The Batavian Republic 511
minded of Alexander Hamilton in America.) He was finance minister during the
radical phase of 1798, again under the “second” Batavian Republic, and again
under King Louis Bonaparte in the days of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Holland.
When Napoleon, in 1810, simply annexed Holland to France, he made Gogel his
superintendent of Dutch finances. After Napoleon’s fall, Gogel went into private
business. But King William I of the Netherlands named him to his council of
State.^7 Such were the tolerance of Dutch politics and the calibre of some of its
“Jacobins” during this turbulent generation.
In 1794, before the French invasion, and in eager expectation of their arrival, the
political or “Jacobin” clubs in the Dutch cities became very active.^8 In June there
were 34 clubs in Amsterdam and 12 in Utrecht, organized in small neighborhood
units. There were probably some 5,000 or 6,000 members at Amsterdam, 800 at
Utrecht, 300 or 400 at Leiden and at Haarlem, representing from 4 to 12 percent
of the adult males. The clubs at this moment were known collectively as the
Leather Apron, and were composed largely of tradesmen. Publicly, before the rev-
olution, they called themselves “reading societies.” They read and discussed the
news from France, and such books as Paine’s Rights of Man and the Dutch Pieter
Paulus’ Menschenvriend. They also secretly stored up arms, exchanged delegations
with each other, and maintained communication with the French and the Dutch
émigrés. Since the break- up of the old Batavian Revolutionary Committee in
Paris, in connection with Robespierre’s liquidation of the “foreign conspiracy,” the
most prominent of the émigrés was H. A. Daendels, a former brick manufacturer,
doctor of law, Patriot of 1787, and officer of the Batavian Legion, who in March
1794 became a general in the French army.
On the night of July 31, with the French now in North Brabant, a great assem-
blage of the Dutch clubs from all seven provinces met at Amsterdam. It autho-
rized Gogel and Irhoven van Dam to proceed secretly to the French headquarters,
to learn the terms on which the Dutch, if they opened their gates, would be spared
the fate of a “conquered province” which they thought was being meted out to
Belgium.
The French reiterated the view they had adopted since the beginning of the
campaign: they would treat the Dutch as allies if they first staged their own revo-
lution. The Dutch were a little discouraged. Revolution was risky with the stadt-
holder’s government still in existence. There was also fear of popular violence.
“Nothing is easier,” wrote Gogel to the French, “than for us to raise up popular
disturbances, but we want no revolution unless we can protect our fellow citizens
from murder and pillage.”^9
The relative moderation of the Batavian Revolution, or its weakness, as one may
choose to call it, was thus manifest from the beginning. The Dutch revolutionists
could enjoy sweeping change, without the accompanying “horrors,” as Gogel called
7 Nieuw nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek, VII, 480. Gogel’s letter to the French commis-
sioner with the Army of the North, dated February 21, 1794, is printed in Colenbrander, I, 378–81.
8 See my article, “Much in Little: the Dutch Revolution of 1795” in Journal of Modern History,
Vol. 26 (March 1954), 15–35, from which several paragraphs in the following pages are reproduced
with permission of the editors.
9 Colenbrander, I, 413.