Liberation and Annexation 435
“noisy and impudent” persons who sat in alehouses and “obscure clubs” engaging in
seditious talk. To the representative of the French Republic they were mostly rich
men and bankers, who were indeed boycotting the Orange war loan, but on whom
in the end the French could not really rely.^16 Estimates of a social level, it would
seem, depend largely on the social level from which perception takes place. And it
appears that among the Patriots there were men of many kinds, who sat both in
banks and in taverns.
The French government, as already noted, long resisted the appeal of Dutch
émigrés for an invasion of the United Provinces. But after the opening of the
Scheldt, and with the execution of Louis XVI, on January 21, 1793, the Conven-
tion accepted war with the British and Dutch as inevitable. On January 31 Lebrun
instructed Dumouriez to occupy Maastricht. Within a few days, by its own decla-
ration, France was at war with the British and Dutch governments, which joined
with Austria and Prussia in the First Coalition.
French and Dutch now crossed the Belgian- Dutch frontier. The exiles brought
with them a plan for revolution, complete with primary assemblies representing
the sovereignty of the people, and the banker Abbema and the nobleman Capellen
van de Marsch prepared a draft constitution, in which a new government was de-
rived from Vrijheid en Gelijkheit, that is Liberty and Equality.^17
But the Dutch revolutionary exiles now had disillusionments in their turn. They
expected, upon re- entering their own country, to take over administrative positions
themselves. They wanted to bring into being, through clubs and elections, a native
Dutch organization to deal with the French in matters of military housing and
supply. They thought that the Dutch people, in meeting these legitimate French
needs, should be allowed to deal with their own Dutch leaders. The French saw it
otherwise. French generals levied direct requisitions on the population in the
neighborhood of Breda. The Dutch émigrés protested. A committee of them, led
by Johan Valckenaer, a former law professor in Friesland, who was to be one of the
most notable of the Dutch democrats of the following years, waited upon Cambon
on February 15. They asked that the decree of December 15 be not applied, and
that the French accept instead a revolutionary Batavian republic. Cambon refused.^18
He remarked that since the Dutch had had their own Protestant revolution in the
sixteenth century, the Reformed Church possessed little property of its own, and
that both the Dutch clergy and the House of Orange were already on a kind of
salaried basis, so that there was little wealth in Holland of the sort that qualified
for confiscation. The existing tax- structure and public revenues should therefore be
maintained. But the French should control the use of them during the military
occupation. At most the taxes on bread and beer should be abolished as a gesture
to the Dutch populace. It was not a program with much revolutionary appeal. But
the men in the French government were not enthusiasts for a Dutch revolution. It
16 Auckland to Grenville, The Hague, June 12, 1792, in Great Britain: Historical Manuscripts
Commission, The Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue preserved at Dropmore, 10 vols. (London, 1892–1927),
II, 279; Auckland to Grenville, November 12, 1792, in Colenbrander, Gedenkstukken, I, 286; Noël to
Lebrun, Amsterdam, January 14, 1793, Ibid., 254, 261.
17 Colenbrander, I, 106–11.
18 Colenbrander, Gedenkstukken, 105; Bataafsche Republiek (Amsterdam, 1908), 25–26.