The Batavian Republic 507
were told that the task would be easy; they did not believe it, and they did not care.
Governments, in the political structure of the Old Regime, did not have enough
moral, psychological, or social rapport with their own peoples to make a strong
stand in adversity against the Revolution. In any case, in 1794, they were beaten,
bewildered, and in disarray. The mass rising in France had succeeded because a
revolutionary government simultaneously arose to carry it out, to channel, orga-
nize, equip, discipline, and direct the excited feelings of the country. The Houses of
Hapsburg and Orange, in the breakdown of 1794, had nothing to offer even at this
purely practical level.
The French therefore met with little resistance. The Coalition broke up in 1795.
The Prince of Orange fled to England, and the pro- French Dutch came into
power. The King of Prussia made peace, and all the German states north of the
Main River, under Prussian leadership, were declared neutral. The Bourbon king of
Spain recognized and signed a treaty with the regicide Republic. The British army
withdrew from the Continent, to which it did not return except for sporadic raids
until 1799. After the treaties of Basel, in 1795, France remained at war only with
Britain at sea, and on land only with Sardinia and Austria, with which hostilities
fell into abeyance until reactivated by Bonaparte in north Italy in the following
year.
Meanwhile the French prepared to re- annex Belgium. There was no talk this
time, as in 1792, of a separate Belgian Republic. Belgium would simply be consoli-
dated with France, and the Belgians assimilated as French citizens, somewhat as
the segments of Poland were to be consolidated or assimilated to the three East-
European monarchies. To military and strategic arguments, made important by the
war, were added commercial considerations arising from the century- old mercan-
tile rivalry between France and England. The idea of Napoleon’s Continental Sys-
tem, of a Continent to be economically dominated by France, and closed to En-
gland, was beginning to take form. Numerous Belgians of the business classes,
long stultified by the old provincialisms, were more than willing to enter into this
arrangement.^3
As for the Rhineland, after initial uncertainties, the French eventually decided
to annex it also.
Among the Dutch there was a true revolution, of which the result was the Bata-
vian Republic, the first and the most important of the “satellite” or “sister” republics
created under French auspices. The Batavian Republic was important not only in
itself but more broadly. It was hoped, by enemies of Great Britain, that the alliance
of the French and Batavian Republics, controlling the whole coast without inter-
ruption from the Frisian Islands to the Pyrenees, and using the extensive shipping,
banking, and other resources of the two together, would form an invincible combi-
nation against British trade and sea power. And when Italian, Swiss, German, or
Irish revolutionaries wished to explain to the French what they wanted in the fol-
lowing years, they often named the Batavian Republic as their model.
Of the Batavian Republic it may also be remarked, as a suggestion of its intrin-
sic significance, that it was the first to use the words “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”
3 On the willingness of Belgian business men see above, pp. 429 and 461.