The Batavian Republic 517
insistence upon an Orange restoration in Holland (as upon a Bourbon restoration
in France) as the most likely means to obtain a durable peace that would be satis-
factory to England. Late in 1798, through the United States ministers at The
Hague and London, William Vans Murray and Rufus King, a group of moderate
democrats and Orangists in Holland opened negotiations with Orangists in Lon-
don. They had in mind some kind of arrangement from which the Orange family
might be excluded as, indeed, it had been excluded twice before since the seven-
teenth century. These talks collapsed when the British insisted on an Orange res-
toration.^24 In 1799 the British and Russians, as will be seen, invaded Holland, in
the mistaken belief that the Dutch people would greet them as liberators and wel-
come the Orange family and the émigrés. They were soon expelled.
The obstinacy of William V, and the unwillingness of the British government to
make any plain promise of return of the Dutch colonies (or its inability to do so,
given the state of British public opinion and the attitudes in Parliament), actually
worked to the advantage of the French and of the more ardent Batavian demo-
crats. It was one of the fears of the French that the British, by promising return of
the Dutch colonies, or resumption of payments to Dutch creditors, would build up
an Anglophile party in the Batavian Republic. This did not happen. As for the
Batavian moderates, they found that they could reach no understanding with the
exiled stadtholder. It remained to be seen whether there could be any agreement
between the moderates and the more radical democrats.
Federalists and Democrats
The internal history of the Batavian Republic remained a stalemate for three years,
from January 1795 to January 1798, during which it had no constituted or settled
government, even on paper.
The French government, when its forces entered Holland in January 1795, six
months after Thermidor, by no means represented the most radical or the most
democratic opinion to be found in Europe. Still dangerously revolutionary in the
eyes of European conservatives, the governments of the later Convention and of
the Directory came to seem reactionary to the democrats, who were now called
“anarchists” by French officials. The words sans- culotte and “Jacobin” now had a
bad connotation to those in power in France. In the spring of 1795, in what was
known as the Prairial uprising, the Convention defended itself against a renewal of
popular violence only by extremely repressive action against the common people of
Paris. In the spring of 1796 the Directory discovered the conspiracy of Babeuf, and
arrested its leaders.
The French were afraid of the Dutch democrats, whom they described as véri-
tables sans- culottes, and who were in fact not altogether dissimilar to their famous
counterparts in Paris a year or two before. The Dutch democrats, issuing from the
“Leather Apron” mentioned above, were composed of artisans and mechanics,
24 Grenville to Rufus King, November 6, 1798, in Papers of J. B. Fortescue preserved at Dropmore,
I V, 3 6 5.