Democrats and Aristocrats 259
factures, eager to break the gild regulations, hire an enlarged work force, or set up
domestic industries in rural districts; merchants willing to expand beyond the
town market, open the Scheldt, and even acquire an island in the West Indies.
Such men, however, were fewer and less powerful than in neighboring countries.
The wealthiest banker in Belgium, for example, the viscount Edouard de Walcki-
ers, had an income of 140,000 francs a year, not much when compared to the rev-
enues of the great Amsterdam houses, or the French banker Laborde, or the
£100,000 a year (2,400,000 francs) of William Beckford of London.
It remains true that the dominant sentiment in Belgium was satisfaction with
things as they were. Revolution came from outside. Placid Belgium, the Boeotia of
Europe, was excited by the energetic emperor, Joseph II, by the sight of American
independence, and, finally, by the revolution in France.
Native stirrings created a susceptibility to these outside forces. Belgians contrib-
uted no books to the European Enlightenment, but they read them. Political jour-
nalism began in 1772 with the Esprit des journaux français et étrangers. There were
half- a- dozen such periodicals by 1785. Forbidden to discuss domestic political
questions, they enabled their readers to take part vicariously in the politics of other
countries. Debates in the House of Commons were printed in Belgian papers as
soon as it became legal to print them in London, in the early 1770’s. The Belgian
press followed the American Revolution with interest, and published the texts of
the American state constitutions.^32 It gave long accounts of the Dutch Patriot agi-
tation. Even the conservative journals contributed to the habit of discussion. The
abbé Feller praised Blackstone and Burke, criticized Gibbon and Adam Smith,
and refused to publish the constitution of Massachusetts, but he set people to
thinking about them. And he reported, though with disgust, the vraie fureur cre-
ated by the presentation of the Mariage de Figaro at Frankfurt on the Main, where
people came from fifteen leagues around to relish its equalitarian sentiments.
It was nevertheless the Emperor Joseph II who threw Belgium into commotion.
Joseph II, and his brother and successor Leopold II, carried on the program of
reform from above, or enlightened despotism, that we have already seen to be
characteristic of the Hapsburg monarchy at the time, and which had already
brought it, and was to bring it again, into serious conflict with the estates of Bohe-
mia and Hungary. Belgium so far had been only sporadically affected, but when
Joseph became sole ruler in 1780, on his mother’s death, he launched on a program
of forcible modernization in all parts of the empire, Belgium included. In Belgium,
as the most advanced of his dominions, he expected to find sympathetic support.
He thought that in Belgium, with its large burgher class, his antinoble policies
would be welcomed. He was doomed to disappointment. The most profound of his
reforms, the abolition of serfdom, had no application to Belgium, where there were
no serfs. It thus created no sympathy for the emperor among the peasantry, as it
did elsewhere. On the other hand, the restrictions he placed on municipal inde-
pendence caused him no trouble in his eastern lands, where towns were weak, but
the same curbing of town autonomy drove the privileged towns of Belgium to re-
32 Mlle. Tassier lays great emphasis on the effects of the American Revolution: Démocrates belges,
5, 84, 87, etc.