524 Chapter XXI
Dutch historians seem to differ in judging what followed. For Pieter Geyl, the
French interference was very high- handed, and the Dutch democrats who de-
manded it went far beyond the bounds of political common sense. To Professor
Geyl it seems that the moderates in the Dutch Convention were on their way to
accepting a compromise with the democrats. For H. Brugmans, the Dutch moder-
ates had an opportunity to work with Delacroix, but failed to use it; it was the
democrats who, impatient at the long deadlock of parliamentary methods, were
eager to take direct action, and it was therefore the democrats with whom Delac-
roix worked.^35
Delacroix brought with him a draft constitution, put together by both French
and Dutch hands, and retouched in Paris by Merlin de Douai and Barras. This
constitution, or something like it, he had to get accepted by the Dutch convention,
which therefore had to be purged. Forty- nine members of the stalemated conven-
tion—about a third of the whole—reached an understanding with him. They sub-
mitted to him a long document, entitled “Constitutional points agreed upon,” and
listing the articles of a “democratic, representative constitution.” They agreed to
exclude forcibly those of their fellow- members “in known opposition to the prin-
ciples here announced.”^36
It is a fact of interest, for Americans, that one of these forty- nine democrats
bore the name of Roosevelt—or rather of F. A. van Rosevelt- Cateau. Not much is
known of him, but he had recently written a pamphlet in which the words Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity, and the Year III of Batavian Freedom were liberally sprinkled.
Six months later he was briefly imprisoned as one of the “chief anarchists” in the
country, defended by a few who objected to such abuse of language, and released.
The coup d’état took place on January 22, 1798. Twenty- two members were
driven from the assembly. The re- formed constitutional committee considered
Delacroix’s draft, which it felt no obligation to accept blindly. In fact, it did not
find the draft democratic enough. Small Holland now gave revolutionary lessons
to its mighty neighbor. The Dutch, as the committee explained to Delacroix, were
“capable of a greater measure of democracy than would be suitable for the French.”
They proposed more direct election by original voters (i.e., less power to electoral
colleges), procedures for amendment by popular initiative, and modification of the
bicameral provision to keep aristocrats from dominating the upper chamber. Dela-
croix accepted these suggestions.^37
The resulting constitution, agreed to by the purged convention, was unitary and
democratic. It extinguished the old provinces and replaced them with eight “de-
partments” of equal population, whose frontiers bore no relation to the old provin-
cial borders. It granted manhood suffrage except to persons receiving public relief.
It consolidated the debt and the revenues. It abolished all guilds, monopolies, and
other barriers to the circulation of persons and goods, and it completed the dises-
35 Geyl, Geschiedenis, III, 478–81; Brugmans, Geschiednis van Nederland (Amsterdam, 1937), VI,- See also Geyl’s “The Batavian Revolution, 1795–98,” translated in his Encounters in History (New
York, 1961), 226–41.
36 Colenbrander, II, 171–77.
37 Ibid., 190–94. For a French translation of the constitution see D. R. C. Verhagen, L’ influence de
la Révolution française sur la première Constitution hollandaise du 23 avril 1798 (Utrecht, 1949), 59–99.