Climax and Dénouement 781
the French Revolutions, but by “the Emperor Joseph, the first Jacobin of his time.”^10
For the Dutch, Lord Grenville, speaking as British foreign secretary, explicitly re-
jected the proposals of the Dutch moderates. He agreed that nothing quite like the
British constitution would work in Holland, since the Dutch had no “great body of
landed proprietors,” of the kind that, in Britain and Ireland, filled the Parliament
and the “magistracy of the country.” He insisted that the Dutch abandon the kind
of unity introduced by the Batavian Republic, and replace it with a degree of pro-
vincial sovereignty as under the Union of Utrecht. Explaining what he meant,
Grenville allowed himself a rare flight of ideological generalization, which may
stand as a programmatic statement for the counter- offensive of 1799.^11
“The reasons,” said Grenville, “which have induced H.M. to incline towards a
different arrangement [from that proposed by Dutch and Batavian moderates]...
are founded principally in an opinion that such is probably the wish of the best
and soundest part of the people of the United Provinces, and also in a desire to
avoid as much as possible the appearance of innovations proceeding on general
and abstract principles of equality, in opposition to institutions grounded on an-
cient usages and conformable to the old and established distinctions and classes of
that people.” He might have said the same of Belgium and Switzerland, Italy and
France.
The plan for the overthrow of revolutionary republicanism was essentially mili-
tary, but involved also the expectation that native elements would rise against their
republican governments as soon as the armies of the Coalition appeared. There was
in fact, throughout the New Republican Order, a good deal of peasant discontent
and rebelliousness in 1798 and 1799. Rural unrest persisted in western France
since the days of the Vendéan disturbance, and rural insurrection was chronic in
Belgium. In Switzerland the small rural “primitive” cantons were held in the Hel-
vetic Republic by force. In Italy the peasants had never favored the new move-
ments, and by February and March of 1799 the whole of southern Italy was in a
state of revolt. We have seen how Cardinal Ruffo gathered a host of Neapolitan
peasants by the promise of reforms. It has been seen repeatedly, in the preceding
pages, how in Europe, in contrast to America, revolutionary republicanism was a
movement of townspeople, and conservative attitudes largely agrarian in their ori-
gin. Mass rural discontent throughout the New Republican Order offered a force,
a social reality already in existence, to which leaders of the Counter- Revolution
might have appealed to heighten their own strength.
The notable fact, however, remarked upon by Jacques Godechot, was the lack of
any contact between conservative doctrine, as expressed by Burke, Mallet du Pan,
Joseph de Maistre, and others, and the realities of anti- Revolutionary sentiment
and insurrectionism among the common people.^12 Conservative ideology, if “agrar-
ian,” was agrarian in that it looked with suspicion on cities, and expressed a view of
life in which large landownership, along with manorial or seigneurial institutions,
10 Great Britain: Historical MSS Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue Pre-
served at Droptnore, 10 vols. (London, 1892–1927), V, 199.
11 Colenbrander, Gedenkstukken, III, 410–12.
12 J. Godechot, La Contre- revolution (Paris, 1961), 407. See pp. 347–90 for le grand assaut contre-
revolutionnaire throughout Europe in 1799.