The Netherlands, 1750-1813

As such he was also a journalist – co-editor of De Democraten, the best political journal of the Batavian Revolution – a member of parliament in  and  and one ofthe framers of th

2 The Netherlands, –

Nicolaas van Sas

On October  Willem Anthonie Ockerse opened the winter series

of lectures in the Amsterdam society Doctrina et Amicitia with a

talken-titled ‘What’s the news?’ in which he offered a light-hearted theory ofhuman curiosity According to Ockerse, curiosity and above all the ask-ing of the question ‘What’s the news?’ was a prime characteristic of the

condition humaine Man – and certainly also woman – could only be

ful-filled in contact with other human beings Sociability and the continuousexchange of views were part of human nature, and naturally gave rise tothe urge to hear and impart news Self-interest was obviously an impor-tant and daily inspiration for human curiosity One person might have aninterest in inheritances, another in lotteries, a third in stocks, a fourth inshipping news, a fifth in peace or war, a sixth in political events ‘What’sthe news?’ was the first question one asked on entering polite society orcoffee house, towing-barge or coach, council chamber or theatre, even –Ockerse added mischievously – sometimes church In an ever-changingworld there was always a great appetite for news But certainly the sad andterrible events of recent years had added greatly to the demand for news

‘Good heavens! How many things formerly unthought-of have happened

in the past years with an ever quickening sequence, the story of which hasmade humankind cry, sigh and shiver!’ Ockerse profoundly hoped thatone day the reply to that perennial question ‘What’s the news?’ would be:

‘Good news! – order, quiet, peace, freedom, prosperity will return to thepeoples of the world, and to the Netherlands.’

Ockerse was not some obscure speaker He was a well-known figure

in contemporary Dutch society, a theologian by training and long-timepractising minister, but first and foremost he was an intellectual, a typicalproduct of Dutch enlightened sociability As such he was also a journalist –

co-editor of De Democraten, the best political journal of the Batavian

Revolution – a member of parliament in  and  and one ofthe framers of the first Dutch constitution. But perhaps his most en-

during claim to fame is his important study of Dutch national ter, published in, which propounds a theory of Dutch society and

charac-

The Netherlands– 

national identity, aimed at furthering the cause of a Dutch state that

would be – like its French sister republic – ‘une et indivisible’.In this study,

Ockerse stated that the Dutch people were traditionally very interested inpolitics and possessed what he called ‘a general and popular knowledge ofpolitical affairs and interests’ Their curiosity was continuously kept alive

by news from coffee houses, newspapers and the stockexchange.In this

sense politics in the Dutch Republic was – as in England – ‘a rather mon and favourite pastime’ Indeed, in his view everybody from the lofti-est regent to the lowest porter used to ‘politicise’ in the Dutch Republic.

com-This was certainly true for his own time – the years immediately ing the Batavian Revolution of – but it was not a new phenomenon.Traditionally, according to Ockerse, there had been an extensive supply

follow-of news in the Dutch Republic However, since the beginning follow-of theAmerican Revolutionary War this had expanded rapidly, reaching a newhigh-point during the so-called Patriot Period of–, when sales of

political weeklies like De Post van den Neder-Rhijn and De Politieke Kruyer (The Political Barrow-man) had reached unprecedented levels.

Ockerse was certainly right to stress the ready availability of news inthe Netherlands From the early seventeenth century onwards, the youngDutch Republic had established itself as the most important clearing-house of international news In the late sixteenth century, while stillfighting off their Spanish sovereign, the Dutch rapidly developed intothe foremost trading nation in the world In the wake of this they also be-came a great power politically Interests of war and trade and its centralposition in seventeenth-century geopolitics worked together to make theDutch Republic, and particularly the city of Amsterdam, the global nerve-centre for the gathering and dissemination of news. From  on-wards, we know of the existence of ‘coranto’: printed news-sheets whichmainly provided factual information from abroad, obtained from a net-workof foreign correspondents From about mid-century, in a process

of piecemeal innovation, these developed into regular newspapers, first ofall in Amsterdam, later also in several other towns in the core province

of Holland like Haarlem (), The Hague () and Leyden ().All of these were commercial enterprises initiated by local printers.Amsterdam had four officially recognised newspapers, appearing on dif-ferent days of the week However, by the end of the seventeenth century,they had merged into one, which in the eighteenth century was acquired

by the city government. Very gradually during the eighteenth century,

other towns, at first mainly in the province of Holland, established theirown newspapers, normally by granting an exclusive privilege to a localprinter By the middle of the eighteenth century, papers were being es-tablished in the capitals of the outlying provinces, including Groningen

 Nicolaas van Sas

(), Leeuwarden () and Middelburg () The most tant of these news-sheets would appear three times a week, the smallerones once or twice Whereas in the seventeenth century no more than

impor- copies would have been printed, by the s this number had risen

to between , and , for the four largest papers, the Oprechte Haerlemse Courant, the Amsterdamsche Courant, the Leydse Courant and the ’s Gravenhaegse Courant In  the Amsterdamsche Courant reput-

edly sold, copies within the city and another , outside.

