518 Chapter XXI
shopkeepers and innkeepers, grocers and printers’ devils, organized in clubs, and
especially strong in the towns of Holland and Utrecht. To very conservative peo-
ple, like William V, it might seem that the Dutch were infected by the French, but
in fact, by a curious inversion, it was now the French who feared infection by the
Dutch. French soldiers in the Dutch provinces were under orders to keep away
from the Dutch clubs.
The Dutch popular democrats had as their leaders various men of higher eco-
nomic status who, like the French Mountain in 1793, were willing to make com-
mon cause with them, the better to oppose the exiled Stadtholder’s party, or to
resist those who might attempt a compromise with the Orange family and the
British. Among these leaders were Gogel, the financial expert mentioned above;
Jakob Blauw, the Batavian envoy in Paris also already mentioned; Pieter Vreede, a
wealthy cloth merchant, former Patriot, and friend of John Adams in 1780; and
Johan Valckenaer, sometime professor of law, who had spent the years from 1787
to 1794 largely in France. The French, despite their apprehensions, were drawn to
work with these men, not so much because of close ideological sympathy, as be-
cause these were the men most committed to the Revolution, and hence most
likely to manage Dutch resources in a way useful to France in the common war
against England.
All issues in the Batavian Republic came together into one—whether the new
republic should be a unitary or a federal state. The bitterness of this conflict amazed
even the French, though they had faced something like it in their own revolution.
As a Dutchman explained to Noël, the French emissary at The Hague: “There had
been less of a gulf to fill between monarchism and republicanism in France than
exists here between federalism and unity.”^25 The formal difference reflected social
realities. Democrats were unitarists, conservatives were federalists, in an almost
perfect correlation. The democratic clubs called themselves societies of Een- en
Ondeelbarheit, Unity and Indivisibility, with reference to internal not external
problems. Noël caught on quickly, “It is obvious,” he wrote home, “that the families
which, under the monstrous system of sovereignty for each province, each town,
were able to perpetuate themselves in offices which became hereditary for them,
are not inclined to fuse all these sovereignties into one.”^26
Federalism or decentralization, the letting of each town and province alone,
thus came to stand for “feudalism,” for the old patriciates and oligarchies, with
closed magistracies and self- perpetuating councils, for the corporative and ecclesi-
astical society, the Ständestaat, and also for the clumsy and slow- moving adminis-
trative machinery which even conservatives admitted to require some reform. The
unitary, solid state, in which the old entities should be abolished, meant uniform
rights for all persons considered as individuals, and it meant the sovereignty of the
people one and indivisible, which in turn was a legalistic way of saying that neither
family, nor church, nor estate, nor town council, nor provincial assembly possessed
any public power in its own right.
25 Colenbrander, II, 60.
26 Ibid., 13. See also 27, 510–11.