Democrats and Aristocrats 257
Belgium belonged to the Austrian monarchy, it was hardly affected by that fact
before 1780.
Belgium was a museum of late-medieval corporate liberties. To begin with, it
was a bundle of provinces. There were ten of them known as the Austrian Nether-
lands, here called Belgium, which comprised the territory of modern Belgium and
Luxemburg, excluding, however, the bishopric of Liège, which, running from the
Dutch to the French frontiers, cut the Austrian provinces in two. The only govern-
ment common to the ten provinces was supplied by the Austrian Emperor. Practi-
cally all his officials, under the level of his viceroy, were native Belgians.
Since the sixteenth century the country had been immunized against change.
The struggle against Calvinism had left the people solidly and devotedly Catholic.
Half the land belonged to great abbeys and other ecclesiastical bodies. The clergy,
high and low, were sober men with little of the frivolity or indifference that had
crept into the churches of France or England. The nobility were old- fashioned;
some were well to do, but they lived without ostentation, and they invested their
savings in land and mortgages, considering commercial enterprises too undignified
or too risky. The peasantry, as in France, were legally free, but subject to the dues
and payments of the manorial system. The load borne by the peasants was the
lighter, however, in that the upper classes had acquired so few habits of modern
extravagance, and because the Austrian government raised little money and few
troops in its Belgian possessions. Business and financial development had been ar-
rested. The Dutch, in winning their independence, had obtained the closing of the
Scheldt river to seagoing ships. This closure of the Scheldt, written into many in-
ternational treaties, was in the eighteenth century also strongly insisted on by
Great Britain. The intent, and the result, was to destroy the port of Antwerp. The
population of Antwerp dropped from 100,000 to 50,000 between the sixteenth
century and the eighteenth, while Amsterdam and London more than quadrupled
in size. Town life and burgher interests in Belgium, like the habits and outlook of
clergy and nobles, remained those of a bygone day.
Belgium was in short an intermediate country, in a state of suspended anima-
tion between old and new. The Dutch Patriots who flocked across its frontier in
1787 found it backward, superstitious, priest- ridden, and oligarchic.^29 To the
French it was the desert of culture. Seen from farther east, as from the imperial
capital at Vienna, it was a far more lively place, the wealthiest of Hapsburg posses-
sions, and distinguished among all parts of the Hapsburg empire (along with
Milan) by its free rural population and its great number of busy towns.
Towns, nobles, clergy all had their historic liberties and their privileges. All were
represented in the several assemblies of Provincial Estates—except that in Flan-
ders, urbanized since the Middle Ages, the nobility were excluded. There could be,
in Belgium, no sharp antagonism between an unprivileged Third Estate and two
higher privileged orders. All three orders had an interest in preserving their liber-
ties. On the other hand, the corporate liberties, or rights of the “orders,” were by no
means equally favorable to all persons within the respective orders or estates.
29 See P. Geyl, “Noord- Nederlandse patriottenbeweging en Brabantse Revolutie,” in Nieuw
Vlaams Tijdschrijt, No. 6, 1953, 3–20.