Though exact information is lacking, the readership was not evenlydistributed over the Republic A rule of thumb may be that reading news-papers was mainly an urban phenomenon and that the more denselypopulated areas – above all the Holland heartland – would be over-represented The four ‘national’ newspapers mentioned above in the mid-eighteenth century had a combined circulation of about, If thecommon estimate that each issue was read by some ten people is cor-rect, their total readership must have been about,, that is  percent of the overall population of the country.But looking at the towns

of the province of Holland in particular, it has been calculated that inthis period up to a third of their adult population – male and female –must have been regular newspaper readers.Indeed, when Ockerse said

that in the Dutch Republic everybody was interested in the news, he wasmerely echoing a well-worn clich´e Already in thes, the French am-

bassador d’Avaux said of the Dutch newspapers: ‘tout le peuple les lit ’.

In Amsterdam, the delivery people of the Amsterdamsche Courant were

expected to collect the papers very early in the morning, in summer at

. a.m., because the workmen used to read them in the tavern beforegoing to work. Newspapers could not only be bought, they were also

rented out and they could be read in taverns and coffee houses, in thestage-coach and, more comfortably, in the towing-barge

The main newspapers were distributed nationwide and, judging fromthe scant evidence available, apparently also abroad, in the southernNetherlands, in Germany and in London. Nonetheless, their geo-

graphical distribution patterns varied considerably Whereas less than

 per cent of the Amsterdamsche Courant was exported outside the city –

which, admittedly, housed per cent of the population of the Republic –

a majority of subscribers to the Oprechte Haerlemse Courant dwelt extra muros.The city of Amsterdam would expect to make between,and, guilders profit a year from its ownership of the Amsterdamsche Courant, but other towns charged a so-called ‘recognition fee’ for the

exclusive privilege to publish an urban newspaper These papers wouldalso be expected to print official publications free of charge Even whenexact figures are lacking, increases in the recognition-fees – especially in

Though these newspapers were local ventures, local news was not theirmainstay Rather, the editors had to be careful not to overstep the bound-aries set by city regents, who were not at all willing to have their local

arcana out on the streets The news – including commercial and shipping

information – was presented in an objective, concise manner, ingly avoiding any colouring or editorial comment The writers of the

painstak-Amsterdamsche Courant in  were given very explicit instructions on

what not to publish They were not supposed to print anything

concern-ing the military power of the Republic and were only allowed to publishinformation on domestic political affairs after having obtained permis-sion beforehand The style of the paper had to be simple, unostentatious,unambiguous and impartial It should avoid offending any person, eitherhigh or low, political, military or religious, friend or enemy. Despite

these limitations set by local authorities, the particularist political ture of the Dutch Republic ensured a considerable freedom of the press,precisely because there was no central authority to enforce effective con-straints This was not so much freedom in principle as a practice offreedom, which in hindsight, however – like the similar matter of religiousand political tolerance – came to be regarded as a matter of principle inwhich the Dutch Republic had stood out in contemporary Europe.News-sheets were important because they made the Dutch Republic

struc-a very news-oriented society, but judging from their contents they wererelatively unspectacular Apart from them, the Dutch press scene of theancien regime had two prime characteristics One was a blossoming pam-phlet culture which made up in newsworthiness, juiciness and politicaloutspokenness (though not in objectivity and reliability) for what the ra-ther staid newspapers lacked All political crises in the Dutch Republic,but also all sorts of local conflicts, scandals and religious disputes, wereaccompanied and fuelled by a surge of pamphlets Far more than the reg-ular newspaper press these ‘flying leaflets’ profited from the so-called

‘tempered freedom’ of the press and the fragmentation of

jurisdic-tion which lasted till the Batavian Revolujurisdic-tion of– The other feature

of the Dutch journalistic scene was the existence of an important language press, especially since the Dutch Republic had become a refugefor French Huguenot exiles This French-language press – of which

French-the Gazette d’Amsterdam was an early example, and French-the Gazette de Leyde

