The Intellectual Origins of the Belgian Revolution

Political Thought and Disunity in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, 1815-1830

Stefaan Marteel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319894256
• eBook ISBN: 9783319894263
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book explores the political ideas of the Belgian Revolution of 1830, which led to the break-up of the Restoration state of the 'united' Kingdom of the Netherlands. It uncovers the origins of liberalism and political Catholicism in the Southern Netherlands in the wake of the French Revolution, and traces the development of political language in the context of the tensions between the Northern and Southern part of the united Netherlands. It shows how differences in 'Dutch' and 'Belgian' political and intellectual history resulted in different understandings of essential political concepts such as 'sovereignty' and 'balance of powers', as well as of the nature of the constitutional order of 1815. Finally, it traces the emergence of Belgian nationalism within the discourse of opposition against the government. Stefaan Marteel therefore provides a fresh perspective on the intellectual background of the rise of the nation-state in the nineteenth century.

© The Author(s) 2018

S. MarteelThe Intellectual Origins of the Belgian RevolutionPalgrave Studies in Political Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89426-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Stefaan Marteel¹

(1)

Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Stefaan Marteel

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

1.1 1830 in Historiography

In recent years, the ‘United Kingdom’ of the Netherlands has attracted new interest in the context of the 200-year commemoration of the foundation of the state in 1815.^1,2 In 2015, two worthwhile volumes were published, with contributions by a considerable number of Belgian and Dutch historians with specialisations in different fields. In the first volume, titled Belg en Bataaf, the editors confront the ‘one-dimensional’ perspective that still prevails in the historical narrative about the establishment of the state that united what today are Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. According to this narrative, ‘the construction of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands came after the Congress of Vienna , which followed … the Battle of Waterloo’ (Judo and van de Perre 2015, 8). Rather than understanding the origin of the kingdom as the result of abrupt changes, provoked by great leaders and great battles, the authors believed that it makes more sense to look at its birth from the perspective of gradual change and ‘synthesis’. It is the aim of the contributions to the collection therefore, to focus on how the old and new came together in this period of transition: how old structures were adapted to a new context, how differences between North and South were looked upon (Judo and van de Perre 2015, 8). In another volume published in the same year (On)verenigd Koninkrijk, the editors pointed out that in previous decades, regretfully, the overwhelming majority of studies on the period took either the Northern or Southern part of the kingdom as their object of study (Aerts and Deneckere 2015, 14–15).³ This national orientation in political and social history constituted a departure from major integrative and comparative histories of the Netherlands in the 1970s and 1980s. This return to national history, Aerts and Deneckere pointed out, is at odds with current international trends in historical scholarship towards transnational approaches. Moreover, the United Kingdom, because of its multifaceted character, seems perfectly suited to studying how ideas, modes and patterns were transferred from one society to another.⁴

If historians of late wish to look at the Restoration kingdom of the Netherlands as more than the sum of two entities, this is closely related to the viewpoint that the eventual failure of the state was attributable to contingent factors, and was in no sense ‘inevitable’. The value of the contributions to the volumes is, in the words of the editors of one of them, that they focus on ‘the beginning of the experiment’ without ‘the final failure necessarily determining the plot’ (Aerts and Deneckere 2015, 18). For some time already, historians have moved away from a narrow nationalistic historiography that viewed the United Kingdom as an unnatural union of two clearly distinct peoples/nations. However, the respective (original) inspirations for this evolution have been very different in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Of primary importance in the Netherlands has been the influence of the so-called constructivist and modernist theories regarding nationalism, and more specifically the studies by Ernest Gellner and Reinhart Koselleck (Van Ginderachter 2009, 527). Dutch historians have argued that a broad Dutch national awareness developed in interaction with the revolutionary events at the end of the eighteenth century. After the transformation of the Netherlands into a centralised state during the Batavian Revolution (1795–1798) , a process of normalisation and consolidation followed that is often described as the ‘nationalisation of the revolution’. In that context, from 1800 onwards, politically inspired patriotism was gradually replaced with a national sentiment that was, above all, ‘culturally’ defined and ‘carried by a new sense of (national) history’ (van Sas 2004, 86–87). From a similar perspective of seeing the advent of nationalism primarily in relation to a sequence of political events (revolution and reaction), Dutch historians generally do not attribute the failure of the nation-state project of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands to a pre-existing division in nationality, but look for contingent, political causes. A strong, mutually exclusive, Dutch and Belgian national awareness was therefore, in their eyes, more likely the result of the break-up into two states rather than at its origin ( te Velde 1991; Aerts 2006; van Sas 2006). In Belgium, on the other hand, the revision of the predominant nationalist narrative of 1830 has primarily been the work of historians who take a social-historical approach rooted in academic Marxism. They have looked at the politics of the period 1815–1848 primarily from the perspective of social-economic transition, the destruction and the dismantling of the clerical and feudal structures of ‘the old regime’ and the construction of a liberal bourgeois state (Dhondt 1953, 1963; Witte 1973, 2006a, 2014). The Belgian Revolution of 1830 emerges here as the work of disgruntled middle classes that took to liberal ideas, and eventually revolutionary action, in their wish to see the state reformed in a way that would give them more political leverage.

