With the natural exception of France, the Napoleonic Wars caused more turmoil in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands than in any other country in Europe. We Nederlanders were perhaps spared the widespread devestation bore by say Russia, but nevertheless families and households were divided: brother fought against brother and son fought against father, and all for the sake of competing ideologies: Monarchism against Republicanism; Calvinism against Catholicism; Dutch Patriotism against Francophilia; Orangism against Bonapartism. Geographically as well as politically and socially, the Dutch state was torn up, spat out and shook from its very foundations. North-South conflict, hitherto something of a rare phenomena in this country, was exaserbated by the territorial divisions thrust upon the Netherlands by the invading French: The predominately Catholic south spent much of the war chaffing under the weight of Parisian direct rule, and for the first time since the days of the Habsburgs found themselves subjects to Catholic masters. In the far south of the country – Wallonia -- the effect of French direct rule was even more dramatic. Predominately Francophone, many Walloons felt more at home with their new French masters than with their own countrymen in Amsterdam or Brussels. This of course would have a profound impact on events to come.
Far from the relatively stable political situation in the south, the North swung violently like a pendulum caught in a tempest. Holland has a stronger liberal and republican tradition than any other existing european state -- with the notable exception of Switzerland -- but the French strain of the republican virus was a particularly virulent one and it introduced elements of revolutionary culture, such as the guillotine, and political concepts like the rule of the mob and the so-called “reign of terror” which had hitherto been considered alien to the Dutch mind. The Batavian Republic was a black stain on our history, as black or even blacker I dare say than our mistreatment of the Javanese and other peoples of the East Indies prior to the establishment of the Ethische Politie, because unlike that stain, which was an injustice borne of ignorance and was corrected swiftly once the public became aware of the realities of the situation, the Batavian Republic had mass public and press support both before its establishment and for the duration of its short existence. The Dutch people had decided en masse to surrender their pride, their faith and their national identity to a foreign power, and in the process to prostitute themselves to the invading French in the manner one would expect from a common whore. This is not the way the citizens of a great nation like the Netherlands should behave.
Dutch militiamen similar to the platoon of conscripts shown above were instrumental in the establishment and defence of the Batavian Republic. The fact that so many Dutchmen enlisted voluntarily illustrates the degree of popular support collaboration had amongst Hollanders, irrespective of first language or religious faith.
The situation grew further complicated with the dissulusion of the revolutionary government by Napoleon and establishment of the Bonapartist Kingdom of Holland – technically the first de jure monarchy to govern the province since the days of the foreign Hapsburgs -- in its place. Louis Napoleon was an odd king, and one who certainly defied the expectations his brother and others had placed on him. He did not behave as one would expect the puppet king of a French client state to behave; a French viceroy; Napoleon's man in The Hague. These things he most definitely was not. From the very start, King Lodewijk (as he styled himself) showed an independence and desire to fight in his subject's corner that was both courageous and admirable. He learned the Dutch language, styled himself in the Dutch manner and even identified culturally as a Dutchman rather than a Frenchman or Corsican. These attitudes did nothing but endear him to his subjects and enrage public opinion in the French capital, and his brother Napoleon soon saw to his removal after a botched invasion by the British. In football terms this would surely be classed as an own goal, one of Bonaparte's lesser known tactical blunders, for appointing Lodewijk as King of Holland was a brilliant propaganda coup for the Dutch Bonapartistsm, and planted seeds for the eruption of Bonapartist sentiment which would occur across the country in the years to come, long after Napoleon himself had been removed from power.
One of history's oddities, King Lodewijk's willingness to put the interests of his adopted nation ahead of those of his homeland or his brother led to his forced abdication and the establishment of direct rule from Paris in the hitherto “independent” northern parts of the country. His legacy most notably included the founding of a de jure “Dutch” monarchy and the abolition of slavery.[1]
The Oranje Restoration:
Following the exile of Napoleon Bonaparte at to the isle of Elba, the Great Powers of Europe saw to the restoration of the House of Oranje as heads of state of the new United Kingdom of the Netherlands at the Congress of Wien. Stadthoulder Willem VI became King Willem I, the first ever Dutch-born titular King of the Netherlands and the nation long divided did unite; on paper that is.