 Nicolaas van Sas

eventually the most celebrated – contributed far more than the

in-digenous Dutch journals to the fame of the Dutch Republic, making

it a byword for freedom and tolerance in the international Republic ofLetters

Around, some important changes tookplace in Dutch society, ashistorical research of the past twenty years has demonstrated time andagain.Outside the recognised sphere of politics and the political struc-

ture, which was still that fossilised medieval jumble fought over by theDutch Revolt, a new civil society emerged, bringing with it a reorganisa-tion and redefinition of the public sphere This rearrangement of publicspace made full use of the existing flexibility of Dutch society, throughthe practical freedom already mentioned and the absence of a centralauthority in internal affairs, which were organised on a local or, at most,provincial basis This cultural shift marked the breakthrough of a dis-tinctly Dutch Enlightenment This ‘Dutchification’ of the Enlightenmenthad far-reaching consequences for Dutch culture, society and also poli-tics Establishing what was national, especially in terms of culture, lan-guage and literature, came to be one of its defining characteristics.The

rearrangement of public space in the Dutch Enlightenment created an

‘imagined community’ in the sense of Benedict Anderson:a community

of people who did not – and indeed could not – know one another but who

at the same time felt a clear sense of belonging together Particularly in the

s and s, Dutch society was newly defined in cultural and moralterms, as a society of patriots, trying to use the forces of Enlightenment tostem the decline of the Dutch Republic and to restore it to its former glory.The civil society of the Dutch Enlightenment was a conglomerate ofsocieties and associations of all sorts and shapes, stretching from thesmallest poetical societies and reading clubs on a scale hardly overstep-ping the format of a living room, to impressive learned societies andreformist associations with a nationwide appeal. But the other pillar

of the Dutch Enlightenment was a plethora of new periodical tions – quite different from the newspapers mentioned above – whichgrew steadily in number between and  A new ‘communicationsociety’ was formed, transcending – indeed ignoring – the formal politicalboundaries of the seven sovereign provinces

publica-Overstepping these boundaries and rearranging the public sphere was

an important phase in the cultural process of nation-building Thusnation-building in an all-Dutch sense preceded by several decades theconstruction of the unitary Dutch state in  Unlike the formativeyears of the Dutch Republic, when war and politics tookpride of place, itwas now cultural developments which were taking the lead To turn thewell-known concept of Ernest Gellner on its head: it was not a matter of

The Netherlands– 

the state producing a nation, but the other way around.In this process

the periodical press played a crucial role Almost imperceptibly, a riftopened up between an increasingly fossilised state not able to meet thechallenges of the times and a civil society which appeared novel andexciting and developed a dynamic of its own, in a context of universalenlightened thinking and enlightened practices Paradoxically, these dy-namics were strongly motivated by the ‘decline’ (or at least the perception

of decline) of the Dutch Republic which was seemingly in a free fall interms of international power and economic strength since the days ofits ‘Golden’ seventeenth century The causes for this decline were ulti-mately sought in the sphere of morals and manners The Dutch peoplehad supposedly lost their pristine burgher virtues and the regent class

in particular was accused of disavowing its burgher origins through anincreasingly luxurious lifestyle and an abdication of public responsibility.This debate on the fundamentals of Dutch society and its pressingproblems of decline and fall was inextricably bound up with new de-velopments in Dutch press culture It was conducted in a series of newperiodical publications, mainly along the lines of Addison and Steele’s

Spectator Already in thes Justus van Effen had published his famous

Hollandsche Spectator, in which the ills of Dutch culture and society were

analysed in plain Dutch by an author who until then had always written

in French Especially in the second half of the century his example hadnumerous followers These moral weeklies were organised according to awell-rehearsed formula, in which a wise and benevolent Spectator-figuregave judgment on all sorts of questions and problems The manners andmorals of polite society, matters of religion, education or the relations be-tween the sexes were subtly connected to the problems that beset Dutchsociety at large In the end the decline of the Dutch Republic was almostroutinely explained in terms of the declining morals of Dutch society.These Spectator-like publications really took off from mid-centuryonwards Some lasted only a few issues; others, however, continued pub-lication on a periodical basis for many years According to the inven-tory made by P J Buijnsters, twelve Spectators appeared betweenand , whereas fifty-eight new ones were published between and. The trend-setting Hollandsche Spectator itself appeared from

 to , to be collected in twelve volumes De Nederlandsche Spectator,

author or authors unknown, appeared in Leyden between and 

De Philantrope was published in Amsterdam from to  and some

of its authors continued with De Denker (The Thinker) until A

short-lived Vrouwelyke Spectator (Female Spectator) was published in –

in twenty-four issues De Philosooph, written by Cornelis van Engelen,

appeared between  and  De Koopman (The Merchant) – an

 Nicolaas van Sas

acknowledged mine of economic information – was published inAmsterdam between and , whilst De Borger was produced in

