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
NIAS
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study
in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy
of Arts and Sciences
Meijboomlaan 1, 2242 PR Wassenaar
Telephone: (0)70-512 27 00
Telefax: (0)70-511 71 62
E-mail: NIAS@NIAS.KNAW.NL
Internet: www.nias.knaw.nl
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 Nederlandse
Verlichting (1670-1800) (translated by Hans van Cuijlenborg), ISBN 978-90-3513209-2, was published by Uitgeverij Bert Bakker (c) 2007.
NIAS, Wassenaar, 2007/5
ISBN: 978-90-71093-58-6
ISSN 1871-1480; 4
(c) NIAS 2007. No part of this publication may
be reproduced in any form by print, photoprint,
microfilm or any other means without written
permission from the publisher.
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‘Failed Enlightenment’:
Spinoza’s Legacy and the
Netherlands (1670-1800)
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
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
1
2
3
4
S.B. Smith, Spinoza’s Book of Life (New Haven, Conn., 2003) p. 200.
Bernardus Nieuhoff, Over Spinozisme (Harderwijk, 1799), p. 40.
Ibid., p. 41.
Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested. Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man,
1670-1752 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 43-50.
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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
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
5
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
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
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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.
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
7
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
10
11
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.
[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.
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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
13
14
15
Ibid., p. 37.
Isaac de Pinto, Letters on the American Troubles (London, 1776), pp. 34-5, 40-1.
Ibid., pp. 41-2.
Nijenhuis, Joodse philosophe, pp. 30-1.
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
9
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.
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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
18
Nieuhoff, Over Spinozisme, p. 82, 306
Antoine-Marie Cerisier, Tableau de l’histoire générale des Provinces-Unies (10 vols; Utrecht,
1777-84), ix, p. 571.
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
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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).
19
20
21
R. van Vliet, Elie Luzac (1721-1796). Boekverkoper van de Verlichting (Nijmegen, 2005), pp. 366-8.
Ibid., p. 371.
See, for instance, Joan Derk van der Capellen, Aan het volk van Nederland (1781) (ed.) H.L. Zwitzer
(Amsterdam, 1987), pp. 6-20.
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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
23
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.
[Pieter Vreede?], Zakboek, pp. 20-31.
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
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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
24
25
26
27
[Pieter Vreede], Beoordeelend en ophelderend verslag van de Verhandeling over de Vryheid
(Arnhem, 1783) (Knuttel, 20405), p. 6.
Pieter Vreede, Waermond en Vryhart. Gesprek over de waere Vryheid der Nederlandren, en den
aert der waere Vryheid (‘Holland’, 1783) (Knuttel, 20400), p. 4.
De Post van den Neder-Rhijn. ii, p, 728 and vi, pp. 945-6 (issue no. 263).
Gerrit Paape, De Aristocraat en de Burger (Rotterdam, 1785) (Knuttel 21046), pp. 9, 53, 55.
14
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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
29
30
31
32
Rijklof Michael van Goens, De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot iii (1782), p. 290.
Israel, Enlightenment Contested, p. 397-405.
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.
Gobbers, Rousseau in Holland p. 224; I.L. Leeb, The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution
(The Hague, 1973), pp. 205-6.
Ibid., pp. 189-92.
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
15
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
34
35
Adriaan Kluit, Academische Redevoering, over het misbruik van ‘t algemeen staatsrecht (Leiden,
1787) pp. 27-8.
Ibid., p. 90n, 93n.
A. Kluit, De rechten van den Mensch in Vrankrijk geen gewaande rechten in Nederland
(Amsterdam, 1793), pp. 66, 103.
16
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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
37
38
39
40
R.J. Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling over eene wel ingerigte volksregeering (Leiden, 1785), pp. 4-5.
Klein, Patriots republikanisme, pp. 193-4.
Ibid., p.193; Leeb, Ideological Origins, p. 182n.
Kluit, Akademische Redevoering, pp. 90n, 93n.
Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling pp. 6-7, 35; Klein, Patriots republikanisme, pp. 222, 266.
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
17
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
41
42
43
44
Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling pp. 7-8.
Ibid., pp. 12-13.
Ibid., pp. 54-5.
Ibid., p. 22.
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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
46
47
48
49
S. Schama, Patriots and Liberators (London, 1977), p. 95.
Ontwerp om de Republiek, pp. 49, 62-3.
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.
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.
Ibid., p. 562.
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
19
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
51
Cerisier, Tableau ix, p. 569.
