508 Chapter XXI
as an official motto. It is well known that these three words, used thus together,
have been the motto of republican France, but this usage in France dates only from
the Second Republic of 1848. In documents of the First Republic we find Liberté
and Egalité printed officially on the top, and Salut et fraternité used as a compli-
mentary close at the bottom, but we never find the three key words as an official
triad. For a time, in 1793, the departmental authorities of Paris invited citizens to
paint on the façades of buildings a formula which included the words Liberté,
egalité, fraternité ou la mort. After Thermidor the citizens were invited to efface
them. It was not by any wish of the French government that the Dutch in 1795
adopted so dangerous a slogan. There was more of a mood of revolutionary defi-
ance among the Dutch at this time than among the now somewhat jaded French.
The Batavian Republic (dropping the reference to death) printed officially, as a
heading to its first proclamation, simply the three words, “Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity.”^4
THE DUTCH REVOLUTION OF 1794–1795The Dutch Revolution of 1794–1795 was a continuation, with differences, of the
Patriot movement of the 1780’s, in which an attempted revolution had been
stopped by a combination of British diplomacy and the Prussian army. Britain and
Prussia had “guaranteed” the restored Orange regime of William V in 1788. It was
this regime with which France went to war in February 1793, a regime, as Pieter
Geyl has said, “in which William V stood apart from the nation with his following
of oligarchs and preachers,” and in whose war with France the Dutch people gen-
erally felt no concern.^5 The “preachers” were the clergy of the Dutch Reformed
Church, which was established with certain privileges, in that no other worship
was legally allowed to be public, no other church could ring bells, and members of
no other church could hold important office in the government, army, navy, Bank
of Amsterdam, or East India Company. The “oligarchs,” in Geyl’s phrase, were the
hereditary “regent” families, Reformed in religion, who occupied all the positions
of power or prominence. Each of the many towns and each of the seven provinces
had a limited number of such local dynasties. For example, thirty- six regents com-
posed the governing council of Amsterdam, a city of 200,000, the largest in West-
ern Europe except for London and Paris. The Amsterdam council was highly typi-
cal of those “constituted bodies” against which, according to the argument of the
preceding volume, the democratic revolution of the eighteenth century was most
essentially directed. They sat for life and chose their own successors. They con-
4 See A. Aulard, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” in Etudes et leçons (Paris, 1910), VI, 1–31, but
Aulard did not know of the use of the triad in Holland. For this see the Proclamatie van der Nationale
Vergadering, 15 vols. (The Hague, 1795 ff.); the journal edited in Paris by persons with Dutch connec-
tions, Le Batave, the issues for February 19 and 25, 1795, and other dates; a Dutch newspaper, the
Binnenlandsche bataafsche Courant, which appeared in 1795, and carried “Gelykheid, Vryheid, Broed-
erschap” at its masthead; and J. Hazeu, Historie der omwentelingen in vaderlandsche gesprekken voor
kinderen (Amsterdam, 1796), in which the three key words are explained at length to children.
5 Above, p. 57.