1715 (1997); Radical

Enlightenment. Philosophy and the making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (2001);

Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires

(1540-1740) (2002); Enlightenment Contested. Philosophy, Modernity and the

Emancipation of Man, 1670-1752 (2006). Jonathan Israel is an honorary professor

of the University of Amsterdam and an honorary doctor of the universities of

Antwerp and Rotterdam, as well as a fellow of the British Academy and a

corresponding fellow of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Academie der

Wetenschappen.



KB LECTURES

KB Lectures are organized in conjunction with the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) –

National Library of the Netherlands, in The Hague. The Lecture is often based

on the KB’s special collections and is delivered by the KB Fellow.

Previous KB Lectures were:

1. 2005: Peter Burke Lost (an Found) in Translation: A Cultural

History of Translators and Translating in

Early Modern Europe

Published by NIAS, 2005

2. 2006: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

Weatherwise – The Impact of Climate on the

History of Western Europe, 1200-2000

Unpublished

3. 2006: Robert Darnton Bohemians Before Bohemianism

Published by NIAS, 2006


The KB Fellowship is a joint venture between the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) -

National Library of the Netherlands and NIAS. It is awarded to a renowned foreign

scholar in the humanities and offers sustained access to the extensive collections

of the National Library. The research facilities provided at both institutes allow the

recipient to reap the benefits of both places: the KB's unique collections and NIAS'

international and multidisciplinary environment. With the implementation of this

fellowship, NIAS and the National Library hope not only to encourage and

strengthen the collaboration between libraries and their collections and between

scholars and their research but also to further the dissemination of knowledge in

the humanities and to promote research in this area.

NIAS is an institute for advanced study in the humanities and social sciences. Each

year, the Institute invites approximately 50 carefully selected scholars, both from

within and outside the Netherlands, to its centre in Wassenaar, where they are

given an opportunity to do research for up to a ten-month period. Fellows carry

out their work either as individuals or as part of one of the research theme groups,

which NIAS initiates every year. In addition, through its conference facilities, the

Institute also functions as a meeting place for scientific programmes of a shorter

duration and more specific character, such as workshops, seminars, summer

schools, and study centres. NIAS is an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy

of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) - National Library of the Netherlands is located in

The Hague. The KB gives access to the knowledge and culture of the past and

present by providing high-quality services for research, study and cultural

experience. The KB's collection constitutes the living national memory of written,

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special attention being given to Dutch history, language and culture in a wide

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KB Lecture 4:KB Lecture 3

Documents

Transcript of KB Lecture 4:KB Lecture 3