Liberation and Annexation 427
larist and reforming governments of Joseph II and Leopold II, against which they
had in fact led the Statist party in the Revolution of 1789. The situation was so
confused, and the dislike of Austrian church policy so intense, that some of the
Belgian upper clergy, even after the September Massacres and the expulsion of
priests from France, expressed a preference for the French over the Austrians.
There were cases in which ignorant peasants believed that the French were coming
to avenge true religion.
Where the Estates party adhered to the Old Regime, the Democrats stood for
the New Order. They were clearly a middle- class group, drawing their strength
from financial and commercial men of the newer type, who could not operate
within the old town and gild limits, and they were reinforced by the younger gen-
eration in general, by lawyers of various kinds, by a few individual noblemen, and
by doctors, intellectuals, and journalists who were impressed by the ideas of the
Enlightenment. The spectacle of the French Revolution made the Statists more
wedded than ever to ancestral ways. The Democrats, on the other hand, thanks to
their treatment in 1790 at the hands of the Statists, and to disillusionment at the
Austrian restoration, and in some cases to inspiration from the French Revolution,
were less inclined in 1792 than in 1789 to be content with moderate counsels. The
sight of foppish French émigrés congregating in Brussels—“powdered abbés flit-
ting about with lorgnettes”—made many Belgians into Democrats.^2 Others were
converted to enlightened ideas by a criminal case at Antwerp in the summer of
1792, when a young man was put to the torture four times, against the protests of
his mother, until he admitted that he worshipped the devil. The Belgians live in
fear of “hunger and hell,” wrote a disdainful Frenchman.^3 The Dutch also thought
them backward. The Belgian Democrats hoped to rectify this situation.
Many Belgians, of both parties, therefore saw in the war another chance—their
second chance, the first having failed in 1790—to set up an independent Belgian
republic. Events of 1790 had shown that the Belgians could not live politically
with each other. As the Poles could only live under a king who was not one of
themselves, so the Belgians (it is the Belgian historian, Suzanne Tassier, who says
so) needed a dominant personality from outside. They needed someone identified
with neither party, and whom both could accept. This outside personality was fur-
nished by Dumouriez. They took hope also in the fact that after the August revo-
lution the French foreign minister was practically a Belgian, Lebrun, who though
of French birth had lived for years in Liège, and was in fact a refugee from the
Liège revolution of 1789. Events in the Bishopric of Liège in 1789 had been if
anything more turbulent than in the Austrian provinces; the rebels, wishing to be
rid of the rule of the bishop, favored a merger in a Belgian national state, and so
agreed with the Democrats of Brabant, Flanders, Luxembourg, and the other Aus-
trian territories. Lebrun, a young man, was very much under the influence of Du-
mouriez, who had befriended him upon his arrival in Paris. Dumouriez, over fifty,
was a thorough product of the Old Regime, and is more appreciated by Belgian
historians than by the French, who see him either as the adventurer of 1792 or the
2 Ta s sier, op.cit., 78, 73 n.
3 Ibid., 61.