522 Chapter XXI
Its most sweeping single innovation was the disestablishment of the Reformed
Church. Catholics, Jews, and minority Protestants all received equal political
rights. Most of the Jews, including the rabbis, lacked enthusiasm for this “French”
idea. They lived apart, unused to politics, in a corporate body of their own, and they
felt a loyalty to the traditional Dutch Republic to whose protection they had in
fact owed so much for two hundred years. But there were also in Holland a great
many modernized Jews who received their new status with pleasure, and who even
had some of the Dutch legislation translated into Hebrew.^31 Noël and the leading
Dutch democrats insisted on this equality of civic rights for Jews. At a crude or
immediate level the matter had little importance, even in Holland, where the Jews
were exceptionally numerous; but at a more general or “abstract” level there was no
better way of affirming the difference between an old regime and a state issuing
from the eighteenth- century revolution.
Many Dutch leaders, as well as Noël and Delacroix, hoped desperately for ap-
proval of the constitution in August 1797. They felt that any constituted govern-
ment was better than none. Nevertheless the Dutch voters rejected the constitu-
tion overwhelmingly, by a vote of 108,761 to 27,955. It clearly failed because it was
too much of a compromise. It satisfied no party of any strength. It was rejected in
every province. In populous Holland and Utrecht, where unitary democrats were
strong, it was the democrats who voted against it; in the eastern or land provinces,
the federalists and conservatives. Both parties hoped to do better on a new draft.
Thus in August 1797, almost three years after the revolution, the Batavian Re-
public still had no government. The old order had collapsed, leaving only a vac-
uum. The revolutionaries in the broad sense of the word—men of all political
stripes who were willing to take the antihereditary oath—were unable to agree and
unwilling to compromise.
THE COUP D’ETAT OF JANUARY 22,1798:
DUTCH DEMOCRACY AT ITS HEIGHTAt this point it is necessary to anticipate developments that will be further ex-
plained in a later place. The fate of the Batavian Republic, at the time of the rejec-
tion of the constitution in August 1797, depended on events of an all- European
scope.
The summer of 1797, throughout Europe, was a time of reviving counter-
revolutionary expectations. Elections in France, in the spring of 1797, had pro-
duced a majority of the “royalist” or peace party in the French legislative chambers.
If this group got control of the French government, reaction could be expected in
France, and the spread of revolution in Italy under Bonaparte could be stopped.
Dutch conservatives took hope in the rejection of the Dutch constitution. It was
31 For this apparently unknown fact I am indebted to Professor Jacob R. Marcus of the Hebrew
Union College in Cincinnati. For Noël’s insistence on equality of rights for Jews see Colenbrander, II,
50, 56, 60, 65, 67.