Utrecht between  and  And these are only some of the known and long-lived Spectators in the decades before the political up-heaval of the Patriot Period, which changed the political landscape andthe practices of periodical publication with it

best-To take just one example, between  and  De Nederlandsche Criticus (The Dutch Critic) appeared in eighty-six weekly issues It was

published in Leeuwarden, the capital of Friesland, and it was distributedwidely in the rest of the country Its editor was the Lutheran ministerStatius Muller, whose name has also been connected with four otherSpectators Dissenting theologians generally played a prominent role inthe dissemination of the Dutch Enlightenment and in its press culture

Introducing itself, De Nederlandsche Criticus described the publication of

Spectators as a craze in which everyone wanted to take part: ‘the Republic

of Letters is in uproar and its citizens are up in arms, the printing pressesare occupied and the Spectators are coming to and fro’ This particularSpectator was advertised as a collective enterprise taking the pulse ofcontemporary society by frequenting all social layers:

We mean to enter all public societies of gentlemen and ladies, at court and inthe coffee house, and to avoid becoming hypochondriacs we will also walkoften

in the market-place We see, we hear, we speak and we keep silent as it seems

fit Everything is to our liking, we read everything as much as possible and

subsequently we will give a free and uninhibited judgement upon it

The explicit reason given to undertake this enterprise was ‘affection for

our dear Fatherland’ because present-day society was possessed by all

sorts of follies Everyone was liable to be taken to task by De Nederlandsche Criticus, which hoped to reach an audience of ‘learned and unlearned

people, of people of high standing in society and common burghers, ofthe male and female sex’.In its eighty-six issues all sorts of topics were

tackled, with a strong bias towards religious themes It was concernedwith general morality, with matters of taste and public behaviour, witheducation, arts and sciences Typical problems of the times were com-mented on in an authoritative manner Though politics in a narrow sense

were avoided, De Nederlandsche Criticus would speakout on the qualities

to be expected from regents and holders of public offices. Topicality

and enlightened judgement were cleverly mixed to make this Spectator,like others, relevant to contemporary issues, while at the same timeappearing to rise above them

Taken together, the whole corpus of these Spectators may be regarded

as the transactions of the Dutch Enlightenment (of which they were both

The Netherlands– 

the mouthpiece and the carrier), which is still to be explored from a widerange of possible angles and perspectives In a recent study Doroth´eeSturkenboom has imaginatively analysed, not to say reconstructed, the

‘emotional culture’ of the Dutch Enlightenment from the formal basis ofthe assembled Spectators. This research could, in principle, be repli-

cated from a whole range of viewpoints: morals and manners, religion,education, social and economic questions, and – last but not least – thecrypto-political nature of much of its social comment and criticism.The continuous discussion in weekly instalments of the morals ofDutch society played a major part in creating a new moral commu-nity of burghers. Traditionally, ‘burgher’ was a legal category denot-

ing the first-class citizens of the many towns which constituted the DutchRepublic But burgher had other connotations as well It was also a moralcategory, drawing strength from a seventeenth-century ideal of burgher-hood that was now newly imbued with enlightened values and alreadypointing towards the political citizenship of the Age of the DemocraticRevolutions Almost imperceptibly the burgher, though still firmly rooted

in the town where he enjoyed his civic rights, was becoming a member of

a Dutch civil society and a citizen of an overall Dutch nation

This moral and as yet only quasi-political citizenship had little to dowith the economic aspirations of an emerging ‘bourgeoisie’ (even if thiswas not defined in narrow Marxist terms) Though economics did play

an important part in the debate of the Dutch Enlightenment, it would

be highly deceptive to reduce the impetus of this enlightened civil societymerely to economic motives The enlightened burgher of the second half

of the eighteenth century was not defined in predominantly economicterms, nor in terms of social class He could even – and often did – belong

to the established upper reaches of society, the ‘periwig aristocracy’

which was often at the receiving end of the enlightened moral critiquevoiced in the Spectators At the same time, this moral community ofburghers was also open to those not belonging to the Dutch ReformedChurch.Membership of this Church – an established church in all but

name – was obligatory for all who participated in formal politics and oftenfor those seeking to obtain public offices, including many lowly jobs inthe pay of local government