In spite of the different historiographical contexts and theoretical influences, these Dutch and Belgian historians share a common interpretation of the events of 1830. An important recent textbook on the history of the Netherlands sums up the political crisis in the United Kingdom accordingly. It was ‘in origin a liberal crisis, aimed at the modernisation of the political system and potentially anticipating the liberal state’ (Roegiers and van Sas 1993, 254); a state, as historian Remieg Aerts paraphrased, which ‘as a result of coincidental circumstances, between 1830 and 1839, was first established in independent Belgium, then in the Netherlands’ (Aerts and Deneckere 2015, 16). Moreover, historians have in recent years emphasised that in many fields there were tendencies towards convergence of the North and the South that have been disregarded. In the fields of culture and literature, initiatives were taken that effectively brought the North and the (Flemish) South closer to each other, even when they also sometimes had an alienating effect (Weijermars 2012). Els Witte supported in her recent book the thesis that large parts of the Southern elite, in all social areas, were before the revolution overall loyal to the government, and, above all, to the king (Witte 2014), even when they continued to distinguish themselves from the Northern elites.

However, the constructivist paradigm that has prevailed in recent decades has not remained uncontested. Especially in Belgium, a number of historians emphasise the importance of Belgian national sentiments in the political opposition in the South and insist the Belgian Revolution was a national revolution born out of feelings of injustice and discrimination by a Dutch-dominated government towards the Belgian provinces and the Belgian people. Based on the nationalism theory of Anthony D. Smith,⁵ they argue that, in early modern times, the Southern, Habsburg-ruled Netherlands, on the one hand, and the Dutch Republic of the United Provinces , on the other, had developed into ‘proto-nations’, which were dominated respectively by a contra-reformatory, Catholic culture and a Germanic, Protestant one. Subsequently, the cultural, proto-national differences acquired a new dimension from the complete integration of the Southern Netherlands in the French Republic and later Empire from 1796 onwards, resulting in a more profound endorsement in political culture of the revolutionary concepts of popular sovereignty and individual liberties. Moreover, these historians recognise a continuity between the Brabant Revolution of 1789 , in which Habsburg rule over the Southern Netherlands was overthrown and a short-lived confederal republic was established, and the Belgian Revolution of 1830 . As the transformation of the Belgian proto-nation of the old regime into the modern nation-state is seen as the result of these two revolutions, 1830 and the failure of the United Kingdom established in 1815 emerge as much less ‘accidental’, that is, more ‘predictable’, than thought by other historians (Wils 1997, 1999; Stengers 2000; Dubois 2005).⁶

Cultural historians, on the other hand, have focused on the emergence of a national historical narrative in the second half of the eighteenth century, highlighting the common traits of the different regions and provinces rather than their differences (Verschaffel 1998, 89–98; Deseure 2014, 62–63). This new historical narrative also gave legitimacy to constitutional political views that were mobilised in opposition to the Austrian government (see later). Furthermore, historians who focus on the promotion of a Belgian national identity after the Belgian Revolution , through the creation of national art and monuments, folklore, national histories and so on, question the evaluation of Belgian patriotism during and after 1830 as a creatio ex nihilo (Verschaffel 1987; Tollebeek 1998). The emphasis on the authentic national character of 1830 was probably to some extent inspired by aversion towards an assertive Flemish-nationalist historiography that, predictably, insists on the ‘artificial’ character of the Belgian nation-state, created by francophone Belgians with the support of France and against the wish of the Flemish population (Van Ginderachter 2009, 529; Witte 2001, 184–187).⁷ The search for the longer-term origins of the Belgian nation has often been criticized by (primarily Dutch) historians of the constructivist school as ‘crypto-nationalistic’ and in continuity with old school Belgian-patriotic historiography (Kossmann 1994, 63; van Sas 2006, 71–73; Van Ginderachter 2009, 528).

In spite of these rather intense historiographical debates, it is remarkable that no recent studies have been conducted into the ideology of the opposition movements in the Southern Netherlands, and the revolutionary movement that emerged from them. In the Netherlands, a number of new, innovative studies on the politics of the period have been published in recent years, but their focus has been almost exclusively on the Northern Netherlands (van Zanten 2004; Lok 2009). In Belgium, only a few preliminary, exploratory articles have been written on the language and politics of the opposition and revolutio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Liberals
• Part II. Catholics
• Part III. Revolutionaries
• Back Matter