Jeremy Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), pp. 175-8
20
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3
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 philoso
L E C T U R E
4
‘Failed Enlightenment’:
Spinoza’s Legacy and the
Netherlands (1670-1800)
Jonathan Israel
NIAS
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study
in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy
of Arts and Sciences
Meijboomlaan 1, 2242 PR Wassenaar
Telephone: (0)70-512 27 00
Telefax: (0)70-511 71 62
E-mail: NIAS@NIAS.KNAW.NL
Internet: www.nias.knaw.nl
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 Nederlandse
Verlichting (1670-1800) (translated by Hans van Cuijlenborg), ISBN 978-90-3513209-2, was published by Uitgeverij Bert Bakker (c) 2007.
NIAS, Wassenaar, 2007/5
ISBN: 978-90-71093-58-6
ISSN 1871-1480; 4
(c) NIAS 2007. No part of this publication may
be reproduced in any form by print, photoprint,
microfilm or any other means without written
permission from the publisher.
K B
L E C T U R E
4
‘Failed Enlightenment’:
Spinoza’s Legacy and the
Netherlands (1670-1800)
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
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
1
2
3
4
S.B. Smith, Spinoza’s Book of Life (New Haven, Conn., 2003) p. 200.
Bernardus Nieuhoff, Over Spinozisme (Harderwijk, 1799), p. 40.
Ibid., p. 41.
Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested. Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man,
1670-1752 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 43-50.
4
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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
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
5
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
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
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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.
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
7
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
10
11
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.
[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.
8
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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
13
14
15
Ibid., p. 37.
Isaac de Pinto, Letters on the American Troubles (London, 1776), pp. 34-5, 40-1.
Ibid., pp. 41-2.
Nijenhuis, Joodse philosophe, pp. 30-1.
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
9
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.
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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
18
Nieuhoff, Over Spinozisme, p. 82, 306
Antoine-Marie Cerisier, Tableau de l’histoire générale des Provinces-Unies (10 vols; Utrecht,
1777-84), ix, p. 571.
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
11
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).
19
20
21
R. van Vliet, Elie Luzac (1721-1796). Boekverkoper van de Verlichting (Nijmegen, 2005), pp. 366-8.
Ibid., p. 371.
See, for instance, Joan Derk van der Capellen, Aan het volk van Nederland (1781) (ed.) H.L. Zwitzer
(Amsterdam, 1987), pp. 6-20.
12
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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
23
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.
[Pieter Vreede?], Zakboek, pp. 20-31.
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
13
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
24
25
26
27
[Pieter Vreede], Beoordeelend en ophelderend verslag van de Verhandeling over de Vryheid
(Arnhem, 1783) (Knuttel, 20405), p. 6.
Pieter Vreede, Waermond en Vryhart. Gesprek over de waere Vryheid der Nederlandren, en den
aert der waere Vryheid (‘Holland’, 1783) (Knuttel, 20400), p. 4.
De Post van den Neder-Rhijn. ii, p, 728 and vi, pp. 945-6 (issue no. 263).
Gerrit Paape, De Aristocraat en de Burger (Rotterdam, 1785) (Knuttel 21046), pp. 9, 53, 55.
14
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4
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
29
30
31
32
Rijklof Michael van Goens, De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot iii (1782), p. 290.
Israel, Enlightenment Contested, p. 397-405.
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.
Gobbers, Rousseau in Holland p. 224; I.L. Leeb, The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution
(The Hague, 1973), pp. 205-6.
Ibid., pp. 189-92.
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
15
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
34
35
Adriaan Kluit, Academische Redevoering, over het misbruik van ‘t algemeen staatsrecht (Leiden,
1787) pp. 27-8.
Ibid., p. 90n, 93n.
A. Kluit, De rechten van den Mensch in Vrankrijk geen gewaande rechten in Nederland
(Amsterdam, 1793), pp. 66, 103.
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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
37
38
39
40
R.J. Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling over eene wel ingerigte volksregeering (Leiden, 1785), pp. 4-5.
Klein, Patriots republikanisme, pp. 193-4.
Ibid., p.193; Leeb, Ideological Origins, p. 182n.
Kluit, Akademische Redevoering, pp. 90n, 93n.
Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling pp. 6-7, 35; Klein, Patriots republikanisme, pp. 222, 266.
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
17
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
41
42
43
44
Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling pp. 7-8.
Ibid., pp. 12-13.
Ibid., pp. 54-5.
Ibid., p. 22.
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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
46
47
48
49
S. Schama, Patriots and Liberators (London, 1977), p. 95.
Ontwerp om de Republiek, pp. 49, 62-3.
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.
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.
Ibid., p. 562.
Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands
19
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
51
Cerisier, Tableau ix, p. 569.
Jeremy Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), pp. 175-8
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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 philoso