The development of nations as imagined communities, according tothe views of Benedict Anderson, has been closely related to the evolution

of national print cultures in the early modern period, and subsequently tothe growth of the newspaper press which made the sense of belonging aneveryday experience For reading a newspaper is a ritual that can be seen –

as Hegel memorably suggested – as a substitute for morning prayers: thepicking-up of the same text by thousands of readers at roughly the same

 Nicolaas van Sas

time creating a spirit of communion. In the Dutch Republic afterthe process of nation-building was conducted on a weekly basis in itsmany moralising Spectators, redefining the public sphere and preparingthe ground – as we can see with hindsight – for the fierce political battles

of thes

Dutch historiography of the final decades of the eighteenth centuryhas traditionally concentrated on its two revolutions: the so-called PatriotRevolution of–, one of the frontrunners in R R Palmer’s series of

‘democratic revolutions’, and the Batavian Revolution of, the Dutchversion of the French Revolution, which can also be seen as the continu-ation of the revolutionary fervour of thes.Curiously enough, there

have been few attempts to place these revolutions in a more cultural text Rather the contrary: the idea of a Dutch Enlightenment was con-sidered slightly ridiculous until perhaps thirty years ago In recent years,however, a change of focus and a change of definition have altered thepicture quite dramatically.As soon as the Enlightenment was no longer

con-defined as an essentially French-inspired and francophone phenomenon,but came to be seen as a multiple experience with a whole range ofnational variations, a Dutch Enlightenment was quickly discovered Part

of this discovery has been the projection of Rolf Engelsing’s well-known

concept of a Leserevolution, developed for eighteenth-century Germany,

on the situation of the Dutch Republic.Summarised very briefly, this

implied that the Dutch Enlightenment was analysed in terms of a ‘readingrevolution’: a substantial enlargement of the reading public on the onehand, together with a change in the manner and in the matter of read-

ing Instead of a continuous, intensive rereading of an iron repertory of

selected texts (the Bible, sermons, almanacs and the like), there emerged

extensive (that is, more casual and desultory) reading of a much greater

variety of material: general information (to quench the enlightened thirstfor knowledge), ephemeral literature (such as novels), periodicals andnewspapers There has been fierce debate over the last few years on the

tenability of the concept of this Leserevolution when applied to the Dutch

scene. This debate has generated a great deal of information, which

has particularly increased our knowledge of the eighteenth-century booktrade Unfortunately, however, the great sophistication of this research interms of new sources tapped and new methods used – such as modernmarketing theory – has not been rewarded with clear and unequivo-

cal answers, since each new specialist monograph tends to rephrase thequestions and, in a sense, adds to the confusion

Research has concentrated so far on the economics of bookproductionand bookdistribution The hard quantitative evidence now available inthis field makes it difficult to uphold the idea of a reading revolution as it

of sorts is still tenable, it is most likely to be found in the area of odicals, newspapers and the innumerable political tracts of thes.

peri-The appearance of new newspapers from the mid-s, the frequentpublication of double numbers and the mounting circulation of the fourmain ‘national’ newspapers, all seem to support this suggestion.

Though the concept of an enlightened Fatherland was carefully keptoutside the realm of politics proper – it remained, after all, an ‘imaginedcommunity’ – it did have a growing impact on Dutch politics Below thesurface a great deal of unease had built up – especially in the Spectators –

as to the way Dutch society was developing and the Dutch state wasrun But it was the growing international tension, especially when Francejoined the American rebels against England in, which really madethe political climate in the Dutch Republic change The number of poli-tical pamphlets – always a sure barometer – started to rise quickly Also

in De Staatsman (The Statesman), the first example of a new type of

political journalism, began publication It appeared fortnightly and was

edited by the philosophe Nassau La Lecq, a distant cousin of Stadholder

William V A typical feature was the recycling of older texts of politicaltheory, especially from the sphere of English classical republicanism.

De Staatsman commented on the international situation as well as on

Dutch internal politics in a rather contemplative, long-winded manner.Its political colouring was pro-French and anti-British, calling Britain a

‘friend in appearance only’ and criticising the Dutch for investing in theBritish public debt.Still, the growing political unrest from onwardswas mild compared to what happened in the final days of , whenBritain quite suddenly and unexpectedly declared war on the Dutch Itwas the shockof war and its immediate consequences in terms of shippinglost and trade routes blocked which produced a political crisis in theDutch Republic that would last until the late summer of , when aPrussian army overran the country The outbreakof war immediately andvisibly highlighted the ‘decline’ of the Republic, which had been debated