As mentioned, the seething tensions caused by the Napoleonic Wars and the French occupation did not go the way of their instigators, instead they began to simmer and fester like a boil under the skin of the nation's consciousness. Willem inherited a nation united, but a people divided; by religion; by ideology; by language – if he wanted the nation to remain united, he had no choice but to act swiftly and decisively, which he did with gusto. In order to stabilise the country, King Willem proclaimed an “emergency” constitution, one so autocratic it would make even the Russian Tsar squirm and fluster. The people to their credit – the liberals among them included – saw the oppressive constitution as an immediate necessity, something that had to be put up with for the time being in order to rebuild the nation after the upheavals of the past fifteen to twenty years. King Willem unfortunately did not see it that way.
Lord Acton once famously remarked that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." His dictum can certainly be applied to the dictatorial reign of King Willem I.
King Willem's autocratic style, and his persistence in maintaining what should have been a temporary constitutiuonal measure for a good fifteen years did little to endear him to his subjects. Unfavourable comparisons were made between King Willem and his predecessor, and there was a yearning – particularly in Amsterdam and in the south – for the days of “Good King Lodewijk.” Nostalgia as so often is the case soon turned to discontent, and marches and demonstrations soon began to spring up throughout the country against the House of Oranje and in favour of the Bonapartists or a republic. These protests ultimately and unfortunately proved counter-productive, and served to do nothing but prolong a state of crisis and therefore stiffen King Willem's resolve. This in turn stiffened the resolve of the Bonapartists and Republicans, resulting in a vicious cycle of bitterness and discontent.
Remembering the example of Willem's father, the equally autocratic last Stadthoulder, Willem V, King Willem's advisors urged him to take swift and drastic action once more, but this time to liberalise the constitution and introduce limited electons in order to stem the flowing revolutionary tide. King Willem acquiesed, and in the winter of 1829 the first elections to the Staten-Generaal[2] in thirty years were held right across the country (but not in any of the colonies outside The Netherlands.) As political parties were technically illegal in The Netherlands in those days, all candidates were nominally independents. Candidates were however allowed to label themselves as either Revolutionaire (Revolutionary) or Anti-Revolutionaire, (Anti-Revolutionary) principally because there was no law which explicitly forbade such a practice. We can therefore see the Revolutionaries and Anti-Revolutionaries as factions, or proto-parties; the harbingers of party politics in The Netherlands.[3]
As one might be able to guess from these labels, the Revolutionaries were a loose coalition of radicals, republicans, Catholics, Bonapartists, Belgian nationalists (in the south) and Francophones. The Revolutionaries identified themselves by wearing light yellow or sea green ribbons and cockades in the north, and yellow, black and/or red, (those of the former United States of Belgium[4]) or blue and red and/or white (the colours of the French revolutionaries) in the south. Blue, white and red were less popular amongst revolutionaries in the north outside of Amsterdam due to their Francophone or royalist connotations, while Amsterdam revolutionaries (typically either Bonapartists or pro-Batavian republicans) wore a sea green ribbon with a red, white and blue cockade in honour of the late French client states in Holland.
A Walloon sans-culotte campaigns for the Revolutionaries in Charleroi. Though only the wealthy middle and upper classes had the vote in 1829, the poorer classes throughout The Netherlands took a great interest in the election, especially in the southern and urban parts of the country. Note the blue, white and red cockade and the tricolour this man is carrying: black, yellow and red; the colours of Belgium.
The Anti-revolutionaries were an even looser coalition than their leftist counterparts, combining monarchists and anti-Bonapartists of all political stripes and persuasions: from ultra-conservative Calvinists to Unionist Catholics; reactionaries; conservatives; liberals – even one or two radicals. It may come as quite a shock to modern ears to hear that men like Thorbecke and Schimmelpenninck
were first elected as candidates under the Anti-Revolutionary label – it is important therefore to remember that the Anti-Revolutionaries at this point in time were a very broad church indeed, and not quite the fundamentalist, ultra-conservative party they would soon evolve into in the years to come.
Anti-Revolutionaries almost universally favoured colour purple or blue in the north, while orange was the preferred colour in the south, where Orangists made up the ARP's prime constituency. Anti-Revolutionaries shunned cockades, which they viewed as too Francophone and Revolutionary and instead favoured wearing rosettes as the primary means of identifying one another.
Unlike general elections elsewhere in Europe and the first world, Dutch elections were rarely dull, apathetic affairs and attracted a great deal of attention and enthusiasm from the Dutch public; voters or not. Turnout, both of voters and of candidates, was often high and walkovers were almost unheard of – this surely was a reflection of the high level of civic pride the Dutch people placed on their democratic institutions. Perhaps in a perverse way, having their liberties deprived from them for so long: first by the Spaniards; then the Austrians; the French and finally; their fellow Dutchmen, helped to build this high level of trust. Sadly, that trust back in the winter of 1829 proved to be misplaced, as once the results of the election were in it became obvious to anyone who even vaguely knew the King's mind that hey would not stand. In those days before opinion polling, the result once announced came as quite a shock and especially to those residing in the Koninklijk Paleis.
Results of the 1829 Dutch general election. The first such election in thirty years, the shock success of the Revolutionaries caused a sensation across the country while King Willem's actions in the aftermath of the election would live forever in the Dutch collective consciousness as a moment of despotic tyranny worthy of the most oblivious and uncaring of Russian Tsars. Never before or since has a Dutch monarch been so ignorant of the needs and desires of his subjects.
King Willem was outraged, to say the least. What started out as an election to determine the makeup of the Tweede Kamer had morphed into a referendum on his leadership, and a shocking one third of the population had voted against him (tame as this may sound to modern ears with experience of modern elections, a result as low as ten percent for the Revolutionaries would likely have been seen as a rebuff in 1829.) To make matters worse, in Vlaanderen and Wallonia the Revolutionaries had won a plurality of both votes and seats. Willem saw his divine right as King insulted and his nation threatened from the inside, and therefore acted accordingly: the results were declared null and void by a royal edict (which the King was well within his rights to do according to the old constitution.) and the Tweede Kamer was dissolved indefinitely. King Willem had acted from his gut rather than from his head, and the results would prove catastrophically counter-productive, and catastrophic for the people of the country as well.
Now it was the turn of the proletariat and bourgeoise to be outraged by the actions of the King. Peaceful demonstrations soon turned to riots and in the south, where the Revolutionaries were in the majority as far as votes and seats were concerned, there was open talk of seccession in the bars and coffee houses of the major cities. A revolutionary citizen's millita was founded on the Batavian Republic model in Brussels, Antwerp and Charleroi with the intention of “defending the people's liberty by force from the oppression of the foreign tyrant” to quote from one such revolutionary leaflet; hundreds of men signed up. Cooler heads in Amsterdam prevailed however briefly, and the repeal of restrictive language laws early in 1830 earned the country a respite; a brief respite, from turmoil and civil war. It would not last for very long, and on the night after the King's birthday in a quiet little opera house[5] in Brussels, an opera was performed... one which would change the future of the Low Countries forever.
Notes:
[1] The abolition of slavery in The Netherlands actually occured during the period of French direct rule, if I recall correctly.
[2] The
Staten-Generaal is the collective term given to both houses of the Dutch parliament, known as the
Eerste Kamer (First Chamber, or the upper house) and the
Tweede Kamer (Second Chamber, or the lower house.)
[3] Like much of this prologue, the Revolutionaries are entirely fictional and only exist to help form an interesting back-story to the Belgian Revolution and perhaps also as to how the ARP got their name. The Anti-Revolutionaire Partij (ARP) was a real political party -- the first political party founded in The Netherlands – which existed from 1879 to 1980, when it merged (along with the Christian Historical Union and the Catholic Party) into the once-dominant Christian Democratic Appeal, or CDA. The real-life ARP was an ultra-conservative, Calvinist, fundamentalist party which supported
verzuiling or religious-based segregation and the rejection of the ideals of the French revolution, hence its name. In Vicky terms it would probably be better classed as reactionary than anarcho-liberal (which is the ideology the party is classified under in the vanilla game) and I have modded the party in-game to reflect that. As Professor Stern mentions above, this current “broad church” ARP bears little resemblance to the party it will become in future updates, which will be much closer to the real-life ARP in terms of membership and ideology.
[4] A short-lived rebel state which revolted against Austrian Hapsburg rule in early 1790, and was disestablished later that year.
[5]
la Monnaie , the National Theatre of Belgium, can hardly be considered a quiet little theatre, but it was here on August 25th 1830 that the Belgian Revolution started, inspired no doubt by the performance of a patriotic opera.