The Batavian Republic 513
rode into Amsterdam on the ice, and in January 1795 the Batavian Republic was
proclaimed.
For two years the French, although they were in military occupation, interfered
relatively little in internal Dutch affairs.^14 The French aim was to use Holland in
the war against Great Britain. This aim did not constitute forcible interference,
since many Dutch were in favor of it. Nevertheless, when the terms of the treaty
between the French and Batavian republics became known (the treaty of The
Hague of May 1795), many in the Netherlands were disappointed. The Batavian
Republic was required not only to declare war on England but to maintain a
French occupying army at Dutch expense, to accept French paper money, to cede
Flushing and the mouth of the Scheldt to France enlarged by Belgium, and to pay
an indemnity of 100,000,000 florins.
This was severe treatment for an alleged ally. It was not severe enough to alien-
ate Dutch revolutionaries from France, since they saw no alternative except capitu-
lation to England and the House of Orange. Containing as it did, however, ele-
ments of both ruthlessness and deception, it gave serious offense to a great many of
the most advanced Batavian democrats. One of these was Jakob Blauw, one of the
negotiators from whom the treaty was extorted. He formed a deep dislike not for
the French Revolution but for the French government, and seems to have been
somehow involved in the Babeuf conspiracy against it a year later.
The relation of the French and the Batavian Republics, if such a figure may be
allowed, was in no sense a rape, since the Batavians were more than willing to
enter upon it. It rested on comparable revolutionary sentiment in both countries,
but it was less a love match than a marriage of convenience.
As the Batavian Republic was proclaimed, William V retired to England. Here
one of his first actions was to authorize British occupation of all Dutch colonies at
the Cape of Good Hope and in the East and West Indies. Few Dutchmen be-
lieved that the British would ever give them all back. With war now declared,
within a few months the British had captured some 85,000,000 florins’ worth of
Dutch shipping. They also naturally suspended payment on the huge British debts
owed to Dutch creditors remaining in Holland.
It would be a difficult problem to compute whether the Dutch in these years
lost more to the French or to the British. The question was rather, for the Dutch,
what they preferred to pay for. For a price, one could have British assistance toward
restoration of the Old Order, or French support for the Batavian Republic.
The Frustration of the Conciliators
Most of the Dutch, in all probability, wanted neither the Old Order nor the
New—neither the confused and ineffectual old confederated republic with its more
recent adornment of a hereditary stadtholdership, nor the up- to- date republic on
the French model in which the separate identity of the provinces and the inheri-
14 Colenbrander, Bataafsche republiek (Amsterdam, 1908), 79; P. Geyl, Patriotten en N.S.B.ers
(Amsterdam, 1946), 27, 30.