Political changes

The focus on the northern Low Countries implies that this book is not about the southern Low Countries.¹ The political split of the Low Countries into a northern and a southern part currently corresponding to roughly the Netherlands on the 1. For general overviews of the political and cultural history of the northern Netherlands in the Early and Late Modern period, see Israel (1996), Frijhoff & Spies (1999) and Kloek & Mijnhardt (2001). For historical-sociolinguistic studies of the southern Low Countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see, for example, Vosters (2013), Vosters & Vandenbussche (2012) and Vosters et al. (2014) and the references there, as well as Willemyns (2003) and Rutten (2011).

Throughout the present book, references to the southern Low Countries will be made whenever appropriate. The main focus, however, is on the northern Netherlands.

one hand, and Belgium and Luxembourg on the other, dates back to the second half of the sixteenth century. Historically, the Low Countries were a collection of duchies and counties that were brought together into the personal union of the Seventeen Provinces by Charles V (1500–1558), emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. In the fourteenth century, the western regions of Holland and Zeeland had already been part of the so-called Burgundian Netherlands. In the first half of the sixteenth century, eastern and northern provinces such as Friesland, Groningen and Gelre (Guelders) were integrated into what had become the Habsburg Netherlands.

Around the middle of the century, opposition to the policies of Charles V’s succes-sor, Philip II of Spain (1527–1598), led to the Dutch Revolt. From a conglomerate

Figure 1. Historical map of the Habsburg Netherlands, taken from Alexis-Marie Gochet, Atlas de géographie physique, politique et historique à l’usage de l’enseignement primaire et de l’enseignement moyen. The red line separates the northern and the southern Netherlands. (Wikimedia Commons)

of possible causes that have been suggested, the most important ones seem to be the Habsburg tendency to centralise policies, for example with respect to taxes and religion, resulting in opposition, particularly in the recently conquered territories in the north. The Dutch Revolt only ended with the Treaty of Münster, part of the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648. Politically, it led to a separation of the Low Countries into a southern and a northern part. The southern part remained under Habsburg rule, subservient to Philip II, and became the so-called Spanish Netherlands, and from 1714 onwards the Austrian Netherlands. The northern part had already for-mally declared its independence of Philip II in 1581 in the so-called Plakkaet van Verlatinghe ‘Act of Abjuration’. From then on, the Northern Netherlands developed into the sovereign Republic of the Seven United Netherlands.

In the second half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century, traditionally called the Dutch Golden Age, the Dutch Republic acted as a uniform state internationally. Matters of war and peace and international diplomacy were responsibilities of the States General in The Hague. Despite the fact that the Republic was not officially recognised by other European states, ambassadors of the seven provinces were admitted to the peace negotiations in Münster. In the treaty between Spain and the Dutch, the Republic was officially recognised as a sovereign state. Foreign policy being in the hands of the States General, which moreover gradually increased its activities to include among others taxes, shipping, water management, religious affairs and colonial expansion, implied a certain amount of centralisation and contributed to a sense of unity. By 1650, however, “[o]nly an outsider could imagine that the Republic was a unity. Internally, it remained strongly divided” (Frijhoff & Spies 1999: 605; my translation). Officially, the united provinces of the northern Low Countries consisted of a group of seven sovereign states, viz. Gelre, Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Overijssel and Groningen.

The region of Drenthe was autonomous, but without a vote in the States General.

The provinces, in their turn, consisted of numerous counties, duchies, manors, and, importantly, towns and cities, which all had a greater or lesser level of autonomy in financial, legal and tax matters. Obviously, cultural and linguistic diversity was at least as significant, and even more so than today. The political situation has been characterised “as a cross between a federal state and a confederation” (Israel 1996: 306), and one that, established in the early seventeenth century, remained

“basically unchanged” until the fall of the Republic in 1795 (Israel 1996: 305). Van Sas (2004: 47) likewise describes the political structure of the late eighteenth cen-tury as a particularistic and in that sense medieval form of government, which was brought to a sudden end by the formation of a national state.

Figure 2. Map of the Benelux: Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

(Wikimedia Commons)

Apart from the provinces, the House of Orange was an important source of power in the Early and Late Modern period. In fact, the period is characterised by an enduring tension between the provincial states and the States General on the one hand, and the Stadtholders of the House of Orange on the other hand. In line with the strong republican current, two so-called stadhouderloze tijdperken ‘stadthol-derless eras’ were established, the first (1650–1672) after the death of William II (1626–1650), whose son and heir William III was only born one week after his father’s death, and the second (1702–1747) after the death of William III (1650–

1702), who remained childless. William III bequeathed his possessions to his sec-ond cousin John William Friso of Nassau (1687–1711), whose son and grandson were William IV of Orange-Nassau (1711–1751) and William V of Orange-Nassau (1748–1806). William V was the father of William I (1772–1843), the first King of the Netherlands (1815–1840).

Mostly due to developments outside the northern Netherlands, the tension be-tween republicans and royalists gave way to an opposition of unitarianism and fed-eralism in the second half of the eighteenth century. William V took up the position

of Stadtholder in 1766. In 1780, with the beginning of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784), republican opposition to the reign of Orange increased, and was in-tensified by the war turning into a disaster. Apart from the crushing defeat in battles, overseas possessions were lost and colonial trade suffered a tremendous loss. The following years were characterised by increasing tension between the republican patriotten ‘patriots’ and the royalist orangisten ‘supporters of Orange’. The situation in various towns and cities in the west, including The Hague, became so virulent that William V and his wife Wilhelmina of Prussia (1751–1820) fled to the loyal city of Nijmegen in the east. In 1787, on her way back to The Hague, Wilhelmina was arrested by patriots. Considering this a serious insult, her brother Frederick William II (1744–1797), King of Prussia, decided to invade the Netherlands and restore the reign of Orange. The French Revolution of 1789 greatly inspired the republican and anti-Orangist feelings of the patriots, while it also promoted among them the idea of unitarianism. Previously, most patriots had been in favour of a federalist form of government. In the following years, the most important political difference was no longer between republican patriotism and Orangism, but between unitarianism and federalism.

In 1794–1795, the French invasion of the Austrian (southern) and northern Netherlands led to the flight of William. Backed up by the French, the patriots seized power and constituted the Bataafsche Republiek ‘Batavian republic’ (1795–

1801), which was succeeded by the Bataafsch Gemeenebest ‘Batavian common-wealth’ (1801–1806), then by the Kingdom of Holland under Napoleon Bonaparte’s (1769–1821) brother Louis Bonaparte (1778–1846). In 1810, Napoleon annexed the northern Netherlands to France, to which the Austrian Netherlands had already been annexed in 1795. The French invasion of the 1790s thus brought an end to the political split of the southern and northern Low Countries. The years 1795–1815 constitute the so-called French period, when the northern Netherlands were a vas-sal state of France, up to the incorporation into France in 1810, while the southern Netherlands were directly under French rule throughout the period. After the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, the southern and northern parts were unified into the (United) Kingdom of the Netherlands, created as a buffer state against France at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Luxembourg was also part of the Kingdom, albeit through a personal union. The Kingdom of the Netherlands disintegrated with the Belgian Revolution of 1830, when the present situation of three separate states was more or less established.

In the French period, the first northern Dutch national parliament, the Nationale Vergadering ‘national assembly’, was established and a form of suffrage was introduced that was unprecedentedly democratic, with the right to vote given to every man of twenty years or older who was neither on relief nor a domestic servant. One of the tasks of the new parliament was to design a new constitution.

In 1798, an unambiguously unitarianist proposal was adopted. While many changes of government would follow in subsequent years, the 1798 constitution laid the foundation for the Dutch nation state. In this period, it became apparent to many that a national government could pursue policies in domains that were previously not subject to intervention by the government. So-called agenten ‘agents, ministers’

were appointed, including an Agent van Nationale Opvoeding ‘minister of national education’, indicating that education had become a matter of national interest, which had important linguistic consequences as well.

When in 1805 the Netherlands had become a vassal state of Napoleonic France, the nationalisation of communal responsibilities continued. A national tax system was introduced and a series of laws for primary education were passed, announc-ing a national system of inspection and pavannounc-ing the way for a national educational system. Nationalisation continued with the introduction of penal and civil codes.

After Napoleon’s defeat in 1813, William I became King of the Netherlands in 1815.

Van Sas (2004: 41) stresses the importance of the 1790s and particularly of the 1798 constitution for the foundation of the modern Dutch nation state. He also stresses that the political unitarianism of this period by no means came out of the blue. It was “the political consequence of a process of cultural unification that had been going on for a few decades under the flag of the Dutch Enlightenment” (van Sas 2004: 42; my translation). In the northern Netherlands, nation-building and cultural nationalism preceded state formation. From c. 1750 onwards, a cultural process of nation-building developed, which was backed up by the formation of a national state in the 1790s so that the foundation of the Dutch nation state can be dated to c. 1800 (van Sas 2004: 44). The vernederlandsing ‘Dutchification’ (van Sas 2004: 54) of the Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century meant that discussions about the Enlightenment primarily took place in a national context (cf. Porter & Teich 1981). A dominant theme in Dutch Enlightenment discourse was the alleged decline of the Dutch Republic after the glorious seventeenth cen-tury, politically, economically and culturally, which concomitantly led to the con-struction of the national myth of the seventeenth century as a Golden Age (van Sas 2004: 54). Much Enlightenment discourse in the countless societies and periodicals offered a diagnosis of the national decline as well as concrete proposals to remedy it. The nationalisation of Enlightenment discourse was widening and restrictive at the same time, as van Sas (2004: 55) observes: while internal borders were ig-nored, the border with other European countries was emphasised. Similarly, Kloek

& Mijnhardt (2001) consider the rise of a national communication community to be one of the defining characteristics of the northern Dutch eighteenth century. A further crucial factor is that many of the proposals launched in Enlightenment dis-course were immediately implemented in actual policies in the late 1790s and early 1800s. Exemplary in this context is the politicisation